The REAL way to scale a business from $0 to $10 million dollars a year.
On today’s episode Russell talks about why you need to set realistic expectations for your first webinar and be willing to make changes to create a masterpiece.
Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to find out how to set realistic expectations to be able to achieve your goals.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody! Good morning! It’s raining here in Boise, Idaho, and I want to welcome you to episode 101 of Marketing In Your Car.
All right everyone, so what do you guys think about the new theme song, huh? Huh? Do you like it? So yes, as I told you in the last episode that’s what delayed me from recording any episodes for like a month.
So all I did was I went to Audio Jungle, found a sweet audio track, then went to VoiceJockeys.com, paid someone $60 to say that and boom! I got a jingle!
Anyway, it’s not quite as professional as the last one, but it’s also not quite as 1980s. So anyway, I’m in the office right now and I’m super excited for today, getting everything prepared for my live event that’s happening next week.
We have our two-day workshop for all of our DotComSecrets Ignite members, and for two days we’ll be focusing on webinars, and webinar sales processes and scripting and traffic and everything tied to webinars, which is going to be awesome.
And then, the second two days, we have our High-end Mastermind Group for our Inner Circle members.
So it’s going to be a ton of fun and I’m excited, and today while I was kind of getting ready and preparing for this, I was thinking about like what I should talk about on the podcast. There was one kind of theme that I’ve noticed in the last week or the last couple weeks that I want to address.
In our coaching group we have a lot of people doing webinars now, because I think webinars are one of the easiest ways to get started, to have an offer that you can break even on traffic or make a profit, a bunch of other things.
And the problem is that… Well, not the problem. The good part is we had -- I think this week we had eight or nine of our students who did their very first webinars, which was awesome and it was fun to see.
It was funny because some people finished the webinar with like… Anyway, every time they were finished, they would all Vox to me. Vox is like my communication channel with my coaching students.
So we’ve got Vox on the phone. They can Vox me. It’s kind of like a walkie-talkie, and they can Vox me any time they want throughout the day. And so, basically, they would Vox me after the webinar, and say, “Hey! This is what happened, and this what happened…” You know, they’d just kind of tell me, and about half of them had such a good attitude. They said:
“Wow, Russell, I did the webinar! I learned the script and I practiced it. Nobody bought, but I did it. And people showed up and people loved it, I good feed back, and they were excited.”
And they’re like, “Man, I’m so excited! I’m going to make some tweaks and changes, and then do it again and just keep getting better and better at it, and start making some sales in the future,” and bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, and those guys are like, “yes!”
That’s the right attitude, you know, like the very first time you do your webinar, your goal is not to make a million dollars. Your goal is to do your first webinar, right?
To practice the pitch, to get some feedback, to see what happens, to see how you feel in front of an audience, to see if people respond to the offer, all those types of things that you do the first time you’re doing one -- doing one live.
Obviously, your goal is to make sales, but not to make a ton of sales. On the other side of it, we’ve got people who -- and it’s probably because I get excited.
I’d share numbers that we do with our webinars and people that other of our students have done and things like that, and so they’re expecting to make like a million dollars in one webinar on their very first one.
And so, the other half wrote me back and messaged me and were just like all depressed, and “oh nobody bought, and only 20 percent of the people actually showed up.” It reminded me of like Eeyore the donkey like, “Oh, nothing’s gonna work.”
[Laughter] you know, like that kind of an attitude, and I literally had to go Vox everyone, and like get them excited and say:
“Look, you have to understand like, you just opened a store. This is Day One, your very first time you ever pitched it. Like most people do not make money on their very first webinar pitch. Most people are going to practice it, and like it’s such a good thing just to do it because you learn so much stuff.”
You learn, you know, did the registration process work? Did the process to get them to attend the webinar work? Boom, boom, boom!
You look through every single aspect, every single piece, because there’s so many different variables, and from that you can really dial in and figure out what tweaks and changes you need to make, okay?
I was telling one of the people, when we did the Funnel Hacks webinar the first time, we did the webinar and I got tons of feedback and things like that, and so the first time, I remember the first day we did it, we did it twice that first day.
The first time I did it, we had a big show up, and we did $30,000, which may seem like a lot of money. For us it was based on the number of people who were on the webinar. It was really, really low, and I was like “ohh!”
I just felt really bad, but I looked at the comments and the feedback, and I thought about like how I felt during each section. And I had my second webinar; it was like four hours later.
During that four-hour period of time, I was tweaking slides and changing and just moving things as fast as I could because I knew the next webinar was coming.
So then, I’d figure out all the questions that people were asking me, and I went and I tweaked those and added them into the presentation and move things around.
Anyway, I tried to get as close as I could to what I thought was perfect, and the second one I did we did $120,000 with the same amount of people on it -- so four times as much money just by taking tweaks and changes.
And so, the big thing I wanted to kind of mention on this podcast, and I want you guys thinking about, is positioning your expectations right, and looking at this as kind of the fun process that it can and it should be.
You know, for me again, I’m looking at we create this thing you’re putting out there, and now my goal is not to -- like I remember one of the guys, he told me, he said, “My goal is to make 20 sales at $2,000 apiece.”
He wanted $40-grand off his first webinar, and I was saying, “Man, if you get one, that would be awesome; like that should be your goal.”
You know, typically the products were selling on a webinar from $500 to $1,000, and so what I tell people I say, “Look, what you need to do is invest. For your first webinar and traffic invest -- if it’s $1,000 product, invest $1,000; if it’s a $500, invest $500 -- and you’re goal should be to just break even.
