Business:Marketing
SFR 9: Interview - Dallin Greenberg and Kristian Cotta Discuss Their Political Quiz Funnel...
2016-09-17
Steve:
Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.
Speaker 4:
(music starts) Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. (music ends)
Steve:
All right you guys. Hey, I am super excited. Today I've got two very special, kind of unique guests on the podcast. As you guys know, a lot of times, I record my own thoughts on things that Russell and I are doing to make marketing awesome, but I like to go and interview other people as well. Today I've got on the show with me, it's Dallin Greenberg and Kristian Cotta. These guys have a pretty awesome unique way for building funnels. Anyways, I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining me.
Dallin:
Appreciate it.
Kristian:
What up.
Steve:
Hey. I actually was thinking about it and Dallin, I don't even remember how we actually met. It wasn't that long ago, was it?
Dallin:
Ah, no, not very. Just a couple weeks.
Steve:
Just a couple weeks ago.
Kristian:
I think Dallin met you the way that him and I kind of joke about he's the black box back alley hacker. He does all the ...
Dallin:
If there's someone I want to meet, I find a way.
Kristian:
He's the unconventional guy. You won't find his practices in a book or a manual.
Steve:
Crap, that makes me a little nervous.
Dallin:
Yeah, don't mess ... I told Kristian the other day ...
Kristian:
Not black hat, black box.
Steve:
Yeah. We can call it whatever we want, right? No, just kidding.
Kristian:
Yeah.
Steve:
Well, hey thanks for-
Dallin:
I told Kristian, the other ... Oh, I'm sorry.
Steve:
No, no, you get a say. Thanks for letting me wake you up at the butt crack of dawn and still being willing to share some cool stuff.
Dallin:
Yeah.
Steve:
How did you guys start meeting or working with each other?
Kristian:
I'll let Dallin take that one.
Dallin:
Yeah. I was working on a kind of unique project. We had a guy up in Scottsdale that owns a software. He's the developer. It's a software that does algorithmic stock trading and he was stuck with his marketing. He's a big guy. He's got a lot of stuff going, but anyway, we were trying to help him get some plans going.
I had actually watched Kristian on Periscope. I'd met a lot of guys on Periscope and one day I noticed Kristian was actually in Chandler, which is only a few miles away from me. Like I said, if I see someone, I'm going to find a way to meet him, so I'll comment in his Periscope a few times and little by little, end up getting his contact info. Day later we're in a Starbucks together talking about a plan that we can do, well I was more impressed with Kristian, what he was doing. My partner that I was working on with this marketing plan for this software developer, we were on kind of different pages. I have a background in sales and Kristian's dynamic was a little more my still, so my partner ended up leaving and I ended up asking Kristian, "Hey, is there anything on the side that you're working on or that I think we can do together?"
Steve:
Mmm.
Dallin:
Badda bing badda boom. We've ... I feel like it's the perfect love story. We've been hanging out pretty much ever since.
Steve:
As long as he says the same thing, I guess that is true, right?
Dallin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristian:
Yeah, no. The funny thing, Steve, about Dallin is I'd been with ClickFunnels, I was one of the first 50 people that signed up for the beta version of ClickFunnels.
Steve:
Wow. You're from the dark ages, Man, that's awesome.
Kristian:
Dude. Yeah. We were just talking yesterday because we literally I mean the crazy part ... I'd been so resistant to start using Actionetics.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
Until I had to transfer from Infusionsoft to AWeber, AWeber to ActiveCampaign and we're trying to do something and it's like, "Dude, why don't we just use Actionetics?" It's all in here." I'm like, "Fine." We're switching everything over and I needed ... I'd been doing funnels and learning about ... like when I first signed up for ClickFunnels, I didn't know what a funnel was. I wasn't even sure what Russell had explained to me. It just sounded so cool and I was like, "Dude, I'm going to figure this thing out because what he's talking about and the numbers, I'm like, "That's what I need to be doing. That's it." I been doing this for two and a half years, which is kind of a long time in funnel years.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah, it is.
Kristian:
It's not really that long of a time in regular terms, but I got on Periscope and started kind of talking about my business. At the time, I was trying to grow this fitness, be an online fitness guy.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
I'd used funnels to grow an email list of 3,500 people and I got on to Periscope and nobody cared about the fitness. They wanted to know how I was growing my email list and how I was doing my, how was I doing this business.
Steve:
Interesting.
Kristian:
Then I kind of became one of the funnel guys on Periscope and was a speaker at the Periscope Summit. I got this notoriety on Periscope for, they call me the King of Funnels. I'm like, "No, guys. I know some really big funnel guys on Periscope." They're like, "No, King of Funnels."
