Episode 14 – Selling $8,000 – $25,000 Services with a Mini Webinar with Joel Erway
- Should everybody still be running a webinar? (5:56)
- How does this work when a traditional webinar isn’t working (power offer to mini webinar and to enrollment call) (13:11)
- Will busy people (that can afford your prices) watch or attend a mini webinar? (19:02)
- What goes into a mini webinar to make it effective? (22:27)
- Some numbers that we have recently with us with our clients (26:32)
- Joel’s Website
- Power Offer Workshop
- Joel’s Two Podcasts – Sold With Webinars | Experts Unleashed
- Book: Ultimate Sales Machine
- Book: How To Create an Irresistible Offer
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Transcript
00:00:52 Gary Ruplinger
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Pipelineology. I’m your host Gary Ruplinger and today I am pleased to be joined by the Sold with Webinars podcast host, Experts Unleashed podcast host and founder of the Webinar Agency, Mr. Joel Erway, Welcome to the show.
00:01:10 Joel Erway
It’s great to be here man.
00:01:12 Gary Ruplinger
I am excited to have you on today. Yeah, I’ve got lots of questions for you so before I get into all of those though, for anybody who is not a regular listener of your podcast or isn’t familiar with you, could you just give a little bit about your background? Your story?
00:01:27 Joel Erway
Love too, thanks for asking. So, my name is Joel Erway. I run the Webinar Agency as you, I founded and run the Webinar agency as you already mentioned, and my podcast is called Sold with Webinars. It is my outlet to share all things marketing and sales related in this industry, so I primarily work with coaches, consultants, service providers and I like to just riff on all topics. Marketing related. I got started in this industry in 2014, 2015. I say this industry. I’m specifically referring to referring to digital marketing prior to 2014. I was in the sales engineering world and I had five years of experience giving sales presentations to my market. So, in terms of marketing and sales, I’ve got probably 10 or 11 years of Professional experience with this topic.
So that’s kind of the short of it. I don’t know if you want to go into any more details.
00:02:31 Gary Ruplinger
You started as an engineer, correct?
00:02:34 Joel Erway
I did, I did so. You know, educated in the world of in the field of mechanical engineering and lasted about six months, maybe a little bit longer than that, in like pure engineering and I just realized it wasn’t something that I enjoyed. At least that type of design I was working for in a commercial heating and cooling. Engineering firm, so we would design Heating cooling systems for office buildings, schools, hospitals, you name it, and I very quickly transitioned into sales engineering where I was selling and designing the equipment that my former colleagues were working on and I enjoyed that a lot more. Just a lot, you know, more exciting, more fast paced and that fits my personality a bit more. And so, I did that for about five years before I went into the world of entrepreneurship.
00:03:31 Gary Ruplinger
Oh excellent, and I’ve listened to some of your how you kind of got started with webinars. I think you mentioned that you got started with Russell Brunson saying that you were the guy to talk to. If somebody needs a webinar.
00:03:46 Joel Erway
Yeah, yeah, so I, I’ve worked with Russell a couple of times. He’s a customer of mine and I was part of his coaching program. One of his coaching programs and his masterminds. So, this is back in the day 20. I mean there was really 2015 there was he was the first. The first thing that I joined when I was looking to level up my game and so I had a course that I was trying to promote. I was trying to sell, and I didn’t really know anything about digital marketing at the time, so I joined his mastermind. He told everybody in that pro coaching program. He still tells people to this day that you need to run a web and R and so once he told me I needed to run webinars like OK, well I can probably figure that out pretty easily. I’ve been doing sales presentations for a while. I get the gist of it and so you know, I learned his methodology, his perfect Webinar formula. I put my spin on it, you know, did it to the way that I prefer to do it. And I started having success. You know, I ended up quickly transitioning to helping other people with their webinars. My course was selling but it wasn’t like taking off as fast as I’d want to end up running out of action round of marketing dollars to promote that. To promote that Webinar and so I started helping other people on the side in the coaching program with their webinars and we were just crushing it with them with their stuff. I say, you know, if I know now if I know what I know. If I knew then about selling courses and, you know, Marketing, what I know now I would have stuck with my course ’cause I was really close to knocking out of the park. I mean I was like really close, but you know you don’t know what you don’t know and ended up helping other people crush it with their webinars. And that was the launch of the Webinar agency for me. I mean, I ended up just having faster success and better success. Helping other people with their webinars and so I decided to launch an agency.
