What Type Of Opportunity Are You In?

05/22/13 • 9 min

Are you an A level marketer in a B level opportunity? Let me show you how to change!

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Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and we are on my way to work today. This is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. In today’s podcast, we’re going to be talking about what type of opportunity are you in right now. Today, I want to talk about types of opportunities that we’re in. this is something that I’ve never really thought about.

When I first got in the business, I just started moving forward. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know what was happening. I had an idea for this software, so I made that and I started selling it. Then I had this idea for potato gun DVDs so I made that. Then I had an idea.

I started having ideas, and then just making that stuff and trying to sell it. I had no real plan or purpose or anything. It was just things started happening. We started moving forward. I think that a lot of times happens with a lot of us in our businesses.

Last summer, my wife and I had a chance to go to Kenya for about 10 days. We were doing a project with World Teacher Trade which is a really cool charity that two of my friends, Stu and Amy McLaren started. We had a chance to go out there. It’s one of the most amazing experiences while we were out there, helping build schools. It was a really cool thing.

While we were out there, there were probably I think 10 or 15 other high end internet marketers who had all donated money to build these classrooms that were all there with us. We were building schools and hanging out with the kids, and having a great time together. I remember one day, I was sitting next to Bill Harrison.

If you guys don’t know Bill, he’s a brilliant marketer, one of the coolest guys from a marketing standpoint. He and I sat and talked for 20 hours straight without even a break because the guy has read more books on marketing than anyone I ever met, a really cool guy. I really enjoy my time with him every time I have a chance to talk with him.

When we were in Kenya, he started talking about the type of opportunity he was in. He said, “It’s kind of frustrating me. I feel like I have A level skills but I feel like I’m at a B level opportunity.” He said, “I have these friends who have B or C level skills who aren’t that good at marketing or business, yet they somehow got plugged into an A level opportunity, and a couple of them just sold their businesses for $100 million.”

He’s like, “Our company does well. We do $10 to $12 million a year but that’s kind of the peak. We maxed out everything that’s possible in our business because it’s a B level opportunity. We can’t really get outside of that.” He’s like, “Also, the other issue is that I built a company that was based off of,” actually his brother’s brand so it’s based on his brother’s.

He’s like, “It’s a business that’s very difficult if not impossible to sell. The problem with that, when you build a company completely off of your face and your name, at first, it’s a lot easier to get traction and make sales, and to grow a business but long term, it’s harder to sell because you sell it, then the personality dies behind the business.”

He said, “I always felt like our business is like a rental. No matter what, we’ll never own it to the point where we could sell it. It’s like a rental home. We could make good income on it, have good cash flow but it’s not something that we own and could sell someday.” Between those two things, talking about the opportunity and talking about basically we’re in a rental business if it’s that type of business, I really took that to heart.

I thought a lot about it. That was last summer. In January, I was at the traffic conversion event and I saw Bill again. We started talking. I told him, “What you talked about really had a big impact on me with the whole level, what type of opportunity are you in.” He asked me, “What are you doing about that?”

I said, “You know, I’m not sure yet.” I remember I had this conversation with the guys on my team. We were all there at the event together, and kind of said it looked like we’re in a good business. We’re at a I feel a B level opportunity.

First off, our business does well. Our best year ever, we did over $10 million so it’s a really good business but I feel like our skill set, what we bring to the table is a lot more than that. I really feel like we were in the same situation as Bill where we had a B level opportunity with A level skills, and we wanted to figure out a way to increase that.

We strategically sat down and figured out with what we have right now, how could we change our business to actually make it an A level opportunity where we could apply our A level skills, and really make what we think what we’re worth in what we can do. Because of that, we basically took a business that was doing $10 million a year and completely transformed it...

Are you an A level marketer in a B level opportunity? Let me show you how to change!

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Previous Episode

Polarity

How to use controversy to create a fan-base and to sell more of your stuff.

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Hey everybody, welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. This is Russell Brunson and I’m excited for today’s podcast. I hope you all had an awesome weekend. I had a chance to go on a family trip down to a wedding, which was always fun. While I was driving, my thoughts were upon marketing.

I wanted to give you guys an eight hour podcast. That’s how long I was in the car but I was dealing with a bunch of crazy kids and a beautiful wife, so was not able to do one but I was thinking a lot about it. I got some good topics for this week coming up. I want to go through a bunch of them.

Right now is the one that I was most excited about, and it’s the topic of polarity. This is one of the keys in your marketing. If you learn how to master this, it will mean more traffic, more sales, and a lot more repeat sales and raving fans. The back story behind where this concept came from today, I got a Skype from one of my close marketing buddies who makes a lot of money but is very conservative, very neutral type personality.

He Skyped me and said, “Man, I can’t believe how much drama you’ve been involved with in the last month.” At first, I was trying to remember, “What drama was he talking about?” Then I remembered all the drama we’ve been involved with in the last month. It’s been really interesting.

One thing in the drama, some of you guys remember I was competing for a Ferrari which I won. I thrashed the guy who took number two, and the number two guy did not take that very happily. The last four days of the contest, he went out there and started this whole hate smear campaign against me which was kind of funny. It was like a two year old girl crying after getting beat up by a bigger kid. That’s kind of what it reminded me of.

He was doing all this stuff, and there was all this controversy was caused, and there were people that were really upset at him, and people upset at me but what was interesting is the last day of the contest, I didn’t really say much. He was the one out there ranting and raving, and posting stuff all over Facebook and trying to trash me, and tell everyone he was a better person than me.

We had three times the sales the last day than we had the entire prior last week combined, so it worked in our favor tremendously. In fact, I had a bunch of JV partners who were so annoyed at what he was doing, they actually went out there and were promoting, without me even asking, were promoting my bonus package just so that he wouldn’t win which was kind of funny. It all kind of comes around.

