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If you listened to my podcast episode, the one right before this where I was talking about the 3 types of launches, one of the things that I have been doing is building this content as a direct result of the one on one coaching that I’m providing inside of Digital Insiders.
So I’m doing this process over and over and over again in different markets, with different personalities and all that kind of stuff.
So Kristin has been in DI since day one, and I just want to tell you a little bit about her journey. I hope to be able to do an interview with her soon. She joined back in 2017, oh my gosh, 2 years ago, and the first year in the mastermind, she’s one of those classic entrepreneurs that has a million ideas, she’s a certified public accountant, so she’s got like tax professional, she’s a university professor, she’s got small biz, she’s got, just all the things. So this first year in the mastermind she was trying to make sense of all of her ideas, and I will admit that I was sometimes a little hard on her, because I was like, “You have too many ideas and you’re spending a lot of ideas that aren’t as fruitful as other ones might be.”
She makes the joke that she couldn’t get me excited about anything, everything that she brought up to me, because I was always finding holes in it. So we built a funnel for one of her websites that she has for accounting, that gets a lot of page views per month, and it didn’t really take off, and there was just a lot of struggle. And the reason I tell you that is because Kristin is an example of someone who did not give up when it wasn’t working right at first. And it’s so hard, I wish I could bottle up how to figure out when something is right. But she had to kind of grope around in the dark a little bit, for almost an entire year trying this funnel out, that funnel out, and nothing really converting it the way she wanted.
So last year sometime, 2018, no 2019 she had the idea for a bookkeeper training school, and I immediately got excited, and she was like, “Oh my God, that is the first time I’ve seen you excited in like a year.” And I was like, “I know.” So I was like, “Yes, Kristin, this is it. I know this is perfect.” So what she did was, she had all of these random audiences from all of these different areas. She had students, even her husband had an audience from a completely different market of like, fantasy world building. Anyway, she scraped together an audience of 100 people because she didn’t have, she didn’t want to do a big thing with ads. And she did a pressure launch for her first time opening bookkeeper training school.
And as suspected the market was right for it, it was dialed in, it was clear, she had the expertise, and she made $8000 in that first launch. And I think the program was at $297 at the time. So that was the market validation that we needed. So we did a pressure launch and she decided she wanted to do another pressure launch. So that latest pressure launch just finished.
This launch she did had a webinar, she ran traffic to get people signed up for the webinar, and wouldn’t you know it, she was floored when she started running ads, and one of my other Digital Insiders Aussie, actually was running her ads for her, and they were getting 79 cents, 80 cents a lead. She was using Funnel Bohemian, I believe, one of our drop designs. And we were working on her headline and her hook, it was actually a group chat with me and Aussie and Kristin just trying to dial it in. And she ended up getting 6000 people to register for her webinar on $5000 of ads spent, which for any of you guys running ads to webinars, know that that is ridiculous.
So that was super exciting, but the nerves and the pressure started to mount because all of my Digital Insiders are required to use all my spreadsheets in trying to anticipate how things are going to perform. And one of the latest spreadsheets I’ve made is actually for Launch Gorgeous, and it’s in anticipating how many humans will see your offer. So one of the things that I teach people is you can go on benchmark conversion rates, you can go on 3%, 4%, 5%, 2% you know, and you can anticipate what your funnel is going to convert at, but it all depends on this one key number, which is how many humans will you get to see your offer?
So I took her list size, her open rates, her click rates, her group numbers, her list numbers, and I plugged them all into a spreadsheet and what we noticed about these leads was that they were incredibly cold. These people were colder than ice. So they were asking questions in her group like, “Is this a job opportunity?” “Do I need to have a computer in order to become a bookkeeper?” I mean they were just crazy, cold questions.
So as we got closer and closer to the date of the webinar, Aussie and Kristin and I were going back and forth and I said, “You have to be prepared. I know you have 6000 leads, but man, I’m not quite sure how this is going to go. These people are cold.” In a way it was almost like her ad had gone viral.
So we decided to make a few changes right at the last minute. We introduced a much easier payment plan option, etc, so she was getting ready for this webinar. We decided to stream it live into the Facebook book, rather than do Zoom just because the people were on their phones, weren’t going to understand what’s Zoom, and all this kind of stuff.
So as we got closer the nerves started to mount because I said to her, I was like, “If you’re only going to get a 1 or 2% conversion rate, you need at least 3000 people to see this offer in 72 hours.” And that may not sound like a lot, but until you’ve actually done a launch, you don’t realize how hard it is to get 3000 people to actually see your offer. I don’t mean just register for an event, or be on your list, I mean see your offer. Either see the pitch on a webinar, or see the sales page. So nerves were high.
