Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - Jason Friedman’s Customer Retention System For Raving Superfans | #Marketing - Ep. 89

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I brought in one of my secret weapons from Inner Circle and Atlas, Jason Friedman. Jason is the guy I think about when I hear “customer experience” and “retention.” I am obsessed with funnels, traffic, and selling online, but Jason walked into our Mastermind in Paradise and basically said, “Cool… but what happens after they say yes?” What followed was one of the clearest frameworks I’ve ever seen for turning customers into raving recruiters so your revenue grows without buying more clicks. Key Highlights: ◼️Why entrepreneurs stay “addicted to strangers,” and how Jason reframes ROAS as Return On Audience Success so your funnels stop leaking profit. ◼️The theater director who scripted audience reactions on command, and how that principle lets you choreograph customer transformation instead of hoping it happens. ◼️Jason’s Kinetic Customer Formula that ties attitude, behavior, momentum, and friction into a system that drives renewals, ascensions, and referrals. ◼️Simple retention moves you can apply immediately, like accelerating time-to-first-value, creating win streaks, and fixing hidden friction points. ◼️How personalization, gamification, and “unreasonable” small touches create emotional connection and make your programs sticky. ◼️Why the future of online business belongs to entrepreneurs who build back-end funnels that turn current customers into their strongest promoters. If you run funnels, sell courses or coaching, or drive any kind of online sales, this episode will help you make more money from the customers you already have while building something that is AI-proof and future-proof. Listen in, take notes, and then start redesigning your customer journey so your experiences compound long after the initial sale! ◼️If you’ve got a product, offer, service… or idea… I’ll show you how to sell it (the RIGHT way) Register for my next event →⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠ ◼️Still don’t have a funnel? ClickFunnels gives you the exact tools (and templates) to launch TODAY → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Do you have a funnel, but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com slash podcast. Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I'm going to give you guys a gift. Jason Friedman is someone who is in my inner circle.

he's in my Atlas program and he is one of the smartest dudes ever met and um it's kind of cool he spoke in our last mastermind in paradise for our inner circle on two ccx members and he talked about something that i don't talk a lot about obviously i am a marketing nerd i love marketing and traffic and funnels and sales and all the fun stuff uh what jason talks about is customer retention after you get the people how do you actually keep them uh and his presentation was brilliant I think it's really fun too because, you know, my focus is, you know, we try to make insane products. So I do focus on retention. And, but also, like, I usually, you know, just the, you know, the cloth that I'm cut from,

I focus on acquisition, acquisition. This presentation, I think, would be useful for all of you guys because it's focusing on, like, growing through retention, not just through acquisition, acquisition, if I can say that correctly. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this presentation from Jason. After we should look him up on social, follow him, tell him he's amazing. and this presentation is where I think it's going to help a lot of you guys to make more money without spending more money, which is the key. So I appreciate you all, and I hope you enjoy this presentation from Jason Friedman.

This is the Russell Brunson Show. Not too long ago, I was sitting in a room kind of like this. It was in Boise. It was Atlas. And I was sitting in a seat listening to like genius after genius after genius. every one of them talking about how to do these amazing things with their business, more traffic, better conversions, all this amazing stuff. And as I sat there, I kind of felt uneasy. I mean, I had lots of great notes, lots of great stuff, but not one single person talked about what happens after someone says yes to you.

Everything was before the yes, how you get more strangers into your business. but nobody was talking about how to get more customers to get results. And it really hit me hard. Now, I had stopped teaching customer experience, like all that stuff that he said was awesome. I pivoted in my business a bit, and I'd tell you more about that another time. I don't have as much time right now,

but I thought this need to come back to that. And so what I want to talk to you about is a different way to think about RoAS today. Now, this morning it was really hardening to hear Simon and then even Richmond talking a little bit. more about customer experience and journeys because experience is everything. The crazy thing is you can't give people an experience. They have to have one. You can do lots of things to set it up so that they do have one. And in that Atlas room, I was challenged by my Dr. Sonia. Where's Dr. Sonia? She said, who here's going to write a book? And I was like, I might write a book. I thought more

about it. Come back to that in a second. But I'm a theater kid. I started when I was eight years old. My friend Billy wanted to go and try out for the camp play, and he, like, needed an emotional support human with him. And so I went with him, and I was sitting in the back, watching all the stuff unfold. And there was this dude on stage, building all the sets, and every so often he'd run over to the lighting board and adjust the sound. And I was, like, totally captivated by this guy. And I was like, oh my gosh. And over the next 20 years, like I went to school for theater. I was a lighting designer. I traveled with Rush, Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, run DMC and Public Enemy. I was the token. And I did like legit theater, lay

