Ep. 44 The Silent Killer of Entrepreneurial Dreams Everyone Underestimates

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Today I want to talk to you about the silent killer of entrepreneurial dreams that everyone underestimates.
I am in the middle of a big launch. My partner and I, Kathy, launched Webinar Gorgeous this week. Webinar Gorgeous is basically our spin on webinar training.

So anyone who’s doing an online presentation of any kind, we have combined design with these gorgeous themed Power Point and Google Slide slide-decks along with conversion strategy training to learn what to put on the slides, why they work, all that kind of stuff.

So in getting ready for this launch, I set some goals. And one of the scariest parts about the whole launch is that I thought I would document it real time. And it’s always safer to document things after the fact, because you can kind of edit them, and you know make them look better than maybe they actually are. But I thought, you know what, I’m gonna actually do this real time.

So I did a prelaunch. Kathy and I sent out emails to our Funnel Gorgeous list and got them all excited about Webinar Gorgeous and on my email list, I actually went through a sort of deconstruction about what I was doing behind the scenes. I haven’t written another, I wrote about three emails and then we got sucked into the launch, so I haven’t had a chance to write another one yet. And I will do sort of a post mortem breakdown. But one of the scariest parts was that I was afraid to call my shot in one of my emails because I thought, well gosh, I could be so out of line here. But I knew that I knew conversion rates, I knew benchmarks, I knew the history of the market. So I thought I’m just going to set my goals and then I’m going to write them in a email for thousands and thousands of people to see.

So I set a goal of getting 4000 people to see our offer, and then I thought, the average purchase rate on a launch is anywhere between 1 and 5%. I know that we’re going to a very hot audience, I know that I’m a good marketer. I’m going to start with a baseline of 3% just because I know my history. So 3% of 4000 people seeing an offer would be about 120 sales. 5% would be 200, and then 10%, which would be nuts, is 400 sales.

So I set those three goals, and I always do this, I set a minimum goal, I set an ideal goal, and then I set a crazy goal. I threw that out into the interwebs and then sort of panicked and thought, well what if I’m completely off? People are just going to think that I’m just blowing smoke. It got me thinking because it’s now, what day is it? It’s now Friday, the cart’s going to close on Monday, and as of right now we have had, not quite 4000 people have seen the offer. We have crossed 3000 people to see the offer and we have another couple of days left.

So I’m thinking to myself, wow, 4000 views for the offer was actually a pretty good estimate. And we are at 258 sales, and I had my minimum goal at 120, my ideal goal at 200 and my crazy goal at 400. So I am currently, Kathy and I are hanging between the ideal goal and the crazy goal, and it got me thinking…Which, by the way, this is awesome, you guys don’t even…I don’t know what it is, it’s a very high buy rate, we’re approaching, quickly approaching $75000 in sales for this launch, which on $197 product is a great accomplishment.

But here’s the point and this is bringing, I’m telling you this entire story because I want to talk about that silent killer that crushes entrepreneurial dreams that nobody seems to estimate. We all underestimate it, and that is your expectation. So I am sitting here right now talking to you and explaining to you how awesome this launch is going and I’m feeling really proud and satisfied, just lots of good emotion, lots of momentum. Okay, why? Because I’m looking at my expectation that I set for myself in my goals, driven by reality and math, and I’m looking at the fact that I am hitting my target and reaching, racing for my “heck yeah” target.

And that puts me in a really positive mind set. However, just a few days before I set these goals, Kathy, and I love her to death. She is the most talented person ever. But her strength isn’t numbers. Her strength is design and branding and she’s just like, she blows everybody I’ve ever met out of the water. But numbers aren’t her thing, spreadsheets aren’t her thing. So she was sitting down one night with me and she’s like, “We should totally have a $100,000 launch, that would be amazing.” And I was like, “Yeah, that would be amazing and completely unrealistic.”

And Kathy, who has been around the block a few times, didn’t think that I was being a dream crusher, she was like, “Oh, alright. Well, what’s realistic?” So then I went through sort of my number crunching. And she’s like, ‘Okay, I wish I could say it’s $100k.” and I was like, “Yeah, and you’d be smoking crack.” And it was just this funny conversation because had we just been like, “Oh yeah, let’s do a hundred thousand dollar launch, that’d be amazing.” Had we set that goal, had we set that expectation right now we would be feeling a very different feeling. We’d be feeling like failures, or we’d be feeling like we missed our goal.

