Ep. 76 What Stressing About The Right Tools Really Says About You!

May 15, 2020

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So today I want to talk about something I don’t normally talk about on the podcast. It’s kind of a little bit of tech talk here, but if I see another post in a Facebook group about, “What platform do you think I should use for x?” I’m going to lose my mind.



It’s amazing to me how much time people spend thinking about the tools. And obviously tools are important. And when you’re looking at business you want to make sure you have the right people in place, you want to make sure you have the right process in place, and you want to have the right tools. But it’s really funny to me because if you were to like, if you were to survey a group you would see that when you look at what business is made, which is people and process and tools, there is far, far more discussion about tools than anything else.

And I think it’s partly a little bit of a shiny object syndrome, it’s partly that the tools, marketing, you know, the way the software markets itself as sort of this be all, end all magic bullet, going to make everything easy. It creates a lot of confusion and there’s a lot of competition in the market. So what I want to do today is kind of solve the problem at the source, rather than just answering, “Should I use Kajabi or should I use Thinkific? Should I use Learndash, should I Woocommerce? Should I use Clickfunnels?” And really get at the heart of the matter.

So a couple things that are important. Number one, if you have purchased Funnel RX that’s one of our, that’s our introductory funnel building program. It’s an add on to Offer Cure, so go to OfferCure.com purchase Offer Cure and then you get a chance to buy Funnel RX. We talk about the basic building blocks of a funnel, and we talk about it without talking about tools, because this is a problem that I’ve seen. And you know, I go through the five assets that any funnel needs, which you know, is a sales asset, a cart asset, a delivery asset, a follow up asset, and a traffic asset. Okay, so if you haven’t gotten that course and taken that course, you should. It’s one of my best courses.

Okay, but here’s the thing. Asking a question about a tool without understanding the context and goals of what you’re trying to do is a problem, because there are a lot of tools and there are a lot of tools that work, and there are plenty of scenarios where you can find people having success with all different sorts of setups.

The first question that you’re going to ask yourself is “When I deliver my content, what kind of experience do I want to provide my customer?” Now if your content is more based around coaching, around consulting, maybe you do a lot of stuff in a Facebook group, maybe your course is 6 or 7 modules, it has a workbook along with it, and some videos, it’s not a very complicated situation setup. You don’t need anything super complicated. You certainly don’t need a custom solution for that.

So custom solutions are required when you have thousands and thousands of students and maybe they have to pass one area before they can proceed to the next, things like that. In those cases you have, you know, it’s a whole different ball game, you want to build something custom at that point. But for probably 80 -90% of you listening, if you were building a program, you don’t need that, so pretty much just eliminate all the custom solutions right off the table because they’re not necessary.

The second question you want to ask yourself is “How tech savvy am I? How much do I like fiddling with tech?” and if you answer that question and say, “I’m just, I hate tech and I don’t really have anyone on my team that loves tech, and I’m going to be doing it all myself.” You are most likely going to want to do a simple, hosted solution. Something that is drag and drop, easy to manage, probably doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles, but is going to get the job done. So that pretty much limits you to something like Kajabi, or Teachable, or Thinkific, or Member Pro is another one.

And the next question you’re going to ask yourself is “How am I going to sell this?” Because if you’re selling the content in a funnel, you want to make sure that the funnel sells a smooth delivery, right. So for example, if you’re using Clickfunnels and you have your sales funnel in Clickfunnels and then they buy, and you use the membership site in Clickfunnels, it’s just a very seamless process because it’s all one tool and get it done.

If you have a little bit more complication, like you have the sales funnel in Clickfunnels, but you have the actual content in Member’s Pro or Teachable or Thinkific, still you’re not going to need a tech degree. So you’re not going to have to stress about that, but you will need to use like Zapier or some little program to sort of bridge the gap between the two.

Okay, so if you are completely tech illiterate, you want to get a hosted solution where everything just kind of works. If you are, if you can handle Zapier, you feel like you can handle that or you can hire someone, you can combine two programs. A lot of people, I do this, I combine two. I combine Clickfunnels and Teachable. And it’s only for people who are going to be using very complex systems around grading and quizzes and graduating and all that kind of stuff where you would need a custom solution. Something like Learndash or Memberium, you know, a lot of WordPress solutions are very customizable. But they also are the most difficult.

