Nov 15, 2021
Cool things I witnessed at a recent fundraiser for my boys’ wrestling.
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---Transcript---
What's up everybody. This is Russell. I just jumped in the Tesla. I'm going to drive into the office and I got something cool I want to share with you. We had a chance to go to a wrestling auction this week and some of the salesmanship and marketing principles that I saw were amazing. And so I want to talk through them and how you can apply them to your business. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. I hope you guys are excited. I've had a good week this week. I'm working on some fun projects with the mushifying of Dan Kennedy’s company with ClickFunnels and a new offers coming out and a bunch of stuff. And so I wake up every morning at five this week and I've been excited and got a lot of work done. It's been good. You know the feeling like when you're excited about something, how much easier it is to wake up and do the thing? It's been a while since I felt that way.
In fact, I was last night, I was thinking like, when was the last time I was this excited about working on something in the business. And if I'm honest with myself, it was when the traffic secret book launch, which is man almost like two years ago now, is that right? A year and a half ago. Anyway. So anyway, it just feels good to be doing something fun. So hopefully all you guys have got something fun you're working on, because it just makes everything else better anyway. Okay. So as you guys know, I'm a wrestler. My ears are all cauliflowered up and my kids, some of them like wrestling, some hate wrestling, but I've got one stronghold who loves wrestling. And so, which is great. And so we went to the wrestling banquet this year where they were raising money for the wrestling team.
And so we were there ready to support and help donate money so that the team can get the stuff we need to be a good team. And I also help coach. So I'm one of the coaches too. But anyway, we go to the wrestling banquet and in the past they used to do a spaghetti feed. They have spaghetti, everyone come, the wrestlers serve the people and they'd have like a silent auction. And I think they said the best year ever was like $6,000 raised. I think the average year is like four or 5,000. So that's kind of the context of where we're starting at. So this time around they met one of the coaches, the coach's wife or someone met these guys who do auctions. They were an auction company and would basically go up there and instead of just like having silent auction where people bid on stuff, that's like an auctioneer up top.
And he's like doing the, yeah, can I get five? Can I get five? All that kind of stuff like they do, right. And so it was weird because it was in a bar so they didn't invite kids. It just the parents. So first we kind of like, this is weird. Like I don't know how it's going to work. Like they still had silent auction and we bid on some things, whatever. And then we had dinner and then after dinner they had the auctioneers get up and start the process.
And this is where the marketing gold started happening. And as a marketing nerd that I am, I was just like freaking out like watching the process and how they did it and how they were able to get the room excited about giving up money and spoiler alert when it was all said and done, they raised almost $40,000 for wrestling. So yeah like, yeah, a lot. And that's not counting we gave extra donations on top. That's just like the rest of the people, right. Which was really, really cool. And so a couple of things, the first thing they did, the auctioneers got up there. The first thing they do is they had to build a rapport with the audience. Because by default you're like, oh, these guys are going to sell me something. And so there's no rapport. So they get up there and they start telling their stories, who they are and how they're a family business and how they get into this.
And they just kind of told these stories and jokes really quickly to try to build rapport as quick as they could. Right. So that was the first thing. Second thing is they had to train everybody how to buy. And this was really fascinating. What they did initially is like, we're going to get this auctions process starting. We're going to teach you guys how it works. And they held up $500 cash and we're going to start with $500 cash. And the way that you can win this $500 cash is if you buy a $20 thing, like you bis $20 or you pay $20 and you get a chance to win this $500. Right? So who would pay $20 for a chance to win 500 and all the money goes to wrestling.
So it's going to be good, right? So start doing this and I don't know how many people did it, but most of the audience put in there $20 to win this thing. And they had a lot of energy and it was fun, it was exciting. And the end of it, they drew somebody and someone won the $500. They got $500 and the person like gave the $500 back just put it toward wrestling. And so from that one little exercise, they raised $1,500 for wrestling, right? The $500 came back and then the $20 bills like a thousand dollars worth of $20 orders that went through really quickly. And so they made $1,500. But that first thing, it was interesting because you're paying $20 for a chance to win 500. So it's like a no brainer. Like I'll just try it.
