Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #54: Beyond the Funnel: Redefining Marketing with Steve Larsen

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 54

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast.

Jason Tonioli:

Welcome to the podcast today. My special guest is somebody I’ve looked up to and admired for a lot of years now and has actually made a huge impact on my career as a musician – Steve Larsen. We call you the Offer King or the ClickFunnel guy that knows how to help people build funnels. I think you’ve probably seen as many funnels as about anybody, maybe in the world, that’s done funnels, right?

Steve Larsen:

Probably. (laughs)

Jason Tonioli:

Welcome to the show. Steve, normally we bring on people that are in the music business or doing music, but I know you came up in the path of you playing piano like me. I’m guessing you were the kid that didn’t really like practicing and you had a mom that made you play piano, right? Was that you?

Steve Larsen:

That’s exactly what happened. My mom taught piano out of our house to all the neighborhoods and when your mom’s teaching, it doesn’t feel as cool.  I played piano for several years with my mom as my teacher. Then, when high school came, I was like, I’m too cool for that. Two years later, I realized that girls like it. So, then I got back into it. Anyway, yeah, you’re right.

Jason Tonioli:

You have the same story as me. I did not want to play piano, and my mom won the piano, so we played with her son. Then when you figure out that girls do like guys to play piano, all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, maybe this is okay. Awesome. With the music, did you ever have aspirations when you thought it was cool? Did you think, oh, I should take music as a career? Was it discouraged by your mom who was actually doing that?

Steve Larsen:

I remember, this is actually a pinnacle moment for me. It was a conversation we had in high school. I told her, I want to make music because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always struggled with that my entire childhood of knowing what I wanted to do. I remember this was a key moment for me. I said, “I really want to go make music. She goes, “Yeah, you should.” I was like, but you have to be super good, and she looked at me and she goes, then be good. I was like, Okay. She actually really pushed me to go after it. I keep looking at her because I have a big stack of music equipment. Even yesterday, I was watching more tutorials on Ableton and things like that. I made a lot of music growing up. I played the drums for seven years and taught my buddy how to, and then he became a drummer of a band. I sang in a barbershop quartet. I sang a lot of musicals, a lot of musicals growing up.

So anyway, I definitely wanted to be open with your audience here. I went through a divorce four years ago, and a really weird thing started happening. About two years after that, I started waking up in the morning with music in my head that I’d never heard. I started seeing stuff. It’s really weird. This creativity thing started coming back into my life, and I didn’t realize it was a suppressed, repressed thing. Now, I’ve been looking for music teachers again. I just miss it tremendously. I have a lot of respect for what you guys do.

Jason Tonioli:

Awesome. As you went down that path, was there a time where you just thought, okay, I’m too busy, or did you just decide, I don’t have time for this, so I’m not going to do any music anymore? I mean, a lot of people do that. Obviously, if your mom was a teacher, you probably got pretty good at piano, I’m guessing, right?

Steve Larsen:

Not bad. I’m the oldest of six kids. My youngest won the self-composition competition in Arizona not many years ago. That guy dances on the piano. I have no idea. I was hitting all the keys. He’s so good. We got along well, but I never got as good as him. I was more into electronic music, things like that. I wanted to go learn how to create that stuff. Discovering new music at nighttime is one of my favorite recharges.

Jason Tonioli:

One of my things, we have such a similar story. I was at Weber State, and I thought, okay, I passed the AP music test. I actually published music with a company that was in Colorado, probably really, I think Littleton is where the company was, that published my two-piano duet. I ended up at college and thought, Oh, I’m a published author. I want to score like John Williams and Hans Zimmer.

All of a sudden, I get up at the school and they make me go to the Music 101 class to learn a half note and I remember what it was. It was killing me. I was like, Oh, my gosh. I sat for the first day and I’m like, okay, be patient. Just don’t like rough feathers. It was like 80 people here seeming to like this. I got to day two and I was just dying. All I wanted to do was learn how to do orchestra stuff. I went up to the teacher and he said, hey, can I at least help teach about quarter notes tomorrow?           He got so offended and told me that I had to wait three years in order to learn how to do orchestration and symphony stuff. I told him, okay, I’ve even got a check. It was a $2.50 check but I’m like a published composer, and he just was like, no, you have to wait for your turn. I thought, screw that. I walked to the bookstore, I bought the orchestration book, and I just decided I’m going to do it on my own. Then I walked over to the marketing business school, and I thought, I’m going to learn how to sell this, how to do marketing, and I’m going to be a better musician, probably than any of these people here. It was the best decision I ever made.

