The 12 Questions Everyone Keeps Asking About Selling $3,000,000 in 90 Minutes
Yes the rumors are true.
Russell Brunson collected over $3,000,000 in cash after he gave a 90 minute presentation at Grant Cardone’s 10x event this past weekend.
Not $3,000,000 in contracts or anticipated sales. We’re talking actual cash in hand.
If you followed along on his social media accounts throughout the day on Friday, his team livestreamed a portion of the talk on YouTube, Russell showed stacks of order forms littered all over his hotel room on his Instagram story while team members furiously tried to process orders, and he even took a Facebook live selfie directly on stage, DURING the talk.
The presentation happened on Friday morning, but even now – on Wednesday – the work isn’t done yet.
There’s still about $500,000 above and beyond the $3M in sales, in declined credit card orders they are trying to capture and save.
But more importantly, there’s so much to be learned, dissected, and leveraged from the record set on the 10x stage this past weekend. Another “four-minute” mile has been broken, and every entrepreneur, marketer, and salesperson wants to know….
…how did he do it?
Though I personally did not attend the event, I found myself glued to social media all day, looking for photos, comments, posts, and livestreams that would give me a glimpse into what was happening at Mandalay Bay.
I wrote down all the questions and comments I saw people asking about it as the news spread of how much he sold.
I impatiently waited the weekend…and then first thing Monday morning, I asked him if he’d give us all a peek into what happened behind the scenes.
Here’s what people were asking, and what he said….
1. How long did it take you to prepare your presentation?
Russell: I could tell you that I only spent three days on the slidedeck, piecing together the best parts of my older presentations with new content specifically for this audience, but in truth, all the stories and social proof I used…took me years to acquire.
It’s taken me a decade to master The Perfect Webinar script. I’ve literally done it thousands of times. I took a year of my life to write Expert Secrets and dissect the script down to the most minute detail.
The slidedeck I used for the 10x event was modified for the audience I knew I’d be talking to – many of them salespeople and entrepreneurs wanting to learn specifically how to sell.
The Funnelhacks presentation I’ve been giving for a year was the backbone and foundation of it, and so it did really only take about three days to craft a newer version of it. Had I started from scratch, it would have taken me one to two weeks to put it together.
2. How did you come up with a great offer?
Russell: In order to explain this, I need to give you a bit of backstory.
You see, this 10x event wasn’t my first.
I actually spoke at last year’s event and sold nearly a million dollars worth of Clickfunnels to a crowd of about 2800. It’s funny, the first year – Grant Cardone didn’t really know me – and when I asked for some staff and tables to help me process orders at the end of the presentation, they wouldn’t even get me a table.
“Ah you know, just say the price of your offer and talk about it a bunch. That’s how it works with this crowd. We’ve had Internet guys speak before and the normal marketing tactics don’t work,” Grant said.
Even though I nodded in agreement (I didn’t want to be THAT guy after just meeting him), I just KNEW that it wasn’t going to go this way because I spent years learning how to sell from the stage.
Sure enough, at the end of the 90 minutes and after I gave my offer, the “table rush” began. People were getting out of their seats and rushing to the back of the room to place orders.
Two of my Inner Circle members, Alex and Leila Hormozi, they were there and helped process orders with Dave Woodard, my one man sales team. They all stood at the exits, handing out forms – no tables or anything! Even without a perfectly choreographed presentation, it was a near million dollar day.
Grant and his team were stunned. They’d never seen a table rush like that before, and for the next month, Grant kept saying, “I want you to show me how to do that!”
About a month later, he asked me to speak at this year’s event, and I knew that a good portion of the people in the room would be the same people who bought last year.
Not only that, Grant was so impressed with my first presentation, he leveraged that video for the next 12 months on social media, selling millions of dollars of Clickfunnels subscriptions to his audience. I would say nearly half a million people have seen that presentation and that video.
I knew I had to offer something different and new, while still selling Clickfunnels. I knew I had to do something bigger and better to get people to buy again, without deviating from the core offer that is already tested and profitable.
Here are a couple things I did….
- I offered all the training necessary to be successful. This included Funnel Hacks, Funnel Builder Secrets, Spy for Profit, Traffic Secrets, 12 months of Clickfunnels, and Funnel Scripts. You literally need nothing else. Nothing. And even if you had Clickfunnels, it would still be worth your while to pre-pay a year upfront because of how valuable the extras were, not to mention the savings on just the software alone.
- I showed the value of the bonus training. A lot of times it’s hard to show how valuable something like a training course is. But with Traffic Secrets bonus for example, I paid John Reese almost $1M to license and buy his course and content. I put the wire transfer screenshots on the slidedeck to show that I was giving them for FREE, the course that I paid a million dollars for.
