Some interesting things that I discovered while on the road this last week in the UK.
On this special early morning episode Russell recaps his trip to London and why he’s happy to be back home. He also talks about the differences with selling to audiences in different countries.
Here are 4 cool things in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear how Russell’s trip to London went and why it was better than when he was in the UK 5 years ago.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and welcome to an early morning fricken-freezing Marketing in your Car. Hey guys! So we just got back from London, woo-hoo! It was a long, long, long, long, oh so long trip to get back. We made it and we are excited and now it’s like 6 in the morning. My kids have not fallen asleep yet, because they’re still on London time. We kind of passed out for a little bit, but we’re awake now. Our cute little baby, who we haven’t seen in a week, we’ve been playing with her. Even though she’s tired, we’re not letting her sleep, because she’s too dang cute. A whole bunch of stuff and it’s not even 7:00 yet! I’m actually driving out to go grab some food because our house is out of food. That’s what’s happening over here.
Other than that, I’m just excited to be home. I’m not traveling again for, hopefully for forever. You know how you feel after you eat Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re so full you just want to pop. You’re like, “I’ll never eat again, ever!” Then five minutes later, you’re hungry. That’s how I am right now. I will never travel again, ever. The last 30 days, it’s just been insane. We’re back! We’re excited, a lot of fun things. I’m excited to get my hands dirty again, and get into work and get into stuff. Speaking, and traveling, and selling, and stuff like that, it’s fun. I just miss sitting behind a computer and just funnel building, funnel hacking. I’m so excited! It’s all good.
We had an awesome time in London, and it all turned out really, really good. It was fun. It was cool going there and seeing all these businesses. It’s interesting because you think about however many, 20 years ago even, people sold things in their communities, right? If you lived in Boise, you sold things to other people in Boise. That’s kind of how things were. The Internets made it so it’s everywhere.
What’s cool, a couple things that I kind of got from it. 1, going over there, you see these entrepreneurs from that other side of the world. What’s interesting is their hopes, their dreams, their desires, their vision, their desire to change the world in their own little way is the same. It’s not different than it is here. I think entrepreneurs; we have something weird inside of us. It’s not an American thing, or it’s not whatever. It’s an entrepreneur thing and it’s everywhere. People there have the same bug that we have here. It’s awesome and I just love being around entrepreneurs. There’s nothing better for me. That was really, really cool.
What was interesting though, this is kind of cool, people don’t see this a lot. You don’t notice it online either. I wonder, I don’t know if I’ll do anything because of this, but it makes me think. For example, in the last 30 days, I’ve spoken in Australia, United States 3 times, and then in London. The 1 thing that is different, culturally things are different. It’s just fascinating. I remember the first time I spoke in London and I tried to sell. I did my normal pitch that in the States was awesome and it bombed over there. I was like, what in the world? These people hate me. I found out later they did hate me.
I remember, this is kind of sad, but after the event was over, I sold a couple, but not like what I normally would have. This is probably 4 or 5 years go. Then I went on this forum later, it was a free event we did, all this stuff. I’m on this forum reading people critiques of the event and all these people were making fun of me. They weren’t making fun of my presentation, or anything. They’re making fun of me because I was American. Wow! I never thought that that was a thing, it was so weird to me. After that I had friends that told me when they sold to the UK, they had to sell different, they had to speak different, they had to do things different for it to work.
I hadn’t had the chance to speak in the UK for 5 years, so I never really tested that again. I’ve spoken twice in Australia since then. Australia was completely the opposite. Australia feels like, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the people in the UK always like Americans. I think they think we’re stuck up. We kind of are. The more cultured I am becoming, the more places I go, the more I realize how annoying Americans can actually be. We are pretty, it’s kind of embarrassing looking at it now. That’s just how American’s are, right? I the UK, if people don’t necessarily like us as much, but in Australia it’s the opposite. Australians love us. It was really interesting, I was in Australia, anything I said it felt like I was walking on gold. It was a completely different cultural experience. That was kind of just weird to me.
This time I spoke in the UK I was very aware of that. It thought if I’m going to be successful with this, I think the wrong approach … The approach in Australia was almost more like I’m this American authority, let me show you all this cool stuff I did. In the UK the way I transition my presentation this time, I had to kind of make fun of myself more. What do they call it, self-deprecating humor or whatever? I tried to make fun of myself more throughout the presentation. What’s funny is in America, even Australia, if you close people, they stand up and they start going to the back, when they get excited and they rush. The UK, none of that. Nobody moved. I’m doing my close and I’m telling them, “Get up right now, go to the back!” I’m doing all my stuff that normally get’s American’s jumping over each other and fighting to get to the back, and nobody budged. They just sat there.
I’m so confused, did I not make fun of myself enough? What’s happening? Then after the presentation was done, people slowly stood up and walked over and signed up. The promoter told me afterwards, he’s like, “Your close rate was amazing for the UK, just so you know.” Really? It was way less, it wasn’t way less, it did well, but it was less than I thought it was going to be. He’s like, “You’re close rate was amazing for the UK audience.” It’s just interesting.