What’s been interesting is I’ve been around all creative people, and I’m sure you’ve been surrounded by a lot of them. I watch the frustration they have as they put their heart and their soul and everything they’ve got into this thing, and somehow, they think people are going to care or find it because their thing was so good. It’s been hard now that I’m more of a marketing guy, and I have been for 25 years. You’ve observed from the sidelines as more of a marketer, what advice would you have for these musicians about what to do with their music if they want to be successful?

Steve Larsen:

I would say two things with that. First off, there’s a place for creativity where you are the only customer. If you like it, that’s good enough and make it. Art is so vulnerable. I’m sure art is very vulnerable. You’re putting a PC out there. You don’t know if anyone’s going to like it but if you’re the one that does… I say this because I’m just thinking when you’re saying that. I heard somebody ask Russell one time. He said, why do you keep building these funnels? You don’t need to do this anymore and Russell was like, oh, I do it because I like it. I don’t really care if you guys don’t do it anymore. He’s like, this is my art. It’s my game and I was like, It’s a really cool answer. When you’re building a product and marketing for a product, you build it for the customer, not yourself. I think art is one of those cool ways where you can do it for yourself only, and that’s good enough but if you are a musician, trying to create an audience and a real business around what you do, it’s really the same playbook. I think the good news is that it’s very proven. There’s a map, and a lot of artists and musicians have gotten very famous from it.

To illustrate this point, I got really tired of people telling me that certain scripts wouldn’t work for their business. This was eight years ago. I got up on stage. I was supposed to give a four-hour workshop to Russell’s people. I remember there’s 400 people in the room. Everyone paid 18 grand to be in the room. I got so tired because they were musicians, they were artists, they were people. They were like, “that marketing script can’t work for me”, So I went in, you probably know the story. Can you become a little bit internet famous now, at least in the marketing world? I grabbed a random book off of my shelf, a book that I’d never read. I stood up and I said, hey, can I tell you guys a quick story? I told this fake story. This is a fake book story. AI said this story about when I was leaving college out of my economics class, I had all this stuff on my mind. I was on business try number eight and friends and family are asking me, is this the one that’s finally going to work? Can you make money with this now? On the outside, you’re like, yeah, of course. But on the inside, you’re going, I have no idea how this drives any different. I don’t know if I should tell the whole story, but the main point of it is that in the story, I’m walking down the street and see this really rich guy and ask him how he got so rich and then he hands me this book and says to read for 20 minutes a day and then apply what I read for 40. He’s like, you do that, your money problems will be solved. Then he drove away in this limo. And then on stage, I held up the book and said, this is that book. I sold so many copies of that dude’s book. I held it out. I remember the staff in the back was like, what is he doing? Is he pitching? He’s not supposed to be pitching up there. Then I said, do you guys want this book? …and everyone was like, yeah.

I was like, I got a cool offer for you and the staff was freaking out, thinking I’m totally snake and Russell and all this stuff. I’m like, we got an offer. Here’s the offer. You guys get the book. You guys get the audiobook. How many of you guys are good at reading? Yeah, I like to listen, too. How many of you guys want the bullet points? You know what I saw. How many of you guys want the cliff notes? Oh, and also, we take 20 people every six months. We went to this author’s house, and we discussed the book and so if you’re one of the first 20 people to get the link, I’m about to drop, here you go. I was lying on my face, and I said that to them in a second, but I didn’t tell them that. I said, all right, let’s put the link up and there was a stage rush. I remember this dude that literally won the Super Bowl and ran from the back, and he charged the stage, grabbed the book, and he was like, I got the book. There are all these people trying to get the book from it and I’m swatting. I’m like, no, it’s a fake story. It’s a fake story. I’ve told that story probably 12 or 13 times now, and it’s had the same effect every time.

