EP 005: The Webinar Marketing Blueprint Backed by 50 Million in Sales

Off the Record by Digital Kickstart: Behind the Curtain with Marketing Millionaires

Mark Thompson: Okay welcome to today's podcast. I am joined here by Jason Fladlien. He is the CEO of Rapid Crush. He has a software company that develops solutions for internet marketers, specifically related to WordPress and Facebook, but one of the reasons that I wanted to bring Jason on was he knows a lot about webinars. He has been doing webinars for years and he has perfected it and become one of the authorities in our space in terms of how to craft the perfect webinar pitch presentation, how to get people on to the webinar, so thank you Jason for joining me today.

Jason Fladlien: Mark, thank you for having me here. I'm very excited to see what we can do today.

Mark Thompson: Perfect well let's dive right into it. The first thing I want to ask you is why webinars?

Jason Fladlien: Why not webinars is what I always ask the people. At the end of the day we have a responsibility, each and every single one of us who run a company, and that's to create amazing things that people get more value of than the money that they put it in exchange. The joke is, how can I get as many people as possible to take advantage of me? Where they get the better end of the deal, and the more people we do that the more money we make, right? Webinars are a thing that allow you to help do that. In my opinion and based on my experience, Mark, I have never found a single greater point of sale transactional process that simultaneously educates and converts the customer.

It's like we can do multi-step sequences where we're mailing them, or contacting them, or talking to them over a 10, 15, 20 day period, to sell like a $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 item, or we can take a complete stranger whose never heard of us, never seen us, never known us, and in 45 minutes both give them insight and value in ways that they never got before, and then present an offer for $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 and get them to say yes. There's very few places I know where you can do one to many communication, where you can take somebody from who the heck are you? To here's $5,000, and I'm getting a fantastic deal as a result of this in just 45 to 60 minutes.

Mark Thompson: Yep definitely. Do you find that a certain point in your sales funnels, or during that contact with the prospect, that webinars just work outstanding, or could it be at any point during the sales funnel?

Jason Fladlien: Really any point during the sales funnel a webinar could be very powerful. The give and take on this is it always kind of delays the sell. It's very paradoxical and I like this, by creating constraints we actually increase efficiency. That by the way, that's a principle that works in all areas of life it's very interesting. By [setting 02:25] a deadline and narrowing our opportunity, we actually increase our value. It's weird but with webinars specifically here's the process. Say we're using e-mail as the primary way to put a person on a webinar, so we would e-mail the list. Some people don't open an e-mail.

Then those who do open an e-mail, some of them don't click the link, right? Those who do click the link, some of the land on the webinar signup page but they don't signup, then some of those who land on the webinar signup page, they do signup but they don't attend. Then some of those who do sign up and attend, they don't stay for the big reveal where we tell them where to go to sign up so we can make some money. Then those who do, they go and the stay for the big reveal then they go to the link to the lading page where they can buy the product, but they don't buy the product.

Like the salmon swimming back upstream home, it seems almost like a miracle the way we describe it now, is some people actually do find that buy button, click it, fill out the form, and then invest, but this is a very, very exclusive way of selling a product. There's a lot of breakage and slippage at each and every single point in the process. You can use this fronted on a funnel immediately to start the sales cycle, and then use massively intelligently crafted followup sequences, you get a leverage there, we can talk about there here in a little bit, or you can use it at the end, where you get them on there and figure out, hey if they haven't bought yet, what would they need to know to buy?

The same with that, Mark, is new information new decision. Customers will say no to an offer, doesn't necessarily mean they won't say yes at some point at some time, so if they said no now, I always ask myself what's new information we can give them to help them make a new decision that's going to be in their best interest? If we feel like the webinar is the best way to communicate that during a sales process, we're going to stick that in wherever we can, whether it's first, last, in the middle, something to supplement other types of communication, or we use other types of communication to supplement the webinar. It is a tool that is extremely versatile.

Mark Thompson: Okay. You talk about breakage throughout the webinar funnel. Lets start from the beginning of this funnel, getting people to actually register for the webinar. What type of tips or things that you have found that actually get people to register?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah so typically in general we do a blind curiosity plus intrigue plus benefit benefit benefit encapsulated in proof. That's the formula, so I can give you a very specific example. I could say to somebody, "Listen come to this webinar. We will specifically and intimately be talking about X Y and Z." There's no intrigue there. You've revealed everything prior to them coming on. If there's no intrigue they're less likely to want to sign up, and even if they do sign up they're less likely to attend, so by putting intrigue, right? Instead of saying this is exactly what we did on Facebook to increase our advertising ROI by 5, right? We put $1 in and now we get $10 back instead of putting in $1 and getting $2 back. Come to this webinar, I'll tell you what that's all about.

That's okay, and a lot of people do it that way, but I could say something like this instead. An advertising channel that most people use inefficiently, we've recently just discovered a breakthrough to where we can put $1 in and get $10 out instead of $1 in and get $2 out. You've never seen anything like this before, even if you've used this communication channel in the past. Come to this webinar so you can discover exactly how to utilize this in a way that nobody's currently doing. That's a blind description, so somebody says what type of advertising channel? Well, it's Facebook, but we didn't say that did we? By keeping it blind and intriguing, we are able to spike attendance, if that makes sense, right? Then of course wrapping it in proof is like the other cool thing is, we can just say we've got a ten to one return instead of a two to one return, right, but is there better ways that we can demonstrate, show visually, or somehow communicate, that type of proof, and I think that there would be.

This is a theoretical example here, but if we actually specifically said, "The first time I did I got 123 clicks at 62 cents and it resulted in that number of dollars in e-mail subscribers. The second time I got 170 clicks, the third time I got 192 clicks," and we stacked five or six or seven times, and made the proof very specific. That makes what we're teaching more real to the customer, so the customer says, "Wow I've got to see that. It's got to be different than anything I've ever seen before, because that person is so specific with how they're describing it." Then lastly benefit, benefit, benefit, so in this particular case, this works fantastic if you have your own products, but interestingly enough a little tweak I'll show you, it also works if you promote affiliate products, and oh any of you who do local marketing, well we've got you covered too. We'll explain more on the call once you sign up here today.

