Transcription
Hey Jason Fladlin here. Today I want to talk to you about some piece of advice I gave a guy this last weekend on his webinar. That you're struggling with, and anyone out there, and he crushed it. And I think you're going to find this advice helpful, regardless of whether you do webinars or not. Because this is some big, high-level business strategic thinking kind of stuff. So let's get into it.
So this gentleman wrote me, and he said, "Hey, listen, I've been working on this webinar forever. I have several hundred slides; I'm kind of stuck. Can you help me out? Can you take a look at it?" So to send me over to slide deck, and I gave him some advice. And what I had picked up on when I first noticed, even in his email before he sent me the slide deck, is I could sense there was some hesitancy there. Like he was afraid to get it out of the laboratory, get it to the public, and see what happens.
And this is a big deal with like everything that people do: is they want to polish it; they want to have it correct; they want to have it exact and precise. And it's almost always better to have something that's really good, with integrity, put it out in front of people in a way that will uplift them, regardless of whether they buy or not, and then see what happens and make adjustments.
Now, I didn't know this until he wrote to me. What he wrote to me, and this is what he wrote to me, says: "I ran a small test over the weekend. I had 158 people on the call; 40 people stayed on all the way through, and two hours and 45 minutes later, I had six sales. So a 15% conversion from the time you started closing, which was at 40 people in, to six people buying. Now, even if you take the raw number of 158 people that showed up for the webinar, still it's like a three-ish percent conversion for this price point on this product, which is like a three-thousand-dollar product with continuity attached to it—pretty insane."
He says, "Jason, thank you so much, brother. Your insights and the way to structure the webby were flawless and killer good." So I appreciate that. But here's what he said that I didn't know, and it would have been nice to know upfront: "I haven't spoken on a webinar since 2017." He said, "I stopped doing them because I was so busy delivering content." And this is a problem in business: this balancing between being a subject matter expert and being a salesperson or a marketer. What happens is the true blue, real good stuff that's out there, it's hard to find because people spend so much time being a master at what they're at and not enough time on the marketing.
On the other hand, you see a lot of guys who spend all their time on the marketing and nothing on the subject matter expertise, and they typically win, unfortunately, in the marketing world, or in the business world, or any world that involves commerce or the proliferation of content, because they're better at putting the packaging together than they are on what's inside of the package.
And so I was glad to bring this guy back out, and I was glad he could experience what he experienced because this is a push in the right direction for him. Now he's got momentum. We've now changed the mechanism from "I'm behind a closed door in private trying to make this thing good before I take it to public," to "I'm now in public, and people are pulling me towards doing more of this," because the small amount of people I've already hit, they're excited; they're happy; they're exuberant, even with a product that is rough around the edges in terms of its presentation.
Because what he said later, he says, "FYI, I was so rusty on the call, you could tell. I stuttered; still have that issue; lost my train of thought at times, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." And it's going to be that way with anything that you do at first. It's going to be warts and all, and it's going to be rough around the edges. However, if the sincerity is there to help, and you have something that is worthwhile in terms of how can help people, they'll take you at that, and the other stuff will be less important, and you can fix the other stuff a lot easier than if you don't have anything purposeful to say. Then that's a lot harder to fix than saying something purposeful but not saying it perfectly.
Now, here's what's really cool about this concept also that he says later on where he goes, "You're right, math is tough to do on webinars, even simple math." Because I warned him the subject matter he was talking about was highly technical. Unfortunately, most people don't try to market that; they stay away from highly technical stuff, and they just try to pick and choose businesses that are simple and obvious and easy to understand. The problem with that is everybody creates a traffic jam saying the same kind of stuff over and over and over again. You could change a lot of these marketers' names, and you wouldn't even notice a difference in terms of the content they're saying; it's all the same. Swap out this name for that name; you wouldn't even know.
