SFR 130:The CORE Of A Funnel...

This is the extended version of what I taught at Funnel Hacking Live 2018. There are TWO parts to a funnel's core...

What’s going on everyone? It’s Steve Larsen and you’re listening to Sales Funnel Radio.

I’ve spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now, I’ve left my 9 to 5 to take the plunge and build my million dollar business. The real question is, how would I do it, without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learned, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business, using only today's Internet best sales funnels.

My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. I am so excited for this episode. I've been dying to record it. I feel like it's going to be one of the episodes that I look back on and I'm like, “man that was one of the Hallmark, amazing episodes of sales Funnel Radio.” You know what I mean? 10 years from now, hopefully this show is still going, but I feel like I look back and be like, “man, that was one of them. That was one of the ones that made it click for a lot of people.”

It's one of the things that made a click for me, and anyway, I'm excited to share with you. It all kind of started honestly, well, how should I say this? How far back you want to go?

Lets see, I was born in 1988. No. So, it's been it’s been a lot of fun working with Russell because, what is fun about it is, I feel like he and I are probably some of the only people on planet earth that geek out at the level that we do. And so, every time we see each other it's like a show and tell, like, “hey dude, check this out.” And he shows me, and we go through all the cool stuff he's doing.

And I'm like, “yeah, check this out.” I tell him all the stuff I'm going through and doing, and the epiphanies that either or of us have had. And so anyway, I was chatting with him a little while ago, and that is when he was saying, “Hey, we want to get you on the funnel hacking live stage”, and I was like, “sweet.” Are you serious? Okay. That’d be awesome. And, which just ended, and I'm kind of backtracking a little, okay? I'm a little bit behind on recording these episodes. But I went and he said, “We want you to teach new offer creation in 10 minutes.” I was like, 10 minutes?!

What? Oh my gosh! That's what I teach in 3 days at the fan event.” You know what I mean? Are you serious? Okay. Oh my gosh.

So, I was sitting there in and the magic formula happened, which is caffeine and dubstep. I was pacing around my own office here and I remember. My head was just kind of subconsciously on this problem, and I love that. Because I will be in random places around the house, around wherever, and I'll have these epiphanies like, “oh my gosh!

It's easier like that...

Holy crap!” My head is constantly on these problems, you guys. I rarely think about anything else, which sounds like obsession, and it is, and I'm glad it is, okay. I sit and just kind of think. I told you guys a little while ago how I kind of brainstorm and come up with these ideas. I imagine them as these little threads and I kind of tug on them, see where they lead, and if it's like good then I just drop it and I go on to the next thing and try and find different possibilities for solving different problems.

Anyway, I was thinking through. I was trying to distill down the 3 days into minutes. It was rough, it was rough. I was trying to work the problem, and figure out the different angles to teach it. I went into click funnels at like 10:00 at night the week before Funnel Live happened. I sat there and I was trying to do it for about 2 hours. I was doodling. For some reason if I can doodle it I know that I can teach it, and I know that it's a clear thing. And so that's the reason why I draw so many pictures. So, I was doodling and I was like, “oh my gosh.” I started having these epiphanies and they start coming faster, and faster, and faster, on the way to teach this.

Well, next morning I'm back in the home office here, which is where I'm now, and I was standing in front of my white board and all of a sudden I had this, guys I don't know really how this happens but I will forget where I am. It actually makes me a little bit nervous because it's happening more frequently.

Whatever I'm thinking of, that's where I physically feel like I am at that time. I will forget where I'm standing and I get kind of lost, in my head. 20 minutes will go by and I'll suddenly come to and realize that I've been standing in the corner of the room for a while. But I’ve been deep meditation and thought. It's a little bit weird and it's kind of happening more frequently. I'm kind of trying to get used it.

So, I was in one of those little, I don't know what I'm going to call it, weirdness things. I was kind of zoning out a little bit. All of a sudden, I had this realization. One of the things that people struggle with the most when it comes to building funnels is, they think that the funnel is a series of pages, and we have had the hardest time trying to describe in this very small amount of words, the shortest amount of words, what a funnel actually is. Right?