That's a slight difference in how people are doing webinars. By wrapping intrigue and benefits and getting very specific and focusing on proof as part of what you're going to teach them, that will in general increase your webinar signups. Now it's very, very important [inaudible 00:07:25] something you can't use all the time. You have to use it judiciously. If we really really want to get somebody on a webinar, Mark, we just straight up bribe them. We say two people will leave this webinar $1,000 richer, because we're going away $2,000, $1,000 to two different people. Could you be one of them? The only way you could be one of them is if you come to this webinar.

Mark Thompson: Yeah. It's interesting it's a very fine line about giving them enough information that they want to come on the webinar but not enough where they're intrigued, right?

Jason Fladlien: You want them intrigued but not enough to where they're not intrigued. To take it even further is you don't want them to show up and then be disappointed by the reveal. Then you worked up all this potential energy and you squandered it. You've got to write it in such a way that still calls them out by name and will be of value of them without spilling your candy in the lobby. Wait until you get to the movie theater.

Mark Thompson: Yeah. That's a good way of looking at it.

Jason Fladlien: You like that, right?

Mark Thompson: Haven't heard that one yet. I guess that kind of brings us to the next point in the funnel which is getting people onto the actual webinar. Obviously, years ago when people were doing webinars, you'd get 50%, 60% people attending the webinars. Now, people realize they're going to get pitched, right? I guess part of getting people on to the call is part of what you're talking about. Creating intrigue and bribe. Is there anything else, any other little tricks that you do to ensure people are attending?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah so there's a lot of different things you can do. You can create followup sequences of e-mails just for people who signed up, and then communicate to them individually. There's all kind of fancy stuff. You could to retargeting, and all that stuff is valuable. On occasion we will do that but I always think 80/20 rule, right? What's the one thing or what's the 20% that we can do extra to increase show rate by 80% more than if we didn't do it? That one thing is the thank you page. That's by the way the only page that 100% of people who sign up for webinar will ever see, or read, or consume, or be able to.

The thank you page is, once they sign up, we want to do something on the thank you page that helps compel them to not only show up for the webinar, because the easiest way to get somebody to show up for the webinar is not necessarily the best thing to get them in a state that's conducive for making a sale, right? If I said free sex and beer, I'd get 100% show rate, right? But I say now that I got you here let me really talk to you about Roth IRAs, right? Everybody's like awww. We want not just to maximize attendance from a quantity perspective but from a quality perspective.

We want to put them in a positive frame of mind that would make them more likely to say yes for the offer that we're going to present to them. On the thank you page typically what we'll do is we'll reveal a little bit more, so it's like at first, we lift the skirt up a little bit each time, right? At first we just wear the skirt, that's the intrigue for them so signup, but then we lift it up a little bit more on thank you page. Okay now you're seeing a little bit more, now you've got to come to the webinar and see the rest. Usually I'll give them a little bit of education and I'll give them ideas of more specific things that they're going to learn on the webinar while still keeping some sort of balance of intrigue there, and really getting them ... Here's the number one question you have to answer on the thank you page, by the way Mark, it's: why should I show up to your webinar as opposed to somebody else's webinar or no webinar at all?

Almost always on the thank you page we'll give a reason, like listen, this is absolutely the most important reason why you need to be at this webinar. By actually specifically telling them, come to this webinar, not other webinars, I mean you don't have to get that specific. By giving them a reason, which by the way most marketers don't think about. Most marketers, here's the rationale. "I'm doing the webinar. That's why they should show up." That doesn't work, right? I'm guilty of that sometimes myself. I'm Jason Fladlien, they should show up just because it's going to be a great webinar, but it's like there's 56,000 other people including Mark Thompson that day that are doing a webinar. By the way, there might be a reason for them to show up to your webinar that day instead of mine. If what you're teaching them is more relevant and specific to their exact needs, by all means they should go to yours and not mine. That's one of the things that we try to answer, specifically, this is who is going to get the most value out of this webinar, maybe more value than any other webinar they've ever attended. Then we list reasons.

Mark Thompson: Okay and does time have an impact?

Jason Fladlien: Time has a massive impact. If I say listen here's this webinar I'm doing six years from now, sign up today, the show rate is going to be horrible.

Mark Thompson: I'm sorry I mean when you're actually going to present the webinar.

Jason Fladlien: Ah I got you.

Mark Thompson: Sorry.

Jason Fladlien: By the way it's important though what you just aid, recency. If I start mailing for a webinar six days out, I'm going to get less of a show rate then if I mail it six minutes out. There's obviously a balance. Typically for most promotions we'll mail two days. Here's the schedule. Two days, day before, day of in the morning and then do the webinar in the afternoon. Now as far as to answer your specific question related to timing, depends on the audience you reach. We reach a global audience and you do as well Mark, so it's like if we do it at say 7 PM Pacific, then we do not get the UK crowd. We get the Australian crowd though because it's early enough in the morning for them.

If we do it at noon Pacific then we do get the UK crowd but we don't get the Australian crowd, and we don't get the US crowd that happens to be at work. There's four time zones in the US alone. It's funny because at the end of the day if we tried to optimize for a time zone, I've never ever figured out one that seems to work better than the other. This is how we do it. Hey, I want to do them at noon Pacific, that's when I feel freshest, that's when I feel like I have enough to prep prior to the call if I need to do anything specific, deliver the call and then have rest after the call, and then do a post-cap to analyze the results of the call, right?

We do them at noon almost always because it's just personal. It's selfish, right? I like doing them at noon, let's do them at noon. Now if you have specific audiences that have bias, so if you're selling to evangelical Christians, I don't recommend you do them on Sundays around 11 AM in the morning when they're at church, right?

Mark Thompson: Right.