And I had said to him, "It's okay to teach the technical stuff, but what you're gonna have to do, especially if there's math involved, is you're gonna have to show your point three times, three different ways." The same points he was proving how this is a more effective than traditionally how people do it, and he had the math that backed it up. So you got to run through three scenarios. So you show them once, and then you say, "Okay, did you get that?" "Yes." "Let's do it again," and show them a second scenario. "Is this making sense?" "Yes." You do it again, and the third time you say, "You got this now completely," and they go, "I got this."
Because there's something about having that dimensionalized, as I like to call it, where you look at it from three slightly different angles with three different sets of data, and you kind of deliver them a little bit differently; otherwise, it feels monotonous. But now you have three ways in which to look at that one insight as opposed to one way to look at that insight. So typically what people will do on any marketing communication is they're going to make three big points, and they'll make them each with one kind of demonstration. I would rather you make one big point with three demonstrations because that will create more depth, especially on the more technical and on the more logical sides.
The emotion is different. People feel emotion, and even if they don't understand emotion, they say, "I came here, and I was changed, and I like that feeling of being changed; I want more of that," and they will follow the guru, or they will follow the subject matter expert of the product to achieve that. And that's great if that's all you sell, but I don't want to be limited to an emotional-only appeal. That has its drawbacks, and it has its limitations, and so on the logic side, you want them to get that "aha" moment by emphasizing from a few different perspectives that insight, so they say, "Oh, I get this now, and this changes everything."
Now we should sell with both emotion and logic if we're going to be all stars. But if we have a subject matter where there's more logic that is needed to parse through, we want to find that one thing and hit it three different ways. And then that brings me to the last point. This is what I warn this gentleman is: in anything that you're really teaching out there, there is one element that will make more difference than everything else. So they call this the law of the vital few: a few inputs get you a majority of the outputs; the 80/20 rule; Pareto's principle; same kind of concept: is there's only a couple things that matter when it comes to the results, and everything else related to that is inconsequential.
Now, this is contextual; it will change depending on the person, depending on the subject, depending on where they're at in their journey. But at any given point in time, there is one thing that if you focus more on and nail than any other thing out there, it will more than anything else influence your results. And so with webinars, if you're really good at it, you find that one critical thing, and you knock that out of the park, and you put all the emphasis on that, and that's really insightful and really useful. But the problem then becomes if you start selling a product and you say, "Now let me show you the 172 other things that kind of make a difference but don't really make a difference."
We tend to want to be thorough when we present solutions, and so what we do is we take all this time to break down in its simplest element, like Einstein broke down E=mc² in its simplest form—one of the most complicated concepts that ever hit this universe, at least in the physical sciences—and he made it that simple, without without sacrificing the integrity of it. What that's what we do if we're doing webinars correctly, or any really powerful marketing communication, is we take that one thing and we break it down so they see that "aha." And then if we sell product, we also want to be thorough, so we want to cover everything, but that creates incongruence. I say, "Wait a minute, this is simple over there, and it's free, and now what I want to pay for over there is very complicated, and it teaches all the other little small things."
So I showed him: go de-emphasize some of that and keep it high enough, uh, high level, and so they understand I have these other areas that if you need them, you can reach for them, and they're there for you, but they're not really what moves the needle. We're just going to go even further into what I showed you today; that's what the product really is, even though maybe that's five percent of the total product. Because there's the basics; there's the setups; there's the fundamentals; uh, there's the fringe cases; you know, there's the, "Hey, once you're in this part of the journey, here's what becomes more important over time," that's less important today. We put that in its proper place. They understand that if they do, then they'll buy; if they don't, then you will undo all the value that you did up into that point, and so they won't buy, and they won't necessarily be better off either; they'll be confused.
So that's the lesson for you today. Here is there's a couple of them, so watch this through as it makes sense to you and go out there. The most important thing is if you take nothing else from this: find ways to experiment in public where there is no downside. You will learn something; your audience will still be uplifted whether they buy or not. And then when you're finished, you can look at it and say, "Okay, now I know something I didn't know before. Now what do we do?" Alright, got it. Go get it. [Music]