Russell Brunson on Building a Sales Funnel: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Hustle Daily. Today, we're pulling a classic EO Fire episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down building a sales funnel. To drop these value bombs, I brought Russell Brunson into EO Fire Studios. Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs and become a New York Times bestselling author through selling hundreds of thousands of copies of his books over the past 19 years. He popularized the concept of sales funnels, co-founded a software company called Click funnels, and it helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.

0:43And today at Fire Nation, we'll talk about how whoever can spend the most money will acquire the most customers. They will win. Advertising is expensive. As an entrepreneur, you can either raise a lot of money so you can start to acquire customers or go with a smarter and cheaper way, build a funnel. And so much more, Fire Nation. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Russell and our sponsors. The Gold Digger Podcast, hosted by my good friend and Jenna Kuchar, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more.

1:20A must-listen episode is one of Jenna's recents on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought of giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Russell, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

2:01What's up, Fire Nation? So one of the things I believe that is essential for you, for people to be successful is that it's really aligning yourself with the mission that I believe God has for everybody. I'm a big believer that I feel like entrepreneurship, that everybody has been called to serve a group of people. And when you look at business through that lens, it shifts the way you do business. Instead of trying to create a product and forcing someone to buy it, you start looking at who are the people I've been called to serve and what can I do? What can I create? How can I serve them? And that's where you get inspiration from God.

2:30You get ideas, you get all the things you need to be able to really serve those people. And that's where you find the most fulfillment. Fire Nation, you are hearing the voice of Russell Brunson. And we're talking about today building a sales funnel. I mean, who in the world would be a better person to talk to about building a sales funnel? Who in the world would be a better contributor to chapter 12 of the common path to uncommon success than Russell Brunson because he is Mr. Building a Funnel himself. And Russell, you went from netting$17 per sale for a DVD on how to make potato guns to losing money per sale when Google raised their ad rates.

3:14But then you discovered sales funnels. Tell us about the process that you went through that led to this discovery. and it's discovery that literally changed my life it's now been my mission for the last 18 years but um yeah my potato gun dvd was selling and then google changed their algorithm i got google slapped and uh i started losing money on my ads and i had a friend who had a similar business to me and i had just that day shut off my ads i was like i give up i missed the the dot-com bubble i it burst i missed it and uh he messaged me and he said hey i think i figured out the secret i'm like what do you mean he's like okay i was at mcdonald's and he's like you know when you go through the drive through and you say, I want to, I want a Big Mac.

3:54He said, what's the first question they ask you? And I said, do you want a fries and a Coke? Right. That's called an upsell. I was like, okay. And he's like, um, he's, he had a very similar business to mine. He's like, I just put him back to all my old websites. I started adding these things called upsells. Uh, and I said, well, how does it work? He said, well, figure out like after somebody buys your product, what's the next logical thing that they need? And so for me, I was like, well, if they buy a potato gun DVD, the next thing they need is they have to go to the store and buy the pipes and the glue and all this stuff.

4:19He's like, make a potato gun kit that you could plug in there. And he's like, my guess is like one out of three people will pay you more money for the kit. And I was like, okay. And I didn't want to make a kit. So I found somebody online who actually sold potato gun kits, as crazy as that is. And I did a partnership with them and we started selling these kits for$197. And what was crazy is just like he said, I started selling my DVDs again, but then one out of three people paid an additional$197 for that potato, for the potato gun kit, which now is making way more profit from every sale. And I was like back in business.

4:53And while I didn't make a ton of money from the potato gun business, cause that's, you know, not that big of a market. It gave me a framework and I was like, Oh my gosh, I could use this in any business. And I started launching company after company using this concept of funnels. And so that's kind of how I got introduced to, uh, to what a funnel is before we even called them funnels back then though. Yeah. And then you decided to go ahead and launch a company called click funnels. And I mean, That's just obviously been what's taking you from a successful entrepreneur to just a mind-bending entrepreneur on fire.

5:23How did that actual concept come to fruition when you're like, you know what? I'm having so much success with funnels, but it's such a pain in the booty to create them with a million different processes. I want to make this simpler. What did that look like? Yeah, there was a big gap between the potato gun and click funnels. That gap in between there was me building funnels over and over. And I'm not technical, so I wasn't actually building them, but I found really good partners and developers and programmers. And so every time I had an idea for a funnel, we would custom build out every single page and then the shopping cart and the order process.