- The power of free. I framed the sexiest part of the offer as free when they invested in the main offer. Everyone wants the software for free, and so people who bought get 12 months of the highest level of Clickfunnels, completely free.
3. What are the things you do right before a presentation to stay focused?
Russell: It’s pretty normal for me to be nervous before an event, even if it’s small. For this event though, I was nervous for a full two days leading up to it. It was intense.
In fact, I remember after last year’s 10x when Grant told me he wanted me to speak again, and that this time, he was going to get 9000 people to attend…I didn’t really believe him.
9000 people is a LOT of people.
But when we had a meeting about a month before, he told me that 8500 tickets were already sold. I think my nerves even kicked in a bit there too.
He did it. He filled the Mandalay Bay arena with 9000 people.
I wish I had some magic formula of focus I could just list out for you, but really….I did the common sense stuff.
- I tried to get enough sleep.
- I ate well.
- I went on the stage the day before to get my bearings and see what it looked like.
- I prayed. I asked God to give me the words to say to really inspire people to change their lives.
4. What is the hardest thing about the logistics of processing that many sales so quickly?
Russell: I think sometimes we Internet Marketers lose sense of what 9000 people actually means. When you’re sending emails and doing virtual webinars, you can’t FEEL the presence of the audience like you can when you’re in the room with a crowd.
Having run my own events and speaking from a lot of stages, I knew that if I could close 1000 people out of 9000, that would be a logistics nightmare.
If you’ve ever been to the Mandalay Bay, it’s an arena. They have boxing matches there. There’s no easy way to do a table rush because of how many levels and exits there were.
Grant’s solution was to use their “app” to process sales. Basically everyone goes on their phone, and buys whatever the speaker is selling when he gets to his pitch.
I immediately said no. I begged them to keep my offer off the app because the biggest psychological and social proof is in the table rush. When you watch people get up from their chairs to go buy, that pressure and fear of missing out helps egg on those who are hesitant.
Thankfully his team agreed to let me and my team handle the logistics of manual order processing.
We also knew that if we actually got 1000 people to get out of their chairs and buy, there’d be quite a bit of a line. And when you spend $3000 on a digital offer, your customers want something physical to show for it, and a reason to stand in line.
So, we gave everyone who bought – a physical package to represent their order. Inside the package were instructions on how to get their account set up, a letter to their business partner or spouse (who would no doubt need some explanation as to what their partner just bought and why), as well as a golden ticket to redeem some free gifts (I’ll talk about that more in a bit).
5. How did you prepare your team and/or your company for this event?
Russell: The biggest thing we all had to figure out was how to get order forms into the hands of 9000 people without sabotaging our conversions.
Many nights were spent brainstorming this problem and I bet a lot of people are wondering what the big deal is about handing out order forms.
Here’s the problem….
Most people give the audience their order forms before the presentation starts, or right as the pitch is starting.
What happens?
People take their focus off the presenter and instead start reading the order form, looking for a pen, etc. It breaks all the momentum and makes it so hard to get peoples’ focus back to finish and close the sale.
Even if this wasn’t an issue, do you know how long it takes to hand out 9000 order forms? At least three or four hours if you have a team of 15 people.
So our team worked on what we’ve now nicknamed “the Trojan Horse order form”.
We knew we’d have to have the order form on their seat, and so how could we hide the order form until just the right time?
We assembled a package. The package included the order form inside an envelope with a big sticker that said “Do Not Open Until After Russell’s Presentation”. We also bought little gifts to give out, sort of as a decoy so they wouldn’t notice the order form in the envelope.
We gave out I Build Funnel stickers and #funnelhacker popsockets. These little gifts enact the law of reciprocity (where people feel more inclined to give back now that we’ve given them something). We also included a pen, knowing they’d need one to fill out the order form.
Lastly the arena. The chairs don’t lay flat, so we put all of these things inside a Clickfunnels bag so it could hang on the chair and not fall under the seat.
All in all, we had about ten Clickfunnels team members come to the event. They spent hours putting packets on every chair. They stood at the table all day and into the evening collecting order forms and giving out gifts. They processed every order manually, and are still – right now – following up with failed payments.
Even those who stayed back were prepared for it! Our social media team was out collecting comments and photos as people posted them in our groups. We also had our billing and support team staffed and at the ready to handle the influx of new customers.
The only hiccup was with some of our temp staff we hired who didn’t follow instructions very well. Other than that, our entire company was prepared for this event.
6. How has it been since the event?
Russell: Nuts. My phone will not stop ringing and ringing. In fact, a bunch of the Clickfunnels team is at the Traffic & Conversion event in San Diego and there’s a lot of talk about the speech that broke the 10x event. Still haven’t figured out what to nickname it yet.
