The Upsell That Made Me Sick To My Stomach...

The Marketing Secrets Show

This is when you’ll know your offer will actually start converting.

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---Transcript---

What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am at Lake Powell. If you've been listening to some of these past episodes you know that I'm on family vacation right now. I'm unplugged, and so I am stuck to my thoughts, which has been really fun, and just thinking through a lot of things, and hopefully... In the past, people told me that Lake Powell episodes are some of the best ones. Hopefully this gives you some ideas, some ahas, some insights in you, your life, your business, and a bunch of other really cool things.

Okay. So what I want to talk you guys about today is actually something that happened right before we left for Lake Powell. So obviously I've been playing this marketing game for a long, long, long, long time. Right? I love building funnels. I love creating offers. I've been doing it for as long as anyone I know. I've been doing it... I think I'm on, like, my 20th year or so. I've been playing this game. I love it and I think I'm pretty good at it. I'm not the best at all areas of it, but I think as a whole, I'd say I'm in the top 1% of people who play this game and I enjoy it. Hopefully you enjoy it as well. And I enjoy talking about it, hopefully as you enjoy listening to me talk about it.

But I had little things that happened right before I left that was really, really cool. So we brought in a couple of new people on our team, some really, really good copywriters, conversion analytics people. And we're looking at some of our old funnels that have done well traditionally. In fact, specifically looking at our book funnels. We have three really good book funnels, my Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic secrets books, which have a lot of traffic to those funnels. Traditionally have done really, really well. And the question was, could we make these better? And one of the reasons why we had to do it is be one of our offers, upsell number two, we had to change out because it was a partnership with someone and we had to change it out. And so it got us kind of thinking like, well, how do we change this?

And as long as we're changing it, let's brainstorm again. And so it was nice because I had a whole bunch of people who weren't me, who weren't there initially when we brainstormed the book funnel and we sat down and said, "Okay, let's kind of talk about this. What can we do? What does it look like?" And specifically there's someone new on our team. Her name is Sabah and she's awesome. And that's all I'm going to tell you because I don't want you guys hiring her away from me. She's really, really cool. But she went through all of the offers and the upsells and everything, and I made kind of a pallet. Here's like all the stuff we have. We have basically unlimited... I've created a billion products. I'm like, "We have unlimited content. We do whatever we want. Well, what should we create?" And so I kind of gave her the pallet.

She spent a couple of days and came back. We started looking at this upsell flow and it was really cool for a couple of reasons. One is it's interesting, things that you kind of forget. Like at my events, when we teach upsell flows, I always talk about the importance of the strategic flow of your upsell flow, right? That people always ask me, "What's the first price point? What's the second price point?" And price point is not the important thing. It's the flow. Like if someone buys this, say they bu the Dotcom Secrets book. So it solved the problem for them. Now they have this book that's going to show them how to funnel.

So next upsell has to solve a new problem. So that by buying this first product, what is the new problem it created, right? So if you bought Dotcom Secrets book, for example, now you know how to make funnels, but now you're like, "I don't know how to get traffic to my funnels," or, "I don't know how to write, copy for my funnels." Or whatever the next problem is. Or, "I know how to build a funnel now, but I need help. I need someone to hold my hand. I want coaching. I want accountability. I want..." Whatever. There's a million things it could be, but it's very strategic.

And what I realized, interestingly enough, is that, and I wonder if you guys do this too, or if it's just me, but sometimes my ego gets in the way. And so my book funnels were, I literally built the book funnels because I wanted my first upsell to be Dotcom Secrets or the secrets chosen, my box set of all my books. Which is cool because it's like now everyone has a chance to buy my books. And I forced that as the upsell on all three of my funnels, but looking at the actual data and numbers, they didn't... I mean, they convert good, but not amazing. I didn't change it because I was like, "Well, that's what I want to sell, that's what I want to sell," as opposed to me asking the question, "Well, what do people actually want to buy?"

