SFR 187: The 5 Phases Of Funnel Building...

Boom! What's going on everyone? It's Steve Larsen, and this is Sales Funnel radio.

 

Today I'm gonna show you guys my 5 phases of funnel building.

 

I spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine to five 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? Hey, I'm excited for this video today! I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit here.

 

Now when you think about building something like a sales funnel...

 

The first time I ever heard about building something like a sales funnel, I was like oh my gosh, I got to write copy. There's the copy piece. I should find some images. I should do some videos. I should do the actual pages themselves. The actual product itself. How I'm gonna promote it?

 

There's all the stuff that goes into it. It can get incredibly stressful. So what I wanted to do right quick is...

 

For those of you guys who are listening, just know that on YouTube - I'm gonna draw this so you guys can see a little bit of my funnel building process.

 

So this is this is interesting. I teach a lot of the stuff at events, and multiple times right, somebody will stand up and be like, "Hey, hey, how should I go about doing upsell, and this, this, and this for my product?"

 

I'm like "Why you even thinking about that? You don't even have a main product yet."

 

Too many times we get too involved in questions we don't really need to answer yet!

 

But there are questions that DO matter from building a funnel.

 

Sometimes people are so concerned about what makes the car engine run that they don't even know how to drive the car. You know what I mean? It's like there's a whole bunch of things out there - and you don't need to know that yet.

 

So literally, my purpose in this episode, is I just wanna walk you guys through the very simple funnel building process that I have and why it works - and how to screw it up.  This is really it, I mean this is truly it.

 

Now if you think about it, there are five steps here:

 

The first thing I need to go do is kind of a research period. Check this out... check this out- and I'm gonna explain this kind of as I go along here.

 

The first thing that I do, is I go and I have to make sure that I know what my customers are already buying and how they're buying it.

 

We call it the "what and the how." You guys may have heard of this before, It's the "what and the how," though.

 

So, I go in, and I look at a red ocean meaning if I'm gonna go sell... I don't know? Pencils. I'm looking at pencils or pens, they're over my desk over there...

 

Let's say I'm gonna go sell pens. Who else is selling pens and how are they selling them? Who as far as businesses go, but also the customers; they're like "Hey, this is how I like to hear about my pen purchases. This is how I like to go and purchase my pens." You know what I mean?

 

So we answer the "what and the how?" What am I gonna sell? What are the people selling and how are they selling it? We call it the red ocean when there's lots of competition inside of one place.

 

So I'm gonna go inside, and I'm gonna look at the red ocean. I'm gonna look at the red ocean, and specifically what I'm doing is I'm looking for "the what and how."

 

I'm just gonna write that down again, red ocean, and I'm looking for like I said, "the what and how." I'm gonna draw a bit of line here. That's like phase number one here.

 

Phase number 0ne, red ocean - just research who is already selling the things that I'm interested in selling, and how are they selling them? That's all I'm answering.

 

So the second thing - now that I know a little bit about the actual red ocean and again remember, I know the what and the how that's all I'm looking for. The second thing I can go and start looking into... It's literally the second phase of, funnel building for me is the actual sales message writing. Not products creation. This is super key.

 

There are multiple products in my early years of doing this where I did it wrong. I would start building products before I knew how to sell them. Stupid! Dumb!

 

And when I say that out loud, you're like, "Well yeah, of course, you wouldn't do that." Yeah, well that's what everybody does! They come in, and they start making these products without any knowledge on how to actually go out and sell the thing - meaning the sale script - the sales message.

 

Products don't sell themselves. A product never sells itself.

 

When you go out, and you say, "Oh, the product's so good you've got to get in front of people." The actual cases where that's true are so rare. That is the exception NOT the rule - and I do not build a business based on exceptions. I look only on the rules. So don't go do that.

 

So the second thing, I go and I start building is the actual sales message. Once I've got the sales message down, the way I know I can move onto product creation mode is when there are literally wallets flying through the air at me.

 

Meaning when my sales message is so compelling that people are like, "I have to have that where do I pay you?" And I actually do collect money. Meaning people vote with their wallet, and they tell me, "Yeah, that's a really great idea. Let me give you money," and I actually have money in my hands.

 

That's when I go actually create the product.

 

And you might be like, "Stephen that's kind of weird. It's like a bait and switch thing.”  No, no, no, no, no! I always tell them, "Hey, this isn't ready yet. We got the beta version. If you pay this discounted price, you can get the beta version coming out soon.” And then I go build it real fast.

 

There are so many companies that do it that way.

 

And what's cool about that is that you are using the market's opinion to create your products. That's huge. That's a massive benefit that you have. It removes like 90% of the risk of the entrepreneurial game.

 

This game is not risky if you just do it in the right way.

 

Going out and creating a product, then trying to figure out how to...