Listen to the first 1/4 of my keynote presentation from FHL. We talk about what funnel hackers are doing and start digging into “Hook, Story, Offer”. On today’s episode you will hear part 1 of 4 of Russell’s first presentation at Funnel Hacking Live 2019. Here are some of the super awesome things you will hear in part one:

-- A little background into how Clickfunnels got started, and stats of where they are now.

-- Find out why hook, story, and offer are the keys to your success.

-- And listen to Russell show how increasing value in an offer is better than decreasing price to compete with others.

So listen here to hear the beginning of Russell’s first presentation at this year’s Funnel Hacking Live about the Hook, Story, and Offer.

I think so many of us risk everything, we’re trying to change the world, we do this thing and then it fails, and then we shrink back and we’re like, “I just gotta hide because I don’t want people to know that I messed up.” I know for a fact there are people in this room who are in that spot right now. You’ve had success in the past but there’s that fear of putting yourself out there again.

-- ClickFunnels: Everything you need to start market, sell, and deliver your products and services online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)

-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

-- ​Traffic Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Filling Your Websites And Funnels With Your Dream Customers.

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I got something really special for you guys. For those who were at Funnel Hacking Live, you may remember my intro presentation. It was called Hook, Story, Offer and how it relates to the Perfect Webinar.

It was a lot of fun, and we actually streamed it live, so that everyone who wasn’t at Funnel Hacking Live would get extreme FOMO, fear of missing out, and want to come to Funnel Hacking Live next. So you know what? I thought as long as we streamed it live online, why don’t I give it to everyone on the podcast and give them all FOMO as well? For those who weren’t there, and for those who were there, just to give you a reminder on the foundation I laid out for the event, because it’s the foundation for all the different things. It’s a presentation I’m really proud of and I think it’ll help a lot of you guys.

So it’s going to go into hook, story, offer and how it ties back into the Perfect webinar and believes and a whole bunch of stuff like that. We’re going to break this up over probably four episodes. There’s a couple of parts I’m going to cut out just because they don’t make sense to show you. For example, we do the year in review video that was really, really fun, but if you can’t see it, it doesn’t really make sense. So we’ll pull some of those pieces out of the podcast episode, that you have to be able to see visually.

But for the most part, you’ll have a chance to hear my opening keynote presentation from this year’s Funnel Hacking Live. If you haven’t got your tickets yet for next year’s Funnel Hacking Live, you are insane. This may be the last year we do it in the future. Maybe we’ll do it in 5 more years. I don’t know. But I do know we booked the hotel, we paid the money, so it’s happening 1 year from right now-ish, and I want you there. So if you haven’t got your tickets yet, go to FunnelHackingLive.com and grab your tickets.

And with that said, I hope you enjoy over the next four episodes, my keynote presentation from Funnel Hacking Live 2019. So I’m going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back we’ll start into my first opening presentation.

How many of you guys are pumped to be here this week. This is like, we’ve been talking about this for the last 12 months, since last time we were all hanging out. How many of you guys feel like this is your Clickfunnels, Funnel Hacker family reunion. It’s so exciting to have all of you guys here.

It’s funny, as we were kind of preparing this whole thing, and you guys know I’m obsessed with t-shirts, you’ve all gotten at least one so far right? There’s more coming. But we were looking at, what’s the right message for the t-shirt everyone’s going to be wearing when they come here today that’s going to really connect us as a family?  And at one of my inner circle meetings, I can’t remember who it was, they posted this quote up during the presentation and I read it and I got chills and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the message.”

So if you see the first slide here, this is the back of the shirts you guys all got. It says, “Surround yourself with the dreamers, and the doers, the believers and the thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those that see greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.” And I think sometimes that’s how it is inside of a family, right.

Obviously everyone that’s here is in a different stage of their business, of their life. Some of you guys are at a spot where you’re trying to figure out the next big thing to take your business to the next level. Some of you guys are at the very beginning, trying to figure this out. So we’ve got a lot of you guys here together, so what’s amazing about this community, this family is how everyone works together to help each other and to raise each other up, which is really cool.

A couple, about a month and a half ago or so, as I was preparing for the 10x event…how many of you guys were at the 10x event? In front of 35,000 people in a baseball stadium, with an echo that made it impossible for anyone to hear, so much stress. And then this event, which is like, all this stuff, it was heavy on me.

I remember I texted Garrett White and I was just talking to him back and forth and he sent me a quote that meant the world to me. And I think for a lot of you guys who are here in this room, you probably feel this pressure a little bit. This is what his text sent to me, it said, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

And he said that to me, and I started thinking, and then he messaged me a few minutes later, he said, “I want you to understand, I understand where you’re at. You’ve chosen to go out from the world. Most people sit at home and they watch TV and they do as little as possible. You’ve chosen to step out into the world and try to change it. And that’s different, it’s not normal. People don’t do that, and you’ve done it.” He said, “I see you.”

And as I was preparing my presentation today, I was thinking about how many of you guys are here doing the same thing. It is way easier to stay at home and not be here right. It is way easier to just go to a job. Or it’s way easier to just plug in and watch TV or watch Netflix, or do whatever it is. It’s harder to come here and try to learn a skill set and the thing where you’re going to go out there and put yourself out there. It’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable a lot of times. How many of you guys feel awkward here right now? Where are my introverts in the room?

