SFR 133: Choosing a MONEY Audience...

 

I get asked a lot, "Steve, how do I choose what market to sell into?" Well, here's some of the basic criteria I put an audience through to see if I should sell to them...

Hey. What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my 9 to 5 to take the plunge and build my million-dollar business. The real question is how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

What's up guys? Hey. I'm super excited for this. I know I'm publishing a lot right now. It's because I have a lot of thoughts, especially after Funnel Hacking Live. That is like throwing gas on the fire for my brain, and I love it. Hey. I am very, very excited for what I want to share with you. I sat back a while ago, and I was sitting down. I was thinking through how many businesses I had tried before ever actually getting one that really started going off the ground. As I looked back and I started realizing it's like, I don't know, 14, 15, 16, 17. I mean, it's a lot. I was going through and I was numbering all the products I had created. I was like, wow, okay, I kind of first started with this one. Then I went to this one. I was like, wow, it's really fascinating.

To look back. I encourage you all to do this. I seriously, seriously doubt, and almost bet on my life that I am not the only one who's tried a billion different products, lots of different businesses and failed at a ton of them, meaning of this audience who listens to this. I encourage you to go sit down and start writing those down. It's kind of a neat thing to look back and realize, like why did that fail? Why did that fail? Why did that fail? One of the lessons that I've learned was tossed back into my head.

I've had a few people asking me a few questions lately, especially with the recent program, Two-Comma Club X Coaching, that I'm one of the coaches for and that ClickFunnel has just released. A lot of people have been coming to me saying, "Hey, Steven, is this a good idea? Is this a good market? Is this a good product?" Well, first off, I'm not going to know your industry like you are, okay, but I do know the models and patterns that show if it is something typically good to go into usually. Okay, okay.

When it comes down to it, like we can teach the models, we can teach the patterns and then after awhile it's guessing. You know, you just have to launch it after awhile and just see if it actually sticks. There's a lot of patterns and stuff that we can walk through to help shave off bad ideas. Anyway, I was recently talking with someone and I had this memory come to my head. Back before I started using ClickFunnels and I was building funnels inside of GetResponse, literally, like the email provider, right, GetResponse autoresponder.

They have a landing page software, and I was building essentially funnels on their landing page software. It was terrible. It was so jenky. Anyway, I would like sneeze and half of it would get scrambled. It was the weirdest thing. Anyway, but it's all I had, so I was trying to do that. It's very much part of my character that as soon as I start selling something or as soon as I've learned something and I know it can help other people, I want to go tell them about it. Say, did you know you can do this? Oh my gosh! Check it out? Right? Which is why I think I podcast the way I do.

Anyway, one of the people that I wanted to go present this to was a door-to-door company, okay, a door-to-door selling company. I had already done one summer of door-to-door sales at that time, and Vivint, like Vivint Home Security. They had a huge office near the place where I was living at the time. This was six years ago. It was quite a while ago. Five years ago, six years ago, something like that. Anyway, so I walked on in to Vivint and I sat down with some of the owners. It wasn't the "owners" of Vivint, but it was before their massive buyout.

They got bought for like $2.4 billion or something for only like 75% of their company. They still maintained 25%, which is crazy. Crazy! Oh my gosh! Can you imagine that? Anyways, it very well may have been some of the top guys because that buyout had not happened yet at the time.

Anyway, so I was chatting with them and I was telling them, hey, did you know, you've got these sales agents that are out there doing this and that, right, these reps that are going around. Think about the cost of supporting a rep. Think about this. I could build you this thing that I'm doing called a funnel and we could like totally ... and I started giving them my ideas of basically and front-end funnel, super awesome. I ended up buying like doortodoorsellingsecrets.com or something like that and a whole bunch of other tons of URLs for that.

I really like the door-to-door sales game. I think sales is one of the most prestigious, I don't know, careers ever. Call me bias, but I think it's true...

Anyway, so I was sitting there and I was telling them about it, and I was like, hey! To be completely honest, I know it would work. I know it would work. Right? It fits all the models. It fits all the patterns. I was like, think about that. This is like having tons of sales agents in lots of cities that you don't have to pay to support. It's all on a website. They were like, "Whoa. That's crazy." It turned out that like they just didn't want it. They just did not want it. Okay. I was like, okay. I was a little bit frustrated. I spent like a couple hours in there teaching them, pitching them, helping them realize. They were like, "Wow, that's amazing. Okay. Let us work this up the chain a little bit and we'll get back to you on that." If you guys have ever done any sales that basically means no. I was like, crap.

I walked out and I was like, why didn't they see it? How come they didn't get the value? Right? I guarantee every one of us has had that experience before in some fashion. Okay? You're looking at a customer. You're looking at somebody you know you could help. You can't help them for free because that negates progress rules and laws, okay, right, for the most part. You couldn't do it for free.

Anyway, you could not, however, sell them on the fact that this was something that they need, right, that it would drastically improve their life or their business. That's a frustrating thing to sit back and go through. I've been through that tons of times, tons of times, and you guys probably have as well. I recently had someone reach out and ask the question, hey, I've been trying to sell in this area to these people and I just can't sell to them. I don't get it.

Why isn't this happening? I had all those memories rush back into my head. You kno...