The Secret Formula – DotCom Secrets

This is the first chapter called “The Secret Formula” of the book DotComSecrets by Russell Brunson. It’s one of my favorite books about internet marketing. You will learn how to set up a sales funnel and which components you can use in a sales funnel.

It was 11:27 a.m. on a Monday morning, and no matter what I told myself, I just couldn’t get out of bed. The muscles in my body ached, although it didn’t make sense. I knew I wasn’t sore from exercise because I hadn’t worked out. I had a sick feeling in my stomach that felt like the flu, but I knew I wasn’t sick. In my head, I was WISHING that I had a boss, so he could fire me and end this nightmare that I knew I had to face as soon as I finally stumbled out of bed.

How had I gotten here? Just a few years earlier, I had “officially” become an entrepreneur and launched my own company. And despite a lot of mistakes along the way, I had learned a few tricks and was having success. The company I started was profitable. We were serving people and making a difference, but for some reason, I was miserable.
A few weeks later, I found myself in front of a huge, blank whiteboard trying to sketch out why I was feeling this way. Something was wrong with my business, and I wanted to figure out what it was. After what seemed like hours, I wrote down two words:
Who?
Result?

I asked myself, “WHO is the person I really want to work with?”
Up to that point in my business, I had been trying to sell to anyone and everyone I could. While that sounds smart at first, it left me tired, frustrated, and empty inside.

After I got a good idea of WHO I would ideally work with if I had that choice, I started to think about the RESULT I would want to give them. I asked myself, “What could I serve my customer at the highest level?” I realized it wasn’t through a product or a service. Rather, it was by giving them a result that would change their lives. That result is where I wanted to take them.

A few minutes later, I added two more words to the board:
Where?
Bait?

WHERE are these people? How can I find them online? What type of BAIT can I create to attract my dream client and repel everyone else? These questions eventually became the outline for what I now call “The Secret Formula”, and it’s really the first step that you HAVE to take before you can grow any company.

THE SECRET FORMULA

The secret formula consits of four simple questions. These are the same four questions that I ask anyone who hires me for personal consultations. At the time of writing, companies pay me twenty-five thousand dollars per day to help them understand and implement this formula and the funnels and scripts inside of this book. Now while I know you didn’t pay anywhere near twenty-five thousand to learn this information and go through this process, I recommend you treat this and all of the exercises inside of this book as if you did invest the full amount. If you do, you will get a lot more out of the process I’m going to take you through, and this book will become like a private, twenty-five thousand dollar consultation with me. Okay, let me walk you through the process.

Question #1: Who Is Your Dream Client? The first question you have to ask yourself is, Who do I actually want to work with? Most of us start with a product idea, never thinking about who we want as clients, customers, vendors, and associates. But these are the people you will be interacting with day in and day out. You’ll probably spend more time with these people than you own friends and family. You choose your significant other carefully, so why wouldn’t you take the same time and care in deciding who your dream client or customer will be? If you’re just getting started, this may not seem important. But I promise you that if you don’t consciously choose your dream client, one day you will wake up like I did, working with people who exhaust you and wishing that someone could fire you from the business you created.

After I had successfully launched my first software company, a lot of people took notice of my success online and started asking me how I was making money. Because I saw the demand, I thought it would be fun to teach others how to start their own businesses online.

The good thing was there were a LOT of people who wanted to start businesses, and we made a lot of money teaching them. But the downside was that most of them didn’t have any money (and couldn’t invest in the higher-ticket thinks I wanted to sell). And most had no business experience, so I had to spend tons of time on the fundamentals, and that drove me crazy (which is why I didn’t want to get out of bed in the mornings). I had so much value I wanted to provide people – showing how I had scaled my companies, teaching conversion secrets and how we structure our funnels – but 99% of my time was spent showing them how to buy a domain and set up hosting.

I literally spent years serving these customers, and it made me miserable. My family suffered, and no matter how much money we made, I wasn’t happy. It took years before I sat back and actually thought about the WHO. I realized I had overlooked some pretty important questions:

Who are my dream clients?
What do they look like?
What are they passionate about?
What are their goals, dreams, and desires?

After about a week of thinking about the WHO question, I sat down and created two customer avatars: one for the men I wanted to work with and one for the women I wanted to work with.

