The big “ah-ha” that I’ve been trying to execute over the last 60 days. On this episode Russell explains the difference between a value ladder and a value maze, and what he’s done to simplify his own value ladder over the last few years. Here are some of the informative tidbits to look for in today’s episode:

-- Find out how a value maze is different from a value ladder.

-- See Russell’s own value ladder and how each step works.

-- See what kind of systems Russell has put in place to assure that each tier in the value ladder continues to work, even without Russell being personally involved.

So listen here for all you need to know about the value ladder and how you can make it more simple in your business.

I’ve coached multiple hundreds of entrepreneurs, especially people in my inner circle who I’ve had the chance to work the closest with, most of them didn’t have a value ladder. They thought they did until I asked them this question, “Do you have a value ladder or do you have a value maze?” Everyone’s like, “Yep, I got a value maze. There’s like a million offers, all over the place, and most of our customers are confused, they don’t know where they’re supposed to go, where they ascend to because there’s this and this.” And I’ve had that problem for years, all the time.

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

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What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I’m going to get into some of the deep doctrines of marketing with you. I hope you don’t mind, it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to go play inside of the value ladder.

Alright so I know you guys have heard me talk a lot about the value ladder over the years and over the decades. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book I talked about it. I talked about it, I think I talked about in all the books somewhere. It’s like the core foundation of how all the things work. So I’ll give you the quick 30 seconds synopsis. The value ladder is if you have a business and you sell a product, then you’re just a product, not an actual business.

A business is tied to a result you’re getting for somebody right. So my over arching goal is to help entrepreneurs with small businesses to grow their companies with funnels, right. So how do I do that? There’s a lot of ways. Yes, Clickfunnels is a software tool t hat helps them do that, but that’s one tier of the value ladder. We also have books out, which is another tier, we also have coaching programs and masterminds, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that happens.

So A business is not just a product, a business is here’s this result I get for a certain type of person. And then all the products inside that, that’s your actual business. And then if you think about it, ideally in a perfect world, if I really wanted to reach my goal of helping a business owner to have success with funnels, the best thing I could possibly do for them is to go and just build their funnel for them.

Build it, launch it, and just give to them like, “Here, it’s done. Money’s coming in.” The problem is for me to do that it would be super, crazy expensive. I think every funnel we’ve launched in the last, I don’t know, few years, has always hit two comma club. So it’s like 100% guarantee of two comma club success. So it’s like, “how much do I charge you if I guarantee your funnel is going to make you a million bucks?” If I did it myself I would just keep the million bucks.

So that’s, by the way, why I don’t do it for other people anymore, because it’s like, I could just do it and keep all the money. But what would I have to charge you? $250,000, $100,000, $500,000 plus royalty? Yeah, it would be insane. So if I walked up to you and said, “Look, I can serve you at the highest level, but it’s going to cost half a million dollars plus 50% of your business.”

Most people would look at me and be like, “You’re insane Russell. No.” Now some of you guys listening would be like, “Yes, I’m in. Where do I wire the money?” Because you know, because I’ve already provided value up to this point and you know that I know what I’m talking about, you know I can actually help, so you’d be willing to do that. But for the average Joe off the street, if I pitched them that, they’d think I was insane, like clinically insane.

“You look like you’re 11, there’s no way I’m giving you any amount of money, especially not a half a million bucks, to build a funnel for me. And you still keep, you get half of it? No.” So that’s why the value ladder comes in point. The value ladder, typically at the bottom of the value ladder is you give them something that’s small that has, gives someone value but doesn’t cost them a lot. So for me, I have my free books. You go read the Dotcom Secrets book, or Expert or Traffic Secrets.

You get the book, it’s free plus shipping, and you’re like, “Ah, worst case I lose $10. Best case I learn something cool.” You buy the book and you read it and all the sudden you’re like, “I got value from this thing, this is amazing. I want more.” And then you naturally want more. So you ascend up to the next tier in the value ladder. “What else does Russell have? Oh, there’s a thousand dollar course. Oh, boom. There’s a software, there’s an event.”

And you start moving up the value ladder. And as humans, as long as we continue to get value we’ll keep ascending up, until somebody either stops selling to you or they offend you. So that’s kind of a quick synopsis of what a value ladder is. So I want to dive deeper into the thoughts because I think as I’ve coached multiple hundreds of entrepreneurs, especially people in my inner circle who I’ve had the chance to work the closest with, most of them didn’t have a value ladder.

They thought they did until I asked them this question, “Do you have a value ladder or do you have a value maze?” Everyone’s like, “Yep, I got a value maze. There’s like a million offers, all over the place, and most of our customers are confused, they don’t know where they’re supposed to go, where they ascend to because there’s this and this.” And I’ve had that problem for years, all the time.