So as you can see, I’ve just really pretty much eliminated the majority of the confusion. Now some of you will still spend 55 hours trying to decide between Teachable or Kajabi, and this is where I would suggest that if this is the kind of person you are, where you’re over thinking, the problem is the over thinking, the problem isn’t the tool. You can do great with Kajabi or Teachable, really they’re similar. And if you’re sort of like spending more than 15 minutes going back and forth on which one is the right one to use, you should check yourself into the over thinking center, because that’s what’s really going on.

Because somewhere underneath that sort of wrangling and decision making process you are saying to yourself that this is a critical decision that requires a couple hours of my time and crowd sourcing. And I don’t trust that I’m going to have success unless I make this decision right. And this is one of 8000 decisions that you have to make in your business. And so one of the things, as entrepreneurs that you have to get really good at, is knowing which decisions require the kind of bandwidth that you’re giving it.

Because if I were to over think and spend all this time trying to differentiate what I need, I’m wasting my most precious resource and I’m not getting any farther. And I’ve seen so many people who have spent thousands of dollars on programs and then wrestle with the idea of spending $97 a month for a tool. In fact, back in the winter when we were running Launch Gorgeous, one of our students said she had this massive aha about how much dissonance there was between her value of like, “Oh, I’ll spend money for a coach. Or I’ll spend money for a course. But I won’t spend money for an easy program, and instead I’m going to wrestle with WordPress for 75 hours when I could just go get a Kajabi account or a Clickfunnels account for $100 a month and have it done in a few minutes.”

So as you start to recognize how valuable time is, way more valuable than money, then you start to see that these decisions that are plaguing you are really just solved by saying, okay spend a little bit of time asking the big questions, which we just went through, those big questions, and once you’ve gotten through those big questions and you know, “Okay I’m going to go with…” whatever this little pile of software are my options. Pick one, pick it on price or pick it on a feature, and then stop second guessing or wondering if it was the right one, or looking for validation outside of yourself because that’s over thinking.

And this is your first test as an entrepreneur, this is your first test as you’re getting ready to launch a funnel. How fast can you make decisions, be confident in your decisions and move forward on them?

So I hope that solves the problem around tools, just to give you guys just some back story. At this point, I have made over $6 million, approaching $7 million dollars in business, and I’ve used the same three tools for pretty much the whole time. I’ve used Clickfunnels for my sales funnels and my carts. I’ve used Teachable for my content delivery, and I use Convertkit for my email service. And I have never felt like I couldn’t get something done that I wanted to get done. I have never felt hijacked or handcuffed, or a tool’s got me by the teeth and I can’t do something I want to do. They all talk to each other using Zapier, and that’s how I’ve been running my business.

I have never stopped to ask myself, “Oh, is there a better way to do this?” Because nothing, everything is working so smoothly, I am just committed to the decisions I’ve made. To give you an example, Cathy and I are trying branch out into international waters with some of our courses. Well, Clickfunnels doesn’t offer certain payment gateways, and certain currencies. So at that point if we’re going to run funnels to South America or to Europe or to Asia, we’re going to have to get a different processing situation set up. Okay, well now we’re going to look for a tool to help us do that. And that’s fine, we can do that.

But this is sort of how you make decisions. So I hope that is helpful for any of you who’ve been kind of stressing over what tool to use. And I’ve seen so many people resist and resist and resist. In fact, in the winter group of Launch Gorgeous, Suzanne, she was really nervous about joining the program, wasn’t sure, imposter syndrome, all that kind of stuff. And she just fought tooth and nail, she didn’t want to use Clickfunnels. And in a certain type of launch, a power launch, which we discussed, which is the low ticket funnel, we really recommend that everybody get Clickfunnels unless you have a really good reason not to. And she resisted, and finally at the very end she was like, “Oh fine.”

But she’d wasted so much bandwidth trying to resist it. She got her funnel up and running and she sent me a message the other day that she had just crossed over $40,000 in sales and she was really grateful. So this is my weekly PSA to stop over thinking, and hopefully that helps clear the noise around tools. Appreciate you all, talk soon.

Julie Chenell initials

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Get in touch! I teach strategic business growth tacticss for everyday people.

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