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In episode 27, ClickFunnels founder Russell Brunson joins me to share a bit of his entrepreneurial journey. We also chat about the exciting upcoming ClickFunnels marketing automation features, called Actionetics.

Actionetics will allow you to build marketing automation sequences directly inside ClickFunnels. You will be able to create dynamic automation campaigns that change based on the demographics of the person in the funnel (see the video below).

Have a look at the Actionectics Clickfunnels marketing automation preview

If you haven't tried ClickFunnels yet I would urge you to have a look. You can set up a free trial account here account by magic.

Check out the Fireworks War

Links Mentioned In The Show

• ActiveCampaign
• ClickFunnels
• DotComSecrets Book
• Rework the book
• Garrett J. White
• FunnelHacker.tv
• Marketing In Your Car

Listening options:

• Subscribe via iTunes
• On Stitcher Radio
• Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Barry: You step back, and … what's the over arching goal that's must do that but don't be too creepy, I guess it's kind of a good way like you said.

Announcer: Welcome to the Active Marketer Podcast where we talk about how to design, automate and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at the activemarketer.com. Now here's your host, Barry Moore.

Barry: Hello fellow [automator 00:00:37]and welcome back to episode 27 of the Active Marketer Podcast, I'm your host Barry and this week is a bit of a treat for me and hopefully a bit of a treat for you as well. And the reason for that is, if you know anything about me you know that I'm a big fan of ClickFunnels, it's a fantastic software tool for building out sales funnels quickly and easily; ties everything together, we used to be a real nightmare to create a kind of cohesive sales funnel from beginning to end that ties in with all the other systems that it needs to tie into like your payment gateways and your auto responders.

ClickFunnels is a great tool for that so this week on the episode we've got ClickFunnels founder Russell on to talk a little bit about the product. But more than that, I know from meeting Russell that there's lots of new features coming from behind the scenes that haven't been released yet.

So I wanted to get him on the show to talk a little bit about his journey, why he created ClickFunnels in the first place but also give you guys a sneak preview at some of the features that are going to be coming inside ClickFunnels that haven't even been announced to the general public yet. So that's going to be pretty cool?

And a lot of those, hint-hint, are around on marketing automation built right into the platform which is going to be super cool. But before we do that, it's back to the shameless social proof segment, we've got a couple of iTunes reviews to read out, one's from Chris in the United States he says, “Needing actionable advice.”

“Just found this podcast about two weeks ago and can't stop listening.” “I love how the episodes aren't too long and Barry's approach to automation and advice is always right on point.” “Thanks Barry for sharing your pro automation tactics with us.”

Well thank you very much for listening Chris and everybody else that's listening, I really appreciate it and I really love it when people take the time to go to iTunes [inaudible 00:02:23] and leave us a review. And it really gives me that little bit of oomph to keep the show going and make sure that the shows are really relevant and provides some fantastic tips for you guys. So thanks very much Chris.

If you want to head on over to iTunes and leave us a review, I'll be happy to read it out on a future show. But for now let's jump into this week's episode with Russell.

All right I'd like to welcome to the show Russell Brunson; Russell welcome.

Russell: Thanks for having me man.

Barry: Now, we're going to start with the tough question right off the bat and the burning question that's been on my mind for days is; Who won the firework war?

Russell: Oh, well [crosstalk 00:03:05] I don't think anyone can actually win a firework war. I definitely got the most injuries this time around, I got a burnt neck, finger, fore and biceps, so I lost as far as injuries but we won the war, they ended up bringing out a firework before we did. That was like flags, like trying to ask to quit and we just wouldn't lapse, we just laid into them and then watched fireworks while they were trying to surrender, so it was awesome.

Barry: No surrender, no surrender, nobody ended up in the hospital with a broken collar bone this time or anything?

Russell: No, everyone survives so it was-

Barry: Awesome.

Russell: Great time. We actually recorded the whole thing so should have a video proof of the experience here in the next week or so. It'll be awesome.