And so what was cool was when Saba came back and said, "Okay, let's look at all these different offers." She kind of restructured things. And she took like my book offer where right now, you buy the books and you get this one book for free. And it's really, really cool. She's like, 'What if we did that, plus we gave them this?" I think it was One Funnel Away Challenge. "Plus we gave them this software over here, and plus we give them...". It was like five or six things. And I remember like, as she's going through, I was like kind of sick to my stomach, like, ugh. But I didn't say anything, because I'm trying to be cool, you know? And I don't want to... I hate when you're brainstorming, someone comes in and has all the negative things to say about it.

So I felt this like sick feeling in my stomach where, I was like, oh, okay. And then she talked about upsell number two and then proposed upsell number three. And upsell number two was like, we can give them this, and this, and this. I'm like, "You can't do that because this one's like a thousand dollars, and this one's this over here." And I was kind of freaking out.

And the next upsell, she's going through it, and in my head, I'm just stressing out because I'm like, "We can't sell these things for that cheap. This is insanity." I'm just like this feeling of just like uneasiness because of this. And then we sat there, we were talking about it and we're looking at, and I was drawing it out on a whiteboard trying to map it out in my head so I could come to grips with this whole thing. And all of a sudden, I stopped for a moment, and I was like, "Oh my gosh. Look at this internal anxiety I have going through this process."

And I started thinking about that. And I was like, oh my gosh. I am struggling because this offer is so good that I don't want to do it. Now what do you think about an offer that's so good that you feel sick to your stomach actually giving it somebody because it's such a good deal? That's probably the right offer, right, if you're trying to make an irresistible, one-time offer. You're like, "I sell of this course for $97. I'll sell it to you for 97 bucks." That's an offer, but it's not an irresistible, insane offer. When you are sick to your stomach because you're like, there's no way we can do this. I can't give people this and this and all these things for this price because it's not worth it to me. You're sick to your stomach? That's when you're close. That's when you probably have the right offer.

And for me it was this big aha of just like, oh my gosh, I've been stingy. I've been trying to feed my ego and trying to make sure that the offers are the things that I want to sell, not what people actually want. And then looking at it from, okay, I'm not just making an offer, I got to make something irresistible. If I want to go from like a 15, 20% conversion rate on an upsell rate to a 40, 50%, it has to be irresistible. We're in the process right now of purchasing a company. I can't talk about it yet. As soon as we finalize it... In fact, the deal might be finalized when I get back from Lake Powell. So I'm sure you will hear me shouting it from the roofs.

But the funnel, we're literally buying this thing because the funnels are so good. Like when someone buys a product through the funnel, the average cart value is like $180, which means, I can spend $180 to sell this front end product, which is crazy. It's so good. But you look at the upsell flow and it's the same thing. It's the most insane, irresistible offer where you... I'm sure when the person we're buying the company from was first putting it together, he was sick to his stomach, like, "Oh, I could easily sell this for a thousand bucks or $2000 or more." And he's like, "I'm just going to do it for $97." Like, wait, wait, what? You can't do that. This is insane. "I'm sick to my stomach. We spent $50,000 creating this thing. I can't sell it you for $97." And when you get that internal dialogue in your head where you're fighting it because this doesn't make any logical sense, that's when you probably have an actual irresistible offer. That's the key.

And that was my big humbling this weekend, or this week before I came out to Lake Powell, was that. And I've been thinking a lot about it, like sitting on the boat. As I'm sitting here I'm thinking like, "Man, I felt so much anxiety and frustration." Is kind of like how many of you guys have ever seen the greatest show of all time, 24? If not, you should pause this right now, go watch all the eight or nine seasons of it and then come back and finish the episode. Otherwise you're going to... It's more important than anything else you could be doing right now is watching every episode of 24. But I digress.

So there's this bad guy in 24 and he's the president. President Logan? I can't remember exactly. It's been a while since I've watched it, but he's the president. And I remember that at first I thought that the guy who played the president, I was like, I hate this character. I hate him. And every single episode, it got worse. I was like, I hate him. I remember being so angry, upset watching, episode, after episode, after episode. This president was such a horrible person and so angry. And I was like, I hate him. Why did they pick him to be the actor? Why these things? And being so frustrated and angry and I couldn't sleep. And I was so angry at this person, this president, I hated him so bad.

And all of a sudden one day I stopped and I was like, oh my gosh. Look how I feel right now. I hated this guy, but I'm realizing now, I don't hate him. He's probably one of the best actors I've ever seen because he's making me have this visceral response to everything he's saying. And all of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh, he's not the worst character of all time. He's the best character. To make me hate him that bad is magical.

