SFR 2: Yard Manager, Door-to-Door Sales, ...Paul Mitchell?

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

Hey you guys. I'm actually super excited for this. I can't believe I'm recording the first episode of this podcast. I mean this is awesome. I love podcasts. I think they're awesome. I've learned a lot from them. I've made money because of things I learn off podcasts. I've gained a lot of respect for a lot of people. Anyways, so I'm excited to be doing this podcast and I remember the idea first came up, and I was like, "I don't want to get podcasting. I don't want to go out and start, I don't know, going around and trying to interview all these people and stuff like that."

What I want you to know is what you can expect from this, though, because I'm excited that I decided to. I used to do a lot more parascoping than I used to. I got 600 parascope followers, and something interesting happened when I started publishing. The moment I started publishing, I started getting a ton of interaction with people. Way more than my ad spend, right? It's super fun. It was just, so, I've got to tell you, it's as much for me to be doing this podcast as it might be for the things that you learn in this. Selfishly, I just enjoy it. It's super fun. I feel a connection whenever I do that, and then I get feedback from people and they say, "Hey, I used that tactic and I made money with it." It blows me away. Super fun. Anyway, I enjoy that a lot.

What you can expect from this podcast is to learn specific sales funnel strategies, whether that's for webinars, trip wire funnels, product launch funnels, automated webinar funnels, anyways. If those don't mean anything to you, no worries. It's okay. I'll go crazy deep on some things, but other things not. I promise to keep it interesting as well. I hate monotone speaking podcasts. Oh my gosh, they're so boring. Those are the ones I always play at 2 time speed. If you didn't know you could do that, it's on your iPhone, but you can play things at 2 time speed, really fast. I kind of tend to talk quickly, so that might sound weird, but what I'm going to do is talk about sales funnels, things I'm building right now for clients.

I've been building sales funnels for the last, about 4 years and the first one I even built was for this guy named, actually I can't even remember his name, but he was an artist and we were selling his art. It wasn't quite like gif art, but it was ... Anyways it was cool. It was cool stuff. I remember I built the sales funnel, cool, and no one came to it. I was like, "what the heck?" I was like, "I've got to go learn how to send traffic." But I didn't, and time went on, time went on, and I was like, "Hey, I'm going to go learn door to door sales, just because I want to learn how to sell in really hard environments." That's why I did it. I went and I was like the number 2 sales guy for a while. I mean I was like crushing it. It was awesome. I was selling pest control and there were bugs everywhere so it was great.

I remember while we were driving out to one of our areas one morning. I was looking and we were on the highway and it was a great day out. I remember it was blue skies, you know, just fantastic out. It was hot, crazy hot. I remember looking around and seeing all these billboards as we were driving down the highway and thinking, this is crazy. I get up every morning and I convince people who were not planning on spending money that they should spend money, and I'm not doing bad at it, which is awesome. That's a skill. But everyone who's seeing these billboards is planning on spending on something when they call that number. It completely switches the psychology of the sale. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. I was in college at the time. I was like, I've got to learn how to do that.

What I did is I got online that night and I started putting out all these ads, just free classified ads, all over the place selling our pest control. "Hey, if you got this issue, call." "If you got this issue, call." "Hey we're doing a sale. Call." My phone started blowing up. I couldn't believe it. My boss called, he's like "How are you getting all these sales?" I was like, "They're calling me." He goes, "Are you kidding? What the heck?" I said, "I'm kind of shocked it's working." I remember I pulled like 10 phone sales in a very short period of time. It's funny because for a door to door salesman, there's different ratios right? Hey, I know that if I pitch 50 to 60 people one of them on average will say yes. That's a crap ton of work and a lot of talking, right? When I was doing this it flipped it and I closed 90% of the people who were calling, always. I think there was only 1 or 2 who didn't purchase, because they called because they had a problem and they knew I had a solution.

I was like, "this is nuts. This whole thing is crazy. Why am I selling this way?" It was a great way to learn how to sell, and it's a fantastic skill to have. I've used that many other places, but the interesting thing though, I was hooked after that. My sales numbers started sucking because I started thinking like, "How else can I blow this up?" I started thinking about ... Anyways, I kind of quit door knocking and I went home that summer. We made money. It was a good experience.

I came home and that just always stuck with me. I was like, that's nuts. People are clicking ... It's not clicking. That's where I'm going. They were calling. I was like, how can I get them to click on things that I want them to online? So I started getting obsessed with this stuff. Just like, okay, I've got to go make a product and then I'm going to get ads and then I'm going to drive it to that product. Wow, revolutionary Steve. It's not that crazy, but what's is that to me that was a huge deal.