Yes, it’s hard right. That’s why I’m onstage because I’m scared of everybody. I understand it, it’s tough, but it’s worth it. I wanted to say it to all of you guys who are in that situation right now, I see you. I see what you’re doing and that’s why we’re killing ourselves. People ask me all the time, “Russell, why are you still doing this? Pretty sure you got enough money from all those Clickfunnels people, right.” Yeah, it’s not about money at this point.

It’s because I understand the process and the path that you guys are going down. So every single day I’m going to do my best to trail blaze as well, so I can show you guys, “It’s over here, come over here. Come on, keep coming.” Because I know for me, when I was trying to figure this stuff out, there are people that I plugged into, people that lead me, so I’m trying to do my best in this role here, to do that for you guys as well. Thank you.

I know that as you’re doing this stuff, as you’re becoming entrepreneurs, you’re building a company, there’s loneliness in a lot of things. There’s loneliness in leadership. It’s interesting, a lot of people when you’re leading a movement you’re leading your group of people, right. You’re there, you’re trying to share your message and you may have a team of people, which is amazing, but when all is said and done it’s you out there putting your face online. You doing the facebook live, you writing the book, you doing the presentation. It’s you and it’s scary sometimes, right. There’s loneliness in leadership.

But there’s also loneliness in faith. The faith of like, ‘Is this actually going to work?” I know for a fact that half of you guys who are in this room right now came on faith, and hope and a prayer. I was telling somebody earlier, I said, “You know half of the room that’s here are people who have come to this before. This is a big family reunion and they’re excited to be with their friends and their family, start growing their business to the next level. And the other half, it’s your first time.”

Right, and you’re scared. You have faith in this process, a little bit. You have hope it’s going to be amazing. But you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what if it doesn’t work? What if I spent all this money and I flew all this way and I’m here taking a week off of work, does it make any logical sense?” Sometimes it doesn’t. So I understand there’s loneliness not only in leadership, but there’s loneliness in the faith of trying to do that thing and trying to step out there to do it.

And then the last thing I want to share is, I did a podcast a little while ago called Entrepreneur Scars. How many of you guys listened to that? I know that a lot of you guys that are here in this room have entrepreneurial scars. You’ve tried to risk everything right. You tried to go out there and do the thing. You’ve tried to do a business, tried to launch something and it didn’t work. Or you had something that was working really good for a while and then something happened and it crashed.

I want you guys to understand, we have all been through that. I feel like one of the most amazing gifts that our founding fathers gave us when they founded this country, America, was the ability for entrepreneurs like us to be able to risk everything, and if we messed up and failed, it was okay. They gave us bankruptcy laws, they gave us things like that to give us the ability to risk without the fear of if you mess up you’re locked up in jail for the rest of your life.

I think so many of us risk everything, we’re trying to change the world, we do this thing and then it fails, and then we shrink back and we’re like, “I just gotta hide because I don’t want people to know that I messed up.” I know for a fact there are people in this room who are in that spot right now. You’ve had success in the past but there’s that fear of putting yourself out there again.

So for all of you guys who are here, I want you to understand, I see you, I understand what you’re going through and we are here for you to support you as a community.

Okay so the theme of this year’s Funnel Hacking Live is the theme of every Funnel Hacking Live. I want make sure I’m showing my slides up here as well guys, because I got a lot of slides that are great. As much as I like to see my face, I want to make sure you guys see what I prepared as well.

So the theme of this year’s Funnel Hacking Live event, is the same as every year. People are always like, “What’s the theme this year?” I’m like, “It’s the same thing.’ I’m not changing it, I love this theme. And there’s a couple…I’ve got to create six presentations, yeah I’m going to do a theme every year too, come on now.

The theme is one funnel away. I wanted, for those that are like, “I thought you were going to change the theme?” no, this is the same message. Everyone’s here at a different spot than you were last year, and a different spot than two years ago, or three years ago. Some of you guys, you’re one funnel away, you’re here, you’re putting it all on the line. You’re like, “I’m going to gamble, I’m going to try it.” And this is your shot, your one funnel away shot. You’re trying to figure it out.
For others of you guys, this is your second year, third year, having success, things are growing, things are amazing, are happening and you’re one funnel away from the next step. In fact, I want to share a really quick story in Clickfunnels. We’re going to share the numbers and stats and growth here in a few minutes. But as we started growing Clickfunnels, as we got bigger and bigger it got harder to grow. And we started getting to a sticking point.

In fact, the last 12 months, we continued to grow but at a much slower rate. It got harder and harder and harder as we got more and more people. And all of us inside of Clickfunnels were freaking out, “How do we grow this thing? How do we get from 50 thousand, to 500 thousand people? How do we grow it?” And we just couldn’t get past some sticking points.

And literally six months ago I was sitting in an inner circle meeting, and Natasha Hazlett, who’s going to be speaking to you guys tomorrow…where’s Natasha at? Natasha is right here. She’s pregnant with twins, she might give birth tomorrow onstage, I’m hoping. It’s going to be amazing.