Barry: Awesome, all right, sounds good. I want to get you on the show to talk about ClickFunnels, a big fan, a big big fan of ClickFunnels and I love the product, mostly because it ties together so many other things that you had to kind of do manually and you can do it so quick and get something up and running in no time. So I want to talk about that but before we get into that, I think there is also another interesting element to your story that could kind of lead into funnels a little bit is, I'm a bit familiar with it but maybe for some of the listeners who aren't, you kind of got some success there in the early days and really kind expanded your team to I think it was up to, kind of you know, up to 100 people at one point, is that right?

Russell: Yeah, we did [crosstalk 00:04:26] unfortunately.

Barry: Why I want to point that out because I think that's a common trap for people, they see some success and they think well the next thing to do is to scale up everything. And I know as part of your story, maybe you want to talk about how you went from 100 plus employees back down and contracted back down but still doing the same with not more revenue, with fewer resources than you did with all those giant call centres.

Russell: Yeah we grouped over 100 and then out of necessity we had to shrink back down, not something I chose but something I'm very grateful for now. I had a friend who told me that he would never work with an entrepreneur who hasn't cycled at least once. I said what does that mean and he said it means, “You build up a company and you crashed it,” and he said that cycling instead of failing and I'm like that sounds good, I'm going to call it cycling now too. Because like the second time you think a lot more through strategically what you're going to do to not fall into the same traps you did the first time. The first time you think you're invincible, unstoppable, you make a lot of choices looking through that lens which is not always good. So maybe it's good, not always good though.

And so the second time, we churned down to a small team of about seven or eight people and we had a year and a half, two years when we were kind of in a transition, still trying to figure out, what are we about, what are we doing, what are our goals, what value do we want to bring to this marketplace in this world and about that time I read a book called Rework which is still one of my top ten best business, probably top two best business books of all time.

But in that book, like every chapter I'd read and I was like, oh crap, if I had of listened to this editor I wouldn't have made that mistake and this mistake and some of the ones were really big for me, one of them they talk about was, only hire when it hurts. Most of the entrepreneurs are like, oh, I need an assistant, I need this and I need that which are to hire people because it sounds cool and makes us look awesome.

Barry: Yeah.

Russell: But the books, I don't hire people just to hire people, I only hire when there's pain, that became a rule for us, we don't hire people unless there's a pain that we need solved and then we find someone to replace that pain which is a big one.

The other one that was kind of cool is I think as entrepreneurs we think we have to grow grow grow and everything is about this whole growth thing so we get obsessed with that. And the book, it kind of gave me permission, like it talked about, what's wrong with having a company that's doing well, like why do you always have to be-

Barry: Yeah.

Russell: [inaudible 00:06:43] or time and I was like, you know what, I'm always stressed now about this stuff which I don't need to be and so it kind of give me permission to take my foot off the gas which gave me time to think and be more strategic in what we were doing and by doing that, like you mentioned like, we are now making about twice what we were doing with 100 employees and between [inaudible 00:07:02] ClickFunnels and everything else we were doing, we had about 30 employees.

And so with less than a third of the staff, we're doing more than twice the revenue now. And so it's just a way better spot to be but it took, being very careful when we hire and taking the foot off the gas to become more strategic and think through things and make, I heard Tim [Ferris 00:07:24] say it's the best way, he said that he spends most of his day looking at the chess piece trying to figure out which chess piece he needs to move that'll make all other thing obsolete as opposed to trying to do every single thing possible. And that's really smart, we need to be more like that, be more strategic so that was kind of the crash and then the rebuild but I hope everyone … if you haven't cycled once you probably will and still okay with that and just be more smart the second time through.
Barry: Yeah there's a big lesson I took from Dan Norris' book The Seven Day Start Up, it's don't waste time money and effort solving problems you don't have yet. It's just kind of a similar sort of thing. But the reason I brought that up is that it's a great segway to the fact that with the right product and with the right funnel, you can be making tonnes more cash without tonnes more resources which kind of leads us into ClickFunnels so; what's the elevator pitch for ClickFunnels for people who aren't familiar with it?

