My One BIG Change I Made Last Year

We made one BIG change last year to our business, that seemed VERY small, yet helped us to more then double sales from the year prior.

On this special 100th episode of Marketing In Your Car Russell talks about reminiscing on the previous year instead of making new years resolutions and the one big change he made in the last year.

Here are some of the cool things you will hear in today’s episode:

• How to attract the right kind of people to your business.
• How to look at your clients and figure out what the end result needs to be.
• And to not be afraid even if your initial sales drop, because it will pick back up again when you attract your dream client.

So listen below to find out how to attract your dream client to your business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to our 100th episode of Marketing in Your Car.

Hey everyone, so it’s been a little while since I’ve done a podcast and to tell you the real honest reason, it’s because I promised you all that I would have a new jingle for the 100th episode and I haven’t got one yet, so I’ve been delaying and delaying. Yesterday, I actually messaged on Facebook to my friends who yelled at me saying, “Dude, you don’t have a podcast episode. Where are you at?”

I’m going to repent and I’m just going to do one. Hopefully today I’ll figure out a new song for you. I appreciate you guys listening, and actually caring so that’s really cool. Today, I’m driving actually to work out. I’m not sure if I’ll get my thoughts done by the time I get there so this may be one of those ones where I pause it and come back after my workout.

It’s the beginning of the year for me right now. If you’re listening live, it’s just after the new year. If you’re listening to the recording or listening later, that’s when I recorded this. It’s interesting because it’s been fun. I’m not a big New Year’s resolution person but I am big at looking back at what happened over the last year and looking at the cool changes that happened in yourself as a person, as a business, and as a company, and all these different things, and then setting big, huge – I think the book Good to Great calls them BHAGs, big, hairy, audacious goals.

I’m totally a big believer in that, setting huge goals for the years as opposed to resolutions. I’ve got some big goals we’ve set out. I started thinking over the last year and I looked at this time last year, where our company was at versus where we are right now. I got to tell you, it’s like night and day.

We had relaunched our little coaching program a little over a year ago. Some of you guys know, we at one time had 60 salespeople and we were selling coaching, $5000 packages of coaching, and it was a huge nightmare to be honest. I shut it down and for three years, we didn’t sell coaching. We kept getting so many requests for it, we relaunched it last year.

At the beginning of the year, it was really hard. We were trying to sell $5000 but the kind of people that we were getting in weren’t that high quality, or the leads that were coming in. It was hard. I remember about this time last year making a conscious decision, thinking, “You know what? If I want to keep doing this business,” because I was burned out, I was turned, and I didn’t really like it, “I’ve got to change the customers we have.”

I started looking at that. To change our customers, I’ve got to change the bait that I’m using. I looked at the bait I was throwing out there to the world to attract people in and what was interesting is most of the stuff I was sending out, most of our offers and things like that were all business opportunity stuff. It was attracting someone who wanted to start a business.

The problem with that is you’re going to get some really good people who want to start businesses but you also get every person on earth who just wants to make a quick buck. It attracts the total wrong type of person. I was putting out these offers and putting out these landing pages and ads, and everything that was attracting biz op people. That’s what I was getting.

It was obviously the type of customer that we didn’t really want to keep having, you know what I mean? That’s kind of where last year had started. We made the conscious decision, we need to get a different type of customer so to do that, we need to create a different bait. If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know the bait we put out.

We created a book called The 108 Proven Split Test Winners, and we launched it for free plus shipping, no continuity, nothing tricky, just let’s give this amazing product out to the world and see what happens. We did that. Over the last year, we sold over 10,000 copies of the book, which you may be saying, “Well, Russell, that’s not a big deal. It was free plus shipping. You didn’t make any money on it.”

But us putting that bait out there completely transformed our business. We started attracting the right people in our coaching program, and we figured out a couple of things. First off, our high ticket product back then was $5000. Over the last year, we’ve raised our prices where right now, our lowest ticket product that we sell through coaching is $10,000 and we’re about to raise that again to $15,000.

By increasing the price, what happened was the people that we didn’t want to work with, the people who were struggling to pay $5000, they stopped signing up. What was cool was that the right person, the people that my bait was attracting, $10,000 was not that big a deal to them. They were people who had businesses, who had websites, who wanted to take it to the next level.

Man, I tell you, for me, that customer is so much more refreshing, such a better type person to work with. Again, we made that our low end as $10,000 and we added a $25,000, and last year, we sold I don’t know the exact numbers, but we sold 120 people at the $10,000 level and 30 something people at the $25,000 level.

That’s like what, one and a half million bucks in coaching sales. We did that with two salespeople, which is insane. We did it without that much effort. It all comes back to we changed the bait that we used to attract. We got the customers we wanted and customers who could afford coaching, those who wanted coaching. It’s been pretty awesome.

I’m at the gym right now. I’m pausing this recording. When I come back, we will finish this up. Hey everyone, I’m back. Just for the record, I want to say that I’m not one of the New Year’s gym goers. I’ve been going consistently three times a week for the last five years. I didn’t go to the real gym. I have a personal trainer so it’s just me and him. I don’t have to deal with the thousand other people.

