My personal biggest take-away from Inner Circle mastermind.

Right now we're competing with ourselves, we have people doing onboarding calls, we have people doing webinars, we have people doing things, it's just chaos. And I realize that as we are working on ClickFunnels 2.0, working on the onboarding process and working on all the things right now, I keep realizing that despite my best efforts, my value ladder keeps becoming a value maze. ...if we're honest with ourselves, what does your value ladder look like? Can you map it out and say, "Hey, someone's going to buy the book and the next step is for them to do this challenge, the next step for them to do this.", and it's very logical, it's very sequential. And somebody can go on that path, know where they're starting and where they're ending, if not, you probably got a value maze.

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What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing today. I woke up in a good mood today, which is funny because yesterday I woke up in a bad mood. So, anyway, I feel great today, which is awesome. So, want to jump into do podcast episode about what I'm working on. It's interesting the first time I introduced this concept of the value ladders inside the Dotcom of Secrets book, and what's interesting is that it's probably similar for me and for you over the years, the more I do it and the more products I create, the more jacked that my value ladder gets, it goes from me a value ladder to a value maze, to this value puzzle and it just gets more confusing, and meaning back landed circle after two years off, I had this big realization that I've done it once again, my value ladders are maze and I need to step back, cleaned it up.

And so, that's what I'm going to talk about today on this episode is how to untangle your valuable ladder or your value mates, whatever you want to call it. All right. So, I'm sure you guys have read Dotcom Secrets book, if not please pause this, go to dotcomsecrets.com, it's spelled out D-O-T-C-O-M secrets.com, and go get the book. Come on now. At this point you always ask me, "Russell I don't know how to get started. Russell, I'm confused". It's okay. The first thing you should definitely do is read the three books that I spent two decades of my life creating for you to take everything I've ever learned and put it in a very simple step by step format, so that's step number one. So, book Dotcom Secrets is the first book, go and read it if you haven't.

So, that's where we begin that right. Now, what's interesting is, in the book I talk about this concept of the value ladder, right?, which if you've seen it, you've read the book or you understand it, somebody comes in, and obviously in my dream business I could sell some of the most expensive thing in the world that gives them the most value, right? Like, "Hey, pay me a million dollars and I'll spend two days building out your funnel for you, then I'll drive traffic for you and I'll do all the stuff and you just have to cash the checks". Like that'd be the greatest thing offer someone, right? But because of how much of value it is, how much time, again, I'd have to charge at least a million dollars to do it, plus a percentage of the company and things like that.

And so, in your dream world you want to sell the best thing that provides the most value, right? And whenever I talk about some stage minds, like I was coming to you off the street and say, "Hey, give me a million dollars. I'm going to build you a funnel that might make you some money, what would you say?" And you probably look at me and be like, "Russell, you're insane. You look like you're 11 years old.", I know. And so, the problem is people think I'm crazy, cause I haven't provided value yet, right?

And so, the value ladder's all about providing value so that somebody fills that value and then they want more, right? And the same thing happens in the real world when we are trying to find our potential spouse, right? The top of the value ladder of the spouse is being married, having tons of kids and that's what we want, right?, but if you walk up to a girl for your first date, you're like, "Oh my gosh, you're beautiful. Do you want to have kids with me?", most women are going to slap you in the face and it's not going to work, right? You haven't provided any value yet.

So, we start at the bottom of value ladder, where we take them on a date, if they have a good time on the date they naturally want more, then we take them on a second date and they have a good time there they want more, you take them on third and a fourth, then eventually you kiss, then you fall in love, then you propose and then you get married, then when you come to them like, "Hey, we should have babies.", it's not weird because you provide value every single step in the value ladder and it makes total sense at this point, same thing is true in business.

So, my value ladder is somebody listens to a podcast episode or they watch YouTube video, they get some content, they're like, "Oh, Russell's really cool. I like him. I want more of him.", then they go and they buy a book, right? Just like you guys all just went and bought the Dotcom Secrets book. You read the book, you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing. What else does Russell have?", then from there you move up and maybe you take the OFA challenge or you go watch the Funnel Hacks Webinar, or you sign up for ClickFunnels or, oh my gosh, what just happened? I just put you into a value maze, right? You buy the book, what's the next logical step?, I've got a whole bunch of next logical steps and it's confusing, it's a whole bunch of things. And even when someone joins ClickFunnels we have a value ladder inside of ClickFunnels.

