Hey, hey, this is Charles Kirkland. You're in for an exciting podcast episode today. Now, like we said, this is the state of marketing. And if you ask any marketer on the planet, that's has a bolt, what is the hottest thing in marketing? Everyone will say Amazon. A. I. A. I. A. I. And that's great. But here's the problem with a I.

Most people don't know how to use it or using it inappropriately. And then it's like, well, you know, this crap sucks. And I've got Jason Parker, my partner in crime here. Now, I will tell you, Jason knows more about a I than anyone I've ever met. He literally is training the biggest copywriters of In the world on AI, the guy is just, he is deep dive.

I should call him Jason AI, the Parker. So dude, how are you doing today?

Hey, doing great, man. I'm happy to be here as always and talk about AI, which is probably my favorite subject right now, because it's just saving us so much time and energy. And literally stuff that used to take me three weeks can be done in an hour now. You know what I mean? So it's

let's back up here. Okay. So let's talk about AI. Like when, when, with the general conversation I've asked, you know, what do you think of AI? I get, well, it's good, but it's not there yet. And what, what is your take on that? That

understand what's capable, what it's capable of. So AI is actually capable of doing something I call, uh, making an extension of yourself or a second brain. And when you use AI as your second brain, it becomes an extension of you. It's really you and AI form.

You're trying to almost digitize yourself in AI. That's the goal. Very difficult to do, but, um, obviously you can't completely digitize yourself, but when you do it right and do it the way I do it. Then it's, it's a tool that's an extension of you. It puts what you're already doing on steroids, like your brand voice, for example, it can put that on steroids and you can give that to an intern and they could put your brand voice on steroids, or, you know, you can scale your brand voice in a lot of different ways, whether you're using the tool yourself or you hand it off to somebody else. But let's say you have a company and you're trying to create this uniform brand voice. would create tools that would write exactly in that brand voice and it with the exact marketing messaging you want. And then you can give that tool to your entire marketing team who can then take it, run with it and scale your voice.

That's the way I look at it. It's, you know, you're trying to authentically scale your voice. People who don't AI and where it's actually at right now have falling, have fallen behind. They don't realize how far the rabbit hole has already gone. If that makes sense.

makes sense. Okay. Okay. You just said something huge. You actually have to work to train this thing. So, I mean, is this like out of the box? I want to go get a car. I'm just going to put the key in and drive every, every Honda is going to drive the same way every other Honda course going to drive, but with AI, you're telling me we have to train this to get a specific output.

Is that correct?

Yeah. So the way I look at it is like this. Most people who are down here, if there's a ladder of AI down here, there's this generic copy that everybody's getting the generic AI. That's what most people see when they look at AI and everybody hates it. When you see the outputs from these, you can smell it a mile away and you say, look, I'm not going to read this.

It's not authentic. It's not written by a person. That's where most people are at. But you take another step up that ladder and you have sort of this framework kind of style AI, which is more, uh, like framework in terms of it can match certain sentences and things like that. And that can be great. Like templated can be great.

Hey, welcome to episode three of the state of the marketing union. I'm Jason Parker. And today we're talking about the rise and fall of ClickFunnels. And with me is my business partner at Parker and Kirkland, Mr. Charles Kirkland. Charles and I have some unique insights to share about how ClickFunnels actually grow into a nine figure juggernaut and what went wrong.

If you. want to call it that, of course, they've. We're outrageously successful, But Charles, uh, there's so much to say about this subject. So let's start at the beginning. Uh, we, we were, you were, I were here to witness the rise and fall, I guess.

Um, the

Yes,

that, but it seemed like everyone and their mom had a page builder, remember that, and then, uh, ClickFunnels emerged victorious somehow

and I will preface this by saying that me and Jason, being the rocket scientists that we are, we released something that was an amazing page builder and we sold it for a one off price of 27. A friend of mine has something similar. I told him, dude, nobody's going to pay you like 37 per month and lead pages apparently exploded.

So let, let, we have to context this with, there's a lot of history here that people aren't aware of because today, if you said, Hey Jason, I need to build a funnel, you could literally go get any number of. Optimize press any number of solutions, you know, go high level. I mean, there's an endless supply of funnel builders, but back in the day, before ClickFunnels, you had lead pages, you had Unbounce, you had Kyle.

We're like, what was a five minute pages, something like that.

million. There's so many of them.

There was so many, like, I remember doing optimized press acts where you would literally try to string together things, but what made ClickFunnels unique was it had a email component. Where you could send through SendGrid or something like that.