And I’ve been trying multiple times over the last years to get better and better at defining my value ladder, simplifying it and making it, like right now our value ladder is really simple. Like right now we sell books, someone gets a book, and from there we try to ascend them up to the One Funnel Away Challenge, which is like $100, that’s the next tier of the value ladder.

From there we try to get people into Clickfunnels, so we have different levels, a thousand books or $97 a month, or whatever. We get someone into Clickfunnels to use the software, and inside there is the different tiers. There’s the $97 a month level, there’s $297 level, and then there’s the $1500 a month level, which is soon jumping up to a lot higher than that. But here’s the side of it. In the past I would have those but then we’d push a bunch of traffic in sales and something would happen and we’d make a bunch of sales at that tier and then it would just kind of dwindle, like, ah, and we’d go to the next tier and the next tier, and we’re bouncing from thing to thing to thing. You’ve probably noticed that from me.

I’ve got some ADD because I’m trying all these different things and it’s like, ‘Okay, we need to build the coaching program.” So we run that tier and do promotions and drive traffic and stuff, and we fill that up and then we’re like, “Okay, this end is hurting over here.” So we run back over here and we start buying ads and doing things and keep building up here. And its going back and forth and back and forth you know. So that’s been kind of the hamster wheel I’ve been on.

It’s juggling all the tiers of the value ladder and how do you keep them up. Anyway, not planned but we did something a couple of years ago where basically one of, as you guys know the One Funnel Away challenge, we launched that. Has it been two years now? Two years ago? We did it again, we do the big launch, it went amazing. We had 5 or 6000 people registered the first time, it was like, “This is so cool.” We did it and then I was like, shifted to the next thing.

Went back and it just started dwindling on the thing, we went to the next thing. And then we’re like, “Man, that one funnel away thing we did, that made us a lot of money, it was really good. People loved it. We should go and do that again.” Right you know, it’s like, “Oh crap.” So it’s like, “But how do we do it?” so we started going back to do it again and it’s like, “Ah, this is too hard.’ So we took one person on our team and said, “Okay, you are in charge of this.” And this is the key, we left someone behind, his name is Shane Larsen.

I’m like, “Okay Shane, you’re in charge of One Funnel Away, I want this happening every other week, I want to seem consistent.” And all these kind of things, you know. So he took over it, and the whole team, a team of people. We left them behind to keep focusing on One Funnel Away, and now him and his team take it and they work on it, every single week it gets better and gets better and gets better and fine tuned and fine tuned.

And for the last, for the next year, OFA just kept getting better throughout time. And now we’re at a spot where we get, it happens every other week, every two weeks it launches, and we get about two thousand, so about a thousand people a week to sign up for OFA, which is crazy. It’s $100 so that’s $100 grand a week we’re making off of OFA, but it does so much more than that. It’s a tier in the value ladder. So people go through that and then they want more and they ascend up.

So not only does it make the money up front, it also keeps people moving, it keeps them at a momentum right, as long as we give them a good experience they’re naturally going to want more value. But the key lesson I forgot is that we left someone behind. So I’ve been looking at Clickfunnels now, we’ve got these different tiers. We’ve got the bottom tier which is like the books. That’s me, I just want to be selling books all day because I spent so much time writing these stupid books, not stupid, these great books.

So that’s kind of me, I’m there and I should be focusing on creating ads, buying, doing stuff and focusing there. So that’s kind of where I want to be left behind. But right now I keep getting pulled from thing to thing as well. So then it’s like, I want to be focusing there. But then we’ve got Shane who is focusing on OFA. Then we’ve got this Clickfunnels $100 level. So it’s like, who’s, we need someone there. We need a team there in charge of growing it and things like that.

And we never have, so you guys probably saw about a month ago we re-launched Funnel Fridays, and the goal of Funnel Fridays was to create a team that’s going to be specifically focused on getting people who are $97 to stick, people who have canceled to re-engage and to get people who, just get all those people there. Get people who have paused plans, get them re-engaged, everything we can to get people at that level. So Funnel Fridays have been happening. So each week we pick a funnel type, we give away funnel templates, it’s been so much fun.

And as I’ve been watching the numbers over the last month that we’ve been doing this, our new trials have dramatically spiked up. People who were canceling, our churn rate has dropped down. So it’s like, it’s doing two things. It’s getting people who were not Clickfunnels members, they either used to be or they’re not, whatever, it’s getting them to reactivate or to create a Clickfunnels account. Or people who might have left in the past aren’t leaving now because they’re getting funnels and templates and training and this consistent stuff.

So now that we left someone behind, that thing’s working. So now it’s just happening. Every Friday there’s Funnel Fridays, and it just happens on auto-pilot and I don’t have to do too much, there’s a team there and it just going to keep getting better and better and better, which is exciting. So the next tier of the value latter, the next tier is FunnelFlix, so it’s the Clickfunnels platinum, and then you’ll get the FunnelFlix, and the same thing. How do we, we need to leave someone there.

So we built a little team, the FunnelFlix team, and some of you guys probably saw we did a 7 day live launch for list building secrets. And the plan is about once a month we’ll do something like this, but it won’t be every month, it’ll be about two months out of the quarter. We’ll do the 7 day live launch, inside list building secrets, you guys probably saw it.

The list building secrets went live 6 times over 3 days and at the end of it we gave away that course and a 21 day challenge if they were part of Clickfunnels platinum, or FunnelFlix. And from there we had over 650 or so people that upgraded up to that level and entered this challenge. And now over the last 21 they’ve been doing the 21 day list building challenge, and we’ve got so many success stories, people using funnels to build lists. It’s insane how successful this little thing has been.

But it got 650+ people to ascend up from $97 to $297, and that’s just the people that ascended by the way. That’s not counting people that just created an account out of the blue, and I don’t’, we haven’t figured out how to track that number. There’s so many stats, so many things to track. But 650 who were at $97 and upgraded to $297 and now there’s a team there.

So once a month-ish, again, next month is not happening, we’ll do the month after. But once a month there’s a 7 day live launch on a specific topic, we launch it, at the end of it there’s a challenge to go with it, and you have to be part of the challenge, you have to be part of FunnelFlix, it gets people to ascend up to that thing. And now that’s in place, it’s happening, it will be happening every month, whether I’m there or I’m not. It’s in place, now there’s someone who will be left behind at that tier of the value ladder.

And right now I’m working on the last tier of the value ladder, which is our high end coaching program and stuff like that, we’ve never had someone left behind there. Once a year Funnel Hacking Live I sell it, and then it just, people come in and it atrophies over the year. Funnel Hacking Live happens again and we sell it, and it goes back up and it’s just kind of been that way.

So I was like, “No, we need to build a team that’s there to make sure it keeps growing and getting better and better and better and better. So that’s what we’re in the middle of right now, and it’s been a lot of work. A lot of work. You’ll see the execution of it happening at the end of June with our, I won’t tell you the name of it, but you’ll see there will be a live event and a bunch of other cool stuff, and it’s the execution of how to fill and how to keep that growing and improving throughout time.

When that’s done though, I’m done. There’s something, there’s someone left behind at every tier of the value ladder, there to focus and make it better and better and better. And it takes the pressure off me like, “Create the next thing, launch the next thing. I gotta shift here and here.” and back and forth and back and forth. It takes the pressure off me where I can just sit there and just talk about the books. In my perfect world all I’d be doing is I’d be writing ads for the books, I’d be driving, sending emails to the books, that’s all I want to be doing.

And then from there everyone gets moved upstream from there. So that’s what I’m working towards, and hopefully it will give me a little bit of a break, I’ve been working way too hard. But in the last month and a half, we have built out systems and teams and processes on two tiers of the value ladder and we’re about to launch the third tier, so it’s been a lot of heavy lifting to get it in place. But two/thirds of it is in place and the last third will be in place within a month from now. And then it’s done. I can take a sigh.

Anyway, I’m sharing that with you guys number one because it’s therapeutic for me to talk about it out loud, and number two, hopefully for some of you guys who are thinking about, “Man, I have a value maze and I’m jumping from thing to thing to thing. My customers are confused, everyone’s confused.” It’s like, come back and simplify it. It’s simple, make it as simple as possible.

You got funnels that bring people in, after that where are they going? And as you look at that, who did you leave behind? What are teams, what are the people, what are processes so that tier doesn’t atrophy fast? We want every tier growing. I don’t things atrophying. If they’re atrophying it means they’re dying, if they’re dying it means that we shouldn’t have it. We need to kill it or we need to put something in place, a team, a person, a process in place so that it grows. If things aren’t growing they’re dying. If they’re dying you should just cut them and start over.

Anyway, I hope that helps. That’s what I’m doing over here. That’s where my brain power has been at. It’s exciting, it’s interesting, it’s hard work to get in place, but when it’s done, like I said, OFA, I haven’t thought about OFA in over a year. It just works. Funnel Fridays and FunnelFlix are now kind of moving in that same direction. Soon our coaching program, or collective, we keep having name changes with it, that thing will be in place too.

So it’s exciting. I hope that helps somebody out there. I appreciate you guys. If you enjoyed this episode or any episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast, please take a little screenshot on your phone, share it on social media, tag me, and tell people, or tell me your biggest takeaway you got, and tell people to go subscribe to the Marketing Secrets show. Appreciate you guys, thanks so much for everything, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye everybody.