Russell: Yeah so ClickFunnels is software we created because we were sick and tired of, it used to take us about six full time people to build one sales funnel and take them on average six to eight weeks to do. And now we can do the exact same process, I can build the same sales funnel, a higher quality, in about an hour to an hour and a half that used to do, to take all these people and we could do it with just ClickFunnels instead of having to glue together, word press and optimised press and lead pages and shopping cart and order response, all these million things you had to glue together, you can do it all now in one spot.

Barry: So is that really just the impetus that you were just scratching your own itch or was it, I'm going to build this product and go out and dominate the market because you saw a gap in the market?

Russell: It was a combination of both. It definitely was initially a frustration on our site, I mean look at my track record over the 12 years I've been doing this; we've launched tonnes of funnels, we do three or four, at times it's three or four a year which … it took us a quarter to get a funnel up and live and working and functioning and hopefully making money.

And that since seemed right, it didn't seem like it should be that hard. Most of the funnels were 95% the same, we just had to tweak little things here and there but it always took so long to do. And so that was part of it, in fact my tech guys, they're all going when they did it is like “We can make this so simple that even Russell can use it then we've done our job right.” Which is like the greatest compliment to me ever right?

And so that was the first part but then, you obviously are an entrepreneur and I thought that if we can execute this and make it where we'll actually use it for everything, I think we can get everybody else to use it as well. Because I'm in the same … I know the pains of our marketplace, I know the frustrations because I've lived through that every single day and I was like if we can solve this problem for ourselves and do it in a really good way that's not … and people have been like trying to solve this problem since I've been online for 10 years, 12 years.

If we can do it right, we will make more money than we will ever dream of, that we ever could have dreamt of. And so that was kind of the goal, make it so that we can use it and if we do that, I think everyone else will adopt it too and luckily for us, they have; it's been amazing.

Barry: Yeah it's a really fantastic product. Everybody talks about, oh you know, we've got this one step form that's just drag and drop and click but it really is a fantastic product. So is that your first foray into software products?

Russell: No, I've done a lot of soft … my first product was a software product. It was a little software product called Zip Brander that I'd hired this guy named Cyprian in Romania to build for me. He charged me $20.00 and that was my first software product. And back then I made five or six of these little like desktop software products.

But there was a lot of haste with that like, when I got started, nobody was using Mac so it was easy, everyone just did a PC, so you developed for the PC right? But every time you had an update, you had to go back to all your customers and have them to re-download the new update and most people never would and then they would use it and it would be broken because they didn't have the new update and it was always like headaches.

And then Macs started becoming more and more popular and everyone Macs and Mac developers were like twice as much money and it was just like so eventually I just gave up on software altogether and then a whole lot moved towards software [inaudible 00:11:14] started coming out and people were doing stuff and we just never had a good idea to do it. I still had some amazing developers and an amazing team but we just never had like the big thing we wanted to focus on so we made little one off things for ourselves, for clients, for up sales, part of a product we were selling.

But it wasn't until, like we came up with the idea for ClickFunnels that it was like, okay, let's put all of our cash and time and energy and resources into this and make it amazing. So this is a real … I mean it's a first like software business where we've got a whole development team now, we've got, it's like a legit company, it's kind of fun.

Barry: What do you think was the bigger challenge, the actual getting the software together and getting it ready or the marketing for it, getting people to sign up and become customers?

Russell: Well my side, programming is real easy because I don't do it [crosstalk 00:12:03] My partner might say- [crosstalk 00:12:06] and they worked their butts off as you can tell. They've did an amazing job. My side of the marketing was way harder than I thought it was going to be. We did a big product launch initially and it flopped.

It was like, I couldn't believe how bad it did. We had all these projections, I thought we'd get 10,000 members the first seven days, like I also felt like, we did a free trial, like there's no way we won't and we did this launch and it just, it tanked and I couldn't figure out why and I'm like, why in the world did nobody buy into this, I tried three or four or five different variations and just couldn't get people to see the vision of it.