Steve:
Wow.
Kristian:
It's been like two and a half years of this little journey of learning funnels where it's been ... I'll tell you the three guys I credit everything to are Russell, Todd Brown and [Lo Silva 00:06:09].
Steve:
Mmm.
Kristian:
I actually had just finished the PCP coaching program with Todd Brown and those guys. Dallin, when he came to me was like, "Dude, this stuff you're talking about is awesome." I said, "Well, let's, I need a guy that gets it. That is driven and ... " that was Dallin. Now we've got this little, little agency we're trying to scale.
Steve:
That's awesome, because good partners are hard to find. I remember I started doing this back in college. My buddy and I were driving traffic for Paul Mitchell and we were doing all this stuff. I ended up firing, going through nine different partners. It's cool that you guys found each other, you know what I mean? That's pretty rare just right there.
Kristian:
Yeah. If you go back and talk about Dallin's ... there's a couple of key things that I was looking for, because I have an entire course. You love Periscope. I saw some of your Periscopes on YouTube and ...
Steve:
Dang it. Man, those were the new days for me.
Kristian:
Yeah. I was a speaker at the Periscope Summit in January.
Steve:
Cool. Wow.
Kristian:
Dallin's helped me develop this program and it's something that we've rolled out in beta and we're going to roll out as a digital product. It's called the Live Video Funnel. I've been working with Todd Brown and the guys at MFA on the entire sequence and the packaging and all that kind of stuff. They're calling Kurt [Malley 00:08:00] speaking at Marketing Funnel Automation Live in October and one of the things they're saying is that the biggest opportunity of 2017 is, they call it the Facebook Live Funnel, but I'm going to let you guys in on a little note. Facebook Live and Periscope don't work the same way. Even though they're both live video, they're different, so Dallin ... I needed somebody to help me with that aspect. I couldn't ... to be honest, you know this Steven,
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
I couldn't do all that, every single thing, every single aspect of a funnel.
Steve:
No.
Kristian:
The script writing, the copy writing, the editing, the videos for the VSL's, the strategy, the email marketing sequences, all the social media.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
What I'm really good, compliments what Dallin's really good at, like I said, his ability to get in on Facebook and recruit people. He has this really strong sense about building a team, which is one of those things that ... we both get along with people, but Dallin's good at that recruitment process. When you want to build and scale something and you need the right people, you need somebody like that.
Steve:
That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's hard to find that stuff. Dallin, you and I, we were talking a little bit about some of the trials you guys went through. Obviously individually you do, but you guys met each other, what have you guys been working on and I guess what was the ... What are some of the issues you guys have run on, I guess, getting to where you are. You know what I mean?
Unspoken stories, you know that where none of us put in our marketing hardly ever unless it's part of our sales letter. "I was in the dumps, but now I'm flying high." These are like, really what kind of issues did you guys run into what you're doing now? What are you doing now, first of all?
Dallin:
Well, the majority of our issues actually are from more individual sides. We're actually doing really good with our projects together.
Steve:
Mmm.
Dallin:
Your typical issues you run in together are testing. That's what funnels are, right, it's testing, testing, testing, testing. There's always that down side until you ... it's just a numbers game, right, until you find something that works. As far as the personal side, because I believe that this kind of runs, this is the fire that's on the inside, the Y factor from what I call it, right. My background's in sales, so I did door-to-door for years. I think, Steven, you've mentioned that you flirted with that a little bit but, I was really good at it.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah. That's like, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's one of the best educations I've ever had.
Dallin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve:
I've got a marketing degree and I don't know what I learned from it. You know?
Dallin:
Well, that's actually just what I was going to say. I was going to school for business and marketing and be honest, my classes were super redundant. I hated them. I was like, "Man, this is for years I've been planning on doing this and ... " Anyway I got into sales and I did pretty good at it. I just kept going. I ended up doing more recruiting and for six, seven years going out on the summers and taking a team out and helping manage and recruit and sell.
Steve:
Yeah.
Dallin:
You learn so much from just talking to people, the sale cycle, funnels, a different type of funnel, right?
Steve:
Yeah.
Dallin:
Learning how to build value to the point where it doesn't matter what you ask for money, because they love it so much that they're going to buy. It taught me a lot. Well, long story short, I made my transition. I was doing alarms and home automation. I made my transition with this solar boom.
Steve:
Mmm.
Dallin:
Solar's on fire and fortunately for us, we live in Arizona, one of the sunniest places in the world. Solar was hot, but a lot of stuff was happening politically. A lot of the utilities are trying to shut down solar here just because of different costs. It's a mess. They succeeded and actually the utility ... There's two main utilities in Arizona. They succeeded shutting down solar where I live.