Ms. Jesus Christ superstar, a fiddler on the roof. What was so interesting was actually one meeting, one production meeting that changed everything about how I saw the world. And so I was sitting with like the theater C-suite, right? The director, the choreographer, the stage manager, all the designers. And as they were going through the script, reading through the script, the director was like, I want them to laugh right there at this moment. And then like a little later, he was like, hey, I want them to like jump to their feet in like, glorious applause. And he got this for all these different things. And I was like, dude, like, there's no way. Like, that's crazy. And then on opening night, I,

sat there and like on command everybody did exactly what he wanted and was like holy crap you don't have to guess at transformation you can choreograph it you can actually deliver an engineer client success and client transformation you can engineer the opportunities for them to have the experience you want them to have because guess what no matter what they're having an experience you kind of want it to be the one that you want them to have. And so you got to do it by design, not by default. And so what I'm just questioning, like, is it possible to do this in business? Like, can you actually do this, like, for a business? And I was like, huh. And I spent 25 years in my life proving that you can do it for business. I raised over $20 billion for Stanford, Harvard, Duke, Yale, doing

customer experience activation events. I did it for brands like Armani, you know, and you name it, everybody out there. It's like all the big guys. And then when Dr. Sonia challenged us to write the book, I was like, you know what? I'm going to write the book, even though I wasn't going to do this anymore. So the book is called Addicted to Strangers, because you all have an addiction to strangers. How to win while everyone else is playing the wrong game. And you notice that I'm manifesting Russell writing the forward. I haven't asked him yet. So we'll see. We'll see what he says. We'll see what he says. All right. But here's the reality, right? The reality is that We've built the entire empire of all of our businesses on conversion, and we've forgotten connection.

That's where Russell started out the other day. He was talking about brand and connection and people, right? We can't out AI, AI. We have to embrace us, the relationships, the people. That's the most important thing. So I've got a quick pop quiz for everybody. How many people here have an ads budget? And ads, revenue, yeah?

How many people here have a client success budget? Okay. Cool. A few of you. Here's the deal. Funnels convert experiences compound. Funnels convert experiences compound. And so I want to give you a different definition for ROAS. I want you to think about it as return on audience success. I want you to flip the funnel. I want you to think about how there's a funnel on the back end like Richman was talking about, how like activating people on the back end is one of the most important, most powerful things you could possibly do. because when you do that, they become not just raving fans. They become raving recruiters. They bring more people in than your ads will ever bring in. It reduces the old definition of ROS.

It makes it better. You get a higher return on advertising spent. And so how do you do this? Well, the formula that we have to do this is what we call the kinetic customer formula. We want active, engaged customers. And so here's how it works. There's a bunch of letters and numbers and plus signs and minus signs. and all that. But essentially, there's five, four variables and an outcome. It's attitudes,

behaviors, momentum, and friction. And if you can master understanding these four pieces, you will get to what we call a radical result. What is a radical result? A radical result was when people rave about your products and services. They can't stop themselves from talking about it because it was just so good. They returned to buy more products and services from you. They renew that membership so that you have that ongoing lynchpin amazing model of continuity and they recruit other people not refer recruit it's different they bring them in they go out and they grab them like you have to do a tiny challenge you have to do it like and they like grab them and they bring them you have to come to funnel hacking lives you have to do this you have to do that what happens

when your customers do that is you start to compound and so attitudes are how people are thinking about your business. What are they thinking? What are they thinking about their journey? A lot of it's actually internal problems that they have where they're afraid they might not get their results. Behaviors are what they do, right? And all of those things can get magnified by momentum. But then, of course, there's friction. And friction is the silent assassin in your business. Too many of us make it too hard to do business with us. Because we think about it from the business perspective. The one thing that I always took for granted, I didn't realize how powerful it was, is that in theater, everything's designed for the audience, like the sight lines,