Jason Fladlien: There are specific instances and then there are other times where you just can't. Maybe my schedule's booked but this webinar is so important that I want to get it out as soon as possible so then we'll do at 7 PM at night or 9 PM at night. We've done Sunday webinars, we've done Saturday webinars, but yeah timing can affect it, but in general overall at the individual level it can affect it, overall though it doesn't affect ... By the way, a lot of this depends on what's you're after-webinar followup strategy? If there's no replay on the webinar, then timing is slightly more of a consideration because you want to maximize show rate, right? If you are going to do followup sequences post-webinar that are going to close the sale, then timing is very unimportant because we'll catch them on the followup mostly.

Mark Thompson: Let me ask you this question because it relates to what you just said. What percentage of your sales come from the live versus the replay?

Jason Fladlien: In general and then I'll give you a couple specific exceptions, but in general we will get three times as many sales on the followup as we do on the webinar itself. Now when I say that Mark, there's a lot of people watching [this on LiveCrowds 00:14:40] before, and they're like 30% of the audience, they almost puke because they're like how is that possible? I laugh because they think in terms of webinars, and I think in terms of campaigns. The webinar is one part of the overall campaign. Remember earlier I said in general we'll e-mail two days before, day before, day of, then we'll do the webinar. Now if that webinar converts like a beast right out of the gate point of sale, we might mail the webinar replay that night, so they'll get two e-mails on the day of the webinar, one before the webinar and one after the webinar. Then we will say, we probably e-mail three more times each day, so day after, two days after, three days after, and that'll be a close date. In general that's roughly the framework that we use.

We have that deadline, and this is the way we structure the webinar. The webinar is scarce. What I mean by that is the actual training itself goes offline on the final day. There's a countdown timer and when that countdown timer hits zero that webinar is gone for good, and that's the sales webinar by the way. Then the offer also has the same ticking clock. When that webinar goes away the offer also goes away, so we double stack scarcity as well. By the way, the way we sell on webinars is, we don't necessarily want to optimize point of sale, we want to optimize overall conversion.

Here's the difference, and you'll hear this all the time, Mark. Guys talk about webinars in terms of EPC. EPC stands for earning per click. They say, "On this webinar we got this earnings per click." Some other individuals will describe it this way, is earnings per attendee. They say, "We had this many attendees, we did this much in revenue, so therefore revenue divided by number of attendees equals earnings per attendee." I think both of those metrics are completely meaningless by the way, because if I want to spike on-call sales I can get a very high earning per attendee.

I could do something that says hey if you buy before the end of this webinar, I won't kill this cute little bunny, right? We're going to maximize conversion on the webinar, but we've just shot ourselves in the foot on followup on the campaign, and more importantly we shot ourselves in the foot on any other damn webinar we ever do again. We can maximize conversions on webinars but at the end of the day we're not cashing conversions in at the bank. The consideration is always what, knowing in the full extent of the campaign, what is going to optimize sales? Very often I'll do things on webinars, Mark, where I won't reveal everything and I'll leave something behind that I can use as a followup, a big reveal. I got this from watching TV shows like cop dramas and stuff like that, where when they get the guy in the interrogation room and they get him, and they're going back and forth and it feels like the criminal is going to escape, and then as they get ready to walk away they're like oh, and they drop this one major piece of evidence.

You're like, why didn't they just lead with that? They could have saved ten minutes of going back and forth with this criminal. Drop it on him. Say we've got your DNA, right? Why this tit for tat kind of stuff, but it makes good drama, it's intriguing, it's exciting. It also makes good drama on a promotion. If I don't lead with my best thing and you are already almost willing to buy, when I do present my best thing it blows your mind, and it's not an experience you normally have as most marketers do it the opposite. They lead with their best thing, they got nothing else, so on the followup they hit you over the head like a hammer with that best thing over and over and over and over and over again, and remember earlier when I said no new information no decision. No new information, same decision, and now they're peeved by it. They're saying oh my god quit pitching this thing, quit shoving it down my throat, but by always having other things that we can use and deploy and put out there, it always creates situations where people are excited to continue to hear about us and that excitement can translate into purchasing.

This is the thing, the higher the ticket the more likely I'm doing this. There will be very often the time is we'll get a point of sale of about 5% of people on the call, but my estimation when I'm done with the call, the conversation we have with the team is: how much more likely are people who didn't buy now going to buy in the future if we do things right? If we feel like that likelihood is high, and by the way just a gut call, you never really know, you can't tangibly measure it, but if we say based on what we did on the webinar, do we feel like we've increased the non-buyers significantly to the point where they would now seriously consider buying? You can read chat logs and stuff like that to help you with that decision, and if the answer to that is no, it means you screwed up and that means that your pitch just sucked completely and that happens to all of us, it happens to me. Then you've got to make a new adjustment and during that campaign be like okay we've got to go back and just head in with a completely new pitch.

Mark Thompson: Yeah. I want to just chime in real quick. One thing that I've noticed, and this is not only for your webinar sequences, but also just your normal straight up affiliate sequences, you do a really good job of hitting on different pain points and benefits, and then I can tell when something is working well for you guys, that's when you'll reiterate it again in a second followup.

Jason Fladlien: That's exactly right. That's very astute by the way. When we're planning promotions, very often, because I want to have fresh new angles for every e-mail we send out. Not just the same thing shoved down their throat. There's two reasons, reason number one is by keeping it fresh and new it keeps people excited, and it doesn't feel like a pitch fest, and it's valuable and so on and so forth, but reason number two is we are hedging. We're figuring out what's the right combination of appeals or the right emotion to touch upon that's going to give us the biggest leverage for the promotion? Then once we find out the right emotion, then we can hit it from different perspectives to still keep it fresh and new, but we figured out that big lever. That's exactly right. When we sit down and have a look at an e-mail promotion for the webinar, we say, okay day one I want to hit this angle with this specific emotion in mind. Day two I want to hit this other emotion in mind, and day three I want to hit yet this other emotion in mind. We almost map it out by emotion, very often we do map it out by emotion.