My mom used to think that funnels, I was selling literally kitchen hardware. “You’re selling funnels, kitchen stuff. You don’t even know how to cook.” I’d be like, “yeah I know I should not be in that space.” Anyway, we’ve had a hard time getting people to understand what a funnel is without people seeing it, right? We've tried literally for years. We’ve tried to figure out how to explain what a funnel is in the shortest amount of time, where people are like, and “oh.”

A couple of years ago, that's honestly where this whole conversation started. We were trying to figure it out. It's a series of pages linked together to turn prospective customers into buying customers. Oh man, that's just a lot of a lot of, how do we shrink it down? What’s the core of funnel building? Suddenly, it hit me! That’s what I'm so excited about, you guys! Holy crap! What is it?! I figured out.

I was sitting I realized, I was standing in front of the white board and I realized, that at the core funnel building is the offer. For a long time I was saying that. It's the offer, it's the offer, and the core funnel building is the offer. But it's not. It's actually only half of it.

The other half of it is story. It's the sales message. It's the belief that carries the offer, and those two things is what makes a funnel. It's the reason why whether or not you decided to make a funnel, you have a funnel. If you're in business and you've made a sale, you brought them through a funnel.

Whether online or offline, intentional or not, you have a funnel. It's just better if it was intentional. It's the reason why people can go, it doesn't matter if it's online, offline. Doesn't matter what you're selling. If there was a sale that was made, there was some kind of offer. Most times people don't make an intentional offer, they have a product, but there's also a message, a belief that carried that into the heart and mind of that person when they purchased it. I was like, holy crap! Maybe I should find that box, because I sent Russell.

I was like freaking out like, “holy crap.” And he was like, “oh my gosh that’s crazy. Should we change the drawings, change sketches?” So, this whole concept, it's not leaving me, and it's been staying for a long time, guys.

So, what I wanted to do real quick is go down and kind of teach you guys the same thing that I taught at Funnel Hiking Live. It took me a solid, see I had this major realization. It was like three o'clock in the afternoon and I started yelling. No one else was in the house at all and I would start yelling. “Oh my gosh! This is so cool! Are you serious?!” I was just yelling. Legitimate yelling and screaming. “This is crazy!” Yeah, I'm that guy but whatever. I'm proud to be that guy.

And I was like, “sweet.” I had to get my slides to them by the next morning. And so I didn't go to sleep. Had dinner, said goodnight to the kiddos, and then from that moment on, I stayed up until 4:45 in the morning distilling down to ten slides. It was so hard, guys, was crazy. So I worked a lot on this, not just at night but this has been a problem that's been on my head for years.

I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of times. But the quest to make things more simple is extremely important and making things complex does not make you smarter. In fact, usually means you don't bring as many people along with you, because they think you've got to be like techno babbly, loaded up. It’s better to just keep it simple.

So, what I want to do real quick is, I want to teach this in the way that I experienced it and I want it to be, how should I explain this, gosh guys, I would take notes. Because when you realize at the core of this, and you realize really, there’s three forces that were fighting with, that I was fighting with, to try to figure out what this is. When you realize what these are, where they come from.

I feel like it’ll make people’s lives better because you'll be more intentional on both funnel hacking and creating your offers, your funnels in general. Then I see episodes here, I can dive into this to teach you what I am looking at when I look at someone's funnel. It's not so much about pages anyway. So, let's get into here.

So, let's start with the plot to a woman's story. If you don’t know what I'm talking about, go to Funnel Hacking Live. So, I started with this question, how do you make money online? It really happened when my wife and I found out that we were going to have a kid. Our first child. We were super excited.

This is over four years ago now, which is crazy. I was reading dotcom secrets. Read for the first time, you guys all now this. I was in the prune, I was in an Army exercise. Laying down, with my M-16 for about 10 days in the dirt. With my weapon in my right hand, and dotcom secrets in my left hand. That's how I read the book the first time. I read the book it was like, “this is crazy.”

