Funnel Hacking Live 2021: Day 2 Key Takeaways

Monetization Nation | with Nathan Gwilliam

15 min readSep 25, 2021

Welcome back to another episode of key takeaways from Funnel Hacking Live. Yesterday, I shared the most impactful points from Day 1, focused on building a strong foundation for our funnels.

During Day 2 of Funnel Hacking Live, John Lee Dumas, Trent Shelton, Krista Mashore, McCall Jones, Matt Harward, Jason Harward, and Braven Grant shared exactly how their funnels are working to scale their companies. In today’s episode, I want to share my key takeaways with you.

Trent Shelton: Find Your Unique Magnet

Trent Shelton, a former NFL player and current founder and president of a Christian-based non-profit organization, started off Day 2 Funnel Hacking Live by explaining how application creates transformation. We live in a society where many people try to fake it, but it is our transparency that will lead to our true transformation.

We should ask ourselves, “Am I going to give myself permission to be who I truly am? Or will I try to hide my true self because I am afraid of what others will think?” Trent made a commitment that no matter what type of obstacle shows up, he’s going to show up. We should do the same. We should be obsessed with our growth, because if we aren’t growing, we are dying.

Trent encouraged us to find our unique magnet. This is the thing inside of us that pulls us towards other people. What is your magnet that separates you from everyone else? Our uniqueness is our greatest gift. During his speech, I took notes of what Trent suggested we can do in order to find our unique magnets.

In order to figure out what that magnet is, we can ask others, “What is it about me that attracts people to me?”
When Trent started speaking, many people told him that he had to change, such as covering his tattoos and dreads. Nobody booked him. He could have cried about the lost opportunities, but instead, he created his own opportunities.
We should have the gardener mindset. When Trent was younger, he helped plant seeds in his grandfather’s garden. Within an hour after planting the seeds, he went to his grandfather and said, “Something is wrong,” because nothing was visibly growing. His grandfather told him to be patient and trust the process. Two days later, he spoke to his grandmother and said they did something wrong because nothing was growing, and he said to just be patient and trust the process. Some time later, his grandfather called him and let him know that the harvest was ready.
A lot of us have visions in our lives but we don’t have the patience. We should put in the work and water the seeds. We need to trust that growth is going on beneath the surface.
People become legendary because they make up their mind they are not going to settle for less. Then, they work to close the gap between their visions and their reality.
Trent goes to a cemetery each year and asks himself, “What is it in my life that needs to die so that I can live?” In order to be connected to the right things that push, motivate and inspire, we need to unplug from the wrong things in our lives that aren’t giving us connection.
We should create consistency. So many people are consistent at things we hate. If we can be consistent at things that we hate, why can’t we be consistent at things that we love? We don’t have a consistency problem. We have a “not understanding how important this is” problem.

Krista Mashore: Pre-Funnel Digital Domination

Krista Mashore has been in the top 1 % of realtors nationwide for 20 years. She realized that her marketing strategies could be applied to all professions and started a coaching business which went from zero to 18 million dollars in just under four years. Now she is Yahoo’s Finance #1 digital marketer and has written four best selling books focusing on digital marketing.

One of her secrets to success is creating the funnel before the funnel — pre-funnel digital domination. Here are a few important things we should keep in mind when creating our pre-funnels:

We should attract, connect, and then convert.
As a young girl, Krista was abused by her mom. At 13 years old, she ran away, was arrested ,and sent to juvi. They sent her to a rehab home and then to a foster home. Krista explained that we all have something in our lives that we deal with. We can’t use that as our reason for why we can’t, but turn that into our reason for why we can.
Krista’s husband left her with two young girls. Her “why” is to support her girls and keep them safe at home.
84% of people say they’ve been convinced to use a service by watching video first. We need to get people to know, like and trust us through our video.
Unless we are solving a problem, we aren’t a solution. We need to know our avatar’s problems and then give video solutions.
We have 60k to 70k thoughts per day. Any time we have a negative thought, stop. Snap and switch.
If Krista could go back in time, and talk to her 13 year old self who didn’t feel good enough or loved, she would tell her the same thing she would tell us. You are good enough. You were meant for more. Never stop. Figure it out. Make the time. Find the resources. If you continue to do what you have done, you will get results. People never fail if they never stop.