I couldn't figure out why, I like why are these not buying like, do you understand what we're giving you? This is the greatest gift that I could possibly give someone is this tool and it was funny Mike [Philseam 00:12:49] invited me to speak at one of his events and he was like, “Hey did you sell ClickFunnels?” And I was like, no one is buying ClickFunnels man, we're trying.

But it was a free trial at the time and so we sold it through and he's like, “We got to figure out a way to sell $1,000 version of it because we're going to speak at the event and why you sell it,” and I was like oh man, it's kind of … I kind of burned out, I spent like two months trying every variation of ways to sell this, I just hadn't had anything that had taken off yet.

And so I sat down, I wrote a webinar pitch over a two day period of time, I flew out to his event and I gave it and it just exploded. I think I sold 38% of the room bought there. Which is really the highest closure I'd ever had at an event. I came back the next weekend, I did three or four webinars that week, we did about half a million dollars that week in sales and I just like, oh man, it's on.

And we started going and just doing webinar after webinar and found out that people just needed a little education on what it was, which the webinar was really good for, helping them understand like how I use it. They understood like, here's the funnel, like get that but why … it was hard for people to grasp. Like show the webinar like this is what I do and how I do it and why I do it. And this is how easy it is … the people, I think a thousand light bulbs went off, so this is it.

Ever since then it's just been growing like wild fire, like nothing I've ever been part of, it's been crazy.

Barry: So was it just coming down to finding the right kind of pre frame bridge to get people across?

Russell: One hundred percent, yep, we had to educate them to get them and by the way, I'm very impressed, you'd better read the book-

Barry: It's a fantastic book [crosstalk 00:14:16].

Russell: I could tell by the reference, yes, it's exactly what it was, we had to have the right pre frame bridge to get people, to get … because like, to being clicked on you've got to speak the language right, like what's the funnel? You've got to understand that and then people don't when they first come in so that webinar is a pre frame bridge to get them so that we're on the same ground and now I can to them in a way that makes sense and that was kind of the goal of that, yeah.

Barry: Cool, all right, well let's talk about a bit of [inaudible 00:14:41], anybody who follows me knows I'm a fan and a user and you unveiled some pretty killer features that are coming up at your funnel hacking live event in [inaudible 00:14:54] and so this podcasts are all kind of marketing automation users as well so maybe you could share a little bit about the actionetics features that are coming up inside the products in the near future.

Russell: Definitely. So real quick, so you know too, the backpacks the other big feature in it, next Wednesday I believe we're making it live to everybody in ClickFunnels so that'll give everybody the ability to have their own affiliate platform inside of ClickFunnels which is cool. And then actionetics is a little further down the line, I think I told you earlier, like tomorrow actually it might be [inaudible 00:15:26] I waited a run through today and I saw the whole thing and it's like the most insanely amazing thing ever created on planet earth. It's like in mind tomorrow to start playing with it to see if I can break it in and after I get done, then we'll open up to a beta group and then eventually it'll go live to everybody.

But actually it's like something, we kind of went back and forth, should we launch this, should we not, initially our goal was just to be funnels. Like we built funnels we integrate with everything else. And so that was kind of the goal and at first that was happening and people were good and then they used ClickFunnels and they had to have like 20 other programmes to plug everything in so eventually we started adding in like order forms through stripe and then people were like, “Oh cool I can do order forms now,” and then we tried adding a couple more things and eventually people kept begging us like, “Why do we have to have a webber, why do I have to have this, why do I have to have all these other things like, can you guys just do that, can you do it in a better way?”

And we were really careful because we didn't want to do those things unless we could do it in a way that was simpler than any other solution out there and easier, like that's kind of like our whole philosophy with ClickFunnels, if we can't do it in an easy way we don't do it, like we need it, it needs to be something that people can use and adopt and people will fall in love with. And so it's kind of what we were trying to do and so we spent a lot of time; a lot of time brainstorming and trying to figure out the right way to do it.

And we come up with a way that's amazing so, you now know how in ClickFunnels you build out your funnels, right?

Barry: Yep.

