SFR 2: Yard Manager, Door-to-Door Sales, ...Paul Mitchell?

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

Hey you guys. I'm actually super excited for this. I can't believe I'm recording the first episode of this podcast. I mean this is awesome. I love podcasts. I think they're awesome. I've learned a lot from them. I've made money because of things I learn off podcasts. I've gained a lot of respect for a lot of people. Anyways, so I'm excited to be doing this podcast and I remember the idea first came up, and I was like, "I don't want to get podcasting. I don't want to go out and start, I don't know, going around and trying to interview all these people and stuff like that."

What I want you to know is what you can expect from this, though, because I'm excited that I decided to. I used to do a lot more parascoping than I used to. I got 600 parascope followers, and something interesting happened when I started publishing. The moment I started publishing, I started getting a ton of interaction with people. Way more than my ad spend, right? It's super fun. It was just, so, I've got to tell you, it's as much for me to be doing this podcast as it might be for the things that you learn in this. Selfishly, I just enjoy it. It's super fun. I feel a connection whenever I do that, and then I get feedback from people and they say, "Hey, I used that tactic and I made money with it." It blows me away. Super fun. Anyway, I enjoy that a lot.

What you can expect from this podcast is to learn specific sales funnel strategies, whether that's for webinars, trip wire funnels, product launch funnels, automated webinar funnels, anyways. If those don't mean anything to you, no worries. It's okay. I'll go crazy deep on some things, but other things not. I promise to keep it interesting as well. I hate monotone speaking podcasts. Oh my gosh, they're so boring. Those are the ones I always play at 2 time speed. If you didn't know you could do that, it's on your iPhone, but you can play things at 2 time speed, really fast. I kind of tend to talk quickly, so that might sound weird, but what I'm going to do is talk about sales funnels, things I'm building right now for clients.

I've been building sales funnels for the last, about 4 years and the first one I even built was for this guy named, actually I can't even remember his name, but he was an artist and we were selling his art. It wasn't quite like gif art, but it was ... Anyways it was cool. It was cool stuff. I remember I built the sales funnel, cool, and no one came to it. I was like, "what the heck?" I was like, "I've got to go learn how to send traffic." But I didn't, and time went on, time went on, and I was like, "Hey, I'm going to go learn door to door sales, just because I want to learn how to sell in really hard environments." That's why I did it. I went and I was like the number 2 sales guy for a while. I mean I was like crushing it. It was awesome. I was selling pest control and there were bugs everywhere so it was great.

I remember while we were driving out to one of our areas one morning. I was looking and we were on the highway and it was a great day out. I remember it was blue skies, you know, just fantastic out. It was hot, crazy hot. I remember looking around and seeing all these billboards as we were driving down the highway and thinking, this is crazy. I get up every morning and I convince people who were not planning on spending money that they should spend money, and I'm not doing bad at it, which is awesome. That's a skill. But everyone who's seeing these billboards is planning on spending on something when they call that number. It completely switches the psychology of the sale. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. I was in college at the time. I was like, I've got to learn how to do that.

What I did is I got online that night and I started putting out all these ads, just free classified ads, all over the place selling our pest control. "Hey, if you got this issue, call." "If you got this issue, call." "Hey we're doing a sale. Call." My phone started blowing up. I couldn't believe it. My boss called, he's like "How are you getting all these sales?" I was like, "They're calling me." He goes, "Are you kidding? What the heck?" I said, "I'm kind of shocked it's working." I remember I pulled like 10 phone sales in a very short period of time. It's funny because for a door to door salesman, there's different ratios right? Hey, I know that if I pitch 50 to 60 people one of them on average will say yes. That's a crap ton of work and a lot of talking, right? When I was doing this it flipped it and I closed 90% of the people who were calling, always. I think there was only 1 or 2 who didn't purchase, because they called because they had a problem and they knew I had a solution.

I was like, "this is nuts. This whole thing is crazy. Why am I selling this way?" It was a great way to learn how to sell, and it's a fantastic skill to have. I've used that many other places, but the interesting thing though, I was hooked after that. My sales numbers started sucking because I started thinking like, "How else can I blow this up?" I started thinking about ... Anyways, I kind of quit door knocking and I went home that summer. We made money. It was a good experience.

I came home and that just always stuck with me. I was like, that's nuts. People are clicking ... It's not clicking. That's where I'm going. They were calling. I was like, how can I get them to click on things that I want them to online? So I started getting obsessed with this stuff. Just like, okay, I've got to go make a product and then I'm going to get ads and then I'm going to drive it to that product. Wow, revolutionary Steve. It's not that crazy, but what's is that to me that was a huge deal.

I went and I built this product and no one came and it never sold and no one came and it was tumbleweed after tumbleweed. I was like, crap! That's when I was like, I need to learn how to send traffic. I started going and I started learning all these traffic techniques and it's super cool. At that time I was, this is just the story of how I got into this so you guys know. I thought it'd be good to tell as the first podcast. At the time I was in my internet marketing, it was called Intro to Internet Marketing. It was one of my classes in college. It was bad, man, it was so bad. For the last couple months I had been studying traffic, right, because none of my ebooks had sold. Still on Amazon, by the way.

Anyway, so I started learning all these traffic techniques but by the time that internet marketing class came up in college, I had been studying enough stuff and practicing enough and had made enough money that I knew everything he was already talking about, and I knew that what the teacher was saying was old and was wrong and wasn't going to work for what he was teaching. I told the teacher that. That's not always the wisest thing to do to a professor, but that's what I did.

I drew up this plan, and it was hey I'm going to have this squeeze page. People will come in. They'll opt in and I'll get their email address and then after that I'm going to push them over to the sales page of like someone else's product. I was practicing affiliate marketing. I would get a commission when I would send a buyer to someone and someone else would make the product. That's called affiliate marketing if you're not familiar with that.

It worked. I put 50 bucks in to some ads. I woke up and there was 50 bucks in my account. I was like, "Oh my gosh! Are you kidding me?" I went and I called my buddy. I was like, "Dude, get over here! It worked!" He comes flying over. I was like, "We didn't really make anything, but we gained 17 subscribers and we broke even. We got 17 people that we know are basically buyers and 2 or 3 of th...