SFR 161: My Favorite Rollout Strategy...
Boom what's up guys it's Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio, and today we're going to talk about how to roll out products. This is my favorite rollout strategy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.
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What's up, guys? Hey, I'm excited for today; I'm excited to be able to share with you some neat things that, frankly, I don't see many people doing.
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The first product I ever launched and put out the door was an utter failure - the thing was terrible, okay? But I didn't know that at the time.
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I spent inordinate amounts of time putting together the product. I thought my product was the best product ever -I was so excited! I was running towards it.
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In my mind, I was like this thing's going to change everything - this is going to be incredible. I was excited, and people would be like, "What are you doing? What do you spend all this time doing?"
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I'd be feeling a little smug about it like, "You don't know - just you wait and see!" There'd be people coming up to me and saying things like, "Larsen, what's up now? You doing that thing again? Alright, good luck with that..."
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I was actively seeking what I called, "My Shut Up Check." My shut up check"was something that I sought as fast as I could when I was launching.
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This was four years ago, and I hadn't perfected the rollout strategy that I want to talk with you guys about today... But what was interesting was I'd go build these things, I was looking for my shut up check.
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The shut up check was a concept I learned from a guy I was listening to six or seven years ago. The shut up check is the first check you get from your business.
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So when someone says, "Oh, you doing that thing again? Is that even gonna work?" You can pull it out that check and be like "Shut Up! It is working, here's the money." \xa0That's your shut up check.
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I hope that you've gotten your shut up check to throw in the naysayers faces a little bit? Not that we would ever do that... BUT TOTALLY DO IT ;-)
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What I wanna do real quick is share with you guys how I roll out my products.
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What ended up happening with that first one is, I spent eight months building it... and then when I finally launched it, and I put it out there... nobody bought it. And it's because nobody knew about it.
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It took three or four months before cash actually started coming on in, and I kind of abandoned it. Until I figured out better ways for traffic - and then I started making more money. But I don't want you to go through that, okay?
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I was in the middle of college, I was doing stuff with the Army, I was super busy. So for me to spend eight months of my time - we're talking late nights, early mornings - time I could have been with my family... And then, to not have it work - that was so mentally tasking it was ridiculous. I don't want you to go through that.
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So instead, I wanna share with you how I roll out my stuff.
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I have marketing books in bookshelves all over the place. I was reading this book, Positioning (It's written by Al Ries and Jake Trout)
... just kind of thumbing through it.
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Frankly, instead of reading front to cover, I'll thumb through and find chapters that look interesting, and I'll go learn something specific from it.
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Anyway, it's kind of cool, they say, \u201cWhen you make a new product you must by default, position against the old product.\u201d I thought \u201cHey, that's super cool.\u201d I totally get it, when you're making an opportunity... and he's saying a whole bunch of other great stuff.
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I really like what they say at the beginning. They say that, \u201cwe live in a communication-saturated environment.\u201d There's so much communication; you're listening to me, you're listening to other people ... Don't listen to other people, just listen to me ;-) There are so many people speaking.
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Back in the day, not enough communication was the issue. \xa0Inside of organizations, not enough communication was really the issue. Maybe even customer to business, or business to the customer - not enough communication. Those are serious issues for sure.
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However, there are also massive tendencies to over-communicate now. I believe in consuming a very information very low information diet - as Tim Ferriss teaches and talks about in 4 Hour Work Week.
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I'm very careful who I choose to listen to and very careful about what I consume. If I'm not learning for intent, then why am I learning? It's just noise. I ranted about that on a previous podcast. \xa0I really like what Tim Ferriss says about the subject.
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In Positioning they say, \u201cToday, communication itself is a problem. We've become the world's first over-communicated society. Every year we send more and receive less.\u201d Now as an entrepreneur, as a marketer, that is a terrible terrible place for you to be.
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It has to do with something that was mentioned in the beginning of the book. There's a point that I really like ... (There are a few points that I disagree with too - sorry. Actually - not sorry - I believe it. Just from my own experience of rolling out products)
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This is the point; \u201cFor years, all of us in the marketing area have taught to our students to build a marketing plan around \u2018The 4 P's\u2019.\u201d If you guys don't know the 4 P's; the 4 P's are like the Bible, they're like gospel. Especially in corporate marketing.