But what they were really doing, if you look at the strategies, they were teaching people how to bid, right. For somebody like me who had never been in an auction before, I didn't know how to hold the paddle and how it worked and all those kind of things and so this gave us the ability to learn at a very low risk thing, with the worst case, you lose 20 bucks, right? Best case you win 500. So it's like a really risk reward thing was, was very, very, very, very easy to say yes to. And it's interesting because training the audience is so important in everything you're doing. In fact, I remember I learned this originally from Bill Glazer at their super conferences day number one, they would do a charity offer where he had this whole swipe file book. He's like, hey, you pay a hundred dollars to charity.
You get the book and everyone ran back and they closed like most of the room. In fact, I remember running back and had a hundred dollar bill and give a hundred dollar bill getting this book. And it was like the first time I had seen that happen. I didn't understand it until my next mastermind meeting when Bill Glazer got up and explained his strategy. He said day number one, my biggest goal in the event is to train the audience how to buy. Because I don't want them trying to figure out how to buy when I'm doing my high ticket, $25,000 sale, right. I want them to know how to buy on something that's low risk, that's not scary. And so he's like day number and I always do a charity thing because number one, it builds rapport because you're helping people.
Number two, you're actually helping people, which is awesome. And number three, though, it trains the audience on how to buy. And so they learn how to stand up. They learn where to go. They learn how to go and where the forms are at. They go through the whole process once and then when you ask them to buy two days later, they already know how to do it. They're not confused. Right? And so you're training the audience how to buy. So again, the auctioneers did that. They trained us how to buy something that was super low risk. We do it at our front hockey live events, Bill Glazer did it at their events where we're training people how to stand up, go to the back of the room, give money on something that's very low risk. Right? And so that's how we've done events, but how could you do it during your webinars?
How could you do it during... There's so many things that you could leverage that idea, like how to train the audience how to buy something small before you're asking them for the big purchase. So that's the first thing. Next thing they go out there and they start auctioning off these different packages. And I wish I would've had a pad of paper and notes the night that it happened I was just like freaking out about everything. But I kind of just remember the core things that stuck out. So next thing is it wasn't just one dude on stage doing the auction, right. That's how I would've thought it was going to be. But the auctioneer had like four or five people in the audience walking around. So people in the audience were doing a couple things. Number one is they were making noise.
So it felt like even though there wasn't a lot of people bidding, it felt like there was because you could hear hear the people out in the audience talking and there are seeds out the audience talking and creating energy and creating momentum and social proof that people were bidding. And so they were walking around and as they were doing that, they started figuring like who are the people that want this offer. Right? And so the people in the audience would see and like, okay, this person bid 50, this person bid a hundred, this person 150. They started looking at the people who were bidding. So then it starts isolating from the entire audience. Like here's the five or six people that are bidding. And as you get closer and closer, the people in the audience walking around the auctioneers is partners or whatever you call them, they start identifying, okay, these are the three people that want this.
And so then they hone in on those people. And as the auctions happening, they're like, he's the 250, do you want to do 3, 3, 3? And then like, they're kind of like helping push and like urge them to bid up. And so person bids up. Next person goes back. And so now it's the auctioneers are standing side by side with the two or three whales in the audience who were going to buy and using that as a way to up the bid, like get it moving higher, higher, higher, higher at the point where these things that probably would've sold for 50 bucks at a silent auction were selling for 15 or $2,000 because of the way the process worked. And it was really, really fascinating. And so I started seeing that. And so how could you replicate that? You could replicate in a lot of ways, right?