The point is, I always rate the book afterwards and I drop it and go, I have never actually read this book and we just wait for a second. I go, Did I tell you… and this is really important for all the musicians out there because you have to realize why the buying emotion gets created. To really drive, frankly, the nail in, what I do is I just bring up and say, how many guys want the book? This is back when I used to leave the cover on it. Hundreds of people bought this guy’s book. I’ve never read it. It’s a random book. People were buying it off Amazon. I was like, do you know what this is about? They’re like, No. I was like, why do you want it? Did I read you the chapters? Did I read the two enthusiastic thumbs up reviews on the back? Do you know what endorsements are? Do you even know what the first chapter is about? Do you even know what it’s actually about, what this is? Everyone says, No. Why do you want it? Because of the story and you have to realize that… And I’d say the same thing. It’s so funny. Someone is like, you’re going to give me a refund for the book I just bought. I said, No. You will never forget this story. People are buying the story, and they’re being satisfied because they got a product but what we purchase is actually the story. 11:21 For musicians who listen to this, your music matters but it’s the story that you build it around, that you build around it, that is actually what’s doing the selling.

Jason Tonioli:

As you’re talking about that, I know for a lot of musicians, people talk about, Tell stories about your songs. I’ll do concerts here at my house and in other places. I found that if I just play the songs, unless you’re some big ’80s pop band or some band that everybody knows your songs, they don’t mean anything to people unless you tell a story. If I can bring the group in and say, I was going through this thing when this happened, or this happened to me, and so I had this thought, or I was sick, or I was going through divorce, or somebody… I don’t know how many times people have said, hey, I lost a friend, and your song has helped me. I’ll tell stories like that, and they’re true. Honestly, I get hit with songs. You were saying earlier that this has happened to you. All of a sudden, that creativity. I think there’s this… I don’t know how to explain it. Some people call it spirit stuff or whatever, but it’ll hit you. I almost feel like there’s this other frequency going on that you can hear these tunes in your head.

A lot of times people don’t take the time to write them down. I think most people probably don’t hear that music or aren’t in that place where they can hear it but when somebody is in a place where they have that happen to them, all of a sudden it means more. They’re like, well, maybe their chance to tap into that as well and be part of that story or have a soundtrack to the story that you just told them. Maybe you can get a piano on stage and start breaking out and saying, I wrote this song with the book.

Steve Larsen:

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s such a fascinating principle that companies that would not normally exist do because of the story. I call it the bag of stories, which is a dumb name. What I’m doing is I’m thinking through what are all the stories? I mean, that’s really what I’m doing: a podcast or anytime I create content, I’m testing stories to see if it causes a reaction, whether it’s positive or negative. I’m not trying to make anyone mad, of course, but was there any effect from what I created of people saying, Tell me more? Just that internal notion, Wait, what? If I can’t get that, I know that it’s a story, but it’s not a marketing story. There’s a dude that takes landscape photography, which stereotypically doesn’t necessarily usually make that much money, but he makes like 100 grand a month because he’s selling one picture. I said, how do you do this? He’s got one picture that he took, one landscape picture of the New York skyline, something that we could easily use Google. If you go read his sales page, it’s really telling a story of how he got up early and how he planned the shot and how he’s been finding it throughout time. It’s not like he’s selling this thing for dirt cheap. It’s like $200 or $300. Yeah, stories with those.

Jason Tonioli:

Well, you watch American Idol, I think, is one of those perfect examples of where they take all these people, a lot of them can’t sing, and all of a sudden now people care because they build these stories around them. When you look at Taylor Swift is another good example. She’s a brilliant marketer and the coaching she’s had, the thing that I’ve been so impressed with her, is that she connects so well at a one-to-one level, which isn’t normal for a lot of artists. There’s that story there. Another one that pops into my mind, Jon Schmidt, the Piano Guys. A lot of people probably heard those guys. I mean, Jon’s been a friend forever. I used to sponsor his concert when I worked at a bank 20 years ago. I’d bring him in, and I’d go backstage with him and play duets upside down with him. What’s been fun with him is as I look at his career progression, because I’ve been in the studio multiple times because I’ve recorded in the same place for years. When he had his breakout, it was when they did an arrangement of Taylor Swift and Coldplay, and they matched up these two songs, and they were really cool. It got this pop with YouTube. I think one of the big pieces that made that really happen is they ended up getting threatened to be sued by Taylor Swift’s dad. I don’t know if you know that story or not.