You could build these funnels, collect emails, and more importantly, you actually had a built in shopping cart, or at least, you know, the ability to check out with a one click upsell. That, see, that's the magic of it. Uh, like Unbounce today, exactly. Like it literally was a Swiss army knife where everyone else, including us, had a single blade, a build to a landing page, and that really Was revolutionary.

But quick question. Did ClickFunnels sell right off the start?

No, okay. So of all, the marketing graveyard is littered with all these funnel builders that came out around that time and some of them did really well as launches like on JV zoo and whatnot and made a lot of money, but then they just faded away. So I think, first of all, the point is, I think you made a good point there that it started integrating more tools, um, compared to other pitch builders, which really kind of makes you think, you know, that's probably what. high level did to click funnels lunch. But anyway, uh, yeah, I mean, I just kind of want to get into that. But what I saw back then was, uh, at very first click funnel struggle. So, and it was the brilliance of Russell that kind of made it, uh, you know, and I was thinking it was his brilliance that, that, you know, of marketing that made it, but you might be right.

That it was, had a lot to do with adding email and stuff like that. So, uh, but I came on here prepared to say, yeah, it was the brilliance of Russell's marketing because. At that time, um, they struggled at first with just standard sales pages. They couldn't sell it, uh, and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Charles, I think, uh, Russell bought the software from somebody else and then turn into ClickFunnels. And I think that was the case, but he was trying to sell it by a sales page. Ended up, um, I would have given up on it by then, you know, because I think I remember like...

Welcome to episode two of the state of the marketing union. I'm Jason Parker. And today we're talking about black Friday strategies that have made millions for our clients over the past few years. And we're going to break down how we pulled off 3. 3 million for launch medical 2. 5 million for Dr. Berg and a record breaking customer acquisition campaign for a CAC ID.

Trader  in Italy. Yes. Black Friday is catching  on worldwide, even in places like Italy. So you need to be ready to cash in during this rare time of the year, filled with rabid buyers who are scouring the internet, just looking to buy things. And with me today is my business partner at Parker and Kirkland.

Mr. Charles Kirkland. Charles, let's first talk about the campaigns that made millions during black Friday and cyber Monday. And what made them tick? 

I think that's a great question to start with, and the reality of it is, when you're trying to plan a Black Friday campaign, most people have the assumption of, well, dude, it's Wednesday, before, it's Black Friday, just put something together. And that is a recipe for disaster.   Now, the way that we did this is we actually  worked mathematically backwards.

We started with a goal. So I'm not going to mention the particular client, but our goal was 2. 4 million. Now the previous year, they didn't do anywhere that close. So they're like, you know, Charles and Jason, y'all have been, um, you know, hitting the shrooms or  something because Lord knows those numbers seem impossible. 

And For the average person, yes, they do seem impossible, but this is what we did. We've realized that all this is just basically a giant math equation. Now, for those of you who weren't good at math, including myself, um, you're not doing math on this call, but  when you understand what we're going to talk about, it's going to make  all the sense in the world.

So, and I'm going to use the example of 2. 5b. The first thing you have to look at is what is the window that you have for Black Friday? Most people go, Thursday. Well, no, actually that's wrong because we launched ours on Wednesday.   And by the way, we did better Wednesday than we did Thursday.   And granted they're carved in the turkey, but for we're really in a time if you go to Walmart, Target, There's Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations, and somewhere in the middle of this you'll see a few Thanksgiving quote unquote pumpkins.

The reality of it is you  now have to look at it as it's really a week.   So from that standpoint, we're gonna start, let's just say Monday, and we're gonna go to Cyber Monday or Cyber, you know, close it on that Tuesday. The easiest way to look at that is A, What assets do I have? Because this is a big one. 

Most people think of Black Friday only as  customer, my existing customer database may engage with me, or they may look at it as, hey, it's the opportunity to get new customers. And I certainly understand that, and that is a way to look at it, but that's the wrong way to look at it. We want to look at it as a multi   tier model.

Jason and I believe in what's called two  tracks, and Jason can explain that in a few moments. But what we look at is we have leads. First time buyers, and then we have repeat buyers. The problem people have is on Black Friday I'm buying from people I've and Jason you may  be the same way There are people I've never seen never  heard of but the price is right, you know It's like boom hit that order button.

I want it now. It's a big discount What you have to look at is these are two radically different tracks for existing buyers You know, I don't need to, I don't really need to convince you about anything. You  know the product, you believe in the product. My  only question is how do I sell you more of the product or if it's a quote unquote one off