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The 4 P's are: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. What's the product - what's the price of it? \xa0Where you gonna place it? How you gonna promote it? Now that makes sense, but he makes a great point. There's some areas here that I agree with and some that I won't here, and I wanna share with you why - and it has to do with my rollout strategy.
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The next point is; \u201cI began to realize some years ago, that some important steps needed to precede the 4 P's. All good marketing planning must start with research before any of the P's can even be set.
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Research reveals (among other things) that customers differ greatly in their needs, perceptions, and preferences. Therefore customers must be classified into segments.\u201d
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Research, get them into segments. You can't serve all segments. I agree with that. I wanna walk you through how I do this without getting technical. So, I'm gonna put the book down.
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The scariest thing ever, is for you, as a marketer, or Sales Funnel builder, to go out and launch a product that nobody has ever heard of. Scary, scary crap! That's so freaky.
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I remember I was watching a lot of gurus launch their products, and these gurus would go launch their products, and a lot of times the product wasn't even built when they were selling it. I had this moral compass conflict inside of me, "Is that right? Is this ethical?" I was like, "that's kind of weird," and I had a hard time with it for a while.
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Every time I teach this strategy, someone says, "Is that right? Is that real? Is that okay?"
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Let me explain what's really is going on behind the scenes: They're doing the four Ps, they're doing research and segmenting, they're doing all these other things inside there. They're positioning the new product against the old one. This positioning game heavily affects what makes a good marketer.
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The stories you tell, all that stuff that stuff matters tremendously. The reason I'm talking about this is that I'm doing it right now for two products.
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If you guys are part of my group The Science of Selling Online, I just built 'Affiliate Outrage' live, in front of the group. I designed the marketing message, drew out the funnel, \xa0and then I built the funnel live.
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Now, I'm doing it again with another product in front of that group - \xa0for FREE - anyone can watch it. I go through, and I say, "There's a need right here, right everybody?" And they're like, "Yeah, there is a need right there." "Okay, what kind of thing would you wish was inside that product? Awesome, cool. You know what, I'm actually go through in front of you, I'm going to design the marketing messages. I'm going to go through, let's brainstorm together what false beliefs there are about the product I'm gonna put out there." They're like, "Well if it's about funnels - I'm not a techie!" I'm like, "Oh, that's a good one community, thank you for saying that. Community, this is how I would combat that?" I go around and show them, "Well, that's a bad belief because of x, y, and z," and I retell them another story. Then I'm like, "Oh man, community, what are some of the stories you would expect somebody to be believing some of the experiences that they've gone through that's made them think they need to be a techie?" They're like well, "I saw this guy and he was an awesome funnel builder a great person online, and he was a coder. All these people were coders." I'm like "Oh that's great, that's great. Okay let me write that down, I need to break that story, I need to put a new story.\u201d Does that make sense?
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I'm going in, and I'm using the very people who are buying the product to help create the marketing message, and I'm doing it live in front of them. What does that do?
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So I just did this for Affiliate Outrage - it's a free program. I took the time to go do it because I wanted to, number one, go through and show... there's a there's a sense of... I'm trying to display that I know what the heck I'm talking about. How do you say that word, I don't know what that word is?
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...But I'm trying to say "Look, I'm not a fake. Watch me do it live. Watch me build and construct the thing in front of you."
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I did for \xa0Affiliate Outrage, and now I'm doing for another paid product. I'm literally building in front of the very people that I hope will buy it. That's the strategy - and I hope you all use it in your businesses.
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The strategy is if you are selling an info product or you're writing a book or you are in retail or if you're in B2B. Take those products and deconstruct them in front of a customer, and put it back together, and say, "Here you go." That increases your sales like crazy.
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Six months into working at ClickFunnels, Russell Voxed me, and he said, "Hey, dude, we're going to start a show called Funnel Fridays." "Like cool, what's that?"
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A lot of you guys know me from Funnel Fridays. Every Friday, Russell gets on with Jim Edwards, fantastic copywriting expert, and Russell, obviously a funnel building expert... They take somebody's product, whether it's somebody from the audience or something else that they're doing at that time, and they build an entire funnel live in front of people in 30 minutes.
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Now, do they always finish? No, hardly ever, that's not the point though. What that does... think about it... Russell CEO of Click Funnels and Jim Edwards creator, the seller of Funnel Scripts coming together and using the product in front of the customer. Doing exactly what their product sells - using the products in the live build.
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Sometimes there'd be two, three, 400 people live watching live, giving feedback and asking questions. "Why did you do it this way... why did you do it that way?" Guys that's selling!