00:05:44 Gary Ruplinger
That’s very cool, so I guess perhaps the kind of question. Everybody’s mind, then, is we’re recording this. It’s getting towards the end of 2020. Should everybody still be running a webinar?
00:05:56 Joel Erway
Yes, so what I say with webinars is they’ve got their place in the marketing and sales world. You know you go back to 2014. 2015 webinars are very hot. They’re still hot right now and when I referred when I say webinars, I’m referring to the traditional you know, hour to two-hour long webinar. You give some content, you educate your audience, and at the end you make an offer whether it’s paid by my program or by this product, or hey, you know if you want to work more intimately, let’s schedule a call.
00:06:34 Joel Erway
So those are the two typical calls to action that you can make at the end of the webinar and 2015, 2016 and even heading into 2017. That was our primary focus where these you know 1 two-hour long webinars and there are a lot of work developing the right offer, developing the content. I mean it’s a, I tell people that a great you know long form webinars like the Holy Grail of marketing. It’s also the most difficult thing that you can get right in in the world of digital marketing, and so there’s a time and place for longform webinars, but in 2016 we had discovered and invented this new process called a mini webinar and it all came about because our own webinar that we’re promoting for our high-ticket programs. High ticket services were not converting well, and it was pretty embarrassing and so you know, we had this webinar running for our $8000 group coaching program and our $25,000 done for you services and it was costing us. You know anywhere between 4 to $450 per phone call that we would generate and if you have ever run paid traffic and you’ve ever run an application funnel that’s very high. Now we were still profitable, but it just wasn’t scalable. I mean there was. It was requiring a lot of risk for us up front to make a sale. You know, here in there down the road and I needed to find a way a better way to bring in leads ’cause it was, you know we were fine, but I needed to. I need to find a more predictable way to generate to generate business and so I was lying in bed one night, you know, staring at the ceiling fan. We had just moved into. We just moved into our dream home. Our son was our first child was born and this new house was three times the size and three times as expensive as our previous home, so our expenses tripled. We have a new mouth to feed and I’m stressing out because my wife’s not working. I’m the sole provider and I don’t have a predictable source of leads coming in the in the door.
00:08:45 Joel Erway
So, you know, I remember I was reading this book. It was called how to create an irresistible offer by Bob Bly. And I was reading all sorts of marketing and sales books in this book. I started reading it was lying in bed, oh, staring at the ceiling fan and I’m like page three or four. I opened it up and there’s this chart and this was like the big ah ha moment that I had that explained to me why we had, you know, scarce leads why we’re struggling to generate leads. Now Bob is a technical writer, so very smart guy and great copywriter. But his voice can be a little bit dull in terms of writing and a little bit complex. So, he writes this chart, which is, you know, the cost per customer acquisition. Depending on the type of content that you put out, and it was this chart comparing brand driven content versus offer driven content and essentially what he was saying was the more, if you put out a piece of content or an ad or post, whatever it is, if your piece of content is primarily offer driven, your cost per customer acquisition will be the lowest. If your piece of content is primarily brand driven or educational, meaning, you’re creating educational post or your lead magnet, whatever it is, your cost for customer acquisition is going to be substantially higher and that chart revealed everything to me because it was like, OK, great.
00:10:20 Joel Erway
I’m running a long form webinar. It’s it doesn’t convert very well and it’s very much an education-based sales mechanism. Meaning I get somebody raise their hand, say yes. I want to learn about your webinar topic. They attend the webinar they watch for 60 minutes and at the end of that presentation I make a call to action. So, it’s very educational based content and when I saw that chart, I realized that what I needed to do is, if I wanted to lower my cost per customer acquisition, I needed to do the exact opposite of what he was told I needed to follow what he was talking about in the exact opposite of what I was doing.