Russell: So when actionetics like, you can build out what we call action funnels which are basically like your follow up sequences. And so I can say, day one, send out this email. Day two, send out this text message. Day three, if they didn't open the email on day one then send them this email but if they did, then send them this email right?

Bunch of cool things like that. So that's kind of the initial architecture, the simplest format that's what it is. So just like the way you build a funnel then the view looks very similar, you have squeeze page, sales page, order form. Now you've got message one, number two, then you build it up in a very similar format. And you click [inaudible 00:17:20]on the stats, on the numbers, everything's that's happening on that marketing campaign, right?

And again we integrate with stuff so it's not just emails; email, text message, post cards like we'll keep adding more and more things so you can make your marketing as complex and as cool as you want to.

Barry: So- [crosstalk 00:17:37]

Russell: The basics of it.

Barry: So in a nutshell it's kind of like the automation features, the best of the automation features that you might find inside of active campaign or infusion soft [inaudible 00:17:46] building out those automative sequences but you can do that straight within ClickFunnels without having to tie it to some other third party. Automation-

Russell: Yeah.

Barry: ClickFunnel yeah?

Russell: Yeah and then there's two really cool things that we're able to do that nobody else can do. And one of them is because we control the funnel, you know like if you thought you can tag people based on things but it's super clunky, it doesn't work all the time, pixels don't file, all sorts of stuff, we're here because we control the funnel. Like I can say when somebody gets this spot in the funnel or if they don't get to the spot or they see this page or they see this page x amount of times, I can change my marketing message.

I can change the funnel, I can changes things on the [floor 00:18:22] I like so that's part of it and the other part is that, let me walk you, kind of the end goal of actionetics. So somebody comes and they join your list, right? And when typically when someone joins your list, what do you know about them? You know an email address, that's it, right?

Barry: Yeah.

Russell: Based on their email address there's so much data on that person publicly available that either for free or that we purchase. So ClickFunnels actually eats the cost now. We go out there and we go and we buy all this data on that person. Someone joins your list, in real time we go out and we find out, that email address like, like how many followers on facebook they have, how big is there twitter following, how much money do they make, what magazines they read, like we pull up all their social, all their demographic, all the information that's out there on the internet based on the email.

Actually pull back into real time and suddenly as soon [inaudible 00:19:07] you know everything that's possible that we can know about that person, right? Now based on that, you can do a whole bunch of cool things. Initially what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to change the follow up sequences. If this person makes more than $50,000 a year and has less than 25 twitter followers, show them this email. [crosstalk 00:19:25]

Or you know, anything you can dream of, if they've got, if they come to my page three times, have more than 50,000 twitter followers and facebook followers, fans, then send them this message or send them this post card mail, have my assistant call or you can, anything you can dream of you can kind of build out. And then the second phase of actionetics will be where you can also customise the funnel on the fly.

So somebody comes and they buy your free plus shipping, your trip wire product and we'll know, hey this person makes $50,000 a year, like sweet, let's give him an upsell for $297.00 but, this guy only makes $15,000 a year, let's give him an upsell for $37.00. And you can change it based on who that person is and that's kind of the second phase to the actionetics where the fly can be customised, the funnel can be customised on the fly based on who that person is.

And so it's pretty nuts, like I can't even tell you how this will affect my business and based on that I can assume it's going to affect everyone else's businesses the same way and because it's all under one roof, we can do so much cool stuff. Every person that comes into your world we assign them an action score based on a whole bunch of different elements. You can see like, what's the likelihood of how much money this person's actually worth to me?

And so you can market the people differently based on action scores, just a whole bunch of really cool things so it's pretty exciting.
Barry: It's very very cool bordering on slightly creepy. I think it's kind of almost like the NSA's wet dream, you know. It's like, who is this guy, what has he done, where does he live, how much does he make? And it also keeps all their order history as well right so you know that they've ordered you know, product A B C so we don't want to market them that product any more-

Russell: Exactly.