In order for me to get work, I'd have to go an hour a day just to prospect clients, let alone keep my pipelines, my relationships, my contracts, everything going, because they're longer projects. It was really funny because I was really bummed because I was really excited about this transition. It was a huge jump for me because we were so comfortable with what we were doing, making awesome money and it was kind of just this really big leap of faith. Well, last April, fast forward a little bit, last April, our little girl, our daughter, she was four years old. She got diagnosed with leukemia.
Steve:
Oh man.
Dallin:
When that happened, we literally were going to leave for another summer, two days after she was diagnosed. It was crazy. Everything was just happening and days and days and days sitting in the hospital. I had always wanted to do something online my whole life, but I didn't want to ... I didn't know exactly what was happening. I didn't know where I wanted to put my foot in. I didn't want to mess with inventory and selling one off things. I wanted to do something on a big level. I just didn't know how to do it.
In the hospital you got a lot of time to yourself and so I'd study these things. I'd start looking at different processes. I'd find patterns. I would sign up for everyone's email list, not because I cared about their product. I wanted to see their system. I wanted to study the funnel. I wanted to study the email sequences and I started seeing the patterns.
That's when I kind of got into a lot of this other stuff with Periscope and live stream. I was like, "Man, this is the future. I get it." I think every guy that's doing any sort of digital marketing has a day where they, it kind of clicks and they say, "Holy smokes. I can really ... This is powerful. This is how you can reach a lot of people." What everyone wants to do is have a voice and do something.
I ended up switching my major, going to school for persuasion and negotiations were my sayings. I was a business communication major and I had that emphasis in persuasion and negotiation. Looking back on everything now, it was just perfect. Everything kind of worked out really, really good. I was kind of like, my little side, so we really hit this kind of rock bottom where it was like ... financially we took a massive hit because I wasn't able to go out, drive an hour and do all this kind of stuff. This last year-
Steve:
Yeah. You needed to be home. Yeah.
Dallin:
This last year has really been an investment of my time and I just kind of feel like I went back to school. I feel like I'm getting way more out of this school than four years of collegiate, right?
Steve:
Easily. Man, how's your daughter now? If you don't mind me asking.
Dallin:
She's awesome. She's in a maintenance phase right now, got another year left of treatments, but she's ... hair's back and muscles coming back and went back to school. She's in a really, really good spot right now. Appreciate it.
Kristian:
She's strong too. You should see her.
Steve:
Really?
Dallin:
Yeah.
Steve:
That's amazing.
Dallin:
It's from everything that she went through. She got down to, had to relearn to walk, lost all her muscles. She was a little skin and bones and now she's this little muscle ball.
Kristian:
Now she's a beast.
Dallin:
She's awesome.
Steve:
I appreciate you guys sharing that kind of stuff. I mean it's ... because most of the ... I've never interviewed anyone on this who hasn't gone through something crazy, you know. It's not like the path is always clear, either. Usually it isn't.
Dallin:
Yeah.
Steve:
There's a lot of times I wake up and come here, I'm like, "I don't even know. I know I got to work on something, but I don't know what." It's like going through this hazy fog, so I appreciate that. Then there's all the personal side and all the things going on. Yeah, I first started getting into this stuff, little bit similar with door-to-door sales. I started looking around going, "What the heck?" We're driving out and there's all these billboards everywhere. I was like, "People call these things ready to buy." I'm knocking on people's doors all day long and they're not wanting to buy it when they wake up. I've got to go convince people who weren't planning on spend money. Like, "How do I do this?" I start putting ads everywhere and that's how I started getting phone sales and stuff. I was like, "There's something to this." Anyways, I-
Dallin:
See, that's funny because I was kind of the same person. All the other managers are, "Dallin, stop trying to reinvent the wheel. It works."
Steve:
DS, yeah.
Dallin:
DS, this. I'm like, "No, guys. There is a better way." My motto in everything in life is there is always a better way. I don't care what you say and what's working. Something can be tweaked and something can be done to scale.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Kristian:
Which is funny, because Russell always says, "You can tell the pioneers because they're lying face down with arrows in their back."
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
I guess in this case, it wasn't really pioneering. You were trying to find the people laying face down.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dallin:
Yeah.
Steve:
Side stepping all the other people who were already face down because they knocked 400 doors that day, right?
Dallin:
Yeah, seriously.
Steve:
What are you guys working on right now though? You guys mentioned that there's some awesome things going on. What's your current funnel, if you don't mind talking about that? [inaudible 00:18:19] sounds like, maybe ...
