Nov 3, 2021
Reasons for entry vs reasons to stay.
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---Transcript---
What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I want to share with you guys a little... It's 20 words, maybe 30 words, inside of a secret fax I got from Dan Kennedy. While he has only recently acquired his company and so I've been going through the archives, and there's this fax he sent to the old owners and I'm not allowed to share the whole thing because literally on the front page it says... Let me see what says, it says, "Confidential. Prepared for internal use only."
Anyway. But there's this one little paragraph that is so cool and probably going to change some of your guys' lives forever. I don't want you to miss it. We're going to keep things on, come back, I'm going to tell you what it is. I'm going to explain it. And hopefully this is a little marketing secret you guys can use.
Okay. Inside of this fax, so this is actually a fax. Bill Glazer, who's my first mentor in this world. Anyway, so Bill Glazer owned Magnetic Marketing. When I was with Bill, on my sixth year of his mastermind group is when he sold it to this PE firm. The PE firm destroyed the company, ran it to the ground and then Adam Witty bought it from them. Adam Witty got this fax from Dan. It was basically, "This is what is wrong with the business. This is how they killed it. Here's how to fix it. Here's what it was supposed to be. Here's the..." It's almost Dan's business plan for business, which is really cool. And so then Adam ran it for three years and then we bought it from Adam.
I think there's so much like gold in here. I wish I could do a whole event just on, "Oh, here's a fax that Dan sent showing how to fix his own business from the PE firms who ran it into the ground." Oh, there's so many cool things. But okay, I can't give you it all because I'll get in trouble, but there's a nugget. I'm going to go on a limb for you guys because this nugget is so cool. And I want you just to understand it and to be able to use it. And it's interesting because I saw it last week at our over Inner Circle meetings and I saw the practical application of this again.
Okay, you guys ready for this? Get out a pad of paper and a pencil if you want to go deep. In this section he titles the sections, "Reasons for entry versus reasons to stay." And then underneath that it says, "The acquisition versus attachment." We're talking about reasons for entries, how do you get people into your company, into your community, into your world, so that's acquisition. Versus reasons to stay, and that's attachment. So how do you get somebody into your community and then what gets them to actually stay in your community? Those are two different things.
And then the next sentence says, "Not the same, not even close." Because a lot of times people think, "Oh yeah, you acquire a customer. They stay because they want to and keep buying your stuff." It's like, no, no, no, no. Acquisition and attachment are two different things. Then what Dan said here is the last sentence I'm going to read to you from the fax. He said, "What brings them in the door initially is almost never what keeps them inside over time." Let me say it one more time. "What brings them in the door initially is almost never what keeps them inside over time."
And so for example, most of you guys who are listening to this, you came in based on some front end something, some kind of acquisition. It could have been a lot of things. It might have been one of my free books. It could have been, you heard me on someone's podcast. It could have been, you saw me in an event or you saw a YouTube video. Or there's something that got you and peaked your interest and it acquired you, got you into my world. Acquired you as a customer.
Now, if you look... In fact, so the very first time I got this is when we first launched my Inner Circle, as my high ticket at the time was 25 grand that we signed up, I don't know, a dozen or so people. And it was interesting because people came to me, they joined the Inner Circle because they wanted to get closer to me. They all told me like, "Yeah, I joined because I wanted to learn from you." But then it was interesting because I watched these people and they stayed year, after year, after year. In fact, we renamed our Inner Circle, we call it Inner Circle For Life because it's like, we want people to come in to stay there for life. They're not allowed to leave after they come in. They can obviously, but that's concepts of Inner Circle For Life.
And so they come in, they stay year, after year, after year. And what's interesting is I noticed that, again, they came because they want to get to know me, but then they stayed for something different. They stayed for the community. They stayed for the other people. They stayed for the group, they stayed for the... They didn't stay for me. If it was just Russell and it was me coming and speaking at them once a year, twice a year for the meetings, they wouldn't have stayed long-term. They stayed because of the community.
And so what brings them in the door initially is almost never what keeps them inside over time. And it was interesting because we relaunched the Inner Circle, I talked about this in the last couple of podcast episodes. But what was interesting is initially, especially in the... We had two levels now, the Category Kings. And most of the Category Kings, all but two I think, or maybe three, had been in my Inner Circle before. And so they knew what was happening.
But for the Inner Circle For Life program, there was almost 100 people who were brand new. Again, there are some people that had been there before, but for the most part they're all new people. And they came, they joined because they wanted to be in Russell Brunson's Inner Circle. They came because they wanted to get to know me. They came because they wanted learn funnels from Russell.
So they came in, but then we facilitated this group and the whole goal of me facilitating the group was not for Russell to be on stage talking, the goal was to get them in this room. It's the room where it happens, the room where the magic happens. The room where these conversations are happening at a higher level. And I told them, initially I was like, "If you guys come here to learn from me, you can learn from me. Go read my books, all the stuff's in there. You don't need to pay me this amount of money to learn from me." I'm like, "Well, the power in this room is not me. It's like I said, I'm going to stand on stage and my goal is to stimulate conversation, and then to send it back to you guys in these rooms to have these conversations amongst each other." That's the whole thing.
