SFR 68: B2B Funnels?! Special Interview with James Smiley...

James is not only one of the most well connected individuals I've ever met, he's also got his B2B funnel totally dialed in...

Steve Larsen:

What's going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to a very special and frankly quite unique episode of Sales Funnel Radio.

Speaker:

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.

Steve Larsen:

All right, you guys. Hey, I'm super excited to welcome you and our special guest today to the show. This is an episode I've never quite done before, and frankly, it's an area that I personally am still learning about sales funnels and I'm really excited to have him here with us today and I think part the curtain, let the veil down, so to speak. Very, very pumped to learn from him.

Guys, please help me welcome Mr. James Smiley. How you doing?

James Smiley:

What's going on, Steve?

Steve Larsen:

Living the dream, man.

James Smiley:

Woohoo.

Steve Larsen:

Living the dream.

James Smiley:

Thanks so much. This is going to be awesome.

Steve Larsen:

I'm excited that you're here. Just for everyone else, the first time I ever met James, my life is run off of an app Voxer, and pretty much my life, Russell's life, all of our lives, we live on this app of Voxer, and that's how we talk. I don't think I've ever called Russell on the phone ever. I don't know his number, you know what I mean? We all live on Voxer and I get Voxed a lot, from just lots of people. Sometimes it's about me creating new barriers just so I can have my own headspace, you know? But then also there was this guy who kept asking, he's like, "Hey, do you want" ... From these really big and really popular companies, "Will you build a funnel for these guys?" "Hey, what if you built a funnel for these guys?"

They were these huge companies, massive, massive, some of them billion dollar companies, and I was like, "Who is this guy? How is he" ... Number one, "Who is this?" Number two, "That would be cool, but how are you getting these leads? How do you find? That's insane." We have a lot of our own certification partners, ClickFunnels.

I have my own clients I've built for, but man, the people that you were talking about, I was like, I mean, "This is insane." Anyway, I don't know if I'm allowed to say any of the names, so that's the reason I'm not, but man, I just got to ask, how do you get into something like B2B funnel building?

James Smiley:

Yeah, no, thanks, Steve. Super excited to be here hanging out with you guys, and I'll just start by saying massive, massive ClickFunnels fan. Being following you guys since before ClickFunnels. I was actually working at-

Steve Larsen:

Oh, really?

James Smiley:

Yeah. I was following Russell from some research that we were doing at a big company that I was consulting with, and we were trying to figure out how big was this internet marketing thing going to be and content ... It was really content and where was content going.

It was really cool. It's just been awesome to see everything that's happened and been a massive consumer of everything that you guys do, so thanks for everything you guys are doing.

I guess to directly share how can somebody go from being an internet marketer or running an agency, or whatever they do now into getting B2B clients, I think one of the things I try to share with people is you've got to get face to face with these kind of people...

I think your chances go up exponentially if you can get face to face with them. One of the things that I've been doing and having a lot of success in the past couple years is running a webinar, mini webinar type of system where you could be running a lead or you could be running a lead ad or a Facebook ad or something, and running that into a small auto-webinar kind of scenario.

Believe it or not, even removing the login aspect, we've seen a lot of success. We've gotten a tremendous amount of appointments by sending a LinkedIn ad or a YouTube ad directly to a website, to a ClickFunnels page, where it's auto playing myself or one of our sales reps or whatnot, and then from there, they can just click to book, to book a meeting.

Steve Larsen:

And that's the main goal? You don't do anything else besides that's just the main goal, the interaction from?

James Smiley:

Yeah. Something that I've used for a long time, I actually learned this I want to say it was like in 2004 or 5, at a Chet Holmes event. Chet Holmes, Tony Robbins event. I think it was called Ultimate Business Mastery a long time ago.

Steve Larsen:

Sure.

James Smiley:

But I learned about the ideal thing to do is to try to broaden and generalize more your message and really hit on something that's new, cutting edge, innovative. Chet taught us year ago to do things like an executive report or an executive summary, and nowadays with technology, it's pretty easy to come up with something innovative.

You can look up online really innovative videos and blogs, and what are the trends in such and such technology. And then essentially what we're doing is we're saying, we're running an ad saying, "Mr. or Mrs. executive. Are you prepared for the 2020 blah blah blah revolution?"

Or, "Are you prepared for this and this? Join a three minute webinar," whatever you want to call it, "And let me explain it to you." The person there explaining it is my sales rep.

Steve Larsen:

Interesting.

James Smiley:

Yeah, and then at the end he or she is saying, "Well, I'd love to follow-up with you. I'd love to give you this $600,000 of research that we've done" or whatever that number is, "Book an appointment right now and I can give you this guide, I can hand you this guide," or whatever. We would always try to get face to face with them if we can.

Steve Larsen:

So do you run these local just to where you are mostly? Or I mean, you're getting on a plane? You're flying out to them a lot?

James Smiley:

Yeah. I think it really depends on what kind of business you're running. When I worked for much larger companies, our territory was across the nation, but in more of an agency model I've helped some internet marketers in the space, it's easy to set up a local roadshow or those kind of things through your town or through your city, where you can go and present some information.

Really hot things I would think would be for your guys' audience maybe like where is Facebook going to take business in the next three years? And, are the companies in your area prepared for that?

You can run a local ad saying, "Hey, I'm booking nine meetings" or, "Six meetings and this is a local tour that we're doing and it's a $3000 event and I'll do it for free, and I'll come to your office, but here's the deal. Number one, the owner has to be there, and then number two, you have to give me X amount of time," or something like that.

You put some stipulations on it, but if you can get in front of them, your chances are going to go tremendously. Utilizin...