For the women, I picked a name and wrote it down: Julie. Then I listed out the things I knew about Julie. She is successful and driven; she has a message to share; she values her personal growth over money; and she’s already grown her business to at least five figures a year.

Next, I wrote down the name Mike. Next to Mike’s name, I wrote out the things I knew about Mike. He is a former athlete. At some point, he has helped to change someone’s life in a small way and wants to learn how to help more people.  He values growth over money, and he’s already built his business to at least five figures a year.

The I went to Google images and typed in Julie and the characteristics I had written out. Within minutes, I found a picture that looked like the women in my mind. I printed it out and hung it on my wall. I did the same for Mike, and within minutes, I had both pictures of my dream clients hanging on my wall.

This may seem like a silly exercise, but it’s important that you do it anyway. Really spend some time thinking about who you want to work with. Write out their characteristics and then go find an actual picture to represent them. It’s amazing how your perspective changes when you have a physical picture of your ideal customer – instead of a hazy, half-formed image in your head.

Question #2: Where Can You Find Them? The next question in the Secret Formula is WHERE can you find this ideal man or woman? Where do they hang out online? Are they on Facebook or Instagram? What groups are they part of? What email newsletters do they subscribe to? What blogs do they read? Are they reading The New York Times or The Huffington Post? What other interests do they have? Do they like sports or the arts? How about fishing or race cars? If you don’t know the who, it will be hard to find out where your perfect client can be found. So make sure you know exactly who you’re trying to attract. Then just write down a few places you think the prospect might hang out online. Over the next few chapters, we’re going to take a deep dive into how and where to find your dream clients. I’ll show you exactly where to find the people you’re looking for.

Question #3: What Bait Will You Use to Attract Them? Once we know where the dream customers are, we have to create the right bait to attract them. Your bait could be a physical book, a CD, DVD, or an audio recording – anything that your dream customer would pay attention to and want. As my company moved away from selling to beginners and toward attracting dream clients, our first step was to create a new bait that would attract “Mike” or “Julie”.

So we created a book called DotComSecrets Labs: 108 Proven Split Test Winners. This bait worked great for us, because most beginners don’t know what a split test is. But we KNEW that Julie and Mike (our DREAM customers) would know what these terms mean and they would be hungry to get their hands on the book. Within days of launching this new offer, we had thousands of dream clients lining up to work with us. When you find out what your dream clients want, it becomes very easy to attract them. Throughout this book, we’re going to talk more about creating the right bait. Right now, just realize the bait has to match what your dream customer wants.

Question #4: What Result Do You Want To Give Them? Once you’ve hooked your dream customers with the perfect bait, the last question is what RESULT do you want to give them? I’m not talking about what product or service you want to sell them. A business is NOT about products and services. A business is about what result you can get for your clients. Once you (and they) understand that concept, then price is no longer a barrier.

For me, I knew that the best way I can serve my dream client is to send my team to their office and help build out their sales funnels, hire and train their sales team, and set up systems to drive consistent leads into the company. That is how I can have the deepest impact and serve the client at the highest level. Ideally, it’s where I would like to take all of my customers. That type of service is not cheap, but the results I can deliver at that level are amazing. To put it in perspective, for that service, my company charges a retainer and a percentage of sales, which combined equal one million dollars.

I understand that many of my customers won’t be able to pay me for that level of service (which is why we develop other products and services), but understanding where you ultimately want to take the dream client is the key to this step.

Imagine that your clients could pay you anything to get a desired result. What, then, would you do to help guarantee their success? Where would you lead them? What does that place look like? Keep that place in your mind; it’s the pinnacle of success for your clients. It’s where you want to take them, and it’s the key to this last step.

That’s it. The four steps again are as follows:

1. Who are your dream clients?
2. Where can you find them?
3. What bait will you use to attract them?
4. What result do you want to give them?

I know that this exercise seems simple, but it is the key to everything else we will be discussing in this book. So take a few minutes now and really answer these four questions.

Up next: In the next chapter, we are going to dig a little deeper and focus on the steps you need to follow to lead your dream customer from taking the “bait” to consuming your product offerings to arriving “where” you want to take them. If you structure this correctly, people will naturally ascend to where you want them to be. They will give you more money, and you’ll be able to serve them at a much higher level.

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