But Natasha gets onstage, with her humble little self, and she’s like, “Hey, we tried a book funnel and it didn’t really work, so we tried this channel funnel instead and it’s really working good for us.” And we looked at it and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve seen challenge funnels before, but not the way she explained it.”

And we went back to the drawing board, we started freaking out, started doing some stuff. And how many of you guys went through the one funnel away challenge so far? So because Natasha gave me that idea, that one funnel we launched it, the last 6 weeks in Clickfunnels, we’ve had more growth per week in the last 6 weeks because of the one funnel away challenge, than we have in the last 2 years.

So for some of you, Natasha, you need to her. She’s going to tell you a story about her funnel and just be like, “that’s the thing I need.” Some of you guys it’s going to be somebody else. We have so many amazing speakers who are all sharing different types of funnels, what’s working for their business. I want you guys listening with ears, not that you have to create everything, you shouldn’t be creating everything, but listening like, “What’s the next thing for me? What’s the one funnel for me in my stage right now?”

Some of you guys it’s one funnel to launch your business. Some of you guys it’s one funnel to get to the next level. Whatever it is for you, I want you to just listen with those ears, because if you’re listening with the right ears you’re going to get it, and you’re going to hear it.<

I could have easily been in my inner circle meeting and been like, “Oh Natasha’s paying me to be here. I’m not going to pay attention.” But I was listening and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.” So I want to make sure throughout this whole week you guys are listening with your ears to hear the things that are here, created for you.

This is a picture, let me go back one slide. This right here, a couple of months ago we did an interview with Andrew Warner, who is the host of the Mixergy podcast, which is my favorite podcast. And I asked Andrew if he could come and interview me on the Clickfunnels startup story because I wanted to kind of tell the whole story.

Obviously a lot of times you guys here parts of the story, but I was like, “I want to tell the whole story and he’s my favorite interviewer.” And it’s funny, Andrew is famous. He does these things called Scotch nights, where everyone gets together and they drink Scotch. I didn’t know what Scotch was, I thought he was talking about Butterscotch, like candy. I was like, “What?” and it turns out it was alcohol. I don’t know these things.

And I was like, “I want you to interview me.” He’s like, “We could do a scotch night.” I was like, “But I’m Mormon, I don’t drink Scotch.” Then I was like, “Wait a minute, there’s this place in Utah, it’s a bar, but it’s a dry bar.” He’s like, “What does that mean?” I was like, “It means it’s a bar that they don’t serve alcohol. We should do the event there.” and it turned out really cool, so we brought him and me and we did this butterscotch night, it was amazing, at the dry bar comedy club.

And he interviewed me about the Clickfunnels startup story. How many of you guys have heard that interview. The first half it just went live on the podcast today, and the next half goes live in like two days. So if you want to hear the whole interview, it’s there.

But what’s cool, before he did this, he does tons of research and he’s like, “So show me the funnels you did before you launched Clickfunnels.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I went back in the domain archives of every domain I’ve ever bought from the beginning of time until now, and all the ones that we actually produced and there was over 150 funnels that we created and launched.

In fact, here’s a couple of them. I’m going to show you guys pictures of all the stuff I tried before Clickfunnels. In case any of you guys are wondering, “When’s my funnel going to work?” You might need to do one or two or three or four. A whole bunch. This is just the ones that were good screen shots. There were a lot of other ones.

So for any of you guys who are like, “I tried my funnel and it didn’t work. This thing’s a scam.” Its’ like, you should try another one. I don’t know, I did a lot of them before I found Clickfunnels. Some of you guys are like, “I’m waiting for the perfect business, when the perfect business shows up, then I’ll build a funnel.” If I would have waited for this, if I would have waited for CLickfunnels, guess what would never have happened? I would never have been ready to be able to run Clickfunnels. I would have run it into the ground two days in. I had to go through all of this to figure out how to lead you guys along this path.

And the same thing is for you. Thank you. In fact it’s funny, the first time I tried to build Clickfunnels was in 2005 and it was called ClickDotCom.com, how many of you guys came to the ClickDotCom.com event? Nobody. My wife’s there. I got my one super fan, thank you.

But what’s amazing, Dylan Jones, who was one of our original cofounders in Clickfunnels, I actually hired him to do the design initially. So if you look at this, this is the initial designs of ClickDotCom.com, we had sales processes, they weren’t called sales funnels back then. But I tried this game a long time ago, back in 2005, trying to get this live. I understood this was the vision I wanted to go, but I couldn’t figure it out. And I tried and I failed, and I tried and I failed, and I tried and I failed. It went over and over and over again.&nbsp; It just didn’t work for a long, long time.

Until I had a funnel, and I was one funnel away from a success story. But what’s interesting is this funnel was a complete failure. And I’m telling you this story because how many of you guys have launched a funnel and it was a complete failure? The rest of you guys haven’t tried yet? Not even one? Come on now.

I want to share a story because we launched this funnel, this was after I’d built up a big company, everything collapsed, I told this story a couple of Funnel Hacking Live’s ago, and those who’ve gone through the One Funnel Away Challenge have heard me tell the story. But we built the company up to 100 people, the whole thing collapsed, I had to fire 80 people in one day. I’m not going to get into that whole story, but on the back side of that I was trying to figure out, “What am I going to do when I grow up?” which is a question I think all of us should ask ourselves at least once a week.