5:55And like, it was, it was a, it was a big process on average would take us about three months to build a single funnel. And we were really good at it. And then one out of four funnels would actually work, like actually make enough money that it was worth it. So we were like, you know, 25 % of the time, once a year we make money and the other three times we were trying and failing, trying, failing, trying, failing, and oh, we hit it again, right? And so it was a lot of work, cost a lot of money, was not, you know, it took so long that it was scary because if one in four succeeded, it just took a lot of time.

6:23And fast forward now, man, probably 12, 13 years after that, that's when Todd Dickerson, who at the time was building funnels for me as an employee and a friend, he kind of came back and said, look, we keep building the same thing almost every single time. Like there's little tweaks and differences and a couple of things. But he's like, I think we could build software that would make this process easy. And it was funny because like I wasn't the first person. We weren't the first people with that idea. Other people had tried and failed. I didn't try it in the past and failed. I was like, I don't think it's possible.

6:52And Todd was like, no, I can do it. And so he went, he lives in Atlanta, went back home and he locked himself in a, in his closet for, for six months and came out with the first version of ClickFunnels. And he said it to me and said, okay, Russell, I want to see if you can build a funnel. I don't want, I don't want to do it. I want to see if you can do it this time. And I remember trying it the very first time. And I remember the power I felt when I created my very first funnel and it was done. And I was like, I did that by myself. I didn't need a tech person like this. This is it. And I started freaking out.

7:19And that's, you know, shortly after that, when we launched ClickFunnels as a company. And the last seven years has been the ride of a lifetime. For sure. And man, I've been watching from the sidelines. And of course, as one of your affiliates for so long now, and a user, of course, and, you know, seeing, you know, the hundreds of thousands of people who have been implementing. ClickFunnels into their business, into their lives to make their business just overall better for very obvious reasons. And Fire Nation, don't go anywhere because when we get back, Russell's going to be sharing one of his favorite stories of an actual ClickFunnels user who saved their business using an upsell.

7:56So Russell, you can think about it during the break and we'll be right back. Artificial intelligence is at the top of everyone's newsfeed. So we all know there are plenty of business pros out there benefiting from AI. AI can help you save time, brainstorm ideas, and tackle your to-do list. But knowing about it and putting it into practice are two different things. So what's the first step? If you find yourself spending hours each day on content creation, then meet HubSpot's new AI-powered campaign assistant, a totally free-to-use AI tool tailor-made for marketers and business builders who spend hours each day on content creation.

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9:40Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online and more. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for his free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. So Russell, we're back. And as I kind of teased before the break, I would love to have you kind of go into your memory banks right now and think of a ClickFunnels user who literally saved their business because of an upsell. You said that you saved your business with upsells back in the potato gun days.

10:18And that's just something that a lot of people have been able to implement successfully in their business. What's one of your favorite stories? Yeah. And I can tell so many of my own stories, but it's always more fun to hear the others. And there's been so many amazing click phones entrepreneurs have come through. But one story that's really, really common is a lot of times people come to my world or people who are authors, right? And they wrote a book and they're so excited because they think the book is going to be the thing that makes them a ton of money. And they launch these books and they put them out there.

10:46More than once I've seen authors do that. So they put the book out there to launch it and it doesn't make that much money. they sell on Amazon, they sell on Barnes and Noble, right? It's making their, their, now you're $19, 1995, whatever. And, um, about that time is when I was doing my, my book funnels and stuff and, uh, for my own books. And I went to some of these authors who are friends with people like Tony Robbins and other people. And I saw them like, Hey, we're launching our books. Tony Robbins was one, Dave Asprey was another one. And both of them were launching their books at the same time on Amazon.

11:13I was like, okay, that's good. But like, you can't pay, you can't profitably buy ads on Amazon because Amazon takes a big percentage of the money. Plus there's no upsells, you know, Amazon does have upsells, but they're selling your competitors products, not yours. And so, um, I went back and I messaged both Tony and Dave Asprey and I said, Hey, can I build a funnel for your guys's books? And luckily both of them said yes. And so I flew my team out there and we, and we filmed the book video to sell their book. And then they thought they were done. I said, no, this is the deal. Like what they have to buy the book.