00:10:59 Joel Erway
So, what I was doing was all educational based content marketing and what I needed to start doing was offer driven content. Meaning I needed to get more people to see my offer rather than at the end of this hour-long presentation I needed to put it right front and center and if I did that theoretically my cost per customer acquisition should be significantly lower and I jumped out of bed because I said this is going to work like this. Makes so much sense like I’m over educating my market right now. Not enough people are seeing my offer. That’s why my lead flow is so dry. And so, I ran downstairs. I remember creating. I remember opening up my laptop and typing up what is now the first draft of what I call Power Offer and I said I’m going to publish this on Facebook. I’m going to close my lap, so I’m not going to check it until next day and we’ll see what happens. So, I, I published that power offer in the very next day I had. I remember I had two people sign up for my $25,000 service and my cost per lead. My cost for application dropped from 400 to $400 to less than $40 per application that very next day, so I dropped by 90% and this was really the birth of Power offers and Mini webinars. I know that was kind of long and drawn out. Hope I didn’t lose you, but that’s the birth of what we’re talking about here today.
00:12:24 Gary Ruplinger
That is great. So, you went from $450 to $40 calls on a $25,000 offer.
00:12:33 Joel Erway
Yeah, I had a couple offers that I made on that on that call. Depending on you know what type of fit they were, but anywhere from 8 to 25,000 dollars 100%.
00:12:42 Gary Ruplinger
Wow, that is amazing.
00:12:45 Gary Ruplinger
So, I’m sure that that set definitely has some people’s attention now, so I guess the question is, how does this work? How do how do we put together something like this? If you’re you know, a service provider, a course creator, a consultant for your higher ticket offerings where traditional webinar isn’t working.
00:13:11 Joel Erway
Yep, so you know, with the traditional based webinar, it’s going to be. It’s an educational based marketing system, so it’s you know it’s the typical Gary Vainer Chuck’s approach, right. Jab right hook where it’s content, content, content value, value. Then you make an offer, right? Well, this is the exact opposite where I see most people failing where I see most business owners struggling is they get stuck in the content marketing hamster wheel they get stuck in the I gotta provide tons and tons of value. I need to build a list then later on down the road. These people will buy for me and while that may happen, it likely will not happen for you that way, because what people do not get right and what people fail to get right immediately is, they need to get their offer right. The offer Trump’s everything, and I mean everything. There is nothing more important in your business than an offer that converts in getting someone to say yes. I want you to help me with that. Yes, I want what you have to offer, and you do not need to provide any sort of educational value in order to get those first. Yes, is now, if you have read, you know Chet Holmes in his book The Ultimate sales machine talks about the buyers’ pyramid and basically what it says is, you know, in any given market, 3% of your audience is ready to buy right now. 6 to 7% of the people who in your in your audience are considering making a buying decision right now and basically, so that’s your top 10% and the rest of your 90%. There’re different phases, but those are there more in the hey, give me some sort of education first before I make a decision and so many of us can go after that. Top three to 10% of the market is rented by right now if we just make a compelling offer like they’re ready to make a yes or no decision right now.