What I realized was that it was saying, funnel hack somebody.” Model someone to the T and then just do what they did. And there's safety in that. And it makes sense to do that. Students that get hired to click funnels, we start putting together expert secrets, but the message of that one is, create something new. So the first one says, model someone to the T, don’t deviate, the second one says, make something completely new. Do not do something like what someone else did.

And then I'm reading another book, read the book Innovator's Dilemma, which says that if a new market does not exist it cannot be analyzed. It cannot be analyzed. It's unknowable because it doesn't exist. It's your turn to create a new niche. Your turn to create a new market. You're going to have a hard time doing that out of your own precepts, out of your own head because you don't know you.

So, by the law of the way this happens you must create the new niche with the customer. It cannot be from your own head. Right. So you take those 3 concepts and think about them. Number 1, you've got to model hack, model someone to the T. Number 2, and create something brand new. Don't bottle anybody. Number 3, it must be created with the customer or it'll be an approval based offer by defaulting. What?

How does this all 3 go together? This question has been on my head for a long time. So, to answer this we've got to understand more of the core of the funnel I was talking about, because the answer is actually to do all 3 of those in tandem, to a point.

First of all, we're going to funnel hack. Second, this is like Dorothy in The Yellow Brick Road. We're going to follow the yellow brick road as far as the yellow brick road goes. When it ends, I'm going to teach you how to make a new brick, lay down there, but do it with people so that it gets laid perfectly, with directional customer.

Does that make sense? That's the answer. That's how you do it....

So, to understand more how to do this, let’s understand the core funnel building. First of all there is an offer and a belief, that’s. That’s at the core of a funnel. That's why it can be offline, online. Whether or not you made one on purpose, you have one. If you made a sale, you made a funnel. So, there is an offer and a belief, and the belief carries the offer. This is like those little red wagons.

That's a like story, whatever is in the red wagon is belief, that’s like the offer. The story carries the offer. That's how it works.

Without the belief, we would have the story part, the offer part does not get delivered. Because they’re going to look at it and go, I don’t understand that.” But if you understand that story it's what changes beliefs, it’s what changes paradigms, that people are like, “oh my gosh, I need that offer.”

Yes you do, comes with it. So, the story delivers the offer. Is this making sense so far? I don’t know if it is. I know I'm going kind of deep in this. It’s a little more techno babbly. I have graphics, and pictures, and drawings to display this but I need you to understand how this works.

Since that is the core of a funnel, you've got to understand that dream customer, the people that you would love to be buying from you, they're already consuming both. They're already consuming both and here's why. I don't want you to think of health, wealth, and relationships as 3 markets. The health, wealth and relationships, those are like the 3 moneymaking markets.

Those are the three no-duh buying experiences. Those are the 3 markets we try and fit every single thing into. Health, wealth, relationships. If you got health, wealth, relationships, one of those, your offer might not fit into it. You're like, “Steven, I'm selling Rubik's Cube. How does that work for health, wealth, relationships?” The actual product does not need to fit in it but the sales message, at least, must. I usually use the example of Gillette. Gillette razors. Right. What market are they in? Health, wealth, relationships? They’re in relationships. Why?

Because, I'm thinking of the commercial, some guy is shaving in the mirror, and he's like, “oh yeah, I'm the freaking man,” and a woman comes up afterwards and feels his face up. You've seen the commercials, right. That's what's happening. They're selling relationships through the commodity of razors. Dudes, you want the woman, you use this razor. Right. That's what they're doing.

You got to understand that your dream customer is already consuming both an offer and a belief, with hopes that it delivers to them either health, wealth, or relationships. That's another way to think of this. Because they're already consuming an offer and a belief, your opinions don't matter.

You're not the one who fills your own wallet, right. You don't fill your own wallet. Stop caring so much about what you think. Step number 1 is all about hacking, which is really answering these two questions. The two question is number 1, what is my customer’s current vehicle, or offer that they're consuming? And number 2, what’s the current belief of how they're buying it? It’s the and how what. What is it? You guys have heard that before.