11:40What's the next thing that they need? And like, what do you mean? I'm like, we're building a funnel. It's not just a one off book purchase. Right. So Tony was like, well, the next thing that they should go through is, um, his, uh, what's the product he has from his infomercials? It's the Ultimate Edge. He's like, Ultimate Edge next. I said, okay, make a video now pitching the Ultimate Edge. We made a video pitching the Ultimate Edge. I'm like, now after Ultimate Edge, what's the next thing they need? He's like, well, man, the next thing I think they should get is the Love and Relationship Program.

12:04I'm like, hey, make a video of that. So we filmed a video of Tony selling his Love and Relationship Program. I said, okay, I got everything I need. And then Dave Asperger's the same way. It was his Bulletproof Cookbook. And I said, okay, ask somebody to buy the cookbook. What's the next thing they need? He's like, well, next thing they need is they need uh my oils and my you know the mct oils and the this and the that and they need the coffee and all this stuff so we made a video and pitching that in fact we filmed the whole thing at his bulletproof store in in la and we filmed those videos we came back and then built out a funnel both for tony and for dave ashbury so okay now you have a funnel you can actually pay ads and so while tony was on tour going everywhere talking about his book on you know every news station possible we're also able to have his team fall behind him by ads selling the book profitably because they weren't just driving it to Amazon or just selling a book one-off.

12:47They now were making money from every single person who bought the book. A percentage bought The Ultimate Edge and a percentage bought the Love and Relationship Program. And now it made it profitable so they could spend ads and grew the company and sold a whole bunch more books than they would have without it. I mean, Fire Nation, how much power are you given when you have the opportunity to literally generate more revenue from every single customer you bring in? And that's exactly why I wanted to bring Russell in and just share this genius. of course, on this episode today, but specifically within chapter 12, which is build your funnel in the common path to one common success.

13:19And he did just that. And in fact, Russell, to end our conversation here today, I pulled out a quote that I'm going to read to you right now. My favorite quote from your contribution. So you can bring this home for us strategically thinking through your customer journey. That is your sales funnel will help you make more money from every person that enters your world. This will allow you to spend more money to acquire a customer. And as my mentor, Dan Kennedy says, whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. I love that quote that you shared. So bring this home for us. What do you want Fire Nation to take away from that quote and funnels overall in general?

13:58Yeah, I think understanding that advertising and attention is not free today and it's expensive. And so there's two ways to grow a company. One is to go and raise money and go get people to give you tens of millions of dollars so you can go and you can start acquiring customers or the other better, smarter, cheaper ways to build a funnel where now you can spend more money. You know, I look at ClickFunnels and when we launched ClickFunnels, we were competing against two companies who literally had raised over$100 million in funding and they were dumping their money into customer acquisition. We didn't have that.

14:26I was broke, right? And so instead we build a funnel and we spent$20 on Facebook ads to sell a book in the funnel. We'd make$40 inside the funnel, then we introduced them to ClickFunnels. And we were able to grow faster and bigger than both of those companies, 100 % fueled by funnels as opposed to VC capital. And if you realize that, it's like, man, if you really want to get more customers in the door, no matter what business you're in, a funnel is the secret. It's the way you can do it. You retain all the ownership in your company, your customers finance them coming into your business, and it changes everything.

14:55And so whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer always wins. And so that's what a funnel allows you to do. Fire Nation, you can tell why Russell is the funnel master. And if you haven't already, it's time for you to pre-order The Common Path to Uncommon Success. Russell is featured in Chapter 12 for obvious reasons, and you get five insane bonuses when you pre-order. One of them, and Russell, I know your head's going to pop off because you'll understand. You like to make money when people pre-order your books. I actually, for some weird reason like to lose money because I am shipping to everybody's door all three of my journals, the Freedom Journal, the Mastery Journal, and the Podcast Journal to every single person who just pre-orders one copy of The Common Path to Uncommon Success.

15:39That's for people in the US. Outside, we're going to give you digital access immediately. So we're going all out for this. It's an absolute no-brainer. And there's actually four other insane bonuses. UncommonSuccessBook.com. Get over there. Cost me money with every single pre-order I make because this book is going to change your life. So Russell, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, man. The Gold Digger Podcast, hosted by my good friend, Jenna Kuchar, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

16:15The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more. A must-listen episode. is one of Jenna's recents on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought of giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.