So the silent killer that happens, and this happens over and over and over again, is that people set unrealistic goals and expectations for their funnels, for their products, for their services, they get disillusioned, they lose momentum, and they become completely and utterly vulnerable to shiny object syndrome, or guru worship, where you’re like, ‘Okay, I didn’t get it. I need to go find another shiny object. I need to go find another magic bullet. I need to go find another guru.” And they get, you become so vulnerable to that. Not only are you disillusioned, not only do you think your product sucks, but your expectations are just completely out of whack. And it kills more people’s mojo than anybody would like to admit.
So what I would say is that when you are setting goals and expectations for yourself and in your business, use math. I love math. I wasn’t super talented at math when I was in high school, but I love math. I love a good spreadsheet that helps me look at realistically what I can expect.

Now a lot of people would look at me, someone who has you know, an email list of 32,000 people, I have a big platform, and they would think looking at my goals, and I bet you some actually thought this, “Gosh, 4000 people to see the sales page. Why does she think she’s only going to get 4000 people to see the sales page? Why doesn’t she think she’s going to get 20,000? She’s got an email list of 30,000, she’s got 10,000 people following her, she’s got 27,000 people in her Facebook group.”

And people do marketer math, not real math, marketer math. They’re like, ‘Oh we can get 10-20,000 people to see the offer. And they start out with a completely ass-backwards view of what they are actually capable of. And I blame bad marketers on this, because we set these expectations and we see only highlight reels and ads, and we don’t understand that real life, that even if you have a following that big, it’s hard to get 4000 people to go to a sales page in 7 days.

Kathy and I are going to hit it because we both have our own email lists. We have a funnel gorgeous email list, we have Facebook groups, we have Instagram followings, we will come close to getting 4000 unique human beings to see our sales offer in 7 days. So I’m giving you that benchmark so you can say, “Alright, (when you go to launch your thing) Julie and Kathy with combined email lists of..” you know, I would say if you combine our email lists and funnel gorgeous, you’re looking at probably close to 40,000 people on our email lists and a Facebook group of 27,000. We’re getting 10% of our following to actually pay enough attention to go over to our sales page. So 4000 views, okay, and we’re hitting a 5-7% buy rate.
That’s high. I wouldn’t necessarily expect that you would be able to hit that. I’m looking for 1-5%. And for anybody who’s turning on a funnel, this is another thing that I am always, you know, asking my digital insiders. “What are your goals, what are your expectations? What’s a minimum, ideal, and crazy goal?” Give yourself that range, base it in real actual math, and what will happen is number one, you will go into your launch or your ad campaign with realistic glasses on, which will help you actually create slow growth over time. You don’t want super, super fast growth. A lot of people think they want super, super fast growth.

And I don’t mean slow, like it takes you 4 years. I just mean steady growth over time, because if you spike too fast, too high, you run into all kinds of deliverability problems and then you end up with unhappy customers. So you want that steady growth. Math will help you get there. I love math, math for the win.

Today’s lesson is all about math, but math combined with setting expectations that are realistic so that when you enter into a launch or a funnel or you’re doing something new in your business, you can actually number one, feel really accomplished when you hit your minimum goal. Everybody should be able to hit your minimum goal. If you can’t hit your minimum goal, I would say readjust. You actually kind of, it would be awesome to blaze past your minimum goal and hit your ideal goal.

I think that my goal setting for this particular launch was on point, because I did what I knew would give us the most momentum, which is we hit our ideal goal, we’re racing for our crazy. And it means that no matter what happens at the end, we’re going to feel really solidly proud of our product and we’re going to be able to give quality attention to all of our customers, and then we have market validation and we’re ready to go off to the races to sell this in an evergreen format.

So I hope this was a helpful lesson for you. And I would encourage you to use math to set your goals and expectations, so you can create a momentum in your business and inoculate, that’s one of the words that my friend James Friell uses all the time, inoculate yourself from disillusioned reactive, shiny object buying, when your expectations were sort of all messed up to begin with. I appreciate you all, talk soon.