I was like, “What do I want to do when I grow up?” and I’m laying in bed, stressed out trying to figure out how we’re going to make money. I didn’t have a vision or idea and I went to flippa.com, and flippa is a website you can buy websites. So I’m on flippa.com and I’m scrolling through my, I think I had an iPad at the time, scrolling through trying to find, what’s the vision for this thing. And this website came up called Championsound.com. I looked at it and it was an email/text messages auto responder for bands.

And I was like, “Oh my gosh, what if I bought this and it would be an email/text message auto responder for bands but I could rebrand it and make it an email/text auto responder for dentists, and then make one for chiropractors, and then for entrepreneurs, and all these different businesses.” And I was so excited. By morning I had sold myself on the idea and I went to go buy this site, and I didn’t have the, it was $20,000 which we did not have at the time. But I was like, this is the vision, this is where we’re going to go.

So I bought championsound.com with money we didn’t have, calling the banks, increasing credit limit, how many of you guys have ever done that before? I’m like, ‘I need this, this is important. This is the future.” So I buy championsound.com, and after we get it, I have, I tell our programmers, “Okay, put it on our servers and we can start selling this, it’s going to be amazing.” And my programmer looks at it and he’s like, ‘I can’t put it on your servers.” I’m like, ‘Well, why not?” He’s like, “It’s coded in Ruby On Rails.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” he’s like, “You know how you speak English?” I’m like, “Yeah.” “You know how other people speak Chinese?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “This is written in Chinese. I only speak English.” I was like, “What does that mean?” Hes’ like, “I can’t help you.” I was like, ‘Oh, crap.”

So then I’m like, okay, I try to hire someone on Odesk. I’m like, “Okay, can you transfer this Ruby On Rails thing to a thing, to a server?” And I didn’t even know what that meant, and they were trying. 5 or 6 people tried it and after like 2 weeks of trying, nobody could figure it out. I was like, “great. I spent our last $20,000 we didn’t have on this funnel, on this company, on this brand, and I can’t even do anything with it.”

And I remember that day at the office, I’m like, well I’m just going to walk away from it. It’s just a lost cost. And then after I packed up my computer, I was walking out the door, I stopped and I had this thought. And I’m so, so grateful that I listened to that voice. And it said, “Turn back around and email your list because somebody on your list, knows what Ruby on rails is.” I’m getting emotional here.

So I come back in, and this is like the lowest peak of my business where everything has collapsed around me, I don’t even know what I’m doing, how we’re going to survive, what we’re going to do. And I email my little customer list at the time and say, “Hey, I’m looking for a partner, I bought this thing it’s coded in Ruby on Rails. If any of you know Ruby on Rails I’d love to be, you know, I need somebody to help me on this thing.”

Sent the email out and a couple of hours later I get an email back from a guy. And I never met him before, he sends me this email and he’s like, “Hey, I know Ruby on Rails and I’d love to partner with you on this.” He’s like, “Send me the login and I’ll see if I can fix it.” So I send him the login that I’d gotten from the guy I bought it from, and I didn’t even know what it meant. I’m like, “Here you go.” And then I went home.

The next morning I come back and there’s a message from him, it’s like, “Hey man, I fixed it. It’s good.” And I’m like, ‘What do you mean?” He’s like, ‘yeah, it’s done.” I’m like, ‘It’s done?” He’s like, “Yeah, I fixed it. And when I was in there I found all these other bugs and stuff and I fixed those as well, got those working and now it’s all done.” I was like, “Are you kidding me?”


And it started my friendship with this person, and that friendship grew over the next two years that we worked together on projects. And the day that we had the idea for Clickfunnels, we sat in a room for about a week whiteboarding out the whole vision of it, and on the way taking him back to the airport, he was flying back home to where he lives in Atlanta, he said one thing before he got out of the car. He said, “Hey, really quick though. If we’re going to do this whole Clickfunnels thing, I don’t want to be an employee. I want to be your partner.”

I remember being so scared like, I don’t know if I, I’m an entrepreneur. I control everything all the time. And I was so scared. And in that moment I made the second greatest decision of my life, outside of marrying my wife. I told him, “yes.” And that man is Todd Dickerson, who is my cofounder and partner in Clickfunnels. Let’s give Todd a huge round of applause. Stand up, Todd come on out.

Todd: What’s up? Oh man, wow. What’s up, Funnel Hackers? Wow, that was amazing. Thank you for that insane intro.

Russell: I’m emotional, so you’re up now.

Todd: I know.

Russell: This is Todd, he’s been the best partner, the best friend, the best mentor that anybody could ever ask for. And he was the one who initially sat down and built Clickfunnels. After I tried for decades to make it work, and he did it in like a weekend. It was amazing.

Todd: A little bit longer than that, most of that was true.

Russell: So really quick, I want to show you guys something really quick. So this was actually, show you guys the right slide. So September 23, 2014 this was the day that changed my life and all of you guys’ life forever, even though nobody knew it. This was the day that Clickfunnels officially went live. How many of you guys remember that day?

Todd: Yeah, three of you.