I went and I built this product and no one came and it never sold and no one came and it was tumbleweed after tumbleweed. I was like, crap! That's when I was like, I need to learn how to send traffic. I started going and I started learning all these traffic techniques and it's super cool. At that time I was, this is just the story of how I got into this so you guys know. I thought it'd be good to tell as the first podcast. At the time I was in my internet marketing, it was called Intro to Internet Marketing. It was one of my classes in college. It was bad, man, it was so bad. For the last couple months I had been studying traffic, right, because none of my ebooks had sold. Still on Amazon, by the way.

Anyway, so I started learning all these traffic techniques but by the time that internet marketing class came up in college, I had been studying enough stuff and practicing enough and had made enough money that I knew everything he was already talking about, and I knew that what the teacher was saying was old and was wrong and wasn't going to work for what he was teaching. I told the teacher that. That's not always the wisest thing to do to a professor, but that's what I did.

I drew up this plan, and it was hey I'm going to have this squeeze page. People will come in. They'll opt in and I'll get their email address and then after that I'm going to push them over to the sales page of like someone else's product. I was practicing affiliate marketing. I would get a commission when I would send a buyer to someone and someone else would make the product. That's called affiliate marketing if you're not familiar with that.

It worked. I put 50 bucks in to some ads. I woke up and there was 50 bucks in my account. I was like, "Oh my gosh! Are you kidding me?" I went and I called my buddy. I was like, "Dude, get over here! It worked!" He comes flying over. I was like, "We didn't really make anything, but we gained 17 subscribers and we broke even. We got 17 people that we know are basically buyers and 2 or 3 of them specifically and now I can go market those people because we know that they want this stuff." It was like, "Oh my gosh, this is crazy." I was like, "We're got to figure out how to make money with it though."

Anyways we told that teacher, hey we don't want to do this. We don't want to come to your class anymore and I want to go do this stuff. He's like, okay. We got out of that class the rest of the semester and our deliverables was that we had to teach the rest of the class what we were doing at the end. It's funny because it sounded like ninja stuff. Thinking back, though, it really wasn't that crazy. We were just doing what works.

What was nuts is we ended up getting so good at sending just a crap ton of traffic. I mean, like 53,000 people in 2 days type of traffic. We sent so much traffic to different places. It's crazy. Our professors and teachers started obviously noticing that, because we would talk about it in classes before they'd start and we were just excited about it, and sometimes we'd go ask their advice. Well there was a Paul Mitchell, you know like the hair school, that needed help with their traffic and they said, "Hey we got 2 kids that are doing pretty good with it."

So we started working with some of the owners of different Paul Mitchells around the nation. There was one in Idaho, no there's 2 in Idaho, and then 8 more ... I can't remember. No, there's just one. One in Idaho and then 8 more down through California. We were on the phone with all these business owners making millions of dollar every year, telling them how to send traffic and stuff. We're like, you got to do this, got to do this, got to do this. They're like, "We don't want to do it. We want to hire you to do it." Okay. They started paying us 1,000 bucks here and there, and they'd give us an ad budget and we'd go send traffic to the different Paul Mitchell sites, and we were good at it though. A normal ad word was like $50 on Google and we were getting it for like $5 or 5 cents even at these different places, and it was awesome. People were loving it.

Here's the thing though. As we were driving all this traffic and we started building some sites for some of their uprising celebrities and things like that ... That's a different story though, but it's crazy cool. They started asking us this question. They're like, "Why when the traffic comes, why isn't is actually doing anything?" They were like, "We're spending thousands of dollars in ads but why is it that we aren't actually getting more people?" We're like, "Oh you know, the next ones are coming along. We're just ... It's all about the numbers." Pretty standard stuff you hear in door to door sales. "Just a numbers game." Complete bull crap, in my opinion.

That question just never left me, and I was like, how the heck do you do that? We ended up moving on and I helped start a cell phone insurance business for iPhones called Fixd Insurance. It's still up. F-I-X-D Insurance. Fixdinsurance.com. That was the first sales funnel that I ever built. It was because of that question, what do I do with traffic when it hits my site and how do I get it so that they buy stuff? That's what a sales funnel is and answers.

Anyways, classic sales funnel. Here's a story too for you to for that. Ads have gotten really expensive to send to just a flat website, right? If I'm buying ads and it's going to, I don't know, WebMD.com, just because everyone will probably know that site. If I'm buying ads to that site, it's very expensive because 90% of it is going to leave without purchasing anything. I don't know if Web MD actually sells anything, but let's say they did. 90% of that traffic is going to leave without ever doing anything. It's very very pricey for these people to send traffic.