When I think about a lot of times I think we craft ourselves messages for all people. As I’m getting more and more deeper into this business, what I’m learning more and more is that I think this is really the power of where Actionetics inside of Click Funnels is going. Changing based on people. This one is making more money, speak to them this way, less money, speak to them here. If they’re male speak to them like this, if they’re female speak to them like this. Whatever those demographics are. I almost think that if I really want to go deep in this, I don’t know if I will, but I might, especially offers that we really focus a lot of time and energy on. I would even change the sales message based on culture, based on geography. Somebody in the UK was watching video sales, I would speak much different than somebody in the United States.
Just interesting I thought. One other thing, this I just want to share with you guys, and hopefully it will resonate. I hate this, I’ve got so many coaching clients who, and I get it, you want to forecast and set goals, and expectations, and things like that. I think it hurts. I always have these, our clients, our friends, or people that I hear are like, “Okay, webinars going to happen, I’m going to do this …” They have numbers built up in their head, “If I only get this percent, and this happens and dahdahdah.” All these things they figure out. They do it, and they don’t get it, and they’re destroyed mentally and physically that destroys them.
I’m a big believer in not, not not setting goals. I’m a big goal setter. Not setting expectations of outcome. You can’t control those things at first. When I spoke at this event, Dan kept asking, he told me how many sales I did. Dan’s the promoter, was like, “Is that good for you? Bad? What were you expecting?” I was like I didn’t have any expectations coming in. I want, when it’s done, for me to be happy with whatever, and if I have expectations, then no matter what I’m not going to be happy. You know what I mean? I didn’t have any expectations. If I didn’t sell anything, I was coming to try to serve and try to help. When I speak, even I’ve been doing this forever, I get nervous. Before I speak, I pray and when I pray I pray that I can give value and help serve people to the best of my ability. That’s what I’m praying for and I like how many sales I can close, I’m legitimately here to serve people. That’s the way I go into it. The people buy, I’m so grateful afterwards that it’s awesome.
But if I would have thought, think ahead of time, looked at Dan’s audience and said, “My typical audience converts this much.” Really though through it and really focused on that number, I probably would have been disappointed, because it made less money than it should have, based on if I would have thought through things. I try not to, I just kind of put it out of my head, and don’t think about that. Just focus on giving, and serving, and helping. I even told Dan that, I didn’t really have any outcomes, I wasn’t really hoping for anything. I just come in and serve and hopefully we can get a lot of people into Click Funnels because they need it. I honestly feel like you can’t be successful in life without it. I feel like they need it. I want to give that to them.
From this, I’m sure people know who I am now. If they enjoyed it, they’re going to keep following me. They’re going to buy more stuff. A lot of them will ascend up and come in our inner circle, things like that. Good stuff will happen from it. I’m not tying an outcome to it. I can’t tell you how many people, over, and over, and over again, in my coaching programs, they have these numbers in their head. When they don’t hit it initially they’re just destroyed. It’s hard to recover. If you go into it with no outcome, with no projected outcomes of your own, you just go and you do it. You try to serve and you see what happens.
Then you can take that data and you can look at it, and you can make decisions. If I was to keep speaking in the UK, I would look at the presentation and say what things didn’t work. There were a lot of things that didn’t work. I could tell, because there was this weird energy when you speak in a room. You can feel it, you can not feel it at times. There are things I would definitely change. Again, I’m not speaking in the UK all the time, so it’s not the same for me. My first webinar, not my first webinar, but my first Funnel Hats webinar, I had no idea if it was going to do well or not. I was speaking at Mike Filsaime’s event, and I did it. When people started running back, I was so shocked. Oh, wow!
The next one was, oh! Every time I was so excited about what happened. Eventually, after we’ve done it so many times, we have projected outcomes, and we have things like that. Now we’ve got something to shoot for. I let the chips fall where they may at first. Then we can look at that, analyze the data, change things. Let that happen a bunch of times before we start making these projections, these models, and tying our happiness outcome to them. If you do, unless you hit it out of the park the first time, it’s hard.
Most people do webinar the first time, they’re not getting 10% close rate. They’re not getting 5%, they might be getting 1-2%. That’s where we start at. That’s what we’ve got to do a billion times. That’s why I’ve done the Funnel Hacks webinar, in the last 12 months, I would say a conservatively, at least 50 times live. It gets better every single time. It just makes me feel for people who create it, have this vision in their head, launch it, and they don’t hit it. They are attaching so much personal emotion to it. I feel for that, so hopefully if nothing else you get from this, stop attaching all these things to you initial work. Just do it from a point that you want to serve, you want to give, you want to help.
Let the chips fall where they may. Then take the data, change it tweak it, then keep doing that. Eventually, when you have a model that is working, now you can come back and you can be stressed out about the results. Don’t do that now. We have enough stress in our lives. You’re building a business, it’s fun and it should be an enjoyable process. It’s going to be hard at times. It’s going to be good at times. It’s going to be bad at times. You’re going to lose money at times. You’re going to make money at times. You’re going to be broke sometimes. Sometimes you’ll be rich. That’s just kind of the process in this game. If you don’t have the skin for that, it might not be the right game to play.
I’m at the store, I’ve got to buy my family some food. Some eggs, some banana’s. Some stuff for us to eat. I better go. Thanks for listening to my ramblings today. Hope that there is some value in there for you. I appreciate you guys. For those of you who are my new friends in London, thanks for letting me come hang out. I had an awesome time. I appreciate you guys allowing me to serve you. Thank you so much, and I’ll talk to you soon.