Russell: Yeah, nobody really knows. So here’s the back story. We were one funnel away too, but we didn’t know which funnel it was. So this is the initial branding and logos from Clickfunnels, so we picked that one. You guys would all be wearing completely different swag today, had we picked a different logo. This is us in front of a whiteboard. There’s Todd and this is one of our other original cofounders, Dylan Jones, sitting in front of a whiteboard mapping out what Clickfunnels was going to become.

We launched it the first time and nobody really bought it. Then we built another funnel, we launched it and nobody bought it. The third, the fourth, the fifth, I think it was the sixth time, we got invited to speak at an event, and this is the picture from the event. It was in a room of about 100 people and I did the very first time, I did the Clickfunnels presentation.

We did the presentation and like 35% of the room ran to the back and bought. And I remember we were all excited and that night we went to dinner and we were sitting around and I was like, “Just so you guys know, that’s not normal. What just happened is, this is game on. This is going to change everything.” We went from that point forward and started growing like crazy.

So I’m going to have Todd go through some of the stats that have been happening ever since that day when we launched Clickfunnels.

Todd: Yeah, absolutely. So after that presentation Russell’s like, “It’s game over. We’re going to be at 10,000 customers next week.” Which didn’t quite happen.

Russell: Close.

Todd: But by the end of year one, we actually did hit 10,000 customers.

Russell: Yes.

Todd: It’s crazy, crazy. Followed by year two 20,000, doubling over. Then year three, crazy growth with the books and the amazing training that Russell was putting out, 50,000 customers. Year four, last year, at Funnel Hacking Live we were 60,000. This year as of today, we are at 76,700 thousand customers. How crazy is that? So insane.

Russell: that’s amazing.

Todd: And Devon alluded to this earlier, we processed over 2.5 billion dollars in sales through Stripe alone.

Russell: All of you guys.

Todd: That means all of you guys have done 2.5 billion dollars in sales. So crazy, which is actually 1.5 billion more than last year. So in a year, you guys did 1.5 billion dollars. So just to give you a comparison here, last year GDP rate…

Russell: We showed you this last year. If you took all the GDP of all the countries in the world, Clickfunnels right now is number 15 highest GDP in the world, which do you know what that means? Check out the next slide. If there was a country and our people were called Funnel Hackers, we would have higher GDP than 15 other countries. And I’m kind of thinking about, do you guys like this venue? I feel like we’re in Funnel Hacker, like our own little city here. What if we all just moved here and lived here and took over like 15 other countries.

Todd: Funnel Hacker island, I like it. Let’s do it. Check this out, so we also, the Two Comma Club winners, we’re up to 505 total winners, which I got an update right before we came out here, it’s actually 506 now so…

Russell: Congratulations somebody!

Todd: And that’s actually 241 new ones in the past 12 months alone, since Funnel Hacking Live last year. So insane. Give yourselves a hand. And we have the Two Comma Club X award, which is the 8 figure award. There have been 38 total winners for that now, and 22 of those in the past 12 months alone.

Russell: Amazing.

Todd: And in order to keep serving you guys, we’v ehad to grow our team like crazy. We’re up to 251 amazing people serving you guys right now, 252 again, as of yesterday we had a new hire. So there you go.

Russell: if any of you guys need jobs, we’re looking for people. It’s a big army to serve.

Todd: Yes, we’re looking new people every day. That’s 132 customer support people, 43 people working on product development with me every day, and 26 people in marketing working with Russell every single day to provide amazing stuff for you guys.

Russell: Amazing. Our mission at Clickfunnels is to help free all entrepreneurs so that you guys can focus on changing the lives of your customers. That’s our goal and our mission for this entire week. We’re so excited, we got so many amazing speakers who are coming here to serve you guys.

We don’t pay our speakers. They come because they love you, because they’ve been in the same spots you are. Half our speakers were in the chairs last year sitting there, and this year they’re up here to serve and give back to you. I’m so grateful for all of them.

One last thing before we move in the presentation. I feel like if we’re going to move from 76,000 customers to 760,000 and beyond and build this community even bigger, I think one of the big things we need to do is start changing some of our language patterns. We have to stop being marketing, nerdy geeks. How many of you guys are willing to help me with this.

I’m going to talk more about this later, but I think one of the big things that we’ve been struggling with, trying to get our message out to more people is we’re using things like, “Tripwire Funnels” and “High ticket application funnels” and all these geeky, nerdy things. So we’re going to try to simplify the language and I’m going to talk a lot more about this the next year, just try to get things more simple. So I got some pictures here of just some stuff.

Instead of calling things squeeze page funnels, which is like when I tell my buddy who’s a chiropractor, “You need a squeeze page funnel.” He’s like, “What does that mean.” I was like, “Well, it’s a funnel that generates leads.” He’s like, “Why didn’t you call it a lead funnel?” I’m like, “Oh, that makes more sense.” And then I was like, “The next thing you need is a tripwire funnel.” He’s like, “That sounds really dangerous.” I was like, “Yeah, but..” I explained it and he’s like, “It sounds kind of like a shopping cart.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, it is.” We call them cart funnels.

We kind of went through and you’ll see instead of webinar. Like what’s webinar? It’s a presentation funnel. What’s an application? It’s a phone funnel. So we’re going to try to start making our language more simple so that we can get more people into our community and start understanding what we’re doing. So we’re going to go through more of that later, I just, I want to simplify the names.