Steve Larsen:

I saw them live, and they said, we need to break two songs up here. Right when they switched songs, they’d stop, and then they go, and now Coldplay, unrelated and then they went.

Jason Tonioli:

That was a legit thing. They were terrified they were going to get sued by Taylor Swift at the time, but all of a sudden it made that story so much better. People were like, oh, I wanted, I wanted, I want. I think as any marketer, whether it’s a musician or not, finding those underdog stories or those things, what’s that hook to be like, okay, what’s going to happen next? Then you’ve got the story to get you there. The other thing I’d love you to talk a little bit about this. I hear so many people say, oh, I need a funnel. They think, oh, this funnel is going to save me or save my life. I think there’s so much more from a marketing standpoint or a storytelling of what’s this journey you’re going to take people on? All of a sudden, they think, If I just do this funnel, it’s going to change my world. They miss all of this other stuff, whether it’s the emails. I’m just curious, your take on funnels versus the whole customer journey that you need to be thinking about, call it the marketing journey, I guess.

Steve Larsen:

Yeah, absolutely. I love this topic because truly, I’m really upset. 17:04 I’m writing a book with Russell right now on dramatic demonstrations and studying all these marketers from the 1800s who didn’t have the Internet and how they got rich. It’s been interesting. The further I’ve gone down that rabbit hole and thought all these I studied all these rich dead guys is you realize that there’s really no such thing as internet marketing. There’s really just marketing, and we use the Internet to push it out. I only like to make that distinction because sometimes it’s helpful. Otherwise, we get lulled into this idea that what time we post on Facebook is what marketing is. That’s just the tactic. It’s not marketing. On that note, though, I think that there’s a lot of security that comes from revisiting the foundations of what marketing actually is and is not, what sales is and is not, what entrepreneurship is and is not, and then what a funnel is and is not. To me, those are the four roles.

Actually, I was a sales guy for a while, and I had a sales message, and I had an offer. At the heart of it, that’s a funnel. That’s an offline verbal funnel. 18:16 I was the funnel. I walked around, I had a sales message, and I had an offer. I think the danger is when you translate that to the Internet, we often think that a piece of tech is what a funnel really is, when really at the heart of it, it’s still just a good sales message or a story and a really good offer. You can have the most technically accurate funnel, but still be obviously missing on one of those two things, and it’s going to look like the funnel doesn’t work. It’s like, well, none of it’s the tech’s fault or the internet’s fault. There’s infinite traffic available. No one ever has a traffic problem. No such thing is a traffic issue. It’s everywhere. We have a message problem, and we have an offer problem. That’s a sales funnel. That was a long answer, but the other part to that, though, is that 19:03 when someone’s going to start marketing, we don’t call marketing funnels for a reason. There’s no marketing in a sales funnel. It’s a sales function, just like a door-to-door salesperson. We should look at our sales funnels, these tech, Internet sales tech amazing things. They’re still amazing, and I’m not going to have one, but they’re really not marketing. Marketing is the act of attention getting measured in lead gen and where I think we get into a mistake is we think that it’s very common out on the internet today to think that we’ll measure marketing in likes, comments, subscribe, share, channel size. None of that’s marketing. They’re good metrics, but it’s not marketing.

19:50 If I put a video out and I never get any leads now or in the future, it’s like, was that actually marketing? No, it’s just a video. Marketing is solely measured in lead gen. I actually, and the reason I get so specifically detailed is because I think it helps bring down the perceived mountain of what it takes to win using the Internet. Really, it’s like, look, do you have a good sales story? Do you have a good offer? Do you have something that gets people to go, hey, tell me more? That’s all really marketing is and then when that lens is seen, your funnel can technically not be accurate and still be a good funnel.