Kristian:
Dallin said like perfect timing. I feel like it has been. We joke about being a startup because ultimately we are, to the point that we're even in the process of creating our business plans and our SOP's and all that kind of stuff, so that we can talk to some investors. We have some investors that we're talking to in order to really have the capital that we think we need to be able to scale this thing quickly, instead of Facebook ads tested at $10 a day for 50 weeks.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristian:
Yeah. The whole reason I got into learning funnels was, you guys talked about door-to-door sales and I have 15 years of commercial real estate experience. I worked with clients like L.A. Fitness and McDonald's. I represented McDonald's for the state of Arizona and Burger King and Taco Bell, so pretty big name companies.
There's a lot of guys that would be happy with that, but the problem I had was that I kept looking at the deal size of what I was doing. It was constantly kind of like this feast or famine situation where you either had a huge check or you had nothing. Literally, nothing. It kind of got to the point where I was like, "Man, there's a better way to do this." Very similar. You guys hear the consistent theme here? There's a better way.
That was kind of the first step of me saying, "I'm going to figure out how to streamline this" so that it wasn't even so much ... I just kept seeing all the guys that were buying the properties doing all these big deals. They weren't even in real estate. They had these other businesses that were generating cash flow and here I am putting these deals together that are making, Dallin and I had this exact conversation, making these guys over a million dollars and they're like, "Oh hey, thanks. Here's 40 grand."
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristian:
What's wrong with this equation? I'm the one that did the whole thing, the financials and all that. I just didn't have the money. That was the start of it.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
Then you add on top of it that we got into a network marketing company and did really well, but we got stuck right under about 10 grand a month for like 18 months. It turned into another full time job where I was 40, 50 hours a week at every Starbucks from east to west meeting people. I'm like, "This is not working."
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
Those two combined, I was like, "If I get online, I can figure out how to do both of these. I don't have to pick because I can leverage myself."
Steve:
That is kind of the funny thing I learned about ... because I got into an MOM. I went and did exactly what my upline was saying. Got 13 people my first move.
Kristian:
Oh, wait, your [inaudible 00:21:42] not duplicatable.
Steve:
No. Not at all.
Kristian:
I don't care. If I find enough of the right people, it won't have to be.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah. My first month, I recruited 13 leeches. Man, they wouldn't do a dang thing unless I was like pushing them in the back with a cattle prod. I was like, "Ah. There's got to be a better way to do this." That's why I took it online and did a lot better. I definitely relate with that.
Kristian:
Yeah. The crazy part about this is, like Dallin was saying, he's, shoot, some of the advanced strategies ... Dallin's has this like ... he understands and can see what the outcome is that we're trying to do. He gets it. He gets the whole flow and process of this, of how funnels work. He's been studying them. I just think for a big part, he just needed to connect certain pieces and be able to see what's going on behind the scenes that you can't see online.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
We talk about ... the hardest part about knowing how to do funnels is focusing because when you understand it and it clicks and you realize what you can do, it's like .... Someone starts talking you're like, "Oh my God. I know how to make money with that. Oh my God."
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
It's like entrepreneurial ADD exacerbated.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
Forget entrepreneurial ADD. This is like an entrepreneurial ADD addiction.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
That's the issue, so we've had to get very focused on okay what's the quickest and most pressing thing at the moment that we can make money with, so that we can reach our long term goals. Like I said, Lo Silva is one of the guys that I credit a lot of what I learned from. There's three little things that I take from them and that's think big, start small, scale fast.
Steve:
Interesting. Think big, start small, scale fast.
Kristian:
Yeah, that's kind of our little mantra.
Dallin:
Yeah. That leads into basically what we're doing now. Our whole plan without getting too much into detail is we have a very, very big picture. Just like a funnel, we have our personal value ladder. Our big picture is more in investments, real estate, things like that. Those are our high tickets. Right.
Steve:
Yeah.
Dallin:
For the time being, we need to make sure that we couple that with clients, so we have our lead gen system, our agency that's doing multiple things, SCO work and funnels, and social media strategies and management and that way it can help us scale. Our agency essentially fronts the bills and I guess the best way to put it is we want everything that we do to be self-sufficient. If we build something, the entire goal-
Steve:
Keep it in hands.
Dallin:
Well, yes and no. The entire thing is for that project to sustain itself, so you understand once you get going with your Facebook marketing and such, it gets to the point where you reinvest X amount back into it. Then it lives, it breaths on it's own kind of. It just needs to be monitored, right.
Steve:
Yeah.