The beautiful thing is ... This is funny because what I was just saying relates to that. When I said is a customer now feeling better about buying this offer, how does a customer feel in relation to this offer? Are they more likely to want to buy it as a result of this webinar? That's the feeling exchange that we're figuring out there. If the answer to that is yes, we've moved forward, we don't go and hit the panic button and say oh crap we've only realized 10% of what we projected for this promotion. The sky is falling. We just say all right, we're already 10% in and we just started the ball rolling. Then the secondary question to that is: knowing how they feel about this, how can we take that and leverage that, and push them towards, with momentum, that feeling, in a way that's going to make them more likely to buy before the cart closes, before the offer expires, before the scarcity is up, right?

Mark Thompson: Yep. We've kind of gone a little bit ahead, I want to backtrack a little bit back. I know, that's okay, I love going on these tangents, but I want to go back into the funnel so we're back to getting people to attend the webinar. I'm going to put you on the spot. What is the main question that people ask you guys when you are promoting a brand new webinar that you're going to be doing in two days from now? What do they always reply with?

Jason Fladlien: That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that because, I don't read. I am so far removed from the day to day these days Mark, I don't do a single support ticket, I don't see anything. If there's ultra-critical communication stuff it gets to me. I don't know the answer to that but I can tell you in general, I'll give you the general answer, is the audience, it depends on your audience. You have a cold audiences versus warm audiences. I'll give you an example.

We run Facebook campaigns where we get people to attend a webinar. This is an automated webinar and these people don't have a relationship with me. They're very skeptical and they're like, I might show up but I'm going to show up and lock my wallet in the car so that way I can't get it even if I want to buy. That kind of person is very much like is this a scam? Is this hype? Am I really going to learn anything? Who the hell are you? Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, so it's a different kind of appeal that we hit that person. Now a warm audience this is somebody that knows you, probably has done business with you by buying products from you or at least has been on your e-mail list or some other way of communication.

They've been exposed to you and have interacted with you several times, even if it's past interaction where you send them a message and they read it. Now that kind of person, their reaction to a webinar coming down the pipeline will largely depend on your relationship with them. I'll give you a great example with us, Mark. My people know I'm going to pitch them something and I'm very upfront with them. The implication of the relationship with my audience is this. Here's my role, my role is to find for you the best greatest stuff to help you build your online business, and yes you will have to invest in it, because the best greatest stuff isn't free, right?

Mark Thompson: Right.

Jason Fladlien: My job is to find that and then go deeper into it to pick it apart and figure out if it makes sense for you and then present my findings to you. Your job is to decide whether or not you should buy it. That's the unstated, but yet the whole frame of how I built my relationship with my audience. Here's the other thing too. My goal is this. You will leave the webinar better off as an individual than you were before you started regardless of whether you do or do not buy. My audience is eager to attend webinars very often even though I'm pitching them stuff, because I didn't act like it's a bad thing to sell them something, but I also give permission to sell them something because I'm going to give them 45 minutes of really valuable insight, and things like that, right? My audience feels really good. Most audiences, so like when do webinars for affiliates, it's so funny, because same webinar, same pitch, same everything, wildly different result even with the same number of clicks and the same number of attendees, because it depends on how the relationship is with the audience.

If it's something where the guy comes out and says, "Listen I normally only sell $7 offers to you because I'm insecure with anything above a $7 price point." They don't directly say this but most communication is not verbal anyway, right? They're like I'm taking a chance on this thing. I don't know how it's going to work but maybe you should attend this webinar over here. It's like I'm going to shoot blanks, but if somebody else comes up and says, "Listen man I sell you expensive stuff all the time and it's not even as good as this thing that's also $1,000, but it's not $2,000, and this guy's going to blow your mind as he blew my mind, and I've actually done stuff with what he said, now come here and check this webinar." Again, non-verbal communication, they don't exactly say that but that's the implication. That person's going to show and be like all right show me what you got. That's my favorite customer. If a customer says all right show me what you got, I've got them already. I'm going to sell them and that's what I want.

How do we create a situation with a relationship with audience? By the way here's the deal. If that customer doesn't accept your kind of agreement on their relationship with you, you get a new customer who does, which is one of the reasons by the way Mark, that I don't really build opt-ins. If you get on my list it's because you bought something from me 90% of the time. Only 10% of our audience has never bought anything from us but 90% of our e-mail list is buyers, because I want to have a conversation with people who want to buy products. I don't want to have a conversation with people that are tire kickers, and I know that's harsh, but it's like I have to tailor my communication and the wider I get, the more general I get, the more people I try to appeal to the less people I appeal to. Like you can't spread yourself too thin so you've got to make certain decisions on what you stand for and what you don't stand for. You communicate those with your audience and they either accept it or they leave, and if they accept it then it becomes a whole different conversation. If they leave that's great, find somebody better and replace them.

Mark Thompson: Interesting. Okay so the answer to the question I was asking about. No no no, this is all great stuff but I really want to get your feedback on this, because just me personally, I'm curious. We get 100 to 200 people that reply and say, "Is there going to be a replay? Is there going to be a replay? Is there going to be replay?"

Jason Fladlien: We get that all the time.

Mark Thompson: Right. This happens all the time, and so you're juggling. Do I say yeah there's going to be a replay, or do I say hey there's not going to be a replay and okay maybe we will open it up, you twisted my arm and we opened it. How do you respond to that?

Jason Fladlien: Great question. Usually 95% of the time we do replays and the reason is very simple, we make more money with replays. Now if everybody believes that there's going to be a replay then [inaudible 00:27:28] incentivized to show up on the webinar, so it's like. In an ideal world you say no there's not going to be a replay then you say tada, there is! If you do that every time your audience is going to hate you because you basically lied to them. It's okay to break the rules once in a while but you have to have a good reason why. Here's the bigger point, Mark. Your customers ask you is there going to be replay? The unspoken word is they're afraid that this time there might not be a replay. That's good, that's a really good sign. Here's our standard answer to this. Yes we're planning on having a replay although it's not 100% certain, because technology can malfunction and recording can be rendered inert. Regardless of whether there will or will not be a replay, you and I both know that your experience is enhanced and education happens at a greater level if you're there live while it's happening as opposed to watching the recording. If you can swing it, I absolutely highly highly highly recommend that you show up live to this call, because I think it's going to be worth your while to be there with us.