the angles, the props, the sets, the lights. Everything is thinking about what that audience is going to do. Go back to what that director said. I want them to laugh here. What do we need to do for them to do that? And in our business, it's like, I see all these people like, yeah, like the guru's like on stage doing all the stuff to get everybody in. They never show up to fulfillment, right? Sometimes we have to scale what's not scalable. We have to do those touch points. Like we're talking about making a phone call, right? Like, that's brilliant.

Right? That's brilliant. And the other thing is, like, what I'm going to give you today is not just a checklist. I don't want you to think about that. I'm going to give you some tactical things you can do. But I want you to change your philosophy. I want you to start using what I call journey-based thinking. Journey-based thinking is like thinking about things on a continuum.

It's not just moment by moment by moment. it's moment by moment by moment that are connected. Who was talking about linking all the things? Somebody was talking about having all the links together and you can't have a broken link. But here's the other thing to keep in mind. Customers do not move in steps. They move in stories.

Right? They have the itty-bitty-shitty committee in their head. They have the imposter syndrome comes up. They think about all the things that are happening and it stops them from taking action. And so I think about what we're about to you is like conversion choreography. where if you want, transformation choreography.

And so here's a couple strategies, and these are probably things you might know. Maybe it's a referral or a review, but I think they're pretty important. The first one is time to first value. And if you haven't been practicing this, this is probably the most important one. How quickly do you get somebody a win? How quickly do you get somebody a win? What's a win? A perception of value.

It's not the ultimate result. That's too big. But the faster we can get someone to feel good. yes, I won. That was great. Here's the crazy thing. Most people don't know when they're winning. You have to tell them. You have to tell them. So we want to get someone as much of a short period of time to value as we possibly can right in the beginning. And then we want to create a win streak. We want that value to keep happening. How can we keep getting people multiple wins? That's number one. Number two is what I call mind the gap for our UK friends. So

In theater, transitions are like rehearsed within an inch of their lives. Like, we do the scenes, but like the scene changes, we practice over and over again until we get them smooth. Like if you don't do the scene change right, like if the curtain falls on the actor or if someone gets hit with a moving set piece, it's a bad day. You lose the whole thing. And so we don't want that. But in our businesses, we don't worry and focus on those transitions. We lose people in the transitions. At the last Inner Circle meeting, I think it was Fabioz Horace was talking about connection rate.

He was talking about how many people saw Facebook ad and never got to the page. That's a transition. There's massive, massive loss if you're not focusing on that. So we have to look at the transitions. Transitions from moment to moment, transitions from, you know, one program to another program, transition from page to page, whatever that happens to be. And now, I'm curious, how many of you love. over delivering. Like you just do it all the time for your clients. Stop it! No more. No more,

no more over delivering and over delivery. Here's the crazy thing. If all there ever is is over delivery, it becomes expected. It's no more over delivery. Context and contrast is everything. A lot of times you just got to deliver. Do what you say. And then pick your key moments to over-deliver. When you always over-deliver, you end up with overwhelm, and you end up spending so much extra money to do it, it's actually not worth it in your business. So do over-deliver, but do it strategically. Pick the key moments, because moments make experiences. Personalize it. And I love what Simon was talking about this morning. He does pre-personalize it. He printed on those cards before they even, he had ever went out there.

Personalization, especially in this world, is amazing. But it's not just having dear first name. That's not personalization. That's expected at this point. And if your emails go out and say dear first name because you even put the right merge field, that's really bad. Right? So what do I mean by personalize it? I mean, get to know your customers.

