SFR 98: Funnels! NOT Just For Sales…

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I use funnels to sell AND manage…

What's going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio.

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, guys. I can't believe that we are almost to episode 100. That's crazy. That's ridiculous. Seems like we just passed 80,000 downloads, and we're almost at 85,000 already, which is kind of crazy.

Anyway, thanks to all you guys who are listeners out there. Hopefully, the holidays went well. I know that's the political way to say it, but whatever. I'm Christian, so I'll just say it: Merry Christmas! 

Happy to have all of you guys here on the show. Really appreciate every one of you. Hopefully, whatever's goin gon for you right now, you're enjoying it.

It is the day after Christmas, here. I'm not going to lie: after three days of vacation, Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday, technically, I have today off. What is it? It's 5:00. I have spent almost 10 hours building funnels today.

Yes, for fun. 

That's what I do.

I had a hard time. Even yesterday, at the end of the day, I was like "I got to get back to work." You know what I mean? I don't know if that's a problem or an issue or whatever.

There's snow all over the place, which is very fun. We had snow Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. It's snow all over the place.

I grew up in Littleton, Colorado. Denver area. Kind of a suburb of Denver, right up against the mountains. The elevation's pretty high there. There's a lot of really high mountains and snows like crazy.

There was one year that there was a five-foot snow storm. I always laugh. Here, in Boise, Idaho, where we live now, last year they called it Snowmageddon. "There's so much snow! It's Snowmageddon! Oh, my gosh!"

There was, like, maybe six inches on the ground. It wasn't that much snow. I was laughing at how big of a deal everyone made it. But there's actually a good amount on the ground here.

Anyway, growing up there was this golf course that we grew up on. We grew up on the back nine, on fairway 16. It was a public golf course. Not super fancy schmancy or anything like that.

It was kind of fun, though, because every time it snowed super, super hard, even just a foot or two, which is pretty frequent in the winter, we would jump the fence. Yes, I know. I'm confessing right here on the podcast.

We would jump the fence, though. We would go out onto the fairway of the golf course. Obviously, there's no golfers out or anything, so it was this massive snow playground. We would build these huge snow forts. We'd build two of them. The other one would be 20 paces away from the other one.

What we'd do is we would go grab bottle rockets and roman candles, and all sorts of fireworks and paraphernalia, and we would load up two different teams and we'd shoot back and forth at each other, between the two snow forts.

We had very minimal injuries, doing this, but it was a lot of fun.

Every time I see snow, in any kind of accumulation, I always remember that experience for some reason. A whole bunch of others as well, but, specifically, that one.

Anyway, hopefully, it's been good. Hopefully, you had time to spend time with family, and you remember the reason you got into this business in the first place.

"Steve, what have you been building today?" Funny you should ask. I've been building a lot of management funnels.

You're like, "What? Oh, my gosh! Steven, what is this? Holy crap!" (laughs)

Anytime that there's a process, internally, that I have to do over and over and over and over again, that drives me crazy. I'm not an efficiency snob, but I do love variety enough that I hate doing the same thing over and over and over again.

I will go automate it. I will go automate as much of it as I can. I'll go automate every piece, every little nook and cranny, as much as possible, so that there is enough variety in my own business life.

It's almost a move, for me, of self-preservation. Funny enough.

Some people are like, "You're efficiency snob!" Not really. It's kind of a mess, where I am right now. I've got parts of guns around me, as I've been toying around, tweaking some stuff with some guns. I've got packages, things I got to finish shipping.

I'm not necessarily a neat freak. I'm not necessarily an efficiency snob. It's the other way around. I love variety so much that, if I have to do the same task over and over and over again... Whether you are an efficiency snob, or whether or not you're like me and you crave variety constantly, whatever it is, you can use funnels not just for sales, but for the actual automation of things.

What I've been doing... I do this a lot. I've done this a lot.

Who's that I was talking to? I think it was Miles! Miles Clifford! Shout out to you buddy!

A few days ago he was asking, "Is Zapier the tool that seems to be really underutilized? That really opens up the rest of ClickFunnels?"

I said, "Yes! Absolutely!"

If you've never used Zapier, especially when it comes to the management funnels and the management funnel topic. Zapier is like the ring from Lord of the Rings. It's the ring of power. That's how I look at it because I'm not a coder! I have no idea how to code.

What I will do a lot of times is, automatically, anytime anyone buys, or anytime anyone becomes a lead, I will pass that data on to Google Sheets. Whether it's a VA, and I don't want to give them access to my ClickFunnels account, or whether it's somebody... I will go and I will automate those different things, so that, A, no one else has access to my ClickFunnels account, then, B, everything's automated.

Steve Larsen: I can say, "Anytime a contact hits this sheet, go ahead and follow up with them about X, Y, and Z, and do the one, two, and three. That's exactly what I've been doing.

I've wanted to build this for a while. I've wanted to build this for quite a while. I don't like automating stuff right off the bat, when there's no need. You know what I mean? I like to look where the biggest pain point is.

I started looking at all these different articles of when to automate, when to do X, Y, and Z. Stuff like that. And, quite honestly, people get really intense with it, which is great. It's not exactly my huge thing. But I love management funnels. That's why I call them.

These are like internal processes. A lot of people don't know that, before I worked for ClickFunnels, my job was to go around and to create internal processes so that the company could run better, rather it was shipping or automating tasks to support agents. All these internal processes. That's what I was doing. Very heavily, very strongly.

I was very good with Infusionsoft, plus ClickFunnel's integrations. The integration back and forth between them. That's what I was doing.

There's a side of me tha...