I’m not sure where I left off but I know I was talking about how we consciously picked who we wanted our dream customer to be. The second step then was go and create bait that would attract our dream customer. If we look at our Dot Com Secrets Labs, what’s interesting about it is anyone who is a business opportunity seeker, if they saw that, they wouldn’t know what it was.

They wouldn’t even pay the $10 shipping and handling because they don’t know what a split test is. They have no idea how that’s going to help them but my dream customer, somebody who has a website, who is trying to figure out how to take it to the next level, the person I want to be working with, the people who I know can write a check for $10,000, $25,000, or $100,000, they see that and it’s the right bait.

I’ve had people who have tried this strategy, the free plus shipping things and they’re like, “I attract crappy people because the price point is so low.” That’s the wrong way to look at it. That’s not true that you attract the wrong kind of person because of the bait you put out there. If you put out there a how to get rich quick product, you’re going to get how to get rich quick people.

If you put out there a product that’s going to attract your dream customer, you’ll get your dream customer. It’s very important to really understand that, that the bait is key. After you’ve created the bait, then you got to come back. The bait has been created. Now where are my dream customers at? Where is the pond that they’re at, trying to figure out where that’s at.

For us, targeting Facebook was big. We had to find other places, trying to find where are our dream customers. For us, when we were finding business opportunity seekers, it was way easier because the world is your ocean. They’re everywhere. When we started identifying the right people, it shrunk our world down.

The universe isn’t as big for us to go after but it’s a lot deeper. Like I said, we got 30 something people that pay us over $25,000 this year. We have two people that paid us for our million dollar program where they pay $100,000 up front and 10% of their profits. I can’t go as wide. There aren’t as many people to target but I can go way deeper with those people.

Then the fourth step in the formula, first is find out who your dream customer is, what kind of bait you’re going to create. Find out where to find those people, what’s the pond you’re fishing out of. The fourth one is where are you taking these people. What’s the goal? I think I used to know the answer to this in my business and I think I was wrong in my goal was, “I’m going to get them into my high end coaching programs.”

That’s not what I’m looking for for number four here. The fourth is what’s the result you want to get for somebody. I have a graph. I don’t know if I mentioned, I’m launching my first real book. I’m going to try to get on the New York Times’ bestseller list in March. You’ll see this is chapter one. I talk about this concept.

The fourth step is the result. Where are we trying to take this person? I have a picture of a mountain and me taking somebody up to the top of the mountain. For me, I look at my clients. Where am I trying to take these guys? What’s my goal with them? What’s the result I’m trying to get them to?

For me, each person is different. I realize that for me to really know that, I need to spend time on the phone with everyone I coach. We shifted our coaching program away from this cookie cutter thing that we pushed everybody through, and they got certain sessions, and had different coaches and started looking at I’m really concerned about these people’s result.

The reason I’m in business is not just to  get money. It’s to get results for people. We shifted our coaching program where when somebody comes in, they get an hour with me where I help steer the direction. Then I hand them off to my team to help implement what we talked about, but then they also have live access to me through Voxer where they can Voxer me as many times as they want every single day.

Some people totally abuse it, and other people don’t take advantage of it at all, but now I have the ability to help people daily and help pushing them towards their goals, and moving them forward. I tell you what, the paradigm and the change in our business has been amazing. From a profit standpoint, from a happiness standpoint, for myself personally, from results for our clients, it’s just been a million times better.

What I wanted to do this podcast about for you guys today is to start thinking about that. We’re at the beginning of a new year. I remember last year, Tony Robbins put this video out there. It was really cool because he said, “You know, it’s the beginning of a new year.” It may be January 1st or whatever but he says, “It’s a new year and because of that, you guys have a chance. If you’re not happy in a relationship, change it. If you’re not happy with your job, change it. If you’re not happy with your business, change it.”

I remember thinking that. I said, “You know what? I can. Why don’t I make these changes that I want?” so we just started making the changes. For you guys, I want you thinking about that. It’s the New Year’s here. If you’re listening to this later on, then today can be your new year but just figure out what do you want your business to look like.

Who are the customers you want to attract? If you don’t think about those things first, then you’re going to attract the people you don’t want, I promise you that. After nine years of experience with not my dream customer versus the last year with my dream customer, it all just came back to knowing first off who I wanted to serve and second off, figuring out the right bait that’s going to attract my dream client.

For you guys, use this as a gift for yourself. Look at your business. Make the changes you need. Figure out who your dream client is. Create bait to attract them. Even if it means lower profits at first because you’re going into unknown waters, and for us, we had a drop. The first year, we had a huge drop but at the end of the year, November, we had the best month of my entire business career, including when I had over 100 employees.

December, which is typically the worst month ever, we did almost as much in December this year as we did all of last year as a company. It can change rapidly. There will be kind of a dip at first, and then it’s going to change. I want to give you guys this gift to make that change, and do it.

I’m back home. I’m going to go get ready for the day today. I got to go attract some more of my dream clients but I appreciate you guys listening. Thanks so much for being a Marketing in Your Car podcast follower. I will talk to you guys again soon.