I'm just trying to tie all these pieces together so it becomes clear. That's the core of funnel hacking. Funnel hacking not so much, “hey there's a green button on the right, there’s a picture of someone on the left.” Yes, that's like the micro level. At the macro level, what you really looking at, is you're trying to answer the question, what is the current offer and current story that my dream customer is consuming. That's my starting place, that's funnel hacking.

That’s the core of funnel hacking. So, what you're going to do is, like I said, you're going to fit your business into one of the 3 markets, right. Health, wealth, and relationships. And when you funnel hack, you're looking for those two things right. The offer the belief, from the red ocean.

Now that you know what the offer and the belief are, the second step is start applying more of the expert secret's model. Expert secret’s model is taking it into a place where you're selling a new opportunity, a new niche a new market that you're creating. And by the law of creating something new that does not exist, you cannot analyze it, therefore you must make your with the customer. And there's various ways to do that. Get clever. That's how it launched my product back in January.

So, please understand the offer equals the result, the offer delivers the result. When you create an offer, not product, it means you no longer have to compete on price. Rather than selling back to this red ocean where everyone’s competing on price and someone’s like, “no, I'm going to bleed for the customer more. No I'm going to bleed for the customer. No I'll take less margin.

No, I'll take less margin.” It’s this race to the bottom. If you don’t do that crap the way to get around it is by selling it offer. Because it over delivers on value, which lets you sell sell it at the actual price you'd like to. So, just structure an offer, this is super hard to do for podcasts.

I hope this is making sense, guys. I hope this is good stuff. Please understand that every single one of these concepts I'm talking about are all things that I realized over the last two years, especially, as my head has just not really ever left the topic. But when you're going to structure an offer, you actually don't structure the offer based off of the offer in the red ocean. You structure the offer based off of the belief in the red ocean.
Does make sense? Let me say that again.

To create a new opportunity to create a new vehicle, right, that will deliver health, wealth, or relationships, one of those three, you actually don't create it off of what the current vehicle and offer is. Actually created off of the current belief is, and from that we gain the vehicle internal and external related beliefs. This is complete technobabble and I am way the weeds here. Please stick with me, okay?

We're going to find vehicle based beliefs that people have inside the red ocean. internal and external. The internal beliefs, I like to think of them as insecurities. These are these are beliefs people how about themselves and their capacity to actually achieve something. I can't speak I'm not good enough. I could get on stage. I can't talk. I would know how to do this. I, I, I, I, and it's their internal struggles that they have when they see this new vehicle that you're going to present. Here's how you get health, wealth, or relationships. They look at it like, “that's so cool.”

“You know what. I actually believe you a little bit, but I'm not good enough.” And that's where the internal belief comes from. Or internal false belief.

The external false belief is usually more about excuses, then they blame their ability to be successful with that vehicle based on things that are away from them. They are pointing away from their own body. I don't have enough money. There’s not enough, I don't have time, my spouse doesn't want to support me in this. Does that make sense?

And they're pointing away, so as soon as you get them to acknowledge the fact that that vehicle is the way to get them health, wealth, relationships right that old vehicles not good any more, and you can offer this brand new one. As soon as you get them to accept that that vehicle, the next two places they go, is usually in this order.

It's usually internal for insecurities, and external for the type of excuses that they're that they're running through. Their excuses running away from them. Time, money, resources, spouse. That’s how it’s working. From those very three believes, vehicle interlocks to all, that is everything that I need to create a new opportunity.

Both offer and story. This is literally how I did it, guys, when I launched back in January.

I launched click funnels December 31st. No offer. I didn’t have an offer, I didn't have a sales message, I didn’t have a funnel, and I had nothing. The funnel wasn’t even built. That's it. I had nothing. All I knew is what the current vehicle internal and external beliefs were. That was all. And from that, I was able to go and develop the product, the message, the offer, and the funnel, the script all of it.

This part is so powerful and I feel like people just will skip over it like, “I know what the false beliefs are.” If you really know what those false beliefs are, you also know what stories the people are telling themselves in their heads that are sustaining those false beliefs.