Make one sale and see if you can do that. If you can break even, make one sale, then boom! You’ve got it! Like that’s the only thing you should be focusing on right now, is just breaking even on your ad spent from your first webinar.
So that’s the expectation, and then from that, now we get so much data. Like insane amounts of data come back to us as soon as you do your first webinar, where you make tweaks and changes, and just all this stuff that you can't do until you do your first one.
Yeah, so I guess my big thing is setting expectations. You know, not trying to make a million dollars on Day One. Everyone that comes into our High-end Coaching Program, we always ask them what they’re goals are.
And the people who come back and say, “You know, my goals, if I can get to $15,000 to $20,000 a month, I’m going to be really excited,” those ones I like working with, because that’s a realistic expectation for what they’re doing.
People who come in and say, “my goal is to make $3-million my first year,” it’s not a realistic expectation, and all it can do is just stress you out. People are like, “Why? I need to set high goals!”
Like, yeah, you do, but you also set a realistic goal. So say, you know, my goal is to be able to get point. Like for me when I got started, I was like I want to make a million dollars a year.
That was my goal, but I didn’t say it was this year; I said I want to make a million dollars a year. You know, for right now, if I can make $10,000 a month, that would change my life so that’s what I’m running for.
So having your -- what do they call them in Good to Great? The BHAGS, the big, harry, audacious goals -- like having some BHAGS, but not like tying those to time. Do you know what I mean?
Like don’t say, “I need this done this year: I’m going to make $3-million this year.” Just say my future goal is to make $3-million a year and a million dollars a year would be really, really cool. But right now, my goal I’m running towards is, you know, what is it? Is it $5,000 a month, $10,000, $20,000?
In my last or two events ago, we did this little exercise with people, asking them like how much money do they want to make, and everyone was giving me these crazy numbers.
And then I showed them how, if you were making $20,000 a month, that you literally could live in a $2-million dollar mansion, drive a $100,000 car, and go on vacation every single month on $20,000 a month.
Like $20,000 a month is a ton of money, you guys, and it’s realistic to live off of that, right? - to have an amazing lifestyle off it, and a million dollars a year is just not realistic. That’s not something that’s going to happen for most of us.
So first off, setting your expectations right, from like an income standpoint, again you goal should be: “I’m going to spend X amount of dollars in advertising. I want to break even.” That should be the only focus when you first doing your webinar. That’s it. Nothing else should matter.
And the second thing is looking at this as the process. This is not like you built a… like I remember when one guy said, “Man, I’ve spent so much time on this, and I’m frustrated because I spent so much time and effort on this.”
I was like, you don’t understand. Like this is not a one-time shot. You’re putting this time and effort in to create this thing. You’re creating a masterpiece, and after it’s done then you keep tweaking it.
It’s like the analogy of like you have a big stone, right? And you’re chiseling away and chiseling away, and you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s looking good, but you keep chiseling and keep chiseling.
I’ve done the Funnel Hacks webinar, man, probably 20 times in the last two months. You know, we did over a million dollars in sales, and from that, every single time I do it, I’ve changed the presentation.
In fact I made like, I don’t know, probably 15 different slide changes yesterday, after the last presentation I gave because every time I’m feeling different things, and I’m tweaking it.
I’m changing it based on response and based on questions I’m getting. And things that don’t feel comfortable when I’m doing the presentation, I’m tweaking and changing and adding things, and every time it gets better and better and better, and so looking at this is a work of art.
Mary Ellen Tribby, some of you guys may know her, I talked to her one time, and she was talking about how us Internet marketing people, how dumb most of us are, and she went into like two different companies.
She went into Wise Publishing, and then also into Agora Publishing, and took the division she was responsible for from like three or four million dollars a year to like $80-million a year within 18 months. And what she told me that I thought was really, really cool is she said:
“All you Internet marketing people are brilliant. You make the most amazing offers in the world. It’s just, but what you do is like the equivalent of creating a play, right?
“You hire the best actors and screen writers, and you put this whole thing together, and you spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, perfecting this play.
“And then, you live in Boise, Idaho, and so you go and you advertise it. A bunch of people show up, and you do the play, and it’s a smashing success, rave reviews, everyone loves it -- and then the next day you pack up and you start writing your next script for your next play.”
And she’s like, “The difference between what you guys do and what I do is,” she says, “I take that play on the road. Okay, it was a smashing success, and I take it from Boise to Salt Lake to Chicago to L.A and I take it on the road.”
And that’s how you have to look at this whole thing as, is this webinar you’re doing, like right now you’re testing in your local area, right? This is how the process is working, and you’re testing and you’re tweaking.
You’re making these changes and then you take it on the road. Each time you get better and better and better, and that’s how you have to look at it, okay?
So anyway, that’s kind of my goal of this presentation, this podcast, whatever you want to call it. Because it’s been on my mind and it’s kind of a rant, but it’s because I think everyone needs to get their minds’ right.
You know, everyone talks about mindset and goals and I think they do it the wrong way. They’re talking about, you know, “set huge goals and work towards...”
And those things are good, but it’s more paralyzing a lot of times than setting the realistic goals and good expectations and understanding what you should be doing and how this process works, that’s really the key in the game plan.
So anyway, I’ve been at the office in the parking lot. For like five minutes now I’ve been ranting, so I’m going to jump in and get to work, have a fun day today.
You guys have a good one as well, and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.