Boom, what's going on everyone?
It's Steve Larsen, and today I'm gonna talk to you guys about the most important shift that must take place in every sales message for it to be effective.
I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.
The real question is, how will 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 learn, apply and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.
My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.
What's up guys? I'm excited for today. I've spent the last few days at Russell Brunson's Inner Circle - which is a lot of fun.
The way it works is we all get up, and we'll give, we'll teach for a little bit cool things that we've all been doing. And then we'll ask for whatever we need, right?
And so I got my slides done, I was super excited about it. Honestly going to Inner Circle's like Christmas morning for me. It's probably the place I like to spend the most time, and I just absolutely love it.
It was right before and Russell sent me a message, and he goes, "Hey did you want to teach some of your offer creation stuff for a little over an hour? I got a little spot to fill. We could give you some extra time there, and honestly, I'd love to see the stuff." I said, "Sounds good."
So I was like, "Oh crap, I gotta remake all this stuff." So I went and I remade this cool presentation to go through and share a lot of these things.
And one of the stories in there, I wanna walk through it, I wanna share with you guys the most important element in a sales message.
Now a lot you guys know, I talk about door-to-door sales a lot. For me, that was like one of the best educations I ever had in my entire life - door-to-door sales. I did not see that at the time. I did not know that at the time. But I was hoping that I would learn sales in the toughest environment - which was literally one of the major reasons why I did door-to-door.
I know I bring it up a lot, but it's because it was so impactful for me. Now a lot of you guys know too that I've told this story right in the past, I'll get to this whiteboard here I have in a moment. But in the past, what's been fascinating is I was so obsessed with products, right?
I would write eBooks, I would put things together, and I was, "What product can I sell? What product can I sell? What product can I sell?" And it led me down this path of learning what products are cool... BUT it also led to actually having zero cash in my pocket...
So back to the door-to-door thing; I had the exact same fixation when I was doing door-to-door sales. I would go around and for the first half of the summer I was the number two salesman as a first year.
I was good, right and I'd be closing people. I was like, "Pest control, pest control, pest control, pest control, pest control."
Customers started asking things like, "ell does it kill bug? Does it kill my ants? Does it kill the wasps? Do you guys take care of the mice? Do you do this, do this, do this...?"
The technician came after me and obviously fulfilled on that and I just was selling it, I was the sales guy obviously.
And what was funny was that when you look at the way I was selling, the first half of the summer for me, I was getting two to three sales a day - which as a sales guy, door-to-door, for that price point - that's not bad. That's not bad.
If you do that consistently, that's pretty good.
What's funny though is that about halfway through the summer it shifted from going from two to three sales a day to two to three sales a week. I was wrecked. I mean it destroyed me.
If I did not do so well the beginning half of the summer, my wife and I would have been bankrupt by the time we hit the end of the summer. We pretty much broke even the rest of the entire summer. And I was like, what happened here? What's going on?
One of the major things that I was getting distracted on was the product itself.
About two months into the beginning of summer, people started asking me questions: "Does it do this, does it kill that? What about this, does it do that?" Blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah, and I ended up falling in the rabbit hole, and I shouldn't have.
I got on this huge spree of learning about the product more: "Oh these are the chemical compounds inside of our pest control. Oh, this is the organic version and the chemical compounds of that one. Oh, here is why it works on wasps. This is why it works on ants. This is why it works."
And I got so far into the why - literally down to the molecular level. I knew exactly why this pest control is killing that bug... because it is jacking up their nervous system... right! Weird details that don't matter.
I got so obsessed over it.
It was not until afterwards, when I started learning about sales that I found out that I was talking myself out of the sale.
Anytime anybody asked me a question where they just needed a simple answer, "Does it kill my bugs?" "Yeah." But I was like, "Yes, booof!" And I'd just like barf all over him. "Here and this and that, and this and that, look at me, I'm smart, look at me I'm smart!"
I went back to college and I started learning more about eBooks, I started trying to sell things online. I started getting more into the internet game. And I got back to that same fixation - believing that the product and what made the product is what did the sale.
Now there's this interesting stat and correlation, even at ClickFunnel's high ticket selling. A lot of internet marketers, a lot of business owners today, they try to not have their high ticket salesmen know that much about the product...
It's not because they're trying to be shady or sneaky or anything like that, it's because there's a danger that salesmen will start to talk themselves out of the sale.
They will literally start explaining all the features. They will literally start explaining all the little details, and it ends up killing the sale.
So I went in, and I got to teach a little bit about this and tell different stories about it to the Inner Circle.
There's one specific concept about the sales script that I wanted to walk you through.
First of all, I just wanna make the point, people don't buy because of the product. They buy it because of the sales message. They're completely separate activities. They're completely separate disciplines. Sales message versus a product.
And for so many years - the reason why I knew it took me 17 tries, (it's something like that), to have a successful product is because it was the first time that I actually decided, "Holy crap, I'm still gonna make a sick product. I'm gonna make something that's totally awesome, but I'm gonna first fixate on a sales message that gets...
