SFR 132: The Natural Flaw In 'Ask Campaign's' (and what to do about it)...

I LOVE 'Ask Campaigns'! But there's a build-in flaw...

What's going on, everyone? It's Steve Larsen and you're listening to a very energetic, high speed, fast-paced episode of Sales Funnel Radio. I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine-to-five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business. The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business, using only today's best internet sales funnels. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

What's up, everyone? Hey, I'm super excited to dive into this episode today with you. I just wanted to go through real quick and help you understand one of the reasons ... I get a lot of people who reach out to me and they'll be like ... Well, here's an example. I brought 700 people so far, 700 about, it's like 680 or something like that, through the current Two Comma Club Coaching Program and, if you guys are part of Funnel Hacking Live, you know that there is a new program that is out, which is awesome, and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who are jumping in as well.

Very, very excited to have you guys, by the way. I can help you guys set up your offers, things like that. Anyways, I'm excited to have you here, it'll be awesome.

And then I have my own students. Here's the scenario, you spend a ton of time, you build a funnel, you're spending time in the editor. You put together this copy and these videos and you're getting together the traffic, you're building up some buzz for it, and you go and you launch this funnel. You're running ask campaigns and you're reacting to what the market is telling you to do, and then suddenly you realize that, oh my gosh, the funnel's not actually gonna work. It's a scam.

Steve, one of those massive eyeballs. He's not delivering. You're like, what? I wanna tell you why that easily is. I don't wanna tell you why it typically is that even when ... When I was working at Click Funnels, when Russel and I would launch a funnel it wouldn't work the first time. Here's one of the reasons why. It has to do with the way that the offer came about. It has to do with the way, especially if you're creating an opportunity switch.

I had the honor and privilege to do a round table at Funnel Hacking Live and this topic came up, and I realized that I don't know if I've really talked or discussed about this with you guys and somebody asked, what do you do when your funnel doesn't work? I was sitting there and I was pretty much yelling for three hours. It was the fastest three hours of my life, by the way.

I love coaching. I just had no idea three hours went by. I had people around me the whole time and it was so loud in there I was yelling so that everyone could hear. My throat was killing me at the end but it was a ton of fun.

Anyway, it pretty much goes like this. When my wife and I were expecting our first child, meaning literally we went to the hospital and she was about to have the kid, we were in the delivery room, and I first of all want to give the caveat that I recommend you never do this, ever, men. We were in there and she needed to be induced. Nothing had started yet. We had already been in there, we'd spent the night in there, and nothing had started yet. We were just kinda hanging out. Sometimes it's kinda long waits inside those rooms before the delivery action actually happens. Super special and a great experience.

Anyway, I was sitting there and ... at the time, I can't remember what I was trying to sell, but I was trying to sell something or I was gonna go make a product. I didn't know about offers yet. I was gonna go make this product and at the time, Noah Kagan, if you know who Noah Kagan is, Noah Kagan had this thing at that time where he would help you make your first $1000 on the internet, but you could text him personally before you actually bought, with any final questions.
I was like, hey that's kinda cool. So I decided I would text him.

I'm sitting there in the delivery room. Nothing's happening yet, there's nothing going on. I'm not that kind of schmuck, but don't do this guys. I was sitting there and I decided that I would text Noah Kagan. I'm texting Noah Kagan and I'm like, hey man, I got this sweet idea and I would love to be able to go and build it.

Do you think it's a good idea? He goes, I don't know. I was like, what do you mean? Is this a good idea? He's like, look man, I let people vote with their wallets. I don't care what they say with their mouths.

I was like, huh. That makes so much sense. How come I never thought of that before? This is like four and a half years ago now. I was like, oh yeah, that makes complete sense. Why would I care about anything? You know?

Now, think about it. What's the thing we teach you to go do to start uncovering the false beliefs? We tell you to do an ask campaign. An ask campaign. That's people telling you, oh yeah. Right? How many times have you guys said ... We've all done it. Classic example is January 1st. We all make our New Year's goals, our New Year's resolutions. I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna do x, y, and z better.

Three weeks in, 99% of people aren't doing their thing anymore. So, same thing is true when you're asking people, ask campaigns and stuff, what's your number one question or challenge with x, y, and z? It helps you like crazy get a good baseline of what it is that you should be go creating. But you gotta understand that when you're creating it, you actually, by nature, have a gap in what people said they're actually starting with versus what they'll actually pay for to have a solution for. There's a gap there.

So, that's why you have to be reactionary so quickly. So that when you go out and you're actually building your funnel and you go out and you launch that thing, you've gotta understand that you are doing so with a sales message, an offer. You're doing so with a funnel that is based off of what people said they're interested in versus what they're actually interested in.

So, by nature, there's a gap. That's why you do and run what Russel calls an audible. A funnel audible. The moment you launch the thing, you do it with the expectation that it will fail because you've created it from this ask campaign based off of the ideas of what people said that they're struggling with. Do you think that people even know 100% of what they're struggling with? No. I can even tell you from when I coach people, most people have no idea what they're struggling with on their own phone.

They're like, I don't know what the problem is Steven, you gotta tell me. And I gotta look in and be like, this is the issue. I love ask campaigns, but it's the reason why I don't just do them once. I don't ever really stop them. I do them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It's not always the same way that Expert Secrets talks about.