Even though that we acquire them, the reason for entry, what brought them in the door initially was because they wanted to be in Russell's Inner Circle and be around Russell. But the reasons they stay is to create attachment, and it's what keeps them inside over time is the relationships, the people, the community. And it's just fascinating. If you look at that from... Zooming out, you start looking at that, it's like, "Oh my gosh, this is the power." So many times we think that all the weight is on our own shoulders to run these businesses long-term, especially information businesses, but they're not. It's the community.
And so if you're not building a community, if you're not doing things correctly, then that becomes the problem. Then it's always on you, always on you. It's just this hard thing. Why do people keep coming to Funnel Hacking Live? The first time they come to Funnel Hacking Live because they want to learn what's the funnel. If you look at the copy on the page, usually the headline I replicate from theme to theme to theme, is always something tied to, "You want to funnel away, but you don't know which funnel it’s going to be. Come to Funnel Hacking Live, I want to show you which funnel that is."
That's the acquisition, it gets people and it's like, "I keep hearing Russell talk about funnels. I just don't know which funnel's for me." So they come for that feel, what funnel it is when they come in the room and they have a feeling. They get to know other people, they become part of a community. They feel the energy. All those intangibles is why they come back. Why people come year, after year, after year. It's why most every other events happening in my industry is getting smaller and smaller and smaller every year, and ours gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Because we acquire people. We bring them in the door initially with the thing that they want. And then we create attachment inside the community with the thing that's going to keep them over time. Coming here hearing Russell talk about the next new funnel is not going to keep them over time, that's boring. Eventually they're going to leave. But if you build the reasons for them to stay strong enough, they'll stay and they'll keep coming over and over and over again.
The first time I ever saw this in action was interesting. The very first time I went to Dan Kennedy's seminar, and I had been studying him, been learning about him. And for me it was like going to see the guru on the mountain. I was so excited to go and journey that direction and to meet him and to see him and all that kind of stuff. And I remember the time I saw him, he had just gotten in a... Dan, if you know anything about him, he has horses and he races horses and stuff, and he got injured or something.
I remember they told us, he's like... At first they thought he wasn't going to come. And he did come, but he's in a wheelchair. And I remember when he came out, they wheeled him out and it was just silence in the room. And no one said a word. And everyone stood up and he came in and I was just like, "This is the coolest thing in the world." And I remember that feeling of him getting wheeled in here and everyone standing and like, the guru has showed up. I was so excited and that's why I came.
And then I remember what he said that was interesting is, he asked the audience, he's like, "Who here has been following me for more than a year?" Everyone's hand goes up. "And more than five years? More than 10? More than 15? More than 20? More than 25? More than 30, more than 30?" And he went all the way back 30 or 40 years, I can't remember what it was. And there were still two dozen people standing with their hands raised of this entire room, who've been following him for 30 or 40 years.
And I remember he said, he kind laughed and he's like, "You guys, I haven't had anything new to say since the seventies," or something like that. And he's like, "So why do you keep coming back?" And that's when he started talking about the reasons why they stay. The attractive character, the stories, the people, the community. These are the reasons why people stay.
And so if you're just building a company on acquisition where you're bringing people in, the problem with that is you have this company that burns and churns where you're always... And I had, my very first supplement company was a burn and churn. People would come in, we had a really good funnel based on media. We'd spend $120 and make 180 back, and it was a good business. We were able to crank things through. But the supplement didn't get people to stick. They didn't keep coming back and reordering and building all these kind of things, they didn't stay.
And so it was always this burn and churn business, and we turned off ads, the business stopped. And that was the issue and the problem behind it. And so that's true for a lot of people's businesses. If you're in a transactional business, all you're doing is acquisition. And if you're in acquisition, profitably you're okay. But if you want to scale your company and grow it, where each person goes from being worth, whatever, 180 bucks to four or 5,000, it's this mindset shift to, "Hey, we acquire them one way and then we create attachment, a reason for them to stay. Something that keeps them inside over time, a different way."
And so hopefully this gets the thoughts in your head spinning, especially if you've got a retention problem, especially if you're losing people. Especially if you know customers by once from you and you never hear them again. This is the reason, you're good at the entry but you're not good at the reasons for them to stay. And so you, together as your team or whoever's you're working with, think through that. Ask some questions, "Why do people stay with us? What's the reasons? Have we built a culture?" If you need to go deeper on that, go back to Expert Secrets. I have three or four chapters talking about building mass movements and what gets people to stay over time, like identity and all the things. Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff that you can learn from there.
But there you go, you guys. So Dan Kennedy, he's brilliant. There's a fax. I think that's, what, 30 words I gave you, but hopefully it's a needle mover. All right, that's it. You guys, appreciate you. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, the reason for entry is different than the reason they stay. And then as Dan said, "They're not the same, they're not even close." Hope it helps you guys. Thanks so much for everything, and I will talk to you soon.