I felt bad for all the speakers who presented after I finished. It took all day to process orders and so there were a lot of people who stood in the hallway and missed the next few talks.
It’s interesting because I know that the majority would take a world record like this and make it a good story…and leave it at that.
But I know that I can make a lot more than $3,000,000 once I’m done leveraging this event.
Knowing ahead of time that I would want to use whatever happened on the stage to sell more Clickfunnels, one of the videographers on my team – Dan Usher – decided to go with me to shoot a bunch of B-roll for the promo videos we’re going to use for upcoming campaigns.
We wanted aerial shots of Mandalay Bay but the only way to do that is by helicopter. More specifically, a helicopter without doors.
So yes, we rented a doorless helicopter and flew through the night over the city for three seconds of B-roll. It was completely awesome and completely worth it.
We also made sure not to waste a moment of Vegas fun – my wife and I went to see a Michael Jackson show, and my friend Bart Miller took us both shopping for Funnelhacking Live outfits.
7. What is the one piece of advice you’d give to someone about to sell from stage or a webinar?
Russell: Stop dabbling and go all in. If you want to sell from stage, it’s not enough to watch a successful webinar or stage presentation once. You need to watch it 100 times and then do it 1000 times yourself. It’s hard work and grueling, but you will learn so much more than if you simply create an automated webinar and let it run.
Read Expert Secrets. Write and re-write your webinars. Watch every webinar I’ve ever done and study them all. There are things going on besides the words on the page. You want to model the energy level, the inflection in my voice, the pacing, the stories, all of it.
8. Why did you have people do manual orders instead of digital?
Russell: So I told you about the app that they were using to sell right? The main reason I refused to use the app is because I want the social proof of movement, of watching people rush for the back table to get to the front of the line.
The line for the Funnel Builder Secrets offer wrapped around the entire arena. The arena was so big you couldn’t hear the rustle of papers and movement the same way you might in a smaller venue, but the line itself, 5-6 levels deep created social momentum and pressure.
But here is another reason to do manual orders over digital: wi-fi.
The Internet connection in the arena was terrible. Imagine 9000 people all logging in and using their phones at once? When the wi-fi didn’t work, some of the speakers had to lamely tell people to buy the offer later when they could get better signal.
Conversions just die.
9. What was the incentive for them to wait in that long line during the table rush?
Russell: Okay so the golden ticket inside the package. That golden ticket really incentivized people to hang out in line.
If they handed in their golden ticket, we gave them a physical copy of the Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook, the audio books of DotCom Secrets and Expert Secrets to listen to on the plane ride home, as well as a photo opportunity with me.
I learned the photo opp thing from Brendon Burchard.
My wife to this day has no idea why people want a photo with me, and frankly, neither do I, but I couldn’t walk three feet in the hotel without getting stopped.
In fact, one morning, I innocently thought I could go down to the lobby in my pjs and bedhead and buy a bottle of water, and 30 minutes later, I was still snapping selfies with people.
So a photo opportunity was a BIG incentive to wait in line. I felt bad saying no to the selfies after the presentation, but I spent four hours smiling until my cheeks cracked for all the people who did buy, so I had to stick to my guns as much as possible.
10. Do you feel different now that you’ve broken another huge record?
Russell: To be honest? I don’t feel that different. My goal now is to keep the momentum going, leverage the event, and to not let my head get too big.
If you keep following along on my blog and podcast, you’ll hear more about what we’re doing with the event so stay tuned.
11. Does Grant Cardone get any kickback since it was his event?
Russell: Yes, he gets 50% of sales. And it’s so totally and completely worth it because he had to do a ton of work to get 9000 butts in seats.
12. Is there anything else you’d do differently?
Russell: I’m really proud to say that our team was well prepared. The planning, presentation, and execution went smoothly.
I think the only thing I’d change is the “double close”. After the presentation, I met up with Grant and told him that I thought I could close more people if I had a few minutes to give one last push on stage. He agreed.
So the next day, I got on stage, and offered everyone in the arena who bought, a free ticket to a masterclass where they could learn the step by step process of how I sold $3,000,000 off the stage.
Looking back, I would have probably made a few slides or orchestrated that more, since I literally went on stage and sort of shot from the hip for about ten minutes.
Even with the lack of preparation there, I closed an additional $250,000.
At the end of the day, my whole goal for this event was to hit $3,000,000 in sales in 90 minutes, and here’s why. When you do an event, you give 50% to the event promoter. And so if I could hit this goal, that means I’d net $1.5 million in 90 minutes, which is $1,000,000 an hour.
Now, next time someone says they want an hour of my time, I’ll say, “Sure – that’ll be $1,000,000 please.”
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Now do you know why I read and follow everything Russell says and does and have been an affiliate partner with him for years? He gets results. - Dave