McCall Jones: The Power of Video

McCall Jones attended Funnel Hacking Live for the first time last year, and this year she presented on stage. She is the founder of Charisma Hacking and an incredible entrepreneur and speaker. Today, she talked about leveraging the power of video in our businesses. Here are some of the most impactful tips I learned:

Shields prevent us from losing, but weapons help us win. The worst thing we can do in a business is look at a shield and call it a weapon.
While we can pay for marketing to get people to watch our videos, once a viewer presses play on a video, we cannot pay them to keep watching. Because of this, we need to find other ways to keep our viewer’s attention.
Charisma can help us attract our customers. It is the ability to get people to:
pay attention
trust
act
McCall looked at the people with the top video fan score and learned from them. She looked at four criterias:
Fan score: how good you are
Authority style: how you get people to act
Compassion style: how you get people to trust
Entertainment style: how you get people to pay attention to you
The top people are using effective charisma styles.
If we get our style wrong, our customers won’t trust us or buy from us. So, how do we get it right? Here are three different styles we can use:
#1: Authority Styles: how you make people act
light (trust the process) — perfect example is Russell Brunson — The big domino framework
lift (trust yourself)
lead (trust me) — if I can do it with them, I can do it with you
#2: Compassion Styles: (how we get people to trust us)
steady (they are emotionally consistent)
fix (they know exactly what I’m going through)
mirror (they feel how I feel)
#3: Entertainment Styles:
amaze (this is fascinating)
excite (I am fascinated)
charm (this is intriguing)
perform (I am intrigued)
impress (this is important)
roar (I am important)
There are also style traps we need to avoid. Here are two of them:
Too face — in our lives people have told us something we are “too” something (i.e. too intimidating, too aggressive). Often, the people who tell us this are wrong.
There are no good or bad styles. These are just tools. There are good and bad in every category.
We can model people who have the same styles. For example, we can model the end of their videos and their calls to action

John Lee Dumas: Podcasting

John Lee Dumas is one of the most successful business podcasters of all time, with more than 1 million downloads per month, more than 100 million podcast listens, and many millions of dollars of revenue.

In his early life, John spent eight years as an army officer. He thought that at 26 years old, he was ready to conquer the world. He applied for numerous jobs and yet, everything seemed to fall through and he felt stuck. Eventually, he found his passion for podcasting and launched his daily podcast show, Entrepreneurs on Fire. At Funnel Hacking Live, John shared how we can create, grow, and monetize our own podcast.

Why podcasting?
It’s free, on demand, and targeted.
We own the platform.
(Can be) evergreen content.
Provides networking opportunities — building friendships.
Builds incredible influence.
Helps us hone our speaking skills — 99.9% of people are born terrible speakers, but this is something we can work on and improve
Can make us money. John has earned over $7 million from a membership site with Podcasters Paradise.
What type of podcast should we create?
Do you want to be a pale, weak imitation of someone else? No. We’re going to be the best we can be and be ourselves. We are incredibly special and unique. That’s how we can contribute to the world.
Identify one big idea, then, discover the underserved niche within that big idea.
Become the number one solution to that big problem. People will beat a path to the #1 solution.
Niche your face off — then at least you have a chance.
John’s niche was the best daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. He was also the worst. He was the only one when he started.
How do we grow our podcast audience?
F.O.C.U.S. — follow one course until success. Instead of trying to divide ourselves and doing multiple things at once, we should focus on one thing.
Podcast networks
Convert the converted. John spends one day every month being on 20 other podcasts. He knows that every person listening to those podcasts are podcast listeners.
The perfect podcast pitch… (he gets 400 pitches every month)
1) Go to apple podcasts, click on top charts, expand all categories, choose your category (like business), click “see all”.
2) List people who interview people on their show.
3) Go to the website, go to contact form.
How do we monetize our podcast?
Sponsors — not a great option, most people cannot make money with sponsors.
The primary way should be selling your own product — ask your audience about their struggle. Find your audience’s #1 struggle and create a product that solves that problem. This is what he called the funnel hacker’s way.
The funnel hackers way:
John has a free podcast course funnel pitch. Then, he has an evergreen webinar that pitches them on Podcasters Paradise, the membership site.
Use your platform to promote you and not other people’s products and services all the time.