Dallin:
If we have this solid balance between us of we have clients coming to us for done-for-you services, that's awesome. That's cash. That keeps us busy. That keeps workers of ours busy. Then in the meantime, if we can couple that with 40, 50% of our other time for in-house projects, because Kristian and I already have entrepreneurial ADD, we're always thinking of ideas. We always have something going on or a lot of times a client that comes in has something that sparks an idea.
Steve:
Yeah.
Dallin:
We'll, like you said, we'll keep them in-house and then we funnel them. We get them to the point where they self-sustain and all of a sudden, we have our house projects, our client projects and it's just a very healthy business model. You don't see a lot of very sustainable and scalable models. You know what I mean?
Steve:
Yeah.
Dallin:
Especially, because I've been with very, very, very big companies with these companies I've sold for and you find ... one of the things I like to do is study patterns and development. I'm really into the business development side of things. You look at the ones that have made it, that have succeeded and that are scaled to the massive, massive billion dollar companies and that's kind of what they do. They make sure they have kind of that happy medium, that solid balance in all these different areas and factors and that's kind of what we're trying to do.
One of the projects we're working on right now is a political campaign funnel. This is just one that's easy to scale and we're just pretty much hacking it and taking advantage events which one of the things coupling social media with funnels is current events, man. That's, they kill. If you can find something trending and good and that has ... that you can milk for a long time, you better believe we're going to find a way to make, pinch money out of it, right.
Steve:
Yeah. Isn't it the-
Dallin:
I'll let Kristian talk about that.
Steve:
The political campaign funnel, is that the one you downloaded I think from Sales Funnel Broker?
Kristian:
Ah, no.
Steve:
Maybe that was you, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. There's some guy, he downloaded it and came back and he's like, "This is the coolest thing ever." I was like, "Just the share [funnel 00:27:53] free one I got from someone else. Glad you like it."
Kristian:
Yeah, no. I got the idea from actually from Funnel ... I got part of the idea from Funnel U. To be honest, as much as we know about funnels, something clicked when I watched Russell's video inside the membership site for the political bridge funnel, where it was like, "I see it." It was that coupled with the, the funnel stacking I got that whole idea of moving them from a front end funnel to a webinar funnel to a high ticket and how you stack those.
Steve:
Sure.
Kristian:
Bridging and when all the sudden the bridging made sense to me, I said, "Oh my God." Just like what Dallin was talking about here. Ultimately our goal is to, take the same amount of time to do all this work to go and work with somebody and do a commercial real estate transaction, where we're an investor or we're buying the property and people are investing with us, as it does to sell a t-shirt. Just time is time, it's just the size of the value and how you frame your mind around it. We are in the process of growing our agency. The whole point of it is to, if you think of construction companies, really good construction companies constantly have work that's in place to keep their employees working, so that they have the best team, right.
Steve:
Mmm. Yeah.
Kristian:
That's what they're always talking about is we just have to keep work so we can keep these guys busy. It's not about keeping them busy, but we also want to have the team in place because ultimately when we have our ideas, we can get them shipped quicker.
Steve:
Yeah. I've been approached by a few people lately and they're like, "I got these awesome guys. I absolutely love them." He's like, "What work do you have? I just don't want them to go anywhere else." He's like, "I don't care what it is. I just got to bill."
Dallin:
That's exactly what it is.
Steve:
Yeah, interesting.
Kristian:
Yeah. That's the idea, but to get back to what we're doing right now is I got the idea of how Russell explained the political bridge and my dad had ordered 100 t-shirts from my best friend. My best friend did all the screen printing for the Super Bowl in Santa Clara.
Steve:
Jeez.
Kristian:
He's got one of the largest screen printing companies on the west coast, based here in Phoenix. He has a company very similar to what Trey Lewellen started with Teespring.
Steve:
Interesting.
Kristian:
He's set in and he came to us and said, "Hey, why don't you partner with me and just handle the marketing on this." He's talked to me about doing some marketing for them for different aspects of their company. Now we're working together and the whole idea came up I said, "Well, you know what? I think I can do it." Before I was hesitant because I was like, "Well, I'm in the digital media space. I'm selling digital products." That was big hangup was I've got to sell to these entrepreneurs.
Then when this political bridge funnel that Russell talked about when he talked about how you move people from this list to this list, I went, "Oh my God. I can build a list in anything. I can just bridge them." It was a combination of that video inside of Funnel U and my participation in Todd Brown's PCP, Partnership Coaching Program, where they were really working on educational based marketing, and script and copy writing. The confidence level in my own ability to write copy had shifted to where now MFA is outsourcing some of their done-for-you client work to Dallin and I and having me write copy and script for their video sales letters.