Mark Thompson: Love it. Yep, we do something similar to that. We'll try to offer some sort of a bonus to people that do attend live.

Jason Fladlien: That's a really good tactical move. It's like listen, you don't have to attend live but you miss out on this extra PDF or this extra thing or that thing. Sometimes we'll literally say to them, listen we've got a special deal for people who buy at the end of this call, because we're going to make a really good offer at the end of this call and if you're not on the call you're not going to get as good as a deal than if you are. It's like we're not hiding the fact that we're going to sell them something. In this case we're using it as a catalyst sometimes to get them on the call. Your strategy is great, the only problem is you've got to actually have that thing, and that thing's got to be good, right? I know you guys do a good job of it but very often we don't have time to put that in place.

Now there are instances where we don't do a replay and those usually are time based. If we're running up against a deadline and we decide to pull out a webinar because we think it's not that important or add a new webinar on top of the old webinar during the sequence, then it's like listen we don't have time for a replay and then they have to show up live. Usually we do replays because they make money and really, the thing is most customers don't say yes the first time you make them an offer. First of all 5% of your customers are programmed to say no, because if they say yes immediately they feel like they get taken advantage of. You could say, "Hey you want this million dollar for $10?" They would said no the first time, 5% of your audience would, because they feel like they're being tricked if they don't resist. Okay that's fine so we'll give them the feeling of resistance and still get the sale eventually, right? Then other parts of your audience want to say yes, but they need to talk to somebody or they need to have a heart to heart with themselves.

Other people will want to say yes but not quite sure to say yes, but they'll wake up in the morning and they'll have come up with new excuses and reasons to say yes, or a new piece of information will hit them in that moment that will make them more likely to say yes, because they'll validate what you just said to them independently. Very rarely do you get most people to say yes the first time they see an offer at a higher ticket level. At a $7, $10, $20, $30, $50 level, it's pretty impulsive. At a $200, $500, $1000, $2000, $5000, it's not usually impulsive. I want them to say no several times so they can [inaudible 00:30:53] yes. By using the followup sequences and hitting them over and over again it increases the chances of ... The more times they watch my webinar Mark, the more likely I am to convert them. We want them to attend live then we also want them to watch the replay, then we want to watch the replay again, then we want them to watch the replay one more time. If we get them to watch it four times, we've pretty much guaranteed ourselves a sale.

Mark Thompson: Yeah it's funny. You'll get people that have already purchased, and then they want to keep watching the replay over and over again.

Jason Fladlien: They do, they absolutely do and I mean they'll come back ... By the way a good webinar, you launch it again three to six months later to the same audience. Most likely you'll make more money the second time you do it than the first time which blows peoples' minds. The thing is you'll get people on the second webinar that you do three months later and they'll say, "Hey Jason, is it the same offer at the end?" Then somebody in the chat box from my team will say yeah it is and they'll say, "Oh okay cool I already bought it but I'm going to stay on and watch because I enjoyed this so much. It makes me feel really good." They get more excited to use the product that they bought from you, even though they're watching the exact same webinar but it makes sense. It's like have you ever watched reruns of a television show? Have you ever watched a movie over again? Have you ever read a book again? Yes it's not the crazy.

Mark Thompson: Okay all right so we got people on the webinar. Let's talk about engagement and I know you're very good at doing this. One thing I love about your webinars is your webinars are very dynamic. It's based off of what people are responding to and saying to you on the call. Are there certain questions or certain things that you're doing in the background to get people to engage so you can tailor your presentation?

Jason Fladlien: Yes, absolutely. They're micro adjustments, they're not major adjustments. The micro adjustments mean everything. It's crazy how the difference can be by a slight alteration of the message based on customer feedback in the moment. I'll give you the overall framework. One of the of very first things that I like to do is get on a webinar and be like all right do you hear my voice? Do you see the screen? If so I want you to affirm for me in the chat box that you do, and by the way yeses are boring, so let's figure out a way to say yes in a better way than just using the word yes. Then the audience will say things like yippy yay and woohoo and let's do this! I'll read like 15 of those. What I've done Mark, everybody just thinks this is like a sound check. It's not. I've just figured out and given them 15 ways to say yes, and we haven't even started the webinar yet.

Not only have I made them say yes in a way they already set the pace that you're going to respond to things that I ask you to respond to and I am going to feed them back to you. We've already beset that framework, that groundwork. We've already set that up and then I've given them 15 ways to think about saying yes by reading it back to them. That's before the webinar has even started.

Mark Thompson: That's in the first 30 seconds.

Jason Fladlien: I don't know, Mark, if I've ever revealed that before in a call but that's the whole purpose and reason of doing that. I read them out loud and now a customer has 15 ways to say yes which obviously I want them to say yes eventually at the end of the call. The first few minutes then, I've done that before the webinar starts, and then my goal is within 120 seconds of officially beginning the webinar, to get some sort of immediate response. There's a couple ways that I do that. One of my favorite ways, you'll see a lot of marketers do this these days. I pretty much pioneered this method is I'll start with a pop quiz. I'll say all right I want to ask you a question. I want your feedback on this one. True or false, and then I'll give them a statement. Go ahead and type into the chat box whether you think this is true or false. Then I will give them a little bit of time then I'll move to the next slide and say well the answer is true and here's why blah blah blah yada yada yada. I'm getting them to think about it. I'm getting them to come up with an answer so now they're emotionally invested in the idea, and then I'm revealing my thing.

It works both ways. If they're right then they feel validated and then I give them further insight to take what they're right about and say now if you go a little deeper with this, here's what's [inaudible 00:34:52] about that. If they're wrong, then I've actually still created value Mark. They say wow, it makes sense based on his explanation of why I was erroneous in my thought process. If he's right about this and helped me with this insight, what else can he help me with?

We'll do that, within five minutes I have maybe ... Here's the trick. I'm sure you've been to a seminar Mark where the guy says raise your hand if you like making money. Who here likes to make money? I think that's how they say it, right? If I catch any of my customers who've learned webinars from me doing that at a seminar I will take them back out of the stage and beat them, because it's so stupid. If an audience feels like you're overtly trying to take advantage of them to make a sale. First, two things. If they don't realize that they're not very smart and you don't want those people as customers, right? Second of all, if they do realize that you're overtly or trying to manipulate them to make a sale they're not going to want to buy from you, because nobody wants to buy from somebody that they don't feel comfortable being around. I mean they still might buy but it's a tough situation.