Jason Tonioli:

As I look at these good funnels, we’ll call it a good customer journey. When I was really early on in my career, our CFO, who was not a marketer at all, came to me, he said, we had like, I don’t know, 20 or 30,000 customers at this bank. I mean, we’re selling checking accounts. We’re selling water, essentially. Everybody can have a checking account. He came to me, and he said, I wish we only had one customer. And I thought, Okay, well, why? And he says, because then we could just tailor the message and take care of that one person. He basically told me, he says, if you can back out and just look at that one relationship, use that dream client and build everything around that one journey. It was one of those I just stepped back and like, well, wait a minute. As I look at my music and the travel agency stuff and all these other things that I’ve done, it’s really hard to do this because you may get 100 orders coming in a day, and you’re thrilled to have that but if you can step above the trees, because a lot of times you’re working in the business and there’s all this stuff happening, you’re just trying to stay alive. If you can get your head above the trees and look out and be like, okay, that one guy, I want him to go from point A to point B, and that would be the perfect journey. If I could just walk and hold that guy’s hand and bring him here, that’d be awesome. Well, what would be the next thing to make that journey just crazy amazing? Well, maybe I’ll give him chocolate as I’m walking with him. I think stepping people back and saying, what would be the most amazing thing ever?

If everything depended on one customer having a success through your funnel, if you can map that out, all of a sudden, you can do it for two, and then maybe four, and then 10, and all of a sudden now, if you can scale it at one person, it’s night and day difference.

I remember coaching these mortgage officers who were terrible salespeople. Bankers are terrible salespeople, awful. They’re really good with numbers, but they cannot sell. Very few of them can sell. They all wanted this CRM system to magically fix and make them good salespeople. We actually went through 12 CRM systems in the time I was at the bank and watched- I went. I watched 11 CRM systems fail with my bankers. What was so interesting is they just expected everything to happen magically.

Finally, we got to the point by the eighth or ninth, and I’m like, okay, if you cannot take a piece of paper in a folder and just move it down your desk and say, okay, when they sign up, I’m going to do this next. Here’s the process. Here’s the next thing. Here’s the next thing. I had two people who did that, and they were more successful than the people that had all the fancy software gadgets to do it. They were the only ones that actually could do a system with a tech stack on top. You talk about traffic and getting somebody to that lead, just like your door to door. You had that. All that mattered was that one on one conversation to get somebody to buy pest control stuff, right? I don’t know. I mean, do you see that being a big problem that most people have, they can’t see the journey that’s going to happen after the fact?

Steve Larsen:

I find that there’s either no journey plan in general, or they build the journey for too wide of an avatar. It’s happening a lot right now. As leads seem like they’ve been harder to get for companies, the response most companies are making is they’re widening the customer base that they say they’ll accept and that’s the exact opposite answer. 23:54 You’re supposed to narrow when times get hard, get actually more specific on who you’re for and who you’re not for, and then dump that into a broader channel. Most will widen the avatar and widen the channel that they fish from and then wonder why they’re not getting the fish they want. It’s like you’re supposed to go to that.

I went to this EDM concert. I like that music a lot. You go there and it’s so funny how I grew up in Littleton, Colorado, near Red Rocks, and I went to tons of concerts there. It’s Red Rocks. I remember my high school graduation was there. I sang there, actually. It was a fun spot. A lot. I remember this EDM concert I walked in, and it’s 20,000 people in the audience, but you would think that they were clones of the people on the stage. Meaning it wasn’t everyone that this artist was trying to attract their music to. I think if that’s one of the biggest things musicians can do is if they’re trying to go the commercial route, who is your music for? Which is also to say, who’s music not for? If there’s such a thing as a dream customer, then by definition, there’s such a thing as a nightmare customer, and they both exist. Sometimes when we start looking at our bank account, we’ll think that it’s everybody, but it’s actually just really focusing on that one culture, that one customer, and building from there.