Steve:
What?
Kristian:
Yeah.
Dallin:
That's real, man.
Kristian:
That tells you the ...
Dallin:
We scale fast. Remember that third principle. We scale fast.
Steve:
Yeah. Yeah. I wrote all those down. That's amazing. What's funny is that people don't realize that it literally is the exact same amount of work to do a small company as a big one.
My buddy, I mean as far as building a funnel and things like that, my buddy and I were building an [inaudible 00:32:11]. It was the first funnel I ever built with ClickFunnels and it was a smartphone insurance company and we were ... we got out of that for a lot of reasons, but it was interesting though because I was building it. We put it all out. That's actually when I got into ClickFunnels and it was right after ClickFunnels left beta. I was like, "Hey, I'm going to build this whole thing out before my ClickFunnels trial runs out." I'd never built one and I just killed myself for the next little while. We got it out.
Then this guy approaches me in Florida. He's like, "I need a funnel for some of my ..." He was selling water ionizers or something. I was like, "Oh man. This is a big company. They're already making a couple million a year." I was blown away. I was like, wait, this is the same exact amount of work as it was for the small little startup. Anyways, I thought that was interesting you said that.
Kristian:
Yeah. That's what we talk about is that it's easier to work with those bigger companies. They get it.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
You work with the smaller companies and they're worried about how much money it's going to cost them. The reality is that the more we put ourselves in a position to work with guys like you and Russell and guys like Todd and Lou Coselino and David Perriera and all them at MFA, they're saying, "Man, why are you, how come you're not charging double and triple?"
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
Dallin and I are sitting here like seriously if they're willing to pay us to write scripts for, to outsource their ad copy to us for some of their client work, what's that say? I mean, we're literally working with, doing work for the guys that are considered the best in the industry.
Steve:
That's ... Yeah. Yeah.
Kristian:
It's just a mindset shift is what it is. That has made it a little easier to have a conversation with someone and say, "You know what? We can take on this project. Here's how much it is."
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
They're like, sticker shock. Well, sticker shock. You can go and just have someone build the pages for you, but it's not going to convert. I know that for a fact because copy os what converts, right.
Steve:
You know Tyler Jorgensen?
Kristian:
You know what, it sounds familiar. I think I-
Steve:
He said the same thing to me. He's like, "You charge 10 grand to build a custom funnel?" I was like, "Yeah." He's like, "Why not 15?" I was like, "I don't know. I'd never thought about that before." I thought 10 was kind of the mark. He's like, "No, no, no, no. I'd do 15, 20, 25." I was like, "You've got to be kidding." That is is just a mindset shift. You'll get better people to build for anyways, whatever it is.
Kristian:
The big thing for us-
Dallin:
True and at the same time ...
Kristian:
Yeah, I don't know.
Dallin:
You there?
Kristian:
Yeah, you cut-
Steve:
Kind of lost you there.
Kristian:
The big thing for us is really to build a team, Steve, and to have that team in place and be able to have people that focus on all the different areas of the funnels, so that they get really, really good at that. They don't have to know the whole process because that's what I've spent the last two and a half years doing, right.
Steve:
Wow.
Kristian:
They can be part of this and be part of building something and helping these clients and really enjoy what they're doing. Then, like I said, when we have these ideas we can ship them. I know you want to know and your audience probably wants to know what it is that we're doing, which is what got you in. I mentioned my friend, Bryant. He's got this company like Teespring. He's got everything in place to roll this out. We had this idea for how to start doing that. We took advantage of knowing that the campaigns going on right now. I mentioned to you I think my dad bought like 100 Trump t-shirts from him. I was like, "Those are really cool shirts." My dad's like, "Yeah, man You should do this funnel stuff and figure out how to sell these to everyone. Look how crazy everyone is about Trump. Trump's going to kill it." At the time, it was still in the Republican Primaries. I'm like, "Well, I don't want to go build a funnel."
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
"Then trump doesn't win the primaries." But as he started pulling away I'm like, "Oh, let's start testing some stuff." We tested one funnel and surprisingly the Facebook campaign got a lot of clicks, but there wasn't a lot of opt-ins and conversions on the funnel. What it did and I think this is one of the biggest skill sets that people who are elite develop versus people that are frustrated and saying this isn't working for me is understanding the information that they're getting and what to do with it. You might not have a winning campaign or a funnel that's making money, but to understand what kind of info you're getting and how to use that to do the next thing is that whole testing process is what separates those that are killing it from those that are getting killed. That first funnel that we did, didn't make money. Not at all.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
I mean it lost $1,200. I went to Dallin and I said, "Dude, this is awesome." He's like, "Huh?" I said, "Look at the retargeting list that we got." Then we went and we tweaked this and I said, "What if we change the front end," and at that time Mike Pence had just been named Trump's VP. I'm like, "Who the hell is Mike Pence? I never heard of this guy before." I started asking people, they're like, "No." Unless you're from Indiana, you don't know who Mike Pence is. I go, "Should Trump have picked Mike Pence? Isn't there someone else." I'm like, "Boom. Is there a vice presidential debate in the Republican Party?"