Like in an event you could replicate that when it's creating social proof. Like you think about when you get a table rush, if you don't get a table rush it's hard, because nobody moves, right. But get people to stand up and run to the back of the room, as soon as a couple people run back and people see that, it creates social proof. Like I remember during my funnel hockey live presentation when I was speaking a lot on stages and doing the whole process like that, I remember I would usually the very first time I dropped the price, it's weird because usually like one or two people would get up. And at first I would just like, I was like, oh, like feeling all awkward. Like, oh man, like only two people got up. I don't want to say things.
I kept going through the rest of my pitch and going through things and over to the pitch, more people would go, more people would go. And I remember this one time I was doing the pitch and I got up and I got to the point where I showed the price and the two or three people that jumped up, and I don't remember why, but some reason it startled me. I was like, oh wow. And I could have stopped. And I said, whoa, I'm like those people right there, they get it. They've already started moving. And I pointed to the people that were walking towards the back of the room, like jogging towards the back of the room to buy and everyone else stopped and looked back and they saw like 30 people running and all of a sudden they're like, oh my gosh, this is legit.
I don't want to be in the back of the line. All of sudden next person popped up. Next one popped. And all of a sudden, like it was this like sprint to the back and it created this table rush. And it's kind of the similar process as like, it's like, if you get one or two people who are in, who are going to buy, right, they're starting to walk to the back of the room. Don't just like be secret about it, like call that like, oh my gosh, like I haven't got the pitch in. Look, these guys are already in the back room buying. Dude, you don't know the prices yet, you're already in. And they're like, yeah, I'm already in like, oh my gosh, like they get it. If you guys get this, you know this is the way like, just like you have my permission to stand up and go right now.
Right. And we create this thing and they start moving. It was just really cool to be able to see these marketing and sales principles that we use in different places used here inside of this auction to raise money for wrestling. And so I started thinking, one of my first mentors, I've had a lot of really good mentors in life. One of them was Jay Abraham. What Jay Abraham taught me really well was to look at things happening in other industries and how do you model them for yours? And so really like my goal with this was to kind of share with you guys a couple just quick examples from the auction, but hopefully open up your eyes so you start seeing all the sales and marketing happening around you, right? You look at ClickFunnels, we launched our dream car contests. People are like, how'd you come up with that?
I'm like, because I looked over at this other industry, the network marketing industry, and they give away cars to people and get people to go crazy to build up their companies. I was like, we're going to take that concept from this industry and move it over, right. From the auction industry, like I saw what they did over here. Next time we do our fundraiser at Funnel Hacking Live, I'm going to do things differently because what I learned over here, right? So it's looking at other industries beside your own, looking like what they are doing, how are they marketing? How are they doing sales? How can you replicate that and pull that into your business? And I hope that's the principle I kind of got to today is just understanding that like there's amazing marketing sales happening so many places. There's businesses, industries that have proven stuff, right? This auction industry, these guys have been doing this for a decade.
They have whole family does this. They test it. They tweak it. I'm sure that they've done a thousand auctions a year. They test all these things and how to say it and when to say it and all the different subtleties, how do you say that word of how to make it work? And so you can come look at that and see the process and just be, it's like sitting there at school learning how to increase your sales online. So keep your eyes open, watch other industries, see what they're doing, click on every ad you see because you have no idea what rabbit holes it's going to take you down, what you're going to learn, what you're going to discover for your own business as well. And I hope that helps. One other side tangent.
I did this recently. I had my wife's phone. I thought it was mine. I grabbed it, opened up Facebook. And I was like, this is not my Facebook because she follows different ads, different people. So the ads she's targeted with are completely different than mine. And I was like fascinated. I started clicking on her ads, started taking me on this magical wonderland of offers and products and funnels I'd never seen before all because I look from a different lens. So same thing. Look at, you know, go to Facebook, create a fake profile and like things that are the opposite of what you normally look and start seeing when ads show up and what things you can learn from different industries. And it gets really powerful. So hope it helps. Thanks so much for everything. And I'll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.