You know the experiences they went through that created the story. You know what they're telling, that is the place in my mind where you intimately learn and understand your customer. And when you do so, it is everything you need to actually be successful in your funnel.

Because it creates the core in the funnel, a sales message, and an offer. Those two things. So, what we do is we take those vehicle internal and external beliefs, and we make a product for each one of them, a product. And we bundle them together with the main thing you originally wanted to sell, and that is the offer. Does that make sense?

Man, this is so much easier to see, drawing stuff. I've it all drawn out here. I wish you guys could see it. So, the offer and the simplest form that I can explain it, if you take the main thing that you actually want them to be buying and you bundle in a few other products that are directly addressing the vehicle internal and external beliefs.

For example, “Russell, I would get click funnels but I don't know what to write.” And Russell comes out like, “Don't worry about it. We've got this thing called funnel scripts, you need to write.” Does that to make sense? It’s a bonus that he's giving away when you buy the main thing, funnel hacks? Does that make sense? So, you're trying to sell the main thing, then you have several the products underneath. This is super super techno babbly.

A new niche is created when you deliver a new vehicle, a new offer. The offer the vehicle. And second, when you deliver a new story new belief that supports the vehicle. Does that make sense? A new niche, a new market is created, when you deliver a new offer and belief. It's the core of funnels. You're just creating a new funnel, selling it back to the red ocean that you stemmed out of.

There was a guy who walked up to me once at an event. He walked up to me and he goes, I don't know remember who it was, he walks up then he goes, “hey Steven, I got this sweet idea.” And he told me the idea. He's on like, first I'm going to do this. And then second, I'm going to do this, and then third.” This is my stack, this is my offer. These are all products that I'm going to deliver, these are the bonuses. And at the end of it he's like, do you think that's a good idea?”

And I said, “Well, who's going to be seeing it? What's the sub market that you're stemming out of? What's the red ocean that you're actually stemming out of? And he goes, I don't know.” And I said, “That’s the riskiest crap I've ever heard of in my life.” You have to know what sub market you're stemming out of, otherwise you're creating things out of your own head, your own imagination. Scary. Be creative guys, just be creative. Second, not first.

There's no relationship between being good and getting paid. However, there’s a huge relationship between being good at marketing and getting paid. What I'm trying to teach you and show you guys, is that this whole thing, the core of funnel building, is a belief. That’s marketing. It's a story. You're telling a story, you're changing beliefs. It's the sales message itself. And above it, it's carrying the offer. And that's all it is. That's all it is. It was 25 minutes for me to spit all that out.

But I'm trying to tell the stories associated with all the graphs, so that it helps break and rebuild your beliefs. But I hope that that makes sense. I hope that that's helpful as I say it. Because I want you guys understand why this matters so much. If you're going out and you’re like, “Hey Stephen. I went out and I created this sweet funnel. It’s not converting. Right. And he took no thought at all of the actual sales message, the offer, and stuff like that. It's going to be it's going to be rough ride.

It's the reason why a lot of times I’ll make up a design that I think looks kind of cool, but I don't spend that much time on it. But my stuff converts well. Why? Because I got a sick offer that fulfills the actual sales message. That fulfills the actual belief that I'm breaking and rebuilding for them. That's why.

That's why design doesn't matter as much as what you did. That's why. I want you to understand that. Anyway, I'm blabbering now. But I hope that makes sense. Just remember that at the core funnel building, at the core of a funnel general, is a belief, which is carrying an offer. All you got to remember from this episode. And you start to think through that, those are the things your funnel hacking. Those are the things you're creating in the new niche. Those are the things that will deliver a customer to you.

So, I'm super excited by that. I am seriously considering, in fact Russell's suggesting I do it too, make a book about offer creation. This is a topic that I obsess over and I love the science, and art piece of offer creation. So, hopefully that was helpful. I know a lot of stuff and it’s a bit of long episode there. Good thing you guys are used to it by now. Alright, talk to you later. Bye.

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