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Does it feel like a sales script? \u201cNo!\u201d The whole point I'm trying to make here is that if you are going, "Hey, I want to go build this product..." do everything you can to, number one, roll it out in front of your audience. Include them in your rollout strategy. Include them in the build. You'll create these true believers.
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Let's say you're building software; your potential customers will remember the story of you going through and teaching them why this button exists. They'll remember everything that went on to create that feature. \xa0Now they\u2019ll have an affinity for that feature. Whereas before it was just a crappy little feature.
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When you're building the little pieces inside of your product, you're putting things together, it's incredibly important for you to document the journey of its creation. That's the point of today's episode.
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If you document the journey of the creation of your product - what you end up doing is pre-selling people for the day that you open the doors.
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That is what I did not understand when I launched my first info product. \xa0I did not understand for quite some time.
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It's kind of like Hollywood right? Hollywood goes out six months before a movie goes out, they start getting people ready. They start creating curiosity, they start building pressure.
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A marketer builds pressure over time towards an event - a purchasing event. That's really what a campaign is. It's building pressure towards a purchasing event.
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There's a campaign and they're building, building, building, building, building pressure. They're building pressure - six months out - or even a year sometimes, right?
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There's a preview for a movie -it's only two minutes long - but it's a teaser. Six months out there's another one, three months out there's another one. A week ahead of time, "Holy crap, oh my gosh, this is the launch date. Get your premiere tickets; pay extra to see the first showing of it in your area." Does that make sense? \xa0They make an event out of the rollout of the product.
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The issue that I find, more often than not, is that there's been no pressure, no talk, nothing about a product before it launches.
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The problem with that is that you're gonna rely on ads and influencer name drops. And that's fine; I would use those strategies. I do those strategies myself. However, if you're not building the pressure ahead of time...
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There are really two ways that you can build the pressure:
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#1 Build the pressure ahead of the product launch \xa0
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#2 Then you can build pressure after the product launch by doing things like ads, closing the cart strategically, doing lots of stuff like that.
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So anyway, I hope that this has made sense? I kind of dove deep with it a little bit.
I agree with what the book Positioning was talking about, but not just from a positioning standpoint, but from a rollout strategy. That's very very huge.
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For you to think through how to actually put your product out the door. So if you want to see an example of that in action, go to thescienceofselling.online.
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I'm saving the live product and funnel builds in that group so you guys can go back and watch them. It's been really cool.
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If you wanna see the Affiliate Outrage one in there, you'll see how I designed the marketing, meaning the actual messaging, the sales message. There's a format, there's a template I used for that. Going out and then choosing the funnel to build. There's a format there's a template. 90% of this is just a big 'ol formula. People just convolute it.
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Then when I'm actually building the funnel, there's a format, there's a formula that I follow to get that out the door quickly. \xa0As I'm doing it live, I'm showing my prospective customers how I'm gonna be selling 'em. There's nothing wrong with that; this is a huge extra value add. Now they're like, "Oh man, I didn't know this is why you did that. I didn't realize Stephen that this belief I have is actually a false belief. Oh cool, you're going to put that feature in. Huh, Interesting."
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What's beautiful beautiful beautiful about this whole thing is I'm going out and I'm showing them what they're getting without them getting it. So that makes the curiosity higher. When they've invested that amount of time with me on the internet, (they're engaging for free), if they don't get the product, the itch is not scratched entirely. So they have a massive incentive to buy.
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Anyway, I just hope that you take that seriously. What I've been doing the last little bit here, is re-creating certain parts of the product after products are rolled out. I'll re-create certain parts of that product live in order to push more people in. The first time the product goes out, I'll make a whole bunch of it in front of the people. Sometimes not all of it, but key parts I know they'll be really interested in. Anyway, lots of fun stuff.
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The whole point is to take the customer with you on the creation of the product (or certain parts of it.) It will create a massive affinity which leads to true believers.
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Rather than go and find true believers, you create true believers - which is very powerful.
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Alright guys, hopefully, this has been a helpful episode for you today! Thank you so much to all of you who've been reviewing the podcast on iTunes, it means a lot to me. Please keep doing that, and I'll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.
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Boom. Just try to tell me you didn't like that. Hey, whoever controls content, controls the game. Wanna interview me or get interviewed yourself? Grab a time now at stevejlarsen.com