Jason Tonioli:

That’s great advice. Last question for you. I’m curious, what would you say is your definition of success? You’ve done music, you’ve done all people would look at you and be like, oh, Steve’s done everything that I want to do with all these funnels and businesses. What do you feel like as a successful person or a successful musician, if you’re just looking at yourself, even, what do you call success if you’re talking with your kid?

Steve Larsen:

I’m laughing because I was talking with Marley, and she’s like, I feel like you’ve lived a lot of lives. I was like, I know. I’m only in my 30s. It’s just a lot of stuff. I would say that to me, 26:02 success is extremely personal. It’s going to be different for everybody, but I think it matters more as the motives behind it. You can have all the money in the world. I have all of it. but if you’re not internally happy, I would not call it successful. Externally successful, but not internally. To me, they both matter. That’s part of the big lesson I’d say that I learned is that I really grew really quick there for a while. Frankly, it was not my intention. Like you, I decided one day that I was going to try to be the best in the world, and that’s why I got big. Some people just try to get big for the sake of getting big, though. They’re like, I’m going to seek fame. I’ve never really been driven by that. In fact, much to the annoyance of my peers, I don’t want to Instagram everything I do. You know what I mean? 26:56 To me, if you can’t be internally peaceful or poor, you probably won’t be rich. If you’re not going to be generous when you’re poor, you probably won’t be, and you’re rich. All money is an accelerant that collapses time, the tool for collapsing time and so you become more of who you really are when you make money. That shouldn’t scare someone from making money, but that’s where you enter that very tailored school of life where I didn’t realize I had all these bad habits over here. Now that I have money, you just lean into it, and you keep fixing and growing. To me, success is growth. That’s really it, the continued growth, because the school doesn’t really end until you die.

Jason Tonioli:

That’s true. Hopefully it keeps going, right?

Steve Larsen:

Yeah, definitely.

Jason Tonioli:

Well, Steve, I know you’re limited on time. I know you’re working on a cool project. You mentioned the book you’re doing with Russell, but you’re doing a lot of dramatic demonstration type of stuff, too. Where can people find more information about that?

Steve Larsen:

Yeah, I appreciate that. In 2020, I was nerding, and I was writing down all the stuff I’d ever learned from P. T. Barnum from the 1800s, which is a movie, Greatest Showman, was very loosely on. I was like, holy cow, this guy has a pattern for launches and much how we would think that a launch requires the Internet, look how he’s using what we would call today offline methods, then it’s just marketing, all these offline methods to go launch a product that no one’s ever heard of to an audience no one knows anything about to brick and mortars. I mean, really, like offline as it gets. P. P. Barnum was the second millionaire in America. I mean, he made tons of money with a museum, which no one really goes to that frequently. That says something. This guy can command volume. I studied him like crazy, and I was dropping something off at Russell’s house, and I was like, Dude, this is awesome. I’m finding all these rich dead guy stories, and I’m seeing now when I look at it from a certain lens, they all had this pattern. He was like, that’s cool and six months later, he’s like, do you want to co-author a book on this? We’re doing a workshop and the purpose of it is to get a clean recording so we can go write the book. So, dramaticdemonstrations.com.

Jason Tonioli:

Awesome. Well, people need to go check that out. There are so many videos I know out there. Somebody is looking to level up their marketing game. Just Google Steve Larsen and ClickFunnel stuff and how to do marketing.

Thank you so much, because frankly, I thought I was a really good marketer for 20 years, and then totally everything got flipped on its head and all of a sudden everything changed, which was interesting to see after 20 years. I feel like I had more growth going through a couple of really buckling down and spending time on things that you taught, and Russell taught. I didn’t think it could make a difference for me as a marketer or as a musician. I fought it for a year, and it really did change the game. If you need somebody to say, hey, does this work? You can always have them reach out and say, hey, go look at this guy who does piano sheet music for old people.

Steve Larsen:

That’s awesome.

Jason Tonioli:

Anyway, so thanks so much for your time today, Steve. We’ll catch you on another one. Appreciate it.

Steve Larsen:

It’s my pleasure. This is awesome. Thank you, Jason.

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