Alright, with that said, I want you guys all to give Todd a huge round of applause for his huge contribution to this community.

Todd: Thank you guys.

Russell: Thank you so much.

Todd: Thanks again.

Russell: Okay, now we can get started, now that all the tears are out. So what I want to do right now, I want to kind of move into my first training portion of this. And I wanted to lead this out, how many of you guys have gone through the one funnel away challenge. Those of you who have gone through it, you know that I stress a lot about one simple thing, which was hook, story, offer. I talked a lot about that.

And I want to talk about that for the next hour or so because throughout this week you’re going to be learning about a lot of different types of funnels. About challenge funnels and summit funnels and all these different things, and some of you guys may get confused. I want you to understand the core fundamental foundation of what you have to become good at as an entrepreneur is understanding this one concept, mastering hook, story, offer. So I’m going to spend some time going over that, hook, story, offer.

I gave everybody a handout that came with your, it should be on your seats, you guys take notes on and stuff like that. But one of the things it says in there, I think on the very front page, “If something’s not working in your funnel, it’s always either your hook, your story, or your offer.” Every time. Everyone’s like, “My funnel’s not working, Russell. What should I do?” I look at it like, ‘Oh, your hook is horrible. That’s why nobody is clicking on your ad.” Or “Your hook is good, people showed up, but your story is boring. That’s why no one’s buying.” Or it’s like, “Your hook and you can tell a good story, but man, that offer is horrible. No one would ever give you money for that.”

And I’ve learned like as I’ve broken down consulting to like three things, it’s always one of these three things. So I’m going to spend the next hour or so going over this, giving you guys ideas, opening up your mind to becoming better at that. If you become better at that, this framework fits into any funnel.

>If I’m selling a book I’ve got to be good at hook, story, offer. If I’m selling something through the phone, hook, story, offer. If I’m selling something through webinars, hook….This is the framework that we all have to become masters at. So I want to lead with that today and then as everyone starts training on different funnels and strategies, just remember if my funnel’s not working, it’s because of one of these three things every single time.

If you were to hire me for my insanely high consulting rates, “Russell, my funnel’s not working. What should I do?” I’d just be like, ‘Thanks for the check. It’s either your hook, your story, or your offer.” So next time you’re like, “Man, I wish Russell would look at my funnel.” Just sit down and be like, “What would Russell say? He would say, ‘it’s either your hook, story, or offer.” It’s always one of those three things, every single time.

So hook, story, offer, it goes hook, story, offer. But I’m going to start with the offer first and then move backwards, just because that’s kind of the framework of how it works, okay.

So the offer. A lot of you guys have gone through my training with the perfect webinar and stuff like that. So you see this thing called the stack slide, how many of you guys are familiar with the stack slide? Good. Okay, the stack slide is how we create an offer. And even if you’re not doing a webinar, you still create a stack slide. There is no circumstance where I ever sell that I don’t use a stack slide.

If I was emailing somebody and they’re like, ‘Hey, what does it cost to hire you as a consultant?” or “hire you to do whatever?” I would literally send them an email and I’d have a stack slide. I’d be like, “Bullet point one, value. Two, value.” I would use this in everything. I’m going to show you guys some examples today. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling coaching, or supplements or physical products or services. You should always have this.

To begin with I want to talk about one of the founding fathers of our industry, a lot of you guys may not even know him or heard of him. His name is Claude Hopkins, how many of you guys have heard of Mr. Claude Hopkins? Alright, all my OG’s, all the originals. Okay, this is your marketing history lesson. So Claude Hopkins was the father of modern advertising. And what’s interesting, way back then in the early 1900’s what they called, what he was called, what his job was, he was what they called a scheme man. He was a scheme man.

And what the scheme men did is they came into a company and their whole job was to come up with offer. That was it, the most important part, which is the offer. Now, to show you the value, even in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the value of becoming a scheme man, the person who actually creates the offer, Claude Hopkins back then made, $52,000 a year in 1907. The equivalent of that is 1.39 million dollars in today’s dollars.

They paid this dude over a million bucks a year to come in and be like, ‘This is what your offer is.’ And most of you guys never even think about this and you just kind of go off and do whatever. And I’m not going to, I’m excited Stephen Larsen is going to be talking in two presentations and he’s going to go deep into a whole bunch of really cool offer stuff with you guys. But understand, this is the value of the most important part of the offer. You have to understand that. It’s so valuable that back then they paid people that much money to come create offers for them. So it’s worth your time to start figuring these things out.

Now I want to kind of talk about what an offer isn’t for a minute, because most people in business, they think about “What’s the product I’m going to create?” and the biggest problem when you create a product is that when you have a product it is a commodity and anybody else can create it. And if you have a product and it’s a commodity, when you’re trying to figure out how to sell it the only thing you have as leverage is price. That’s why when you go to Amazon, someone’s selling the thing at this price it’s like, “Oh, well if I’m going to beat them I gotta sell it for less and I gotta sell it for less and less and less.” And it’s a race to the bottom, which is the worst type of business to be in, by the way.

Dan Kennedy told me when I first got started 14-15 years ago in this business, he said, “There is no strategic advantage of being the second lowest price leader in town.” So if you can’t beat Walmart, there’s no sense in being the lowest price leader in town. But there’s a huge strategic advantage of being the most expensive person in town.

