Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - Project "Mother Funnel"

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

A quick glimpse behind the scene of what's happening here on our biggest, most crazy, funnel to date. On today's episode Russell talks about the new Project Mother Funnel that should be rolling out in the next 30-60 days. Here are some of the awesome things you will learn about it in this episode: What Project Mother Funnel is and what it's designed to do. How it will help decrease churn rate by weeding out the customers Russell doesn't want. And how it will help new customers stick. So listen here to find out what you can expect when Project Mother Funnel is finally live. Transcript - https://marketingsecrets.com/blog/project-mother-funnel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Excited to have you guys here today. If you have not yet rated and commented and subscribed to iTunes, please do that right away. It's about sharing with you some amazing stuff. So the big question is this. How are entrepreneurs like us,

who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own pockets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world and yet still remain profitable? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing Secrets. All right, everybody. So I want to talk to you today about an internal project we have called Project Mother Funnel. I'm really excited about it.

And I think I've told you guys a couple little secrets about it. But today, Brandon Poland from Lady Boss Weight Loss asked me, he's like, what is Mother Funnel? Tell me about it. I want to know. And so I started telling him and I was geeking out. And I'm like, all right, I'm going to do a podcast on this today because there's some cool strategy behind it and what we're doing. Um, now I want to preface that this strategy may not be perfect for all of you guys. Um, or at least not all of you yet, but longterm, it's something that is really, really

cool. So, um, we, uh, as you know, launch click funnels and somebody has heard my story before took us five funnels before, excuse me, six. The sixth funnel is when it finally took off. And then when it took off, it was awesome. And it's grown and it's been nuts. It's been literally Christmas every day since then. Well, I'm not gonna lie. There's a couple of Halloweens in there. But for the most part, Christmas every single day.

But it's been awesome. And what's interesting though is when we first launched ClickFunnels, our goal was conversion, conversion. How do we get as many people in as possible? And that was always the thing was where we had the free trial and we had like high converting landing pages and like, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it's been really, really good. I'm not talking down against any of that. Um, but it's interesting as we've grown, I remember when we were first launching ClickFunnels, Todd told us, he's like, based on how many people were at it each day, he said, as soon as we get to the point where we're at 60,000 subscribers, he's like, we won't be able to grow anymore because, um, based on our churn numbers, like,

I don't know the churn numbers, but like, let's say 10% of people churn each month, um, at 60,000 members, that's 6,000 people a month that are churning. And so if you're adding 6,000 people a month, you're churning like whatever, anyway, whatever the numbers were at about 60,000 members. Um, that's when we stopped growing. We're just flat lines. And I did, that didn't make any logical sense to me until we got to 55,000 customers. And then it started getting slower. And then 56 took way longer. 57 took way longer. And we've been sitting on like 57 for the last couple of weeks and like, we're getting close to 58, but it's just like everything's slowing down to the screeching halt. And I'm like, ah, Todd, Notre Dame's Todd was right. Once again, how does he know everything all the time?

Drives me crazy. Don't tell him I told you that, but he seems to always be right. And he was right again. And so, um, on our side, I'm like, okay, what do we got to do? So obviously we're doing a lot of things. We're fixing, uh, cleaning up onboarding, cleaning up, um, user experience, UI, some cool UI stuff coming out. You guys the next couple of months, which is so exciting. Um, but on my side, cause I don't have any skills to do anything other than like the sales funnel. So I'm like, okay, how do we do the sales funnel and change it out? And so it's interesting is we had this thought of like, the problem is like, we're go, we're have conversions so high that everybody can come in and sign up, which is good as we're

growing. But now we're spot where like, it actually hurts us because it's so many people coming in and all that kind of stuff. So like, how do we flip this around? About the same time, we did some testing. We felt we were looking at all of our different front end offers, different books and things like that. And I did a podcast on this, I believe. Um, but there's a huge, um, a huge difference in what products somebody purchased immediately before they joined ClickFunnels. Um, and, and then their, their stick rate, their churn rate, like there's a