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
We created a little mini survey around is Mike Pence the right one. First of all, you've got all these people that love Trump and they're hardcore republicans and now you're creating an internal debate. Everyone wants to voice their opinion, but they don't want to be judged.
Steve:
Yeah. People get pretty intense about that for sure.
Kristian:
Yeah. We created a mini survey.
Dallin:
Oh yeah.
Kristian:
We created a mini survey and we had this retargeting list from the first time and we started running ads. I didn't expect and I don't think Dallin either, that it was going to do as well as it did, but I mean, we had in less than 12 hours, we had 500 email opt-ins.
Steve:
What? Oh my gosh.
Kristian:
I was like, "Oh my God." I'm like, "Holy crap." I'm like, "What the hell's going on?" Of course the first goal is to try and get the funnel to break even. What we had to do was we were getting so much information so quickly that we really had to be on our toes and make adjustments and modifications. What we figured out through the first week of testing this is there's so much activity on this funnel. Just to give you the stats, after what was Dallin, really 6 days of running the ads, we got 2,600 email subscribers?
Dallin:
Five and a half, yeah.
Kristian:
Yeah. Five and a half days, we got 2,600 email subscribers.
Steve:
Wow.
Kristian:
K, the funnels not at break even, but here's what I want whoever's listening and whoever wants to take this information understand is the testing process. We figured out between two front end offers-
Steve:
Which one was the winner.
Kristian:
Which one's working better.
Steve:
Yeah. Which one's the awesome one. Yeah.
Kristian:
It's still not winning. Our free plus shipping is not, it's not helping us break even. The reason for that is because we're getting so many opt-ins. On a normal free plus shipping, you're not getting as many people clicking on the ads, right.
Steve:
Right.
Kristian:
Well, we're getting 5, 6 times the amount of people subscribing to the email-
Steve:
Would you, in that scenario, would you ever try and get even less people. It'd be counter-intuitive maybe, but I would just start tweaking the free plus shipping, I guess.
Kristian:
No. No. Well, no. We can't-
Dallin:
The strategy-
Kristian:
Yeah. We can't really tweak it because it's not like we're going to offer anything cheaper than free plus shipping. When you start looking at all the different things we can offer, there's not a lot of options, but here's what Dallin and I have figured out is that we think we've created a new funnel. It's not really new in the sense of what you and I and Russell and all these other guys think of.
Steve:
True.
Kristian:
In terms of Russel and [Daygin Smith 00:41:29] coming up with the black box funnel, right.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
It's just soft offer funnel, a front end soft offer. We think that we've come up with what we call a backdoor funnel.
Steve:
Interesting.
Kristian:
You get so many people on your email list. You get as many people to take the first offer and you get as many people to take your upsell as possible to figure out how close to break even you can get. If you look at 2,600 people, we go back and look at the numbers, only about 115 of those 2,600 ever saw the offer.
Steve:
Huh.
Kristian:
Now we have an opportunity to present those people with the offer again. Well, how do you do that in a way that's going to get a lot of people to open the e-
All right. Want me to ...We cut off here at the point of high dramas. As I was mentioning, we got so many email subscribers and such a lower number based on the email subscribers because we didn't expect to have that many, that we still weren't at break even, but we have a ton of people that we can show an offer to. It's a little different obviously because our price points ... We're doing apparel and things like that.
Steve:
It's like delaying the offer almost on purpose, right. I mean this is ... awesome.
Kristian:
Yeah. Remember, we started this whole thing with a survey, right, something that people were very passionate about, so a lot of polarity in there. They want their opinion-
They also want to know what everyone else thinks, where they fall in line here. We thought, "Oh my God. Somebody that votes, that voices their opinion, takes the time to put a vote in wants to know what the results are." We created a results page that shows them the results and has a special offer that all those people haven't seen. When we send it in the email and we tell them here's the results of the survey, the open rates are and the click through rates are sky high.
Steve:
How long are you waiting to actually send them this results page?
Kristian:
A couple of days, so-
Steve:
Oh really. Wow.