We need to get agreements because if they're not emotionally investing and really, I mean there's listening and then there's listening with intent of behavioral change, and listening with the intent of implementation. One of the ways you get listening with the intent of implementation is to get them involved dynamically in the educational process. You want and need their feedback. It's not manipulative in the sense that we're doing this only to make a sale, but I will tell you, if a person says yes 150 times, you've checked in with them 150 times throughout the webinar to make sure everything that you're saying makes sense with them and they agree and resonate with it, then on the 151st time when yes is yes I will buy it, they're way more likely to say yes to buy it, simply because they've gotten comfortable saying yes to everything else that you've talked about. If they say no by the way, that's okay too because if you can get them to say no and then change their answer to yes, that's actually a better customer then somebody who just said yes and agreed with you.

This is how we want to create interaction and dynamic and by the way, there is often times Mark where I reveal a concept and 90% of the audience gets it wrong and that's in the first five minutes. I say to myself mentally, oh crap. These people are way off the mark on this thing and I've went down this tangent of assuming this is true, and I build all this education for the next 45 minutes and they can't even buy into step 0, I can't take them to step 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. What I'll do and this is a calibration you make on the spot, you'll still have to use your slides because you can't write new slides at this point, right?

Mark Thompson: Right, right.

Jason Fladlien: You'll relay that back. Now that I've cleared up X for you, do you see how this is important where maybe in the past you didn't even realize this was important? Then I take less of a nuts and bolts step by step approach, even though the slides are the same and focus more on the higher level of how this relates to them conceptually, that kind of stuff. You can still calibrate and it's not ideal by the way, but you can still calibrate, but then what you do as soon as that call is done you say, "All right now that we know this is true, that the thing that we thought people knew about, they don't have a clue about. Now let's fix that." Then the next one are you make sure that you're on the same check, so by being dynamically interactive with audiences we don't do it just to make the sale, we do that because the insight you get as a result can dramatically affect what you're going to say on the spot as well as what you're going to do to that webinar to make it even better after you're finished with that particular instance of it.

Mark Thompson: Awesome. We've talked about engagement, we've talked about, you're giving great content during a presentation, now we're getting to the pitch. Now one thing that I learned fairly quickly when I started doing webinars was you can't just go and say here's the product, go and buy it at the end, and then have nothing else to say at the end. Actually I've learned from you how to pitch something over and over and over and keep the dialogue going because that is when the sales continue to flow. Can you talk about that?

Jason Fladlien: I love that by the way. First of all even before you pitch, my thing is this. You should get permission to pitch, either implicit or explicit, then I'll give you an example of each. You want to do education, and then education should lead up to a transition where the pitch occurs, but if you say okay that's fantastic, that's great, here's what I showed you, that's all nice, now let me sell you something. It's like a splash of cold water on somebody's face. It's usually too hard, and by the way we laugh but I see 99% of big-time gurus do that. I'm like oh, because in their mind they separated education and pitching, like they're two separate things, and that's not true.

What we want to do is have a logical process of moving somebody from education into buying into the fact that if this is valuable for free, it's even more valuable if you pay for it kind of a deal. The transition is an explicit transition that says so far we've discussed X Y and Z, you do a quick recap of what you covered on the call and you say do you find value in this? Somebody says yes, and you say if I create a resource for you that would make this bigger, quicker, easier, more likely for you do to X Y and Z or blah blah blah, would you be very interested in investing in something like this if the price was right and the content was right for your situation?

By the way that's a question that almost everybody will say yes to. You didn't change it to, you change the situation from yes I will or no I will not buy, you've changed the situation to I will buy if ... which is my favorite situation. We change the presupposition, the presupposition now is you will buy if I meet a certain criteria, not will you buy? Which you might say no. Now they say yes I will if ... and that's a transition. You say here's what I got for you and here's why you're going to love it, and then you go straight into the pitch.

The other way is the implicit way where you don't actually say it specifically, and one of my transitions that I really like, Mark, is if nothing else I say okay so far we discussed X Y Z A B C 1 2 3 and you saw value in this that and the third, and you're going to be able to go and do something with this aren't you? Yes of course I am. Okay let me ask you this question. What's the likelihood that like many other trainings you've seen in the past that this will feel really good to you in the moment, you'll get a lot of good ideas and then you'll go back and you won't implement very many of them. Let's be honest with each other, because don't tell me that this doesn't happen to you at almost every single webinar that you attend.

You get all excited up in the moment, you get all dressed up but you don't go anywhere right? You know it's true, let's fix that. Here's how we're going to fix that. If you really want to change, if you really want to take ideas and turn them into implementation, if you really want to make this time different, then you're going to need more than just one 45 minute webinar with me just one time, right? You're going to need education, what else are you going to need? You're going to need tools. What else are you going to need? You're going to need support. What else are you going to need? you're going to need community. What else are you going to need? You're going to need product. That's the CliffNotes version of the pitch but you can understand the framework of it. We set them up in a situation where now implicitly we say hey here's why you should buy, here's why it's important to buy and the customer now is implicitly saying yeah I will buy if this is truly something I believe will bridge the gap between an idea to implementation, which is in information businesses especially the biggest barrier to entry.

The joke is, what prevents customers from taking action? Well, downloading, that's like the big thing. Downloading the content they pay for is a big barrier to them implementing it. I know it's cynical and it's for effect in a sense, but it's like the implementation is the hardest things, so we use that thing, we don't fight it, we actually use it, we make it a friction-less transition and we use that to slide right into the pitch, and set it up as because we're doing them a favor, right? Then we start pitching.