So if you’re creating something like, you create a product and become a commodity and you’re racing to the bottom, or you understand how to create an offer, which de-commoditizes you, I’ll show you here in a minute, and makes it so you can charge whatever you want. So that’s kind of the key that you have to understand.

So a product is like a one singular thing. An offer is you take a product and you bundle it with a bunch of other things to increase the value and make it unique and separate and different. If I would have sold this as a digital marketing event, there’s like 800 digital marketing events you could have gone to right? Why did you guys fly here in the middle of the rain? It’s because it’s different right, it’s wasn’t just a product. It’s not a marketing event, it’s a whole bunch of other stuff.

When you bought Clickfunnels, most of you guys didn’t buy it because “here’s software that builds websites.” There’s tons of software that builds websites, right. We created irresistible offers and bundle them together to make you go crazy to come and buy and come here and do things right.

I spend a ton of time focusing on how to create an offer. One thing you have to understand, there are, basically there are two ways to make your product the cheapest in town. What’s the best way to illustrate this? The first way is obvious, if you want to be the cheapest product in town, you have to decrease the price, which again, funnel hackers don’t do that. We don’t. We should make a t-shirt that says, “Funnel Hackers don’t decrease prices.” If you decrease the price you become cheaper than somebody else.

The other thing is if you increase the value of what you’re offering, then you become cheaper. Because if I sell you something and it’s worth a million dollars and I only sell it for a thousand, that’s cheaper than the person that sells you something that’s a thousand bucks and it’s worth a thousand bucks. Does that make sense?

So I can either decrease the price or I can increase the value to increase the value of the thing. But if you look at this, it’s interesting. I had this conversation with my kids the other day. How much money you make is 100% tied to how much value you give. It’s 100% correlation. So my kids were asking me, my kids are cute because they’re at the age where they’re trying to start figuring things out. And one of my sons, Bowen was like, ‘Dad, it doesn’t make any sense. This guy over here (one of our friends) is a doctor and he’s way better than you and you make way more money than him. How come?” And I said, “You get paid based on how much value you offer.” He’s like, “But dad, he operates on people. That’s way more valuable than what you do.”

And I smiled, I said, “It’s definitely more difficult. I can’t imagine that. But you don’t understand. He’s only able to operate on one human being at a time. So he’s offering insane amounts of value for one person. So because of that, he gets paid really, really well, but it’s finite. It’s as big as it can be. I’m able to offer value to 4,500 people or 76,000 people, or a million people because I create something of value and I create and sell it so many more times.” So I said, “That’s the reason why I’m able to make more money than doctors, because of how that works.”

And I kept explaining this to him, so I told him, “Look, if you want to get a job you get paid based on how much value you have. So if you get a job at McDonalds and they’re paying, whatever it was, minimum wage nowadays, $8 an hour. That’s how much value you’re getting. But if you go and create something and you can do something bigger, the value is so much higher and you can get paid more money for that.” And I was trying to explain this to a kid which is really fun.

So the whole name of this game is you’re creating funnels and you’re figuring out your hook, your story, and your offer. You’re trying to increase the value. So the offer increases the value of whatever it is you’re trying to sell. So I’m going to show you some practical life examples. The first one here is dating.

When I met my beautiful wife, Collette the very first time, there were tons of men who wanted to date her. And I was just a product, I was like, “Hey, I’m wearing baggy pants and I have a shaved head and glasses.” That was the product, that was the best I had. There were much better looking dudes who dressed nice and all sorts of stuff. And I was like, looking at me in a lineup, there’s much better offers, there’s much better products, because I was a commodity at that time.

So it’s like, okay, if I’m going to convince my wife to marry me, who’s way more beautiful than me, what do I gotta do? I have to create an offer. I have to make this better. This is true for any of the single men who are trying to figure out how things work, you’ve got to bundle. So if I’m like, “Hey, do you want to go on a date with me?” She’s like, ‘I got asked by four other people this week.” I’m like, “Okay, this is the deal. I planned a date that’s going to be amazing. What we’re going to do is we’re going to go to dinner. What’s your favorite place to eat? We’re going to go there. And then what do you like to do?” and we plan an actual date and make an amazing offer. Then she’s not judging it as me versus somebody else, product versus product. She’s like, “Oh man, that experience seems amazing.” And the offer is better.

So when you’re dating it’s the same thing. When you’re business partners, when Todd came to me as a business partner, he had so much value. It wasn’t just like, ”Oh I’m a programmer.” It’s like, “I’m a programmer who can turn your dreams into a vision, into reality.” I can do this, I can do this, and it all the sudden becomes this amazing offer. It’s like, “Oh my gosh I can’t say no.” The value gets so big.

So it works in dating, and it also works for movies. How many of you guys are pumped to see this movie next week? How many of you guys have no idea what movie this is? So if I came up to you and I was like, “Hey, Captain Marvel is coming out next week. Who wants to go with me?” This room is fine, but if I walked into a normal room like, “Who wants to go to Captain Marvel with me?” they’d be like, “Eh..”