00:15:02 Joel Erway
And so, this whole theory of leading with the offer first, then give them marketing rather than doing the opposite, which is give them education 1st and then make an offer. It changes the game for us because what we need, if we’re struggling with leads, we need to make more offers. And so, as I launched that power offer, I needed to develop, kind of a more systematic approach for turning this into an actual lead generation machine, and so the way that I developed it is you know it’s offer based approach. 1st and then we give them a little bit of just like need-to-know education based on our based on what we have to offer. And so, we start out with a Power offering. That Power offer is that kind of like one to two sentence statement that says, here’s what I have. Do you want it? Yes or no? And so, going back to that first night where I created that first draft of the power offer. I was looking to build more webinars for clients and so I quite literally drafted, this power offer. That said, hey, you know, and I’m probably going to Bush right here, but here’s the gist of it. Said hey, if you’re a coach, consultant, or course creator. If I offered to develop a high converting webinar for you in the next 24 hours. Guaranteed to convert so you don’t have to figure out what to say or how to say it. Would you take me up on that offer and that simple statement, right? There is the power offer and if you’re listening right now, you need to develop your own power offering. Get somebody to say yes or no, either internally or externally. Like as they’re reading it, you want them to internally, like have that yes or no decision to say yes. I’m interested. Or no, I’m not. If it’s if they say no, that’s totally fine. But you want somebody to actually have to say. Yes, I’m interested in that. And so, I developed that power offer and I published that as a post. I published it as an ad and I had a slew of people raising their hands saying yes, let’s talk right, and so that is the first step in your funnel. Now once you get somebody to kind of raise their hand and say yes, then a lot of times you will need to give them a little bit more information. So, we have developed what we call now you know 10- to 15-minute-long Mini webinars which you know still reinforce the offer but then kind of back into the need-to-know information like OK cool, how can you do that? Offer like how are you able to fulfill on that offer? What makes you different than anyone else is making similar claims or similar promises, and so we structure many webinars to answer that question specifically.
00:17:40 Joel Erway
When you do that correctly, you get people who are presold on your offer, so you don’t have to do strategy sessions anymore. Anybody who’s in here listening right now, you know, strategy sessions are a thing of the past with one how I run my enrollment calls ’cause I have never been a fan of strategy sessions. I think they’re they. They proved to be ineffective and we can really eliminate them entirely, and so you preset. And when you do these many webinars and these power offers, you presell the prospect and you get them ready to make that yes or no buying decision with you on the phone without you having to do any sort of you know, fancy sales tactics and so, really, that’s it. It’s Power offer to Mini webinar and to enrollment call, you know. Basically, it’s a Q&A call and we do this to sell, you know, high Ticket offers from 1000 bucks to $30,000. We’ve done everywhere in between.
00:18:43 Gary Ruplinger
Well, that’s awesome, so I think the question and I think that probably a lot of people are thinking is well, if I’ve got these high-ticket offerings, usually this is, you know, to somebody who has the ability to afford it usually means they’re busy. Will busy people watch or attend a mini webinar?
00:19:02 Joel Erway
Yeah, it’s a great question because that’s really the other part of this whole coin. That’s the other side of this whole coin was that. When I was running my old long form webinar and I really started to think about it. I started to realize that these you know there are two universal currencies that all business owners have. They are its number one is money, right? That’s the one currency that most people think about, but the other is time, and your high-ticket buyer is who has more money than time, does not want to sit through.
00:19:36 Joel Erway
An hour-long webinar presentation ’cause it’s actually costing them money to sit through that presentation. And so, I started to really think about it. I’m like, OK, well yeah, I’ve got a high-ticket offer. If somebody is willing to part with more money in order to save time. I need to develop a sales funnel that aligns with their universal currency of time and so I need to shorten down my sales funnel because they value their time more than they value their money. If I have a high ticket offer for them and so that was kind of the other ahha moment. They’re more likely to watch a 10- to 15-minute-long mini webinar presentation than they are a 60-minute presentation because they don’t want to have to sit through the, you know, the fluff that that a lot of these webinars you know typically have.
00:20:31 Gary Ruplinger
That’s that, I’m just I’m getting excited now listening to, you know, the kind of opportunities here, and I think you know some of the other things you kind of touched down here is that this isn’t this. Doesn’t just have to be to a warm audience that knows you right? The I think the idea behind the Power offer is that it’s you can do this to as an ad funnel, paid ads Facebook, YouTube all that kind of thing is that am I understanding that correctly?
