A Return To Simplicity... - a podcast by Russell Brunson

Why complexity is killing your funnels, and your business, and your life.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how complexity halts the work, and the solution is to simplify. Here are some of the awesome things you will learn in this episode:

• Why Garrett White took his business away from Clickfunnels Actionetics, and why Russell convinced him it wasn’t the answer.
• Hear an example of Russell and his team trying to make something more complex and why it didn’t go anywhere for a long time because of it.
• And find out why simplicity could be the solution we are looking for in all aspects of our life.

So listen here to find out why complexity doesn’t make your business run better.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. If you can tell right now the sound is insanely good, it’s because I am in a recording studio reading the Traffic Secrets, the Dotcom Secrets, and then the Expert Secrets books.

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are all doing awesome. So I’m in the middle of recording all the audiobooks, which as painful as writing a book is, recording an audiobook might be more painful. It is really hard to stay excited and keep your energy levels up and all these things while you’re reading 3 90,000 word books, which is really stupid now that I look at it that way.

It’s funny, the guy who is doing the audio engineering stuff, he’s like, “Some people will read one audiobook in their lifetime, but nobody reads 3 in a week.” That’s where we are right now. And it’s funny, as we were driving here today, I was so tired and we’re talking about starving artists. And I’m like, “I’m not a starving artist. I’m just a tired artist.”

So I think when you first get started you’re a starving artist trying to figure out how in the world to actually make money, and then eventually you figure that out. Then you’re just a tired artist because you can’t keep up with all the stuff that’s happening and all of the opportunities and the things as you start creating and figuring out your voice.

Anyway, as I was going today through, I’m about halfway through, I’m actually on page 214 in the Dotcom Secrets book. I started reading Traffic Secrets first because that one is the next book we’re selling. And then I’m going back and have read the new Dotcom Secrets, and I’m about halfway through that now. So that’s where I am in the process, halfway through all three books.

And I was reading them, it was kind of fun because you forget about these lessons that, you know, I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book 6 years ago, and I kind of forget about the lessons. And one of the ones that got me re-excited as I was reading it, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I talked about this, I did it for a while, and I haven’t been consistent with it, was this concept of daily Seinfeld emails.

And it’s interesting because I think so many times we sit here trying to figure out “What’s the email I’m going to send out? What am I going to say? What’s it going to look like?” and we freak out and get so caught up in the, trying to figure out the right message, that half the time we just don’t even publish anything.

And it’s interesting, at Funnel Hacking Live behind the scenes I was sitting there, it was after Garrett White spoke onstage, me him and Todd were back stage talking about stuff. And we were talking about funnels and complexity. And it was funny because Garrett had temporarily moved his email stuff to some other provider, away from Actionetics over to Entreport I think. And we kind of asked him, “Why’d you do that?” and he said, “We did it because we wanted to add all these things that Actionetics didn’t do.”

And he started talking about all the different features and the things he wanted to add a ton of complexity to his auto responder sequences. And we’re like, “When did you move it over?” and he’s like, “A year ago.” I’m like, “Well, how’s it going?” and he’s like, “well, nothing’s working, we haven’t even done it yet.” And Todd starts laughing, he’s like, ‘That’s the problem everyone has.’ They sit down and want to build these insanely complex funnels and follow up funnels and messaging and sequences, and they spend months mapping out these things where they never actually get anything done. Most of them never actually go live.

They keep looking, they want the shiny whistle. They want the hack, the technique, the thing that, you know all the millions of different features. But the reality is the reason why people have been successful with Clickfunnels so far is because it’s simple. You can’t build a funnel with 8000 different variations. You build very linear 5 page funnels and 8 page funnels, and things that are very, very simple.

We force people to have simplicity and because of that, those people have success, whereas other platforms give you unlimited complexity ability and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I can do a billion things.” But then because you have so much complexity, you never do anything.

We had the same thing, we were looking at all the different segments inside of Clickfunnels. There’s people who start a trial but they cancel, people who start a trial and they stick for a month and they leave. You have people who fill in step one of the order form and then they leave, people who have been on for a month, all these different segments of Clickfunnels users.

So probably almost a year ago we sat down and said, “Okay, we want to write different messaging segments for each of these lists. So if somebody wants to pause the account, what’s the sequence we’re going to use to get them to re-upgrade their account?” So we sat there and mapped out, I think it was 9 or 10 different segments, and all these different email sequences. We’re like, ‘Okay, we’re going to go do that.”