Now the second half of your question and this is very important. Now that we set up a situation to pitch I know full well the first time I reveal something, the likelihood that anybody will say yes to it is slim to none. I know that, so the first reveal of the offer is usually the weakest, and I know that's counter intuitive and by the way most people don't do it this way and that's why, it very well might be Mark, that I have sold more on webinars than any other internet marketer in history, at least internet marketing. A lot of people have said that that's true about me, I don't know if it is or not, but I've sold over $50 million just in the last two years via webinars alone of product.

The funny thing is a lot of people think you leave with a hard hitting close. I say you do the opposite. You leave with the weakest limp-wristed close that you possibly can. Not quite that bad, but let me give you an example. When we do our first close it's usually like this. That's why I am so excited to introduce to you product X today, and what is product X exactly? It's eight modules, and let me break down to you what's involved in each module. Module number one, sexy headline plus bullet points bullet point bullet points, and now you'll be able to do some sort of future paced result.

Now you want them to see themselves in the future, and then module two, sexy headline bullet point bullet point bullet point, orientate them to what their life will be like in the future as a result of this. Module three, four, five, six, seven, and eight, and I'll say oh my god product X Y Z you can see how incredibly powerful this is, can't you? Yeah of course. Aren't you excited to get your hands on these eight modules today? Yeah absolutely. Okay here's your investment. Here's how you can get started. Then we'll do a price point that's higher usually in general, and then we'll drop it down, then we'll reveal the price and then we'll drop it down one more time with a good strong reason why, and scarcity, and then we'll tell them to go buy it.

That's how we close and I'll tell you why that's why we close. Because we haven't put any emotion into this pitch at this point. We've purely used logic to sell them. The logic is here's what you get, here's how much you pay for it, here's why you should buy it, now go here and buy it. The only emotion that we've used at this point is trying to create a situation like they feel like they're getting a really good deal, which by the way you should always do. You always need to create a situation where the customer almost feels like dang I'm taking advantage of this person. If I don't buy this, yeah I already, yeah if I don't buy this I might be the biggest idiot in the world, right?

Mark Thompson: Right.

Jason Fladlien: We want to set that up. That's the only emotional push that we've done. Here's the thing. We've gotten them comfortable with the buy button, we've gotten them comfortable with the URL. I'll say go here and sign up at example.com/buy or whatever. Knowing full well by the way, Mark, most people are not going to say yes at this point, not actually going to go buy, but we've diffused the tension, like ooh there's an offer, now we know what the offer is. It's on the table, let me think about that Jason. I appreciate the value, I see that there's a lot of value here. Logically it all makes sense to me but let me think about it and think about it is always the kiss of death in sale. Now that they think that's it. They're like ah okay cool now let me just sit back and reflect on it, and that's when I got them. Now they are actually willing to let their guard down because everyone has this logical conscious gatekeeper, and usually that doesn't work in your best interest.

It'll be like yeah I know I need to lose weight but look at that chocolate bar, I want to eat that. The gatekeeper is like yeah you don't really want to eat vegetables today, those things taste like crap anyway, eat that chocolate bar, but the unconscious mind says, I can't be eating chocolate bars all the time, that's not good for me. When we first make an offer we get that gatekeeper that says you know what? Don't spend any money and do nothing and that's better than spending money and then having to go do something, right? It's like it's fighting you against your own best interest, and so we want to distract that gatekeeper.

We say to them okay here's your offer and so while it's off there distracting and thinking about them now we start to work on the unconscious level. One of the things that we very first do is that's our first call to action. By the way do we get buyers when first do a call to action? Sure we do. There are people on any market, there are a certain percentage of buyers who will buy anything that you put in front of them basically. By the way most marketers live off that segment which is why you see a lot of guys do okay. Build six figure businesses. It is my belief, Mark, that anybody who is making offers will eventually whether their offers suck or don't, whether their products are good or not, will eventually just by sheer brute force get six figures a year, because there are always segments of the market that will say yes to anything you put in front of them. I don't recommend building a business around them, and those customers aren't exactly always the best customers, although sometimes they are, but that's true.

Mark Thompson: They're the ones blowing up your support everyday.

Jason Fladlien: Some of them are. Some of them are amazing. It's funny because in that pool you get your best customers and you get your worst customers.

Mark Thompson: Very true.

Jason Fladlien: It's funny because it's like, and it's hard to distinguish between the two, it's like that old Dr. Seuss book, it's like the star bellied sneetches versus the ones who don't have the stars and by the end they're all mixed up, right? That's the first close. Then we really get to work. One of the first things that I do is I anchor and link the price to the core offer, and then I introduce the bonuses. Now logically speaking, Mark, what they pay for is the whole package. The bonuses aren't free, they're part of the overall package, but by intentionally segmenting them and putting them separate after the price we do two things. First of all we build a price and then we immediately spike the value again, so we put the focus not on price but back on value but the second thing is youre paying for the core offer and look at everything you're getting for free, right?

Mark Thompson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Fladlien: That's an emotional psychological effect because when somebody feels like they're getting something for free that they should be paying for, they get more excited about that concept than just about anything when it comes to a buying decision. I'll say and when you act today you're also going to get this, bonus one, bonus two, three, four and five and we'll go through all the bonuses and here's what's funny. Core product, I might take five to seven minutes to explain what they're getting and what they're paying for. Bonuses, I'll spend ten to twelve minutes on them very often. Yes, that's right. You heard me. I will spend more time explaining and selling the bonuses than I will the core product.

Mark Thompson: That's funny.

Jason Fladlien: It doesn't make sense because they're buying the core product but I'm taking all my time to sell the bonuses but this is the reason why, because my second offer is related to bonuses. By the way I might even hold one bonus back and not show them all the bonuses and then boom hit them with another bonus later on. That's our second call to action. Our third call to action is usually a risk reversal. I'll say okay so here's the deal. At this point if you haven't invested yet presupposing of course that they will invest. If you haven't invested yet based on everything you get here, if I had to guess it's not because of the price tag, it's because of the risk associated, because here's the deal. Tell me if I'm correct in this assessment. If you knew for a fact that investing today for $997, it would make you ten times that in the next three months, would you invest? If you know 100% certain that was the case I'm going to assume that you would say yes because who wouldn't want to put $1 in and get $10 out, right?

Mark Thompson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Fladlien: If you haven't invested yet, and we agree that you would in a scenario like that, it's because you don't believe that this will be the thing that you can put one dollar in and get ten dollars out, right? What if I could set up a situation where no matter what happens, you're protected, so you have zero risk and only reward. Now I can't guarantee you how big that reward will be. It can be three times as much, ten times as much, a hundred times, a thousand times, I don't know, but I can tell you what your risk is, your risk is exactly zero and here's why. Then we reveal the guarantee. Then we can stack guarantees, we can do more than one guarantee. Everybody does the standard 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee, but we can do other types of guarantees and sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. It's very similar to sometimes we spike attendance by offering a bribe and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we do a webinar only bonus and sometimes we don't. You have to hold them and use them like salt. A little bit of salt on a meal is good. The who jar of salt on the meal ruins the meal, right?

We have to know when to use it an when not to use it, but that is when we might stack a second guarantee on it. By this time we've done three calls to action if not four. Then we'll do the psychological call to action. Here's a very rudimentary version of that just to prove the point. I'll say at the end of the day you have three options and here's what your three options are. Option number one do nothing, just do nothing, okay? I don't know if that's going to help you achieve your goal or not but that's an option and I bring it up so that's your first choice. Your second choice is to continue doing what you're already doing to solve your problem. Question, how's that working out for you? Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result. If that's the case then what do we do to get you a different result, to get to a breakthrough, to get to an answer, to get to a solution that you are currently being alluded of?

Option number three is an investment with this course today. I propose to you of these three options let's figure out what the best for you. Doing nothing, doing what you're currently doing, or doing something new. Let's analyze these and let's make sure we are making the right decision together. Now I'm speaking very generally here. Of course really to the pitch, that's the framework. We'll adjust and that's one of the types of closes I use, I have many other ones right, it's a psychological close that's basically a, hey, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Are you going to sit there and screw around or are you going to take this serious? That's a hard stern fatherly pure emotional close. That might be the fifth close that we do.

Here's a little bit of psychology, this is where it gets kind of fun Mark. I say all right, whew, I'm done selling you now right? Let's sit down and now just be helpful and answer some questions, right? Everybody's guard is gone, the air out of the room the tension is like Jason got his pitch out of his system now he's just going to hang out with us and chill with us for a bit. Now they don't realize I've got three more closes left.

Mark Thompson: Yeah.

Jason Fladlien: It's funny because a cynical person listens and says damn Jason you get off on manipulating people to buy, and that's one way to look at it, but here's the other way. Most people know that they should be investing in bettering themselves and most people know its good for them but most people are also their worst enemy, so they're the people who will sit there and say man I wish I could do that but then they won't buy the thing that helps them do that. That's like almost the market. We're asking people to pay us money to then take education and information and figure what to do with it and do work. We're asking people to pay us money to then go and work their butts off to solve their problem, right? That's a serious consideration. Now if we have something that can help them solve that problem, we're going to have to push them in order to overcome that inertia of just sitting there and doing nothing. That's why we have to work.

Now of course if you have a really bad offer and you do this yeah you're not helping anybody, but if you have a really good offer and you do this oh my god you're helping a tremendous amount of people. Then when we get to that Q and A portion people think I'm just being helpful and giving clarification and answering questions but what I'm really doing is setting up things and every so often every two three or four questions, I'll pounce upon an idea and I'll turn it into a sales angle, and then I'll go to a close. By the time the webinar is done, Mark, we've probably done anywhere between 9 to 15 specific go here and sign up now, set up, close, tie down, set up, close, tie down. When we're done by the webinar we've probably given the opportunity to say yes 9 to 15 times in general, and that's before the followup sequence.

Mark Thompson: Yeah. I will say this. Between you and also who does this very well Russell Bronson you guys have a very similar format and one thing I'd like to do is put in the show notes maybe some replays from you and also from Russell because you guys do an excellent job of closing multiple times and continuously keeping the dialogue going, and like you said, you're hitting lots of different pain points throughout this entire close and one thing that I noticed when I first started doing webinars was, the more times that I pitch, the more sales that I got and so if I only have one pitch, I may only get 1% of buyers. If I do two pitches, I may get 3% to 5% of buyers. If I do three four or five pitches I'm going to keep on getting more and more. The way that you've structured it I mean I know me personally I've studied it to a T because I absolutely love it and you can see why you've sold $50 million on sales in a webinar.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah and the funny thing too is Mark if you plan on this then your pitches can be valuable. What I mean by that is a lot of our pitches contain information inside of them. Like one of the tricks that I do on pitches, it's funny. I will do education in the pitch itself. I'll say listen I didn't share with you this technique earlier, let me break it down to you now so that you understand what we're dealing with. Let me show you and I'll do like five minutes of education of step by step how to. People are like oh wow, more training, and I'm not expecting that because nobody does that in a pitch. Then I'll loop it back in and close them. I'll say listen now that you know this and I didn't even tell you about this before, here's the reality. We've got a lot of people signed up and I didn't even reveal this yet, and they already see the value in this. This is just one of many examples of all the different things that we couldn't even talk about today that are valuable. If you are already thinking about saying yes, you should have already marched your butt over there to the add to cart button right now. If you haven't let me help you.

People are like that's one way, there's many ways. We always want to pitch in a way that even if they say no they feel good about interacting with us, right? There are lots of guys who are good at closing, Mark, who basically do a close like if you don't buy from me then you're the dumbest person on the planet. It's like, you either buy or we lock the doors and force you to starve to death. I call it the timeshare close. It's really easy to sell a timeshare, you just lock them in a room for eight hours then the only way out of that room is to buy the timeshare, right? That's not a pitch that offers value. We want to offer value while we're pitching so even if they don't say yes we didn't guarantee that they'll always say no. They still have the ability to say yes and they still like hanging out with us.

Mark Thompson: Yep, awesome stuff. Guys, these are the golden nuggets right here. This is like $10,000 worth of consulting with Jason. I mean this is amazing. All right, what else have we not covered. I mean we talked about the replay. Is there anything else that we left out that you wante