Mike Schmidt and AJ Rivera: Shadow Traffic

The next speakers were Mike Schmidt and AJ Rivera, both FunnelHub experts. They talked about what we can do when our funnel isn’t converting.

Maybe one reason the people going through our funnels aren’t converting is because they have doubt and skepticism. Many may be leaving because they want to learn more about us.
While building a funnel business, Mike and AJ were creating a shadow sales funnel. They found that typically, 4% of people buy and 96% of people go somewhere else, such as looking at your reviews or case studies.
Shadow traffic is the people who are aware of who you are and are trying to learn more. They search for us because they are trying to figure out who we are. If we only have a funnel, we lose them. That’s why we should build a funnel hub.
When you’re just starting out, it’s even more important to go after shadow traffic. The people searching for our name, our product, company name, brands, ratings, case studies, scam, ripoff, fraud, etc.
In order to improve conversions, two things must happen: we must eliminate skepticism and we must build trust.
Some people have higher and lower trust tipping points. Sometimes it takes more to help certain people to overcome their skepticism than others.
Shadow traffic people are trying to gather as much evidence as they can to make a decision/verdict and close the case. They often join our podcast and read our blogs to do this.
Mike and AJ offer FunnelHub technology to help target shadow traffic.

Jason & Matt Harward: Direct to Consumer

Jason Harward has earned 19 Two Comma Club awards; more than anyone else in the ClickFunnels world. He has made $335 million in sales from his own offers. Both Jason and Matt know how to scale and repeat their business success. During Day 2 of Funnel Hacking Live, they discussed Direct to Consumer (DTC).

“98% of DTC companies are already dead, the just don’t know it yet” — Gary Vaynerchuck
DTC is when you sell something to a consumer and you own the relationship with the consumer. If Johnson and Johnson sells through Walmart or Amazon, that’s not direct to consumer.
“It’s never been cheaper (or easier) to start a business; although I think it’s never been harder to scale a business.” — Neil Blumenthal, Warby Parker CEO
Matt can be the CEO of a $100 million company and still have nobody know who he is. In their version, the customer has a relationship with the business, but not the CEO.
SMAQ — Single Most Asked Question:
What products should I sell? How do I find products to sell?
However, we shouldn’t focus on this question at all. Instead of focusing on products, we should focus on our customers.
If you are following people, you are probably following them into the wall, since 98% are already out of business and just don’t know it. We shouldn’t follow someone else.
Rule #2: Sequence matters — don’t do things out of order, such as starting with a logo.
If you have a business card and you don’t have revenue yet, you’re out of order.
Rule #1 — Products don’t matter.
What does matter? Our audience matters. We should always put our audience first.
algorithms matter (marketing today is controlled by algorithms). Trying to game algorithms doesn’t work very well either
Analytics matter. We should be a data-driven business.
Product-first challenges: (This is what happens when we focus on building a product first)
slow
expensive
unproven
unreliable
lottery mentality
easily discovered by competitors
not algorithm-friendly
fatigues or goes stale easily
higher risk
Matt had a $65,000 neck surgery he had to pay for. He went for a consultation and got a diagnosis. In this situation, the product didn’t matter. The result matters. It started with an event and led to a consultation, diagnosis, and then prescription.
The product doesn’t matter. The result matters.
Traditional sales funnel:
provides a clear path from point a to point b
conversion oriented
high effort
designed to identify buyers and action takers
Sandbox funnel
provides a diverse surface area for machine learning algorithms
discovery oriented
low effort
designed to identify outliers and opportunity
Instead of starting with a product, they start with an audience.
Offer fulfillment mechanism — we sell people on the outcome and the result, not the product specifically.

Braven Grant: Funnels v.s. Carts

Braven Grant is currently 23 years old and made multiple seven figures before the age of 22. Braven has found success in combining carts with funnels and so that is what he spoke on today.