00:20:57 Joel Erway
100%, I mean when we’re working with clients or you know, we’ve got students in our coaching programs. Everybody wants new leads; everybody wants cold traffic. And so yes, this was designed for cold traffic later on down the road. Yes, you might need to build out some more Marketing funnels and some more you know systems to help warm up your audience, but like until you’re at 20 to let’s say $30,000 per month.
00:21:25 Joel Erway
All you need to do is start to validate your offer and get your get your offer in front of as many people as possible and that’s why we developed this power offer funnel and this many webinar funnels are to do just that. Get you from, you know zero you might have business coming in from you, know organic or referrals or networking. When I say zero, I mean from paid traffic like you need to get that predictable pipeline coming in and going from zero to say $20,000 per month or $30,000 per month with paid traffic. All you need is the right offer and this simple power offer mini webinar funnel.
00:22:02 Gary Ruplinger
So, do you have any? I guess insights on how to craft somebody says I’m interested in this. Is there any anything you can kinda tell somebody if they’re looking to do this? What does a mini webinar look like? How does that? How does that put together ’cause? I think most people are pretty familiar with the long form.
00:22:23 Gary Ruplinger
What is what? What goes into a mini webinar to make it effective?
00:22:28 Joel Erway
So, the core questions that you want to ask yourself and you want to come up with a good answer for when you’re developing your mini webinars number one, but you want to make sure that number one here. Repeating your promise in your power offer meaning like right away. Like if you want to have a preselling funnel, which is how this is designed. It’s not a lead generation funnel to be very clear. It’s a sales funnel and a sales funnel attract buyer leads. So, people who are ready to make a yes or no purchasing decision.
00:22:58 Joel Erway
On that enrollment call, right? It’s not a, Hey, let me get more information call. It’s no I’ve got all the information. Now let’s just make sure this is the right fit for me. OK, so it’s more of a Q&A call, so this is a sales phone. And if you want to make sure that you develop the right sales funnel, then your messaging has to be congruent with speaking in a sales conversation so your mini webinar it needs nor wanis lead with your offer again. So, it needs to repeat your power offer promise, right? So, if I offered to do X, Y and Z, would you take me up on that offer right? So, in that has to be reiterated, like right at the beginning of your mini web and are the other questions that you have to answer our number one? How am I different?
00:23:39 Joel Erway
Every like if you want to really separate yourself and get the maximum price for your products or services, you have to come up with a unique differentiator, right? Unique mechanism is what Todd Brown calls it. So, like, how do you separate yourself from your competition? Do you have a methodology that you follow? Do you have, you know, a unique delivery system for how you deliver your promise, whatever that is, this is your opportunity to set yourself apart and get them be like, OK, I want that right. Ultimately, that’s what we want to do is we want them to say, Joel. Or Gary, I want a power offer or Joel or Gary. I want a mini webinar, right? Those are some of my unique mechanisms. My unique methodology is that once they start to buy into that then.
00:24:33 Joel Erway
I know they’re brought in Hook, line and sinker, right? So, developing those unique mechanisms, those unique methodologies and unique delivery systems. That is really where we spend a lot of our time focusing on inside of a mini webinar right? So, a traditional web and are you still give some sort of educational content, like? Hey, here’s, here’s what needs to happen, right? And so, the reason why we call them mini webinars? We do still give a little bit of educational information and we do that in the form of what are the steps that we’re going to be taking you through to achieve whatever the end result that we’re promising you to receive? So, whether that’s three steps or four steps like, we’re outlining that inside of our mini webinar. So, the main things that we have to focus on in this many webinars; number one repeating our power offer promise, number two, what makes us different?
00:25:24 Joel Erway
And #3, what is the process that somebody has to go through to achieve the end result? What is the high-level process like? How can you break that down and distill that into three steps? Three or four milestones so they understand? These are my expectations. If I were to work with you, Gary, if I were to work with you, Joel right. And if you get them to understand that and by the end of it, saying yes, I want that meaning. Yes, I want a power offer. Yes, I want a mini web and are then you don’t have to do any selling ’cause if they’ve already been sold, they’ve already convinced themselves that this is exactly what they want.