Barry: And the next step in the value [earner 00:21:00] is product D E F or whatever so it's very very cool stuff. Automation's a hard thing to get right, I think especially straight off the gates so any big lessons you guys have learned along the way there?

Russell: You know it's … I mean there's two sides of it, the development of it and then the actual application of it so I'm blessed because I get my account tomorrow so I'm going to have a chance to start building things down so … you know I'm not sure exactly what those issues are going to be before I start doing it, I know that … I think the biggest problem that I'm going to have and think that most people, is that people are going to try and get too complicated sometimes.

Barry: Yep.

Russell: I've got [inaudible 00:21:33] who's come to me and they explain to me their funnels and their processes and what you know has happened here, like it's so complicated that … in theory it's amazing but I think a lot of times like you can make more by not over-complicating things and just getting more stuff out there and then try and get everything just perfect.

I think but even the biggest fear I have for people that are using a tool this powerful is that they're going to use it so granually that they never get anything done. You know what I mean?

Barry: Oh yeah.

Russell: And it's like, a big part of it is like, is step back and what's the over-arching goal that then let's do that but don't be too creepy, I guess it's kind of like what you said, you know like, don't send out 8,000 emails based on everything you know but be smart about it. I mean, do some of the testing that [Todd 00:22:20] has been doing the last week that's really cool what we're doing, you know an email goes out and then you can set up where if … everyone who didn't open it, re-send that email a couple of hours later. Things like that where you can really like, it's just amazing how much more engagement you can get in a smart way that doesn't take so much custom work to do every single time.

The other thing that's amazing that I think you'll love is that the emails, Dillon built the email editor and it's very similar to the ClickFunnels' editor right now but it's obviously more basic but I look at everyone's emails that come through and they're all ugly and like everyone's emails are so bad. And now we'll build to design emails that just look amazing because we've got the ClickFunnels' editor inside your emails which is just, I think is going to increase engagement, increase just so many cool things.

Yeah, I can't even sleep I'm so excited. [crosstalk 00:23:11]

Barry: So it's probably a bad time that you and I are so excited about automations but-

Russell: We're such nerds I love it.

Barry: Yeah, I know it's great, get my little propellor hat on and everything. Yeah, that's going to be really interesting to see how people use it, I think that it's temptation within the automation platform, oh I'm going to build this giant 400 step automation that caters for every circumstance under the sun and-

Russell: Yeah.

Barry: It just ends up being the nightmare and I think the way to go is more, like you said, more, smaller, simpler but more kind of granule modular type automations work.

Russell: Yeah.

Barry: Once we've gone through this one then we'll put them in to the next one over here or this one over there, so that pretty cool. So I'm really excited to see it, I'd love to get my hands on it and have a play. Just on a kind of a broader scale, what are your kind plans for the product, you know from the outside looking in it kind of looks like you're trying to make this thing an infusion soft killer. Is that a fair estimate?

Russell: Not like directly but like we're trying to- [crosstalk 00:24:07]

Barry: Make it directly-

Russell: Yeah, it will be but-

Barry: Yeah.

Russell: Our goal's not to go out and try to kill other people, in fact, I always tell them something like lead pages and infusion soft and these other ones like the best lead gen in the world, for like, you will go and sign up and have a horrible experience and then you come to us and it's so much easier because they've been educated and they had a bad process so for me, I don't want to kill those guys, they're great lead generation for us but definitely if we want to have everything in one spot for entrepreneurs, I don't want … you know I'm a big believer, Joe [Vitale 00:24:35] taught me this when I first got started, he said money follows speed.

Barry: Yeah.

Russell: And I believe that so if it takes me three months to build a funnel, I lost a tonne of money. Like I did an interview with Trey [Lewell 00:24:43] and … yesterday, and their goal was to launch a new funnel every seven days. And they're consistently doing that. And they're making so much money and I think that, that's my goal, like if we can simplify this process for entrepreneurs where you can have an idea, log into ClickFunnels and it's done, you don't have to glue together 30 things and call people, like that's our real vision and that's our real goal.