Then we were in the middle of this launch of Rippln which I’m sure some of you guys have had a chance to see that. I was brought under to write the whole sales and marketing part of the company launch, help orchestrate all that stuff. It’s been going amazing. We’ve gotten over half a million people to sign up in the first 30 days. It’s been fun, but with that, there’s been a lot of controversy written about it.

We had Tech Crunch, this big huge tech blog, go and write. They don’t really write anti articles but they wrote a huge anti article about my video, the pre-launch video which made me proud. Then we got Salty Droid did a write-up on it, and some other guys who think they’re cool wrote big write-ups about how we’re scam artists, and all this stuff.

It kind of made me smile because all this fuel has just been great for our business, for our brand, for everything that we’re doing. The controversy behind things has been awesome. Now, what I want to talk about today is the concept of polarity. Polarity is the opposite of neutrality. A lot of people in their marketing want to be very neutral. They don’t want to offend anybody.

They are very careful not to step on anybody’s toes but the problem with being neutral is when you’re neutral, you’re boring. Nobody listens to you. Nobody pays attention. As much fun as it is to make everybody happy, that’s not the way to make money. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not in this business to make everybody happy. I’m in this business to make money.

The neutrality behind most people’s marketing is what keeps them from really succeeding. It makes them irrelevant. It makes them so that people don’t really talk about you. You may have some people that are interested but nobody talks about you. That’s what causes your business and your brand to grow.

It was interesting, I was talking to Mike Filson about this awhile ago, and Mike said one of his biggest things he’s always trying to do is figure out how can I stay relevant. He said, “You know, guys like me and him have been in this market for 10 years and so, and you look at how many people and personalities have come and gone in that time,” and he said, “most of them just aren’t relevant anymore. What are we doing to stay relevant, to sta...

Next Episode

A Student Of Marketing

What is the secret message I’m trying to get to you?...

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Hey, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing in Your Car podcast today. It is a beautiful day. Hey everyone, this is Russell again. It’s Friday today and I’m excited because we’re heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend. We’re going to have some fun out at the lake with my family, so I’m excited for that today but on my drive in to get some stuff done this morning before we head out of town, I want to give you guys a quick message.

This message has to do with becoming a student of marketing. There’s this guy I got some text messages from yesterday. He’s someone who I met in the last six months or so and someone who I think is a really cool guy, who wants to be an entrepreneur. He’s trying to learn this stuff. He’s got his first app he’s been creating, and I’ve been helping him, steering him the right way.

When Rippln came out, which obviously a lot of you guys probably know what Rippln is. It’s a new viral app that we’re helping launch and stuff like that. I showed him that. He got excited and signed up, and started talking about it to some people, and started doing some stuff. Then last night, he texted me and said, “Hey, can you take me and my wife off of Rippln?”

I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “I’m tired of getting all the text messages and emails, and it’s not for me,” all this stuff, “please cancel it.” So I wrote him back and said, “Yeah, just go contact [email protected]. They can take care of it.” I sat there. It really bugged me. I wanted to write him back but I didn’t because I knew if I did, it would be kind of out of me being upset a little bit.

It just makes me sad because I know someone like him, he’s trying to learn this internet marketing thing and trying to learn apps, trying to learn how to launch his own app. I gave him behind the scenes access to the fastest growing social network app launch in the history of the world. He got behind the scenes access to watch it going live.

He’s getting all the marketing material texted and emailed to him every single day, and instead of looking at that and saying, “Wow, this is a really good case study about how to launch an app,” he got annoyed with it and asked to leave and to cancel it. It just blows my mind how many times people who are trying to learn marketing get upset at marketing.

It drives me crazy. I can’t tell you how many emails we send out doing cool marketing, showing cool marketing, and actually marketing to people, and instead of people looking at that and saying, “Wow, that’s a good idea. I’m going to go and implement that in my business,” people come back a lot of the times and just get upset and say, “Oh, I can’t believe you keep emailing me. I can’t believe this.”

They’re upset about whatever it might be, and it just makes me laugh because the reason why they joined my list, the reason why they listen to this podcast, the reason why you come to my teleseminars is to learn how to make money. Sure, I’m going to be selling you stuff along the way but watching the process is worth as much if not more money than the actual thing we’re selling every single time.

For example, yesterday, we did a webinar that in the first 90 minutes or whatever, in the 90 minute webinar, we did $80,000 in sales. Now, a lot of people were on that webinar and they got excited by the product and they bought it, but if you were just to have watched the process about how we got people on the call, what happened on the webinar, the words we said, the slides we used, the process, the close, the takeaway, the offer, I would have paid $1000 just to have seen behind the scenes of that webinar, what I did.

Everybody had a front stage pass. Everyone is on my email list. They all got the emails. They all sat there on the webinar. They’re watching the replay cycle right now. From this webinar, we’ll probably make a quarter million dollars and there will be people unsubscribing from my list because they’re annoying I’m marketing to them.

Why did you get on my list in the first place? You’re trying to learn marketing from me. Watch what I’m doing. Anyway, I just wanted to stress that because so many times, I think that we’re looking for something and we’re missing what’s right in front of our eyes. If you want to learn marketing, you cannot be annoyed by people marketing to you.

You need to watch that and study it. With my friend, I started texting this back but then I deleted it but I wanted to tell him, “Look, if you want to be passionate about this career, you should be throw away all your marketing books, quit going to college, whatever it is but every one of those emails that Rippln is sending out or that I’m sending out, you should print those out, put them in a binder, and study them every single day because ...