Tag: 2024

People Management & The 10% Rule​

People Management & The 10% Rule

Transcript

Today, of course, we are continuing on with August theme for Copy School Pro, which is the people powered month, how to get help and get them to be helpful.

So I’m going to share my screen. You got the worksheet delivered over the weekend. Tina sent that out.

So make sure you reference that and print this out.

Now this is today’s lesson is based on something that I only heard after a good six or seven years of managing people. And that was this whole ten percent rule, which is kind of crazy to me, and it might be to you. So what I learned is that every person that reports to you takes up ten percent of your time to manage. So if you’re managing five people, half of your day is half of your day, half of your time is spent, managing those people.

And that might seem like, woah. That’s a lot. But the reality is there’s a lot that goes into managing people if you wanna do it right. Then you look at companies like Google where there’s, like, twenty eight people reporting into one developer, and you wonder how that could possibly work.

But that’s a whole different story. I think that’s a lot of, like, you just make it work for various purposes and reasons and people.

I would argue that they’re probably not very well managed as people. Probably not getting a lot of time to talk about development, to get one on one with you or with the person who makes decisions about their career, who helps them through their career.

I think it’s really important to remember that everybody that you hire is on a career path. They’re trying to do something in their life, whether that is I’m shifting from a high stress job to a lower stress job or I’m looking at my career ladder and where I wanna go, they’re on a path. And so it’s important for us as employers to respect that.

Thus, we need to give them the time that we would want to have with somebody if we were working for them. So ten percent of your time is real, and, thus, if you are going to continue in an execution role, which I know so many people here are still like, I can’t give up control of research, of synthesis, of planning, of writing, of editing, of talking with the client. If you can’t give that stuff up, how are you ever going to really grow if people are at the heart of where you get that leverage that you need to grow? And so even if you only wanna have a small team, if you’re like, I only want three people reporting into me, that’s thirty percent of your time that’s gone.

It’s gone. So you really have to make sure that the seventy percent that is left is time really well spent. So it’s a really simple lesson today. How can we make sure that the more people you hire, even if that’s one or two, every single if you hire one, it is ten percent of your time gone, possibly more because you’ll be so partnered up with that person and because they’ll really depend on you as, like, a social, like, being in their lives, like, you are the only two that work together, you’re gonna get pretty close.

And if it’s not a close feeling, you’ll probably lose them.

So you have to think about that. And every time you lose somebody and have to replace them, every time you hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, this is all stuff that takes up time, and this is the stuff that will burn you out on people. So we wanna be realistic about people. If you want to get to a place where you’re going to make really good money without doing all the work, you’re going to need people. They’re gonna have to be the right people who are well managed and who feel like they’re part of a bigger vision of growing something. So meetings.

Meetings are how we communicate as remote team members. There’s there’s Slack, of course, but meetings are going to be critical. No one likes a meeting. It’s a rule. Nobody likes a meeting. Only middle managers like meetings because their whole job is to meet with people.

That’s not your job. That’s not an individual contributor’s job. You hire a copywriter. They don’t wanna have meetings. They’re also going to complain a lot about meetings. Oh, it’s interrupting my flow.

And and that’s fair, but the reality is you work in an organization, and that organization needs meetings to grow. So what you need to do is make sure you know what meetings you have and what meetings you don’t have because people adding meetings to your calendar is how things get out of control. No one cares about your calendar like you do. So right out of the gate, we need to make sure we’re making really good calls about what meetings you have as a team. And that could be starting with you as one person.

Having meetings with yourself is huge. So if you have a start of day stand up with yourself, that’s you sitting there looking at your to do list and determining what’s the most important thing to get done, when you can do it, blocking out your calendar for the day, whatever that might be. An end of day stand up could be a thing for you as well. And then just think of all the other meetings that you need to have. If you can start with a strategy now, then every single new team member that you hire, you can just hand this sheet over to them and say, this is how we do meetings here. So you choose, are you gonna do start of day stand up or an end of day stand up? Are you gonna do both?

I would recommend you choose one or the other and you make it daily and you keep it short. So we’ve got how long is it gonna be. If you have a ten person team, you’re gonna need at least thirty minutes for the stand up. And then later, you have to, of course, come up with your own agenda for that stand up.

Because the last thing you wanna do is go into a stand up and just have people say, today, I’m working on this. And you’re like, I could I could see that in Asana. I need to really, like, know what my stand up exists to do. Is it a social stand up to get everybody, like, jazzed for the day or to celebrate what we did at the end of the day?

So you need to decide that as CEO of your business.

When do you do a stand up? And that’s a whole team meeting, and how long is it? Do you need weekly team meetings or biweekly team meetings? What happens in a team meeting? What’s its function? What why are people going to attend this meeting and not be, like, upset that it’s interrupting their work? How long is that team meeting going to be?

There will be a need to have team meetings later.

If you figure this stuff out too late, you’ll always find your meetings are changing. And every new person who comes on says, let’s do meetings differently. Let’s do meetings differently.

You are not running a democracy.

You’re running a business, and you’re in charge of it. So you say, this is when we have meetings, and you get everybody on board. And if you have a good why behind that meeting, when it happens, why it’s as long as it is, what you cover, then it’s not a waste of time meeting. And then we’re not just adding in meetings for the sake of meetings.

So what does the stand up exist to do? What do your team meetings exist to do? When is there a time to socialize? What what happens there?

Things that you would normally do in an office where it’s lunchtime and you go get lunch together. It’s coffee break, you go get coffee together. What can you do to unite your team members? Do you need a large format team meeting, which is more of, like, even if you’ve only got, like, one person in sales, two copywriters, a smallish looking team, sales and account management.

They’re the same thing at this point.

It might feel like, well, all hands is, like, every single meeting we have. But an all hands meeting is a really good chance for you to restate your vision to the team, for individual team members to say, here’s how I fit into this world and, like, teach the rest of the team about their job. So there’s a lot that you can do with that that can better help you communicate. And then things like project briefings.

Those are just whole team meetings. Then you have individual meetings. Do you have a weekly one on one or biweekly one on one? How long is it?

Do you have coffee chats where you just sit down together? If your one on one is not meant to be a time to, like, talk about each other and what you’re going through, If it’s more of a get me up to speed on your projects, then when do you have time to just chat and be social with them? You are somebody that very likely they look up to in some ways. They’re usually going to be confused by the decisions that you make.

What you think is clear, they won’t think is clear. So there’s a lot that you have to consider in managing people, and just having a coffee chat is a good way for them to be like, oh, I think I understand you better. And for you to be like, oh, okay. Got it.

I see who you are now as a person. I’m getting to know you better. And that’s really critical for managing them well.

Quarterly performance reviews, annual performance reviews, what happens with those? Do you want it to be quarterly or annual? Gotta have a performance review at some point. People need to know how they’re doing or they’re not gonna feel well managed, and they won’t have a chance to say, I want more. I want less. I want clarity. Whatever those things might be that they’re looking for.

Goal setting.

They’re your team member.

You have targets for them, I’m sure. You probably have goals for where they go with their career in your organization, what they want to do more of. You won’t know unless you set goals with them. And Then, of course, once you set a goal, do you have growth check ins? Do you have, like okay. You said that you wanted to get better at email copywriting.

Great. We put you in ten x emails. Let’s talk about how that’s going for you. And then they can say, I haven’t taken it yet.

Okay. Now you can manage them towards taking it because they said that they wanted to. What’s getting in the way of them taking it? You have to manage them towards that.

So we gotta have our meetings figured out. Shorter is always better. If it can be done in fifteen minutes, do it in fifteen minