From Two Years of Failed Launches to $287k in 8 Months
This was a problematic campaign for a couple of reasons.
- This creator only sold the course in-person (pre-covid)
- Original offer was for mba students but tried to push it to a different market
- No differentiation
- Price point did not make sense (for the type of sale process needed to support it)
- Two years of different employees and agencies trying to make it work created a Frankestein funnel that was beyond confusing
When we took this course on it was priced at $400 each and had a total of 7 sales after two years of work.
Total sales of roughly $5k.
All came from his network.
Since he is a VC & consultant he wanted to now have something to sell to startups as a low cost entry offer to move them to his more high-end package.
The first thing we had to address was the offer.
The gap between the course and upsell was too high. We added a 0 and the course was now sold for $4k.
In case you’re wondering, the upsell was priced at $75k.
One thing became obvious fast.
People wouldn’t buy this without talking to someone (needed sales rep) and startup founders are too busy for webinars (based on data from month 1 of testing).
I entertained the webinar idea for a few weeks but had a better plan.
We created an application process that was followed up with an email sequence and a sales call.
Initially we only had one sales page that asked people to apply.
The numbers were ok but I kept testing.
Biggest difference came after I decided to split up the application process into two parts.
Page 1 was the sales page asking people to click over to Page 2 which was an application page which they could then submit from.
Why this worked?
If you can have people take a small action up front, that’s often enough of a buy-in for them to want to take the next (harder step).
This more than doubled the conversions on the front end.
After that I dialed in the ad and we were off to the races.
Next we moved up the rest of the funnel.
Adjusted the form on the application page 2 until one was a clear winner.
Fixed up the headlines and emails so that people took action faster.
The differentiation was a tough one.
We didn’t want to remake the course or have him spend too much extra time on each student.
The decision was to give each graduate access to his network (of other investors and an intro if needed).
Big valuable bonus.
We were now booking over 50 calls per week.
He wasn’t a great sales person nor was anyone else on the team so initially a lot of people wanted to think about it.
I introduced real scarcity turning the course into a cohort that only ran 4 times per year. This improved the closing rate but it was still low.
Closing skills matter.
I had them record a few calls and noticed there was little structure or closing happening. Mostly telling people that they’ll send more info and had weak follow ups.
We came up with a script and a solid follow up sequence.
After 8 months of work (with most of the sales happening after month 5) the combined sales (course and upsell) were $278k (with 75% profit margins)
Can you see why he was successful whereas most marketing efforts fail?
During the initial two years the focus was on everything (and nothing).
Let’s change the name, logo and rewrite the emails and fix the pricing and get someone to run ads and try the webinar etc… exhausting and unable to read data. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.
I stopped that nonsense.
Explained why things are not working and gave a clear strategy on how to fix it.
Mindset issues I had to address…
If you keep changing everything you can’t see what is and isn’t working.
If you only focus on tiny adjustments it rarely creates a breakthrough.
If you only focus on one or two levers (sales page copy or traffic) things get tricky. You typically have two different workers. Each one only focuses on his part and things never come together.
Also when a good test is running most creators give up too fast (“what if we try change these other 3 things on top of it?”)
That part between month 1 & 5 (when things took off) is what we call the messy middle.
Were sales happening?
Yeah, sort of, maybe, not really.
All I knew is if we stop testing this course would never scale but I did and it worked.
Whenever you’re ready…
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