I’d be like, “This is the deal, Captain Marvel is coming out. I’m so excited to come and se this movie. I’m so excited that what I did, it comes out on my birthday, March 8th is my birthday and that’s the day it comes live, but the night before they’re doing a private screening in Boise. And I saw this commercial for it the other day and on the commercial it said ‘the movie is coming out, make sure to book your tickets now.’ So I went to the little app, to Fandango app, and I looked at the theater, there’s only one theater playing it at 7:30 at night the night before and half the theater is taken. And I was like, ‘half the theater is taken.’ So I bought the other half.

“This is a true story. Collette’s like, ‘Why do you keep buying all these tickets.” I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure someone’s going to want to hang out with me.” So if I was like, “This is the deal, you could come to Boise with me and we’re all going to go together. We got half the theater just for Funnel Hackers, it’s going to be amazing.”

Now it went from a movie, a $20 movie to this experience. “And then ahead of time what we’re going to do, we’re going to go to my favorite sushi restaurant, there’s a roll called the rattlesnake roll and it’s like this little Podunk joint in Boise that seems kind of weird. But the literally have the best sushi on planet earth. I always bring people and theyr’e like, ‘oh yes, sushi in Boise is going to be great.’ And then they have it and they’re like, ‘oh my gosh, this is the greatest sushi I’ve ever had.’ I’m like, ‘I know.” How many of you guys have been there with me? A couple, yeah, it’s insane.

“So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to sushi first, I’m going to introduce you guys to the rattlesnake roll, best roll on planet earth, then we’re going to go and have a separate funnel hackers section, we’re going to watch captain marvel together, third thing is I’m going to buy costumes for each of us, and all of us get to pick somebody, it’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be awesome. And then fourth off, after it’s done, we’ll come back to my house and we’ll just goof off. We’ll play in the wrestling room, play on the tramps and stuff, it’ll be amazing.”

How many of you guys want to come to that movie now? Do you see how I increased the value? It went from “it’s a $20, I’m going to a movie.” To “Oh my gosh, I’m going to book a plane and we’re going to fly there tonight.” Right. Just by increasing the offer.

So if someone’s not buying your thing it’s because the offer’s not good. How do you increase the offer? How do you make it better? Always think, “How do I make it better? How do I make it better?” We have a product we sell right now, it’s 2 pieces of paper and we sell it for a thousand bucks. How many of you guys will give me a thousand bucks for two pieces of paper? My die hards, thank you.

We literally do. I have two pieces of sales script, high ticket sales script, it’s two pieces of paper we sell for a thousand bucks. And if you look at it you’re like, ‘I would never pay a thousand bucks for two pieces of paper Russell.” And most people wouldn’t, but I’m like, “These two pieces of paper, guess what they are? This is our high ticket sales script. Today we’ve done just short of 30 million dollars in sales with these two pieces of paper. Someone picks up the phone, you read this one, then you read the other side, then they give you money. It’s amazing. It just works, every single time.”

And I didn’t make it up, people have been using it for years, there’s been billions of dollars tracked back to these two pages, and the person I know in the world who’s the best at this is a guy named Robbie. In fact, Robbie’s here in the room, where’s Robbie at? He’s here somewhere, he’s probably out…Robbie is the one who showed me this script initially and he trained me and then he trained our sales guys and built a whole team and he had everyone on it.

“So for a thousand bucks I’ll give you two pages, but then I’ll also give you Robbie in a box. So how many of you guys would also like Robbie to make videos to train your entire sales team for you? It’s amazing right. So you hire sales people you give them these two pages, and you say, ‘watch the video of Robbie teaching you.’ They watch those for like 3 hours and they come out ruthless sales people who can sell anybody anything.’

And then you’re like, “That’s cool but I don’t have any ads.” I’m like, “Okay, how about this? I will give you the ads we run and I’ll give you the funnels I run. I’ll just give those to you as well. And then I can hook up a call and you can jump on a call with Robbie for 30 minutes and he’ll train your sales people one on one and make sure it customizes the script specifically for you.”

Now how many of you guys would pay a thousand bucks for that offer? Do you see how it works? It went from two pieces of paper til I bundle it and all the sudden it’s like, ‘oh my gosh, I have to have that.’ If people aren’t buying, again, it’s always hook, story, offer. If it’s offer it’s because you don’t have, you gotta figure out how to make it better, how to increase it.

The one funnel away challenge is the same thing. This is a challenge where you get to jump on a coaching call every day for thirty days. Did you see the energy like, ‘ugh’? Now let me tell you all the stuff you get, the first thing you get is the big old box in the mail. Inside the box is a book called thirtydays.com where 30 people of our two comma club winners each wrote a chapter about how they got in the two comma club. Then there’s videos of them showing behind the scenes of each of their funnels. Then on top of that you’re going to get 30 days of video from me, then you get 30 days of video from Julie Stoian, and then on top of that Stephen Larsen’s going to come one every single day and yell at you and make sure you actually get the stuff done. By the time they’re done, your funnel is going to be finished.

We go on and on and on and all the sudden this is the most irresistible offer of all time. The first challenge we had 7500 people sign up for it. My goal is to get 10,000 people a month signing up for this challenge and we keep making the offer better and better and better.&nbsp; If you want to sell more stuff, figure out your offer and make it sexier, increase it, make it better.