It's not always me legitimately or forwardly ever saying, what's your number one question or challenge with x, y, and z? But I'm usually always doing some kind of ask campaign. I'm gleaning from the market what it is that they said that they'd like. What it is they said that they don't like.

How many times do you change what you do and don't like? You do it all the time. So when you launch the funnel, you've gotta go through and understand that there's this gap that's created by the very nature that you created the data. The very nature. Human nature. Yes Steven, I'm struggling x, y, and z. My number one question or challenge is this. Oh, you want me to pay for that? Well, I don't know about that. You gotta understand that it's the same thing that ... I've told the example before on this podcast about when we launched the Expert Secrets book. Within a day and a half, we realized that something was wrong with the funnel, the Expert Secrets book funnel.

It was Russel, John Parks, Brandon Fisher. We were all in a cabin hanging out with the Harmon brothers, creating the script for the viral video for click funnels, and that's when we realized that, oh crap, we gotta go through and fix this thing. So what we did was we called an audible, within a few days.

What I'm trying to tell you is that you've gotta understand that when you launch it, do it with the expectation that it will fail. It even fails every single time that we put it out there. But the speed of success is gonna be greatly dependent on the speed at which you call your audible. So do it. Don't plan something else after you launch your funnel. The only thing you should have planned after you launch your funnel is to sit and watch, for there to be enough data for you to look back and go, crap. This OTO isn't working.

Crap, this opt-in page isn't working. Crap, looks like this ... You know what I mean? You go in and you do macro level, huge level changes, huge level split tests. Not little tiny stuff like, let's go change the button colors. No, no, no. Nothing like that. I'm saying you switch up the whole freaking offer. I'm saying you adapt the whole sales message. Big stuff. We hardly ever get down to the micro levels of split testing stuff. Hardly ever. It's usually at these macro, macro, big, big levels.

We're like, man, we could change this whole thing and try and get a 15% boost in conversion, versus us trying to get a micro two to three percent boost in conversion based on button color and positioning and stuff like that.

Go macro before you ever go micro. I wouldn't even think about micro for a long time. Stay high level with it. But that's the reason why a funnel will not work, typically for quite some time, because it's the nature of the way you collect the data. It still is better than you doing it off of your own head. So still do the ask campaign, but just understand that this is you literally creating your product with the market when you do it this way, when you do it with the understanding that when you launch it, it will not do well.

Usually not. Because you're doing the ask campaigns. You're getting it from people who are saying what they want, but they're not actually putting their wallet forward and voting with it. When you actually get to a spot where you're like, hey people are actually gonna vote with their wallet. Sweet.

There you go. You bridged the gap. You gotta figure out that gap. That gap is the reason the audible is needed. It's the gap that's created when you're actually collecting the data for your message, for your offer, for your products, for your funnels. Does that make sense? I don't know another way around that. I still think you should do the ask campaigns. It helps you understand, if anything, the excuses of your market, which is great. It's gonna help you put all those things together. But in terms of what people actually get their wallet out for, that's a little different there.

There's a bit of a chasm there. There's a bit of a valley there, there's a bit of a canyon there. So you gotta figure that out and be ready to build a bridge so that you can cross that gap, because you'll get a lot of traffic. They'll just buy it from you anyway. But, when you can cross the gap into what mass market is willing to pay for it, that's you crossing that gap, and you gotta do it with some speed. The faster you do it, the better.

I feel like most of the time when I see a funnel, they've not called any audible on their own yet and it's one of the reasons why their funnel still stayed bad. It's because they come to me and they're like, hey Steven, how come it didn't work? I'm like, well what did you change after you launched it? We don't know. We just know this one page didn't work.

Okay, if you know that one page didn't work, why have you not changed anything on it? Switch it at a high, high level. Big, macro level changes. Switch out the entire product in that OTO. Maybe you're telling the wrong story all together. When you launch the funnel, you're not done. You're kinda starting. And you're starting on this phase, this period, where you're reacting to what the market said, and you're being very reactionary, which is good. Then it's react, relaunch, react, relaunch, react, relaunch till you get it to the spot where you realize, holy crap, we've bridged the gap.

Hopefully that's helpful. Bit of a shorter episode, but it's the reason that the audible is needed. I love Russel's presentation at Funnel Hacking Live about funnel audibles. That's the reason why the audible happens. That's the reason why the audible is needed. Many times, multiple audibles.

Especially if you're doing an opportunity switch. That gap is pretty wide if you're doing an opportunity switch. When you're doing an opportunity stack, the gap is a little bit smaller because you've already crossed it once before. You kind of already know what people will pay for versus just say that they'll pay for. If that makes no sense to you, you've gotta go read the book Expert Secrets. Huge fan of it, obviously. If you guys have not figured that out by now, you don't know who I am. Hopefully that's helpful guys. Be ready for the audible.

The speed that you call the audible, the speed that you react, this is the correct moment to be extremely reactionary inside your funnel. All right guys, thanks so much, and I'll talk to you later. Bye.

Thanks for listening. Please remember to write and subscribe. You want me to speak at your next event or mastermind? Let me know what I can share that would be most valuable by going to stevejlarsen.com and book my time now.