As entrepreneurs, we have a gift and a curse that we are never satisfied.
There are two strategies that can simplify scaling your brand 10x, 15x or even 20x in the next 12 months, and make sure there is profits to show for it:
Strategy #1: Use a funnel to acquire customers for free or less than free
When Braven wasn’t making enough money from his funnels, he thought of every excuse. He thought, “Maybe my product doesn’t work with funnels, maybe I am too late to the online party, maybe clickfunnels is a scam, maybe my market is just too saturated…”
You cannot scale uncertainty. Certainty creates scalability.
How to create certainty:
Understand your break even numbers
Focus on one channel for growth (one funnel)
Measure everything
The value of your numbers
Found out your break even number.
Adjust offer to increase value/price (increased value providing to customers so they could increase price)
Braven was more profitable when he had certainty. Then he could scale.
Push button growth when you get this number right
Within a short period of time, Braven earned first Two Comma Club Award, and is working on #5
Marketing math is the first step to going to the Two Comma Club.
Go to breakevenordie.com to calculate your break even numbers.
Strategy #2: Have a front end and back end funnel. Use a cart to build a machine that gets customers to come back and spend more.
If we have a business with only a front end funnel, we might only make $10k. However, by having a front and back end funnel, we could become a $10 million business. We can use a cart to build a machine to get customers to come back and buy more.
Find out how to get your customers from order #1 to order #2.
Braven brings most people through their original product (creatine), then 30 days later, they offer another product plus the original item. Each month they add a new product and tell them about the new thing. Within a short period of time, they had customers buying seven products each month over and over.
The two questions to ask to grow:
How do we get more free customers into the machine?
How do we get more customers to come back and spend more?
In summary, use a funnel to acquire customers for free or less than free. Then, use a cart to build a machine that gets customers to come back and spend more

Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson: ClickFunnels 2.0

Today is ClickFunnels 7 year birthday. Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson came on stage to review their normal Funnel Hacker lifecycle and then showed how ClickFunnels 2.0 is an end to end solution. ClickFunnels 2.0 will go live in March for the entire market.

Some of the features for ClickFunnels 2.0 include:

Has a new funnel builder flow chart
Attaches work flows to each step in the process
Has an amazing email editor
Universal sections — when you update it on one page, it will update it everywhere.
Page templates
Customer Center
Teams/sites and shared workspaces.
Shopping cart + funnels integrated
Shopping carts — order bump for carts built in
Funnel Stats on every node in the funnel builder
Optimize email sending
Membership sites 2.0
hosting videos
optimizing videos
secure the videos, so only the people who are logged in can use the video file
can use ClickFunnels editor to build courses and pages
amazing templates will be available by default
And more!

Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson: Marketing

Finally, the last speakers of the night were Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson. Dan is the father of direct marketing and has written over 30 books. Dan was Russell’s marketing mentor, the father of direct-response advertising. Over the years, Dan has found that while the tools and tactics of marketing have changed, that doesn’t really change the foundational elements of marketing.

We should set up marketing with push instead of a pull. Seth Goden later called it permission marketing.
Shovel sellers do better than shovel users.
Message to market match: More than half of scaleable, sustainable success has to do with the audience you select. If you select it really well, then mediocre can often get good results. If you choose the wrong audience, then even exceptional advertising will do poorly.
Find an underserved market, then create a message to match it, and you will likely create a slam dunk.
We need to make sure we are delivering the right message at the right time.
Whoever figures out how to spend the most for their leads wins. They can buy scale and speed.
You cannot afford to rent your customers from Facebook or Instagram. You have to get your customer moved to your own media platform.
Wealth, freedom, and security comes from what you own. The most valuable asset not to lose is you. The second most valuable asset not to lose are your customer relationships.
Send the invoice to the herd. If you have the data and the relationships, you can sell a product to your audience.
Leaks in businesses: typical chiropractic offices allow all the staff to go to lunch together and send the calls to voicemail. However, if you have calls answered by a live person who is incented to care, sales go up by 20%.

Thank you so much for joining me today for my key takeaways from Day 2 of Funnel Hacking Live. Be sure to join the live stream tomorrow on YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn to hear my key takeaways from Day 3.

Next Steps

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