Same thing when I first met Ben Settle. I joined Ben Settle's email list and I used to get the daily emails. And I remember I kept reading them and kept reading them and they would annoy me so bad, get me so frustrated. And it was probably two or three weeks into this email sequence where I was like... And I don't unsubscribe from anything ever. And I remember the emails were coming in. I read one. I was so upset that I was going to unsubscribe because I was so angry at him and his philosophies, and his thoughts and everything. I was like, oh, and I was about to unsubscribe. I stopped for a second. I was like, oh my gosh, look how I feel. Notice how he's making me feel right now? He's giving me, once again, this visceral response where I'm like angry, and upset, and frustrated. And so much so that I wanted to like, oh, and I was like, oh my gosh.

I think prior to that I was like, he's the worst marketer ever. I hate this guy. He's wrong about everything. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, oh my gosh. Look how he's making me feel. He's an amazing marketer. He got me to feel this way. Never in my life I've read every email from a marketer and I'd read every email of his for months because I was so angry and so upset and so frustrated. And I was like, I bought his thing. I bought the other thing even though I hated him and frustrated by it and annoyed by him.

In fact, the first time I met Ben, I told him that story. I was like, "Just so you know, like I hated you at first." I was like, 'Every email that would come, I would get so annoyed and so upset and all of a sudden I realized, oh, look at how he made me feel." To cause this kind of feeling in me shows that he's a master, not someone who's bad. And so a lot of times I want you to start noticing how you're feeling as these things are happening to you because a lot of times our brain is pushing us one way and hating this thing where it could be like the greatest thing we could have learned.

And so, anyway, I wanted to share that because that's how I felt when we were going through this upsell flow. And so next time you're creating an offer and you're working on your upsells, your down sells or your, whatever your thing is, you're working on, I want you to start thinking about that, like how do I make this offer so good that I literally am sick to my stomach and frustrated and angry and like, oh, I can't do this? Like, there's no way we can give people this much value. We just can't do it. And all of a sudden you're like, that's it. We got there. We finally got to a point where I don't want to do this because I feel like the value is so high.

Like they always say in any good offer, but any kind of good business deal or business partnership, both people should feel like they got the better end of the stick. Right? And if not, it means that someone felt like they got a worse end and that's not good. You want both people to feel like they got a better end of the stick. So if I make an offer so good, I'm like, this is insane. I can't do this because it's such a good offer, and honestly feeling that way deep in your gut. And then the customer coming in like, "Oh my gosh. They only want $97 for that?" Or $200, whatever the price is like, oh my gosh. Now both sides feel like they got the better end of the stick. That's how to make irresistible offers. That's how you create raving fans. That's how you create amazing offers.

Anyway, I wanted to share it with you guys because it was interesting. It was fascinating. And I hope that helps you guys. Go back to your old offers. Look at the upsell flow and be like, what else could I add? What else could I add? What else could I tweak? How can we make this offer better? How can we make it better? How can I up this offer? How can I increase it even better? And keep thinking through that. And the better you make the offer, the more likely people will be to give you money.

A lot of times people are like, "My upsell's not converting. What do I need to do?" I'm like, "Your offer sucks. Make a better offer." "This is the best thing I've got." Well then make something better. Like, what else can you give them? What else can you create? What else can you invent? What else can you put together? You need to make something that is so irresistible that they look at it, they're like, "I have to give them money. I need this thing. This is such a good deal. It's such a good offer. I have to give them money." That's the feeling they have to have or else you missed it.

So anyway, with that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Hopefully you guys go back and look at all of your old funnels, all your old offers. Look at things you're doing and figure out what else can I bundle? What else can I add to make the software even more irresistible? And keep doing it until you feel sick to your stomach. And that's when you're probably to the spot where your offer's finally going to start converting.

Okay, I hope that helps you guys. I appreciate you all. Thanks for listening, for subscribing, for hanging out. If you liked this podcast, please do go to iTunes and leave me a review. That'd be pretty sweet. And with that said, I'll see you guys on the next episode. Bye everybody.