00:26:00 Joel Erway
Now the only thing they need answers they need answered is, Will this work for me? You know, Gary, let’s hop on the phone. I want you; I want you to tell me that this will work for my specific situation. So that’s really in a nutshell. What we focus on.
00:26:17 Gary Ruplinger
That’s brilliant. Do you? Do you have any? I guess any other numbers you could perhaps share with people just to kind of give an idea of some of the transformation all value of this of industries you’ve worked in.
00:26:32 Joel Erway
We worked in tons of industries. I mean, it’s hard to say all of them because it’s it literally goes all across the board from, you know, biz op, two coaches to health and Wellness to relationships. I mean, we go across the gamut and like the sales processes. All the same, right? I had a client who is in the geek dating niche. Now I’m not saying that to be disrespectful, that’s how she refers to them, right? So, she calls herself the Geek Whisperer. She’s amazing and she has this same process out for attracting coaching students to help them find, you know, find a dating partner.
00:27:13 Joel Erway
And so, you know, in terms of numbers, I just broke down 7 mini webinars. Seven of my clients and my students, many webinars and I upload in the membership area and the average cost per sale of I think everybody was selling at least a $5000 program. One of them might have been selling a $3000 program. One was selling a $15,000 program. So, on average it. Let’s just say the median price was 5 grands.
00:27:42 Joel Erway
No, we had I think 3 out of the three out of the seven that I reviewed had a cost per sale of like $130 per high ticket sale. One person was my $15,000 offer it was costing about 2 grands to make a $15,000 sale, and we’ve since optimized her funnel as well. We had another guy who was making. He’s at $50,000 per month right now with his $5000 offer. He’s in the personal development space and we had other a couple other people who were spending, I think 3 or $350.00 to make a $5000 sale. So, the numbers are across the board, but you know our bare minimum ROI for these funnels is 4X. Return on ad spend. Like if we’re not hitting 4X return on ad spend we’re doing something wrong. We’re doing something wrong, and so we know that our power offer promise. Likely it’s our power offer promise, because if you get a dialed in power offer like you really don’t need anything else to sell it, you’ll get people to raise their hand and want to hop on the phone with you and it’s pretty incredible, so I mean, those are some numbers that we have recently with us with our clients.
00:28:53 Gary Ruplinger
Those are some pretty amazing numbers. Well, I know I could talk about this, you know, for the next 2 days but I’m sure I know we both have things to go do so if anybody is kind of interested in exploring this further with you there, they want to look into, you know, Power offers, Mini webinars. Where should we send them?
00:29:13 Joel Erway
1st place they can go is they can head to my website joelerway.com, that’s kind of my central hub for everything that we’ve got going on. We talked a lot about power offers and we do have a workshop that people can attend. It’s a paid workshop, but it’s probably the single like, most popular product that we have out there right now is a $37 workshop that shows you how to craft your own one to two sentence power off. We’ve had people make as much as $20,000 in two days from this workshop. Just launching these power offers to their own internal audience, and so for $37 you can go to power hour.
00:29:54 Joel Erway
Powerofferworkshop.com that’s powerofferworkshop.com and they can take the first step and learn how to craft that craft that power offer.
00:30:03 Gary Ruplinger
Well, that’s great and I can. I can speak firsthand how good that is well, well worth the investment. It will give you a great ROI, pretty much within a week or two if you implement it. I know I certainly did so.
00:30:19 Gary Ruplinger
Well, anything else. Anything else somebody should know before we wrap this up?
00:30:24 Joel Erway
No, I mean, you know we covered a lot. You know if they want to check out my podcast as well, they can. They can search for that on soldwithwebinars.com that we’re switching domain providers for where that was previously hosted. So, if you go to it right now and it’s down, we’re working on it, but you can just search for sold webinars on iTunes or Spotify and find the podcast that way, but it’s been great Gary. Appreciate you having me on.
00:30:52 Gary Ruplinger
I appreciate it. You’ll take care and I really, really appreciate you sharing today. You got it. Take care.
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