And if it happens to kill other companies in the process that's awesome but that [crosstalk 00:25:05] the goal is just to give entrepreneurs the ability to have something that works in one spot. And companies like Computer Soft tried to do that, they tried, they keep trying to do that. They just haven't done it and it's frustrating for everyone. And so we can do it the cool easy simple way that actually works then, everything else will just work out for everybody so that's the goal.

Barry: Yeah maybe you should invite infusion soft to the next fireworks war- [crosstalk 00:25:29].

Russell: That'd be awesome.

Barry: It was really cool, it was really interesting at the event when you kind of displayed … the murmur in the crowd was like, oh no, I don't need infusion soft any more [crosstalk 00:25:40] it's going to be great.

Russell: Does this mean we can cancel infusion soft [crosstalk 00:25:44] Take me for what you believe, yeah, very cool very cool.

Barry: So the product's been going well, it's getting lots of users on board, have you seen people do stuff with it that you're totally surprised with, like oh my god, I didn't think of about that.

Russell: Yeah, all the time. It's cool, I saw this one dude, in fact I saw this page and was I was like, is that a ClickFunnels page and I was like, it is and it was just like free plus shipping something, some weird thing like in the prepper market, I don't remember what it was, I remember, I ordered and it was like some sticker with snake on it or something, so I don't even know.

But once the pages … I was like and I sort of like clicked on it and things started like morphing and moving around and everything and this little process and I showed it to Dillon, the guy who built the editor, he's like, “I didn't know that was even possible to do within the confines of what we built.”

And like we're learning things like, I can't believe that's even possible, I remember when the first time I saw Garret White's funnel, we'd been doing the high ticket stuff for years and we've got a process that works really really good and then he messaged in the face area in our support centre, “Hey, you know ClickFunnels is great, we love it, whatever,” this poor guy sent me a link to it and I clicked on his link to look at his funnel and it was like, there was similarities to what we had done in the past but he'd taken it to a different level then so many different things, I spent like two hours like going through his funnel and just like, wow.

Like I never, like we all had the same tools right? It's like, ClickFunnels gives you a whole bunch of tools. You've got hammers, you've got building blocks, everything you need but you can really use your creativity to build anything. And he built this thing that was just like, I never would in a million years have built that process with these building blocks but now I see it there, now I can model that and I can go do it.

I think that's one of my favourite things too about the ClickFunnels community as a whole is that, for the most part, people are really sharing about sharing this one, this is my process, this is my funnel. If I here share my funnels, click on this, it'll add the funnels to your account and it's been such a cool community that I think everyone's built up that, I just, I love it, it's been exciting and … yeah, it's been something that's been amazing for all of us and every time I see a new page or a new site, I click on a facebook ad and I go to a ClickFunnels page and I'm just like, jumping up and down for joy. It's like so exciting.
Barry: Yeah, Garret's funnel's really cool. I was actually going through it a couple of weeks ago and I was like it's … and he does so well with that sales documentary type [crosstalk 00:27:54] You watch it for like 10 minutes, like, yeah yeah, I need that. [crosstalk 00:27:58]

Russell: I think every American man's like I need that- [crosstalk 00:28:02]

Barry: All right cool so if someone has never used ClickFunnels before, they haven't built a sales funnel for themselves before, what's the best way for them to get started?

Russell: I think the best thing is, is to get your ClickFunnels account, get in there and, you know, first … it's like walking into a shop, right you've got hammers, a bunch of building blocks. You know, for me the biggest thing is you've got to find and I know you know this but I've got to talk about like funnel hacking, you've got to find, you've got to find somebody else's sales funnel that you like, right?

If you know you want to be in the weight-loss industry you've got to go, find beach body and find all those companies who are already successful and look what they're doing then you've got to go buy their product. And go see like what they're funnel looks like.

And that's the biggest key is going out there and buying as many … in any market I go into I buy, I try and find five, ten, fifteen competitors and I buy all their stuff so I can see what's, see what's actually working right now. Now I've got a blueprint, right, now I can walk into that shop and I've got all the hammer and the bricks and the tools and stuff, I've got a blueprint now of what I need to create.