Understand them. Segment them. Give relevance to them in the communications, in the way you interact with them, in the phone calls, and things you do. when you can find things that are not traditionally scalable and scale them like making the phone calls doing those things it has such an immense effect that there's an exponential

return on that investment of time and so if you can find ways to do that you're going to be really glad that you did gamify it gamification right using game thinking to get people to do what you want them to do

right perfect example this morning was the challenge thing right we got to have a really good prize. I'm going to fly them first class, and I'm going to have them come out there. People will do anything for a little red ribbon, right? Napoleon said that. And so we have to give people,

status, access, power stuff. Status, access, power stuff. What are you doing to create gamification? Challenges are amazing. Challenges in fulfillment are amazing. Challenges on the front end are amazing. It's driving people to compete and win. How many people like love running in the back of the room

to get the T-shirt from Russell at all the event? right? It's stuff. Crazy enough, stuff is the lowest level. Stuff is what is like the least valuable. What's really the most valuable is recognition. It's being known, it's being seen. It's being asked to speak on this stage. It's the Atlas lanyard. It's the inner circle lanyard. It's being part of a group that shows that you've ascended up the ladder. What are you doing in your business to let people feel like they've ascended? Because ascension does equal retention. Love that. Right. Engineer expectations. If you don't set an expectation, your client still has one,

and it's often not what you want it to be. And so I want you to think about where can you actually set and manage those expectations to their benefit, to get them better results, to make them show up more. Like what Richmond was talking about with like the amount of people that comment and respond in a Facebook group, that's amazing. How many people are like blown away by that? Dude, those are amazing numbers. I've never seen anybody that's had that result either, and I've seen lots of this. And so that's amazing. Reward and recognize your customers.

Make sure that they feel seen. We all want to feel seen. The problem that we have is, I mean, it's like someone says yes to you, and then they get inside, and then you kind of ghost them. It doesn't feel very good. We need to see them. And I would say we also want to create rituals. What are things that we can do that are special? that are very impactful to people.

And a lot of people, like, you start thinking, okay, in reasonable it has to be expensive. It doesn't have to be expensive. Give an example. I'm in a chain of sleep diagnostic centers. We test people for Russell Syg Syndrome, Narcolepsy, sleep apnea, things like that. When they come in, we welcome them.

Now imagine, you went to the doctor's office. They tell you you're probably going to die in your sleep because you stop breathing every, like, 10 seconds. And that's not just snoring. You're like your body stops breathing. And you have to solve this, otherwise you're going to have a heart attack or stroke. So they come into this crazy place.

They get connected to all these things, wires and stuff, and they have a video camera watching them sleep. Super uncomfortable scenario, right? So one of the things we do when they come in and they go through the place, and it's beautifully designed, they have all the amenities and whatever. We ask them one question. Are you going to be going to work right from here tomorrow?

Yeah? Would you like us to press your clothes? They're like, what? Like, would you like us to press or steam your clothes? You're going to go to work and make sure you look good. They're like, holy crap. We had an iron, an ironing board, and a steamer in the back. Not once did anyone ever take us up on this,

but almost every client went back to their doctor and said, this place is unbelievable. They thought of everything. They thought the health care was better because we asked them that question. Right? That is what it means when you start to be unreasonable. What are the unreasonable things, the completely unexpected things that you can bring into your customer's world

that will help you make a bigger and better impact. I want to leave you with this. I want you to flip your funnel focused. I want you to stop just looking at the front end of your business as a funnel and look at the back end of your business as a funnel also. It's a funnel to your next level program, to your next level program. It's a funnel to have them become your raving, recruiting fans.

We want them to be talking about it. Focus a lot of effort and energy on what happens after they say yes. Because if you don't focus, you're going to see with the ad costs going through the roof today and you're fighting for eyeballs and we have more upsells

and down cells that we have to add in to try and self-liquidate the funnel, it gets messy. And then it feels like it's an offer factory, not a transformation factory. And we end up creating a disappointment factory. And I don't want anybody in this room

especially to have that. So stop competing on acquisition and start competing on retention. Now, I know, I know this is going to be controversial. This whole idea of, like, what if he or she can spend the most money to acquire customers wins? But what if she, he, who can spend the most money to acquire your customers was based on the philosophy that your customers were becoming your best traffic? What if that's how you were spending the most to acquire a customer?

By getting their success and then they bring all these other people in. That's how we need to do it. Funnels convert, experiences compound. And at the end of the day, while the world automates the soul out of everything, you can build something AI-proof. You don't need more traffic. You need more traction. Thank you very much.