But because it was so big and so complex, we never did. And then fast forward 6 months later, we had our next funnel marketing retreat, we sat down and said, “Okay, how are those things going?” and we’re like, “We still haven’t done them.” And we’re like, “Why not?” “Well, it’s too complex.” So we said, “Okay, let’s do it again.” So we mapped it all out again, went back to the drawing board and the last 6 months we still haven’t done them.

So then we went and hired this team to do them for us, because we’re like, ‘We can’t even get these out the door. Let’s hire someone else to do it for us.” So we hire them, and first thing they do is they map out the same thing we mapped out 200 times, and then they start saying, “Well, for each email we need to be able to split test different emails and different headlines, and Actionetics doesn’t do this yet.”

So then they were trying to get us to recode Actionetics to add in split testing, and all these things and finally we’re 2 months in and Todd’s like, “We don’t even have an email yet, let alone an email to split test. Why don’t we just make this simple and put them in and just do it. Stop trying to make everything so complex. Let’s just use it the way it’s supposed to be built.”

So we did. We had them write the emails and we plugged them in, and there’s no split tests or nothing, but guess what? The emails are going out. Oh my gosh, a year and 2 months later we finally have the thing out.

And I think that so many times we get so complex with those things. I look at in the Dotcom Secrets book, 6 years ago is when I wrote this book initially, and the strategy was so simple. Somebody joins your list, take them on a soap opera sequence to build a relationship with you. When they finish that sequence they drop into a broadcast list, where we send out daily broadcast, telling stories about what’s happening in your current life right now, and you tie the stories somehow back into whatever it is you’re selling. And that’s it. It’s simple. You wake up every morning and that’s it.

I was telling my team this last week, I said, If…I look at all the things I do in a day. I’m being the CEO, I’m writing books, I’m creating content, I’m tweeting and videoing, and instagraming and all the things. There’s a million things that I’m doing every single day. All these things that are critical. If you look at what’s the one thing that I could do every single day that actually makes the most amount of money for me in the company, it would be to send out a daily Seinfeld email. To email a million plus people a message that gets them re-reminded about why they should use Clickfunnels and build a relationship with me, there’s nothing more valuable than that, yet I haven’t done it consistently since we launched Clickfunnels.

So it’s been 5 plus years since I’ve done the one thing that will probably be the most profitable thing I could possibly do. And the reason why is because we keep trying to build up all this complexity in our sequences. If someone buys this, then where in the value ladder they move? They go from here to here. All this stuff, and we’ve been talking about it for years, literally years. And none of the things are live yet.

So this is my commitment to myself, to go back to simplicity. It’s a commitment that Garrett made to me at Funnel Hacking Live, after we talked about this he said, “I’m calling my guys up, all my guys who have been begging me for all these insane features, that we moved everything on our platform over to, and now nothing is happening. We’re going back to simplicity, we’re moving everything back, we’re going to focus on simplicity.” So Garrett made that commitment to me, I’m making the commitment to you and my team, and to everybody. We’re going to go back to simplicity.

So my message for you guys today is that, stop focusing on the complexity. The complexity keeps you from actually finishing the project ever. And this is not just in business, it’s very true in business, but it’s also true in all aspects of life. In your relationships, in your family life, in your just all the things you’re doing. I think a lot of times we get into these super complex things.

I think about spiritually too. I have, I know if I woke up every morning and I read the scriptures, and that was my number one thing, that’s the most important thing I could do, my life would be a lot better. But instead I have these complexities of all the things I gotta do to try and get closer to God and be more spiritual, whatever it is, they are so complex it keeps me from ever doing it. What’s the simple thing, what’s the very simple thing you could do that actually has the biggest impact in your life?

Start thinking about that in all the different areas of your life, like in your personal life, your relationship, in your business, in your marketing, whatever the thing is, if you could water it all down and only get done one thing each day, what would be the most vital, most valuable, most important thing, and then just do that. And then maybe just take the rest of the day off. I don’t know. It depends on you. Or then do the second thing after that, then take the rest of the day off.

Anyway, I hope that helps somebody out there. Again, complexity is the killer of us having success. So simplify things and I promise you things will be better for you. So hope that helps. Thanks you guys all for listening. If you got anything from this episode please take a screenshot of it, and post it on Instagram or Facebook or tweet it, or wherever else you put your stuff, and pleas tag me. Use #marketingsecrets and tag me, I’d love to see it and get your comments about what you thought was good about this episode, what you learned from it.

Obviously, all these episodes we create for free, so how you pay back is by sharing these things and letting other people know about it. So thanks again you guys, appreciate you all, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye everybody.

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