Kristian:
Yeah. I mentioned Actionetics. The whole reason that we started doing this is because we wanted to ... since we're having people take a survey and we're offering them this gift, we want to make sure we get as many people that take us up on that gift for taking the time to vote. We have a few of those triggers built in there, "Hey, don't forget to grab your free gift. We noticed you took the time, maybe something happened. Go back here and grab your gift." Then we make sure that everybody sees the results page a couple of days later.
Steve:
A couple of days. That definitely is a different style for sure. You don't think that hurts conversions at all?
Kristian:
No, I mean. It's a survey, right?
Steve:
Sure.
Kristian:
The point of high drama and the suspense and all that. We're still testing it, again, like I mentioned earlier that the biggest thing I think that separates those that are successful and those that aren't is to understand the type of information that you get.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
We may found out that we need to send the results sooner, but we don't know. We've got to test.
Steve:
It's interesting positioning too of you saying, "Hey. It look's like. Thanks for taking it. Here's your results. I don't know if missed this, but just jump back and get that." That's interesting. Like they missed it. They missed the gift.
Kristian:
Yeah. Yeah. "You forgot to grab your gift." That's our first step and then in the email that comes after they've taken the survey, "Hey, we're in the process of tallying up the results. We'll send them to you as they're updated."
Steve:
Interesting. It keeps the loop open, basically.
Kristian:
Hmm-hmm(affirmative). Exactly. Exactly.
Steve:
Man, that's awesome. Well, hey is there a URL that we can go check that out on? I don't want to pollute or dilute any of your stats, so if not that's fine, but ...
Kristian:
Yeah. We're just running ads to this right now.
Steve:
Good.
Kristian:
We're in the process of, like I said, this was just an idea that my dad came up with. I've got to give him credit for the initial idea, but now it's turned into kind of a new business entity, right.
Steve:
Yeah.
Kristian:
We're growing this email list and the concepts that Russell talks about the how to bridge funnels and lists and things like that. We're starting to build a list now in that republican, conservative, survivalist category. We're going to take it a step further and build out a home page and start doing some different stuff with it.
Steve:
That's interesting. You're going to go through and who's going to keep opening all the emails over and over again, looking at all the stats of all the people around. These are the hyper active political caring people. You know what I mean? That's awesome. That's a really clever way to segment out those people. That's fantastic.
Kristian:
Yeah. Yeah. You never know where your next business entity is going to come from.
Steve:
Interesting. Gosh, well, hey, I know we've been on quite a while. Thanks for dropping all the bombs of gold you guys did. I don't know what happened to Dallin, but ...
Kristian:
Yeah. He just texted, said thank you. He's trying to get back on, but I know we've got to take the kids to school and stuff, so-
Steve:
Awesome. Well, hey man, I appreciate it. Thank you so much and this was awesome.
Kristian:
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Steve. Love meeting new people that are doing the same thing as us and glad that we can reach more people that are trying to learn how this works and kind of help them understand the process and that if they just stick at it and keep testing. That's really the big thing I think is testing and learning is how you get better at it.
Steve:
You're kind of a scientist going through this, for sure. Going in an industry you know will make money obviously, but whatever you're doing specifically, you might almost always be the first. The think big, start small and scale fast. That's huge.
Kristian:
Yeah. If anyone wants to connect with us, Dallin and I are both on Facebook. We mentioned Periscope. I do a lot of broadcasting on there with what I call the Live Stream Marketing Funnel Show. We're rolling, if people are interested in learning how to use live video, we've got that coming out. Yeah. Connect with us on social media. Kristian Cotta and Dallin Greenberg.
Steve:
Okay, yeah. Then you've got the Health Success Podcast. Guys, go check him out at Health Success Podcast as well as he said Live Stream Marketing?
Kristian:
Well. Yeah. Just go to KristianCotta.com. It'll take you right there.
Steve:
Cool. Awesome.
Kristian:
Kristian with a K.
Steve:
Kristian with a K. Cotta, right?
Dallin:
I'm in.
Kristian:
Kristian with a K. Cotta. Dallin's in here. He just got back in.
Dallin:
Dude, I don't know what happened. I was getting all excited what Kristian was saying and then just cut off.
Kristian:
It's the point of high drama, that's what we were talking about.
Dallin:
I know. It was. That's what I told Amy. Is it over?
Steve:
It is now.
Kristian:
Yeah. We're just wrapping it up.
Steve:
Awesome.
Dallin:
Sorry.
Steve:
It's good. Hey, thanks guys so much.
Kristian:
All right. Take care, Steve.
Dallin:
See you man.
Steve:
All right. Bye-bye.
Speaker 4:
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