And here is the part that I love to tell because I think it just gives so much hope to people. She did her webinar and she had 7 sales, and the Voxer message I got at the end of that was so sad. She was, you know, she was feeling like it had just completely flopped. It was the first time ever doing a webinar, and she had about 600 people online, 500 maybe, which out of 6000 is not a very high show up rate, but again, that’s pretty typical for live webinars. The show up rate, unless you doing voicemail drops and texts and all this crazy stuff, it’s hard to get people to show up to a live webinar. So the show up rate didn’t surprise me, but obviously the 7 sales was very disheartening, because her stretch goal, like her goal that she was hitting for on a cold audience at like a 1 or 2% conversion rate, she was trying to get at least 60 sales. And 7 was not 60.
So I actually went into her Facebook group and started looking at the comments and we started to form a plan. So Aussie and Kristin and I were saying, okay, clearly objections haven’t been covered. There’s no question that the ad performed so well. Like it almost went viral. It was hitting the mark, but people weren’t making the sale. And as much as people complain that its about money, it’s never about money.
So I got a Voxer message from Kristin, I don’t know, it was like the next day or maybe later on in the day. And she’s like, “I think I want to change the offer. I think people can’t afford it. So what if I, instead of doing a $500 course with a payment plan..’ Because we had a 6 pay of $97, I think. She’s like, “What if I change into a membership and it’s only $47 a month, they get the job leads.” And she was, I immediately stopped her, again this is another reason, a pitch for why you need a coach, I was like, “Don’t you dare change the offer.”
And she was feeling the pressure of all these people in this group saying, “I can’t afford. I can’t afford it. I can’t afford it.” And she was trying to pivot to be able to serve them, and you know, it’s hard sometimes to know when to double down and stay the course, and when to pivot. But I knew in this moment, that this was not the moment to pivot. This was not going to go well if she pivoted. And Kristin is amazing and she’s a go-getter and I said, “Don’t you dare.” And she’s like, “You’re right. Okay, I won’t. Just, what do I do?”
And so we brainstormed about all the ways to crush objections. And I have never seen someone be so diligent at showing up in those 72 hours. Kristin went live sometimes twice a day in her group. Aussie was sending a ton of emails, and basically what was lacking in the webinar, because that webinar really needed to be dialed in more, was then systematically handled over the next 3 days in terms of lives and emails to help sell this program. And had she pivoted the offer, she would never have given her offer a chance to shine.
So that was just such a super important lesson to know, when something flops, when to pivot and when to like, hold steady and stay the course. And I told her, I said, “Listen, you can always, if you decide you want to, you can, it’s totally fine to do a downsell after you’re done. After the launch is over, if you don’t get as many sales, and you want to try to recoup your costs and stuff, you can absolutely do a downsell. But right now, in here, is not the right time.” So that is incredibly, incredibly important.
Anyway, she had an amazing launch. She ended up doing a $90,000 launch in this launch. She sold way more, she went way past her goal of 60 students. And that was largely in part due to her not giving up, her staying the course, her showing up and doubling down on crushing objections. It was fascinating to watch. So she was thrilled.
So that is a lesson, there’s lots of lessons in there, but it was incredible to watch because so many people have these kinds of things happen where they end up having a webinar that doesn’t perform as well, they pivot at the wrong time and they don’t follow through with their plan. And I‘ll say to people who are never sure whether they should pivot or double down, I think that in this kind of scenario, if you create a commitment, follow your commitment to the end. So if you say, “I’m going to launch in the next 90 days.” You follow that commitment.
It doesn’t mean you can’t offer like cool, little plot twists. Because all along the way you have to be able to respond to the market, but plot twists, and sort of reading your customer is very different than sort of pivoting in a new direction. Ask yourself, “Is this going to confuse my customer?” because if it is going to confuse your customer you need to wait until you’ve finished your commitment, and then you can move on. Then you can downsell, then you can pivot, you can change, you can look at the numbers and say, “Okay, what actually happened?”
And the reality is that as this launch was going on, Kristin’s numbers were looking pretty good. She was definitely in benchmark for conversion. So she wasn’t getting as many sales as she wanted, but her conversions were at the benchmark rate. So I said to her, I was like, “This is not a problem with the actual offer, the problem is there’s not enough humans seeing it. So we need to work on that.”
So it’s just knowing how to evaluate in the moment what’s not working or what is, because this had a really happy ending because she ended up, just so close, a stone’s throw away from a six figure launch on her program, and that was super exciting.
So I hope that was helpful for you guys. And like I said, I’m going to try and get her on an interview on my Facebook page, because I just think it’s really fun. And I just hope that whole back story and journey helps you stay the course as well. Talk to you soon guys, appreciate you.
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