And the powerful thing about ClickFunnels is that you can really build almost anything. Like there are very few limitations, like you show me almost any web site online, I can build something very similar to that inside of ClickFunnels.

And to actually know that, it's just going out there finding what you like from that kind of creating a blueprint now come into ClickFunnels and learn the process of how to build it. And it takes, you know I mean, you can go and take existing templates and edit them and do that pretty quick or if you spend 30 minutes to an hour really learning how it works.

You can build anything you can dream of and I was pretty shocked, like what I'm able to build, I've got no [inaudible 00:29:36], I've got no design skills, I'm like, you know I've had programmers and designers working for 12 years because I couldn't do any of that kind of thing.

And now I do all my own pages, I did my own book launch for and all by myself and I'm like, I should not be able to do this, like [crosstalk 00:29:49] this is not my skill set and it turned out amazing you know so, I think that's really the biggest thing is go in there with a blueprint of what you want to create otherwise you're going to be kind of walking around, you know, hammering nails and stuff not really knowing what you're doing and not really have a purpose and if you don't, then you're going to leave pretty quick.

Barry: Do the developers ever say, “Russell, step away from the keyboard.” [crosstalk 00:30:11]

Russell: I don't know, no I try to get them to like, hey can you help me with this real quick and they're like, “No, that's why we built ClickFunnels so that you can do that.” [crosstalk 00:30:18]. Right, [inaudible 00:30:19] I'll learn it.

Barry: Very cool very cool. Yeah and that funnel hack, the one on one presentation that you did, I think that's a fantastic place for someone to start. I mean like the real world example is if you've ever moved into a new house you know the first, you're trying to decorate a new house, the first thing you do is go grab a bunch of magazines and you go, and you look at, I like this and I like this and this looks good and then you kind of emulate what you see in other places. And that's exactly the same with funnel hacking, I think it's a fantastic idea.

All right Russell, I appreciate you coming on, I want to respect your time here so thank you so much for sharing your time with the listeners today and obviously the best place they can reach out to you is funnelhacking.com but you've got a couple of podcasts that are really great as well and you want to tell people about that.

Russell: Yeah, definitely, if you got to funnelhacker.tv you'll see each week I do video of me funnel hacking somebody which is fun and then marketinginyourcar.com is another podcast which is my rants every morning when I'm driving to the office, they're like five minutes long and they're really fun so, those are my two podcasts.

Barry: Yeah, they're fantastic, so thanks again Russell, I really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you in [Boise 00:31:21] in August.

Russell: Awesome, thanks man, I appreciate you.

Barry: Thanks Russell.

Well I'd like to thank Russell for coming on the show and I'd like to thank you guys for stopping by and downloading and listening. I really appreciate all the feedback that I get and I'd love it if you could join us over on our private facebook group called Automation Nation. If you just go to facebook and search for Automation Nation you'll find us.

We exchange tips, tactics, automations, all that kind of good stuff inside there so you want to take your automation skills to the next level, get in there are share with the rest of the group, lots of great tips and tactics flying around in there. Again, head over to facebook and search for Automation Nation.

I'd like to thank Russell once again for stopping by, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the actionetics features inside ClickFunnels.

If you haven't had a try at ClickFunnels I urge you to do so, it's a really great piece of software. If you head on over to the show notes, the activemarketer.com/russell, I will have a pre-done funnel there waiting for you, all you need to do is click on it, it will instal the funnel from my account into your account, if you don't have a ClickFunnels account, you'll be able to set up a trial account straight away and a completely done [inaudible 00:32:37] funnel already to go for you.

And I'll also have some notes there on how you can integrate that with your own active campaign set up or any other kind of autoresponder marketing automation platform set ups. So head over to the show notes, the activemarketer.com/russell, get your free funnel there, it'll just magically appear inside your account, another great feature of ClickFunnels.

So thank you so much for stopping by, I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, in the meantime, get out there and design, automate and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation.

See you everybody.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Active Marketer Podcast, you can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at the activemarketer.com.