direct correlation. So if they buy this product first, they're going to, and, and then their, their stick rate, their churn rate, like there's a direct correlation. So if they buy this product first, they're going to, they're going to be, they're going to stay way longer versus this product can be less. So I was like, Holy cow, this whole pre-framing pre-suasion thing that we keep talking about, uh, is actually true. Like it's, it's a legitimate thing. Um, the pre-frame somebody enters your world and we'll have a hundred percent to do with how long they stick, what they do, how they buy, how they send everything. So it's like, dang, so we need to focus more on, on, um, on architecting the pre-frame. Right. And so that's what project mother funnel came about. And it's something that, um, this is not new. It was called project super funnel last year. And we just didn't have the

team, the people in place to do it. And after we started building this agency, finally got the point where like, we have the team. Now we've got the copywriters, the designers, the programmers, like, uh, the developers, all the people we need to actually make Project Mother Funnel become live. In fact, one of them, I can't remember who it was, was the one that coined it. They're like, this is like a mother funnel.

I'm like, that's the new name. So it's literally called Project Mother Funnel on our Trello board. Anyway, so this is kind of the gist of how it works. The goals are two things. Number one is to actually decrease conversions, to weed out the people that are most likely going to churn anyway. And then after we weed out those people,

then to significantly affect the pre-frame that somebody goes through before they sign up for the trial. There's the concept, right? So how are we doing that? So when somebody comes, you'll see this live in probably next 60, 30 to 60 days. No, 60. The live event's in like 28 days. So yeah, it'll be, hopefully, if we get done, it'll be sooner than that.

Maybe it'll go off live after the event. Anyway, you come to the landing page, and on the landing page, there'll be a video, and then it basically asks you which one of these markets you're in. We've kind of broken ClickFunnels down into 10 segments now. And so someone will self-select, like, oh, I'm an agency or, oh, I'm in this, I'm in this. And they'll select like the type of business that they're in. And after that, then we'll redirect them.

We'll get them to opt in and we'll take them to a sales page that's specifically written for that market. Okay. This is the pre-frame. We're trying to adjust and affect the pre-frame. So they'll go through, they'll see this pre-frame of this page that'll show them how ClickFunnels works for them. Number one cancellation reason we have outside of it's too expensive is,

which by the way is not a valid excuse, so I don't believe it. The number one valid excuse people have why they cancel is because they can't figure out how it actually works for their business or their industry or whatever. And so this page will identify which one of these 10 markets you're in

and then it specifically sells you on that. It's like, oh, cool, you're in retail. Let me show you how funnels work for retail. And it sells them specifically where they are. So it should be a frame that's going to increase their stick rate because they've come through this frame that helps them understand how ClickFunnels actually works for their business, and then they sign up for the trial. So we lengthened the process, decreased initial

conversion, pushed out a lot of those who would just churn out anyway. And those who we, who aren't going to churn out now know who they are. And we increased the likelihood to stick because of the pre-frame we took them through. And, um, and then after they, they, they either sign up for the trial, they don't, then they get three emails afterwards. Each email has a case study of somebody in their industry, us showing how it worked for them specifically, and it pushes it back to their specific sales letter. So there's three of those in a row. And then other testimonials, stuff like that.

But there's a whole sequence, follow-up sequence now, specific to them, their market, their situation as well. And so that is kind of what Project Mother Funnel is, and it's exciting, and I'm pumped for it. So anyway, you guys will see the fruits of it here in a little bit, but that's the concept behind it. And I hope that me explaining that helps some of the wheels you guys spin.

Again, I don't necessarily say, let's decrease conversions on our page and make it harder, but sometimes there's a point of like segmenting the audience, weeding out the people you don't want, and then increasing the pre-frame to make that person stick longer. And I think it's amazing.

So there you go. It could completely flop though, For all I know, we'll find out here soon. Anyway, it's awesome. Hope you guys loved it. If you, um, again, if you aren't listening or following, if you're on iTunes, please go subscribe, comment, let other people know about the podcast. If you are on YouTube, watch us now, please click on the like, subscribe, follow our channel. We got a whole bunch of cool stuff coming and, coming and new videos that you guys are going to love. Appreciate you all. Thanks so much for paying attention, listening in, and I'll talk to you guys again soon. Bye. Want more marketing secrets? If so, then go get your copies of my two bestselling books. Book number one is called Expert Secrets, and you can get a free copy at expertsecrets.com.

And book number two is called Dotcom Secrets, and you can get your free copy at dotcomsecrets.com. Inside these two books, you'll find my top 35 secrets that we've used to become the fastest-growing, non-VC-backed SaaS startup company in the world.