Us internet marketers, we had to come up with a different way, right? We had to come up with a way to make it cheaper and to get back our ad costs while still getting a customer, and that's what a sales funnel does, right? You come in, you give them something that's free or discounted that a lot more people will take. 20, 30% of people will purchase or opt into. Something free at the front end. Now you got their contact information so then you can put them on different email campaigns and cell phone campaigns and follow ups and direct mail campaigns or whatever it is. You got their information and over the long tail, as they purchase, you're going to make back your money. That's just a one page funnel.

We were like, well that's all right. It's not amazing though. What we did is, us internet marketing industry, we started going and saying hey, why don't we add a product that's slightly higher priced to the next one. Less people will take it but we'll make back more of our ad spend money, right? You got this free thing and then one more thing that's hey, like 20 to 50 bucks. Then we do that again, but we hiked it another time so now it's 97 to like $150. That's the typical price range for the next one, depending on what industry you're in.

Anyways, it's kind of cool. My cost, like I have a site called secretmlmhacks.com. I've built a ton of sales funnels in the last, especially the last year. Probably close to 20 of them custom. It's not like I'm selling the same one over and over again. I'll tell you guys more about those as I go along. Just so you know, the stories I'm telling here are from case studies and things I'm learning personally. I will reference other people in this podcast and I will give them credit, but I will also use just the things that I'm using that are working. That way you guys know.

Anyways, we started going and we started driving this traffic to these different sales funnels and they started working. For secretmlmhacks.com, that's one that is mine. It cost me like $1.30 to get someone into the door, typically, and then my average cart value at the end after it's all said and done across everything is like $2.80. You can make a business off of that.

McDonald's, McDonald's, McDonald's. They spend about $1.81 just to get you to their drive through. That's their ad spend. On average, per customer is $1.81. If they sell you a $2.08 hamburger they've made 20 cents. You can't make a business off that, so what is their "up sale"? They ask you, would you like to biggie size that? Would you like fries and a drink with that? Now that they've done that, they've recouped their ad cost and their average cart value jumps up to I guess like 5, 6, $7. You can make a business with that now. Now they're making 4, $5 after their ad spend in every single thing they go.

That's how it works though. Know what your ... It's all about what's your cost to acquire a customer and what's your average cart value. If your average cart value is higher than your cost to acquire a customer, you have a business. The simplest way to do it is to have a sales funnel that helps you recoup your ad cost. You don't try and make money first, just recoup your ad cost, and then you sell them the other things in the back end. Amateurs focus on the front end. The pros focus on the back end.

Anyways, that's maybe getting a little too technical for this, but that's how I got into it. It's just me asking all these questions, like how do I do this? How do I do this? Why isn't this selling? Why isn't this selling? Then it suddenly clicked after like 2 years of trying in the internet space. My purpose of this podcast is to cut down the time it takes for you to learn these things. I'm just going to tell you some sweet nuggets. I'll tell stories in every one of them, usually, just because I hate podcasts that don't have stories. Stories are amazing. Stories engage us. I have to tell stories, so I'll tell lots of different stories and different scenarios and things that I'm working for right now.

I love sales funnels. I am a full time builder and I use a tool called click funnels. If you want a trial of that, go to salesfunnelbroker.com and click on resources and there's a trial for click funnels there. I used to build everything in Word Press and that was not a fun experience. Click funnels is awesome because you can build literally anything, and I'm not a coder or programmer. I'm not a "tech guy." I might be now considered more of a tech guy because I've self taught some code things, but I would never consider myself a coder or a programmer. I use click funnels because I don't have to be a coder or programmer, and I have completely say in what I build and do. It's not like you're getting a template. You can use the templates, but I always blank them out anyways and delete everything and just start over and build what I want.

Anyways, guy thank you so much. I am super excited for this podcast. This is actually a dream come true for me. It's as much for me as it is for the things you'll learn here. Anyways, please subscribe and let me know what you think about this. If you think the idea's cool, or if it's stupid, either or, I just want to know. Feedback would be awesome. Please comment, rate this podcast, subscribe. I would love to send out more of my stuff to you, and my whole purpose is just to help you make money online or offline. Sales funnels work offline, like McDonald's. But make more money using sales funnels because ads and competition have really increased, especially because of the internet.

All right guys. Thank you so much again. Please let me know what you think about this. Bye.

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