The Product Launch Formula Explained

If you want to launch your product or service, your online course, your membership site, your mastermind, your coaching program, whatever, well, that's become my life's work. I've been heading online business for 25 years. I've been teaching people for 15 years how to launch.

Now, if you see one of my Launch Masterclasses, it's three or four sessions long; it could be 10 or 12 hours. It's amazing, it's free, it's great. But I decided, I thought, well, I thought I'd see if I could do it in a condensed version, see if I could get it done in 20 minutes. So I just did a live training, and I've got the recording for you of the super compressed Product Launch Formula®. Check it out.

So the idea of a launch is, if you think about the way Hollywood rolls out a movie or Apple rolls out a new iPhone or the gaming industry rolls out the latest game, they don't just drop it onto the market. They turn their marketing into an event. So this thing that I teach, which we call the Product Launch Formula, you can forget that word “product” is in there, but it can also work for services just as well. And it's worked for online and offline. Most of my students are—I have online digital businesses, and most of them have training businesses. So they're teaching people how to golf better or scuba dive or ski or meditate, or have a better relationship or build their business. So most of them have online courses or membership sites. But it's been adapted offline; it's been adapted for all kinds of different things. And I think no matter what market you're in, there'll be pieces here that will work for you.

So the whole idea is, turn your marketing into an event. And there's three main tools I use for that. And they are stories, sequences, and triggers. And I'll walk through those for you.

So like, how do you—if Apple or Hollywood, they release a trailer a year in advance, and then six months in advance, and then a month in advance. And then they send their actors out on all the talk shows. And all of a sudden everyone's talking about that movie before it came out. We're taking that power of the Prelaunch, of the buzz campaign. And we're taking that power and we're bringing it into like our kinds of businesses. Most of the people I work with, they might be micro businesses or they might have small teams. They might have 20 or 30 or 40 people on their teams, but generally it's taking that power that Apple and Hollywood has, and it's bringing it into our kinds of businesses.

So, there's a metaphor we use called the Sideways Sales Letter®. And in the Sideways Sales Letter, we'll release Prelaunch Content. And typically there's three pieces of Prelaunch Content. And these, you'll release these in a sequence. This is the sequence. This is the first sequence that you'll use. You'll release these, and generally these days, they're done either as videos or as live streams. Now I've been doing this so long that when I started out, the only real tool we had was email. So we just did this all via email. And then eventually we got the capability to use audio online, and we used audio online. And then we used blogs. Then we started to use really ugly video. Then we started to use fancier video, and then we started to do live streams. But these are three pieces of content that you'll typically release over a seven to 10-day period. And they will tell the story of your upcoming offer. So this is the Prelaunch Sequence. And then this is what we call the Open Cart. OC, for Open Cart. This is when you actually open up and you start taking orders. So this is when you start selling your product. So this is the equivalent of Apple releasing all those rumors and inviting people to media events or Hollywood releasing trailers. This is your equivalent in your business.

So these three pieces of Prelaunch Content are very specific jobs to do. The first one is what we call opportunity. And no matter what you're selling, you're selling the opportunity for someone's life to be better. You're either giving them pleasure or you're taking away pain. No matter what you're doing, whether you're selling private jets or pizzas, you're either giving more pleasure or taking away pain. So they have an opportunity for their life to change. Even if it's in a small way, they have an opportunity for themselves to have a better life, to be able to step up onto that golf tee and hit their drive an extra 10 yards further than they have in the past. For them to be able to get their tennis serve, and for them to be able to have a great meditation practice, for them to be able to speak a foreign language. And this first piece of content, and I'm just going to assume we're doing video these days. It could be live video; it could be a live broadcast. Most people do video these days. And your first video is going to be about the opportunity. So let's see, I'll write that down, of how their life can change. I'm teaching people how to launch a product or a service. But really, I'm teaching them how to have an online business or an online business that has grown quite a bit. So the opportunity is for them to have an online business. But really, it's about them having the freedom that an online business gives them. It's them having the income, the lifestyle, the impact. And so really, this first piece is all about showing what their life can become.

The second piece is what we call the transformation. And in this piece, you're really showing what their transformation will look like in their life. This is often done with case studies or examples. I love to use case studies. So, here it's like conceptually their life could be better. They could have that great tennis swing. They could have that great, find their soulmate. They could have that incredible meditation practice. This is what their life will actually—this is where you show them how that will, how that transformation will actually show up in their life.

This third one is ownership. And in ownership, it's like here it's conceptual, but here they actually start to take ownership of the change for themselves. So whenever you're selling something, especially high-end—most of the products my students are selling are higher-end products. I sell $2,000 online training. I sell a $12,000 coaching program. I sell a $35,000 mastermind. So they are significant investments. And a lot of times people will look at that, and say, that's really awesome that people can have that change in their lives. And, oh, wow, I can see how their life truly would be transformed if I had an online business, but it's all conceptual. And this one is about having them actually take ownership for themselves. It's one thing for people to say, yeah, someone else's life can be changed, or maybe my life can be changed, but for them to really embody it, to step into that idea of owning that change in themselves. That's a whole different thing. And then once you get to Open Cart, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in depth in a minute, but this is where it's all about truly enrolling them in that change.

So this sequence that you take, well, I've been teaching it for 15 years; it works. It's a very, very effective model. But what really makes it powerful is, I mentioned sequences, stories, and triggers. These are the two primary sequences that you'll use. Seven to 10 days for the Prelaunch. And then this is usually four to seven days for the Open Cart where you're actually taking orders.

So, there's also these things we call the mental triggers. And mental triggers are these factors that impact how we make decisions. So I'm just going to go through three really important ones for you here. So for triggers, the first one is authority. When we perceive someone is in a position of authority, then we pay more attention to them. And when you're going through here, and you're actually—one thing that… This is all about building value. It's not just about showing the opportunity, transformation, ownership; you're actually teaching and giving real value throughout here. So if you're teaching, maybe you're teaching guitar, you can be teaching, you'll be doing real actual teaching throughout each one of these pieces, and hopefully creating some real change in their lives, even before you ask for the sale. And when you can do that, it establishes your authority. I'll do this—I recently did this exact same sequence to sell my Product Launch Formula. And I did it as three live broadcasts, each between three and four hours long. So I was giving nine, 10, 12 hours of content here. I established enormous authority because I could just sit here and teach hour after hour, without even asking for any money. That was massive, massive authority.

Another trigger here is reciprocity. When you give something to someone, they feel like they want to give back to you. And by giving true value as you go through here, you're building up huge reciprocity.

Another one is called social proof. And social proof is this idea—if we see a lot of other people doing something, then we'll do it as well, or we'll take that, that will create enormous influence for us. So for instance, Amazon reviews. You go to Amazon, and there's 4,000—you're looking at one product and it's got like 12 reviews and another one's got 4,000 reviews; you're going to think there's something going out with the 4,000 reviews. And that's probably going to be the one you check out first. And the same thing works with social proof. Well, all the way through here, you're creating a little community which, by the way, is another trigger. And you're asking people to comment, especially, like a lot of times in the live streams, there could be a chat roll. If it's just a video, down below each video, there'll be a section for comments. And in those comments and in the interaction, they can see that others are paying attention. And that creates social proof.

Now, another really powerful trigger, actually closely related to social proof, is scarcity. And when there is a limited amount of something, we tend to want it more as humans. This goes back to the days when we were living in caves, and there was like one thighbone left. We made sure we were, we got really interested in eating that one thighbone before we'd go kill another mastodon. So scarcity comes into play here in the Open Cart. This whole Prelaunch leads into mailing for Open Cart. You get into the Open Cart period, and there's a whole sequence here as well. But as you get down to the end of the Open Cart, this is where it got really technical here. You have to make sure that there is a definitive end to your launch. By that, I mean, they have to act by the end of the launch, or some negative consequence takes place. And that's either—bonuses go away. In other words, the offer changes. The offer is no longer quite as attractive; bonuses go away or the price goes up or the offer comes off the market. And when you do that, what happens typically—we'll go to green for sales. Your sales will typically, if this is a chart of your sales, your sales on day one will be pretty high because you get all the emotional people that are very excited about it. And then that will drop off midweek. And then it'll spike through the roof on the last day. Often 50% of your sales come on the last day because that's scarcity trigger. But you absolutely have to have some negative consequence if people don't buy.

Now, as you're going through here, you're going to be sending emails. I'm a big fan of email. This entire thing can be supported by social, but I love using email. So you're going to be emailing to each one of these pieces of content. You're also going to be mailing, if it's a 10-day Prelaunch, if you're mailing these every three days, you're also going to be mailing in-between. And then once you get into Open Cart, you're going to be… Let's just put some days in here. Let's make it a five-day Open Cart. So we're going to go right there. So here's day one, day two, day three, four, five. Hope that is clear; I should have more room, but you're going to mail twice here. You're going to mail once here, once here, twice here. And in the last day, you're going to mail three times. And you're going to be posting to social all the way through. And if you're using paid traffic, which works really, really well, both warm and cold paid traffic work really well, you're going to be hitting all these trigger points.

What this allows you to do, we call this the Sideways Sales Letter. It's like the idea if you take a long form sales letter, if you've seen one of those, and you turn it on its side, this gives you many opportunities to mail, many opportunities to touch your people. And it's not like the same old, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. It's more—you have real reasons to reach out, hey, this is an amazing video. Oh, did you miss this such and such a thing in that video? Go check it out. Oh, here's another great video for you. It's the second in our series of four videos. Oh, did you see that really, really cool thing in that video too? Oh, I've got a great new video for you. And then here, hey, you know what? The fourth video is coming, and I'm going to open up our program, and you're going to be able to enroll. And then, hey, it's open. And, oh boy, it's flying off the shelf. And, oh, look at these case studies. And, oh, frequently asked questions. And, hey, it's going to close down tomorrow; you need to get it today. And, oh, I added in a bonus of a livecast. And here, it's closing tonight. And oh, let me tell you a story about one of the people that had success with it. And then, hey, you've only got a few hours left. Now is the time to act.

So that's super—let me check the time. That is a super quick pass through the Sideway Sales Letter. So like exactly, that is exactly it. You had this long sales letter, which could have been four pages or eight pages or 50 pages long, and those actually started way before the internet; they were hard copy. People would send those hard copy out. And back then it cost money to add more pages. And then when that long form sales letter shifted to the internet, then all of a sudden it became 50 pages long because copywriters could just make them as long as they wanted. It didn't cost any extra money to make your sales letter 50 pages instead of 24 pages. So that worked initially in those late '90s, early 2000s, but they started to burn out. And that's when I came up with this concept of the Sideways Sales Letter.

And one of the big differences is that that long form sales letter would have—what they did was, they had—this is the letter, and it'd have a headline up here. And then it'd have a subhead. And then it'd have a bunch of copy, and then maybe a subhead, a bunch of copy, a bunch of copy. And down here, it'd have the price. And they filed this formula called problem-agitate-solve. So you would define what the problem is. Yeah, you've been trying to fall asleep, but you don't know how; you're not doing a good job falling asleep, then you agitate it; you make them feel really bad. You know that when you don't get a good night's sleep, then you raise your risk of a heart attack. And you snap at your family and you get less work done. You just really rub it and make them feel bad. And then you give them the solution. The solution is to buy your product. And that worked really, really well. But then when that went online, what people would do is this page would load, and this much would load. And then they would grab that little scroll bar, and then they would scroll down and see what the price was. And then they would decide if they wanted to buy from you.

So, it worked and it still works. And I still use them on occasion. But it didn't work as well as that Sideways Sales Letter. And the other thing is markets became more savvy. They're so much more savvy than they were 20 years ago or 10 years ago. And certainly more than 40 years ago when this formula worked so well. So now it's about really delivering—instead of problem-agitate-solve, I have this thing I call the P.S. Path, which is the Problem Solution Path. So in this first video, you would define a problem. And you would not just define it, but you would actually give the solution, flat out give it. So in mine, and I'm just going to use mine because we're compressed on time and I'm more familiar with mine, but the first thing is you want an online business; you need to launch. So let me show you how to launch. And then I'll actually teach the Sideways Sales Letter. And because I have more time in my live broadcast, I'll even go deeper than I'm going with you guys here. So I'll go full out deep and say, if you want to have an online business and all the freedom, the time, the money, the lifestyle, the impact that would give you, you need to launch. You can't just put out a product and hope it sells. You can't just put up a website and hope people find you. You need to launch; let me show you how to launch. So I teach the Sideway Sales Letter, boom. And like I said, for three hours, I'll teach it. And I give that solution. But you know, the thing is, every solution has inherent in it the seeds of the next problem. So at the end of this video I'll say, okay, so I told you, you need to launch. I just showed you the formula. This form has been used to do a billion dollars in launches. But the thing is, there's actually three types of launches. And in my next lesson, I'm going to actually show you the three primary types of launches. So what did I do? I just defined the next problem, and left a little cliffhanger. So then we come back into here and I reiterate what their problem is. Okay, well, there's three types of launches, and let me walk you through them. And then I actually teach all three launches. Again, at a 50,000-foot level, I can't be super granular, but I teach it—teach the three types of launches that are most popular. And I let the viewer find which one works for them the best. Then, because every solution has the seeds of the next problem, I define what the next problem is. So it's like, okay, in the next one, I'm actually going to walk you through the nitty gritty step-by-step. And so then, what do we do? We come in here; I redefine their problem and I solve it. And then I give the next problem, which is, okay, I've given this all to you, but if you're ready to be walked hand by hand through this, then you really need to check out my next training because that's where I'm going to show you, share with you how you can get coached all the way through this process. And that final solution is also where you make the sale. So instead of like the old style, problem-agitate-solve, this is what we call the P.S. Path, the Problem Solution Path. And it's a way to give real, real value. Like every year I have people just go through my free Prelaunch, my free, what I call my masterclass, don't pay me anything. And they still do great launches, so real value. But the P.S. Path takes them right down the path to the sale.

Okay, there you go. The super compressed version of the Product Launch Formula. If you want the full thing, the Launch Masterclass, go to productlaunchformula.com. Now, because of the way video works, I don't know when you're going to be watching us. We only do it once, maybe twice a year. So I don't know if it's going to be available when you're watching this. But go to productlaunchformula.com, put your email address in. And the next time we do a Launch Masterclass, we'll send you an email. And we'll get you all hooked up. When you go there, right now the odds are, there'll be a waiting list or something like that. Just put your email in at productlaunchformula.com, and we'll get you hooked up the next time I have a free Launch Masterclass. So that's it; I'm Jeff Walker, and let's go get 'em this week.