Right now we're competing with ourselves, we have people doing onboarding calls, we have people doing webinars, we have people doing things, it's just chaos. And I realize that as we are working on ClickFunnels 2.0, working on the onboarding process and working on all the things right now, I keep realizing that despite my best efforts, my value ladder keeps becoming a value maze. And partially it's because I like to create stuff, I like sewing things and I like doing... And hopefully you guys are all like me. Well, hopefully not, but if you are and if we're honest with ourselves, what does your value ladder look like? Can you map it out and say, "Hey, someone's going to buy the book and the next step is for them to do this challenge, the next step for them to do this.", and it's very logical, it's very sequential. And somebody can go on that path, know where they're starting and where they're ending, if not, you probably got a value maze.

And it was interesting because in my meetings with my inner circle, last week or two weeks ago, whenever it was, I started looking at this common thread, the people who are crushing it have very clearly defined value ladder, the customer journey is very defined where step by step is. And people are struggling, it's like someone buys this, they can buy this, this and it's all over the place, and I was having this realization like, "Oh no, I did it again". I created so much stuff, because I want to create stuff that got more and more crazy.

And so, for the last week or so, I've been noodling on this, "What does that mean? Do I need to shut down some of my sites list? Some of my programs? What does that look like?", I kind of freaking out. And one thing that I talked a lot about the inner circle, when you build your value ladder, you have your front end, right? And then you have, everything moving up. And in theory, after you build the back end of your value ladder, every rung besides the first one, you should never touch those rungs again, in there they're perfect, don't touch them, don't mess them. You build the value ladder at once and you never touch it again, and if you're like me, you want to create more things, the only thing you should be creating your front ends that bring more people into the value ladder and push them up the same path, right?

And so, anyway, I should map mine out and I was like, "Hey, if I'm going to do this correctly, I'm going to have to..", for me it's like killing some of my babies, killing somebody's sacred... What's that phrase?, killing sacred cows. These programs, products and things that I love, we have for years, this actually work, I have to kill those things, and it's like, "Oh, that's so hard for me. I love these things, they're my babies, I don't want to kill them.", but honestly for me to be able to streamline what we're doing and make it successful, make it easier, we have to. And so, that's the last week I've been looking at it and napping a value ladder and saying, "Okay. What is the next logical step?". Okay. That thing over there is not a logical step, but you need to kill it or need to transform to a front end, because it's not part of the value ladder, and the next thing is that logical.

And, it's been interesting because there's been some of our sacred cow, some of our babies that we love, that's like, "I can't have to get rid of that" or, "It's not going to work. We have to change how we structure that.", or, "We've been doing this thing for three years, but if we do different it's not going to work.", It's been scary and hard. And I don't know if you guys ever felt that, but it's been that way for me, in fact, I didn't even talk to my team about it for three or four days, even though in my head I knew what it was.

But anyway, so I went back and I said, "Okay, this is how we need to shift things around." And I showed everybody they're like, "Oh my gosh, that makes so much more sense. That's so much simpler. Now we all know what the focus points are.", right? And anyway, it was interesting. So, you'll see some of this coming up. Not now, when 2.0 launches you'll see it, because 2.0 launches we will relaunch this new value ladder that takes people on a very specific journey, and you'll see it, you'll see some of our programs that you've seen forever, are going to be completely... Either shut down or changed differently or in a good way. But it's going to give us the ability, I believe to dramatically scale, to able to get deeper knowing break, what our value ladder looks like? What's the goal? What's step one, two set three?

It should give us the ability to spend more money to acquire a customer, because now it's not just this, we're all new mazes, we are able to see like, "Okay. Of all the ads we bought to give a book, how many people from there did step two? How many did step three? How many step four?" And you can see exactly what's happening with the breakage, how deep you're able to go with the lifetime value of customers, all those things so much simpler when the path is clearly defined and it's not a value maze. So, what I want to challenge all you guys is to be honest for yourself, sit down, map out what your existing value ladder looks like, and if it looks like a value maze where there's... Each step, they could go to four different things.

The next step, they can do four different things. If you say that or you see that, realize that you got to value maze and not a value ladder, you got to come back and reevaluate it, like I've been doing. So, anyway, my goal with this podcast always is to give you guys hints on the things I'm running with. Here's the hint, this is what I'm doing and hopefully it gives you guys the ideas of different ways to look at your business that maybe you haven't thought of before.

Because if you're hiring me as a consultant, guess what I would do?, I would do what we're talking about now. I wouldn't just give it to you as a hint like, "Hey, here's something I'm doing, you should try it". I would sit down and say, "Okay, let's map out your value ladder. Oh my gosh, you got a value maze, which one of these sacred cows were going to kill?", and that would be the conversation. So, if you're able to take my hints, then become your own consultant and coach yourself through the process, you'll get, maybe not the same value, but it should be almost the same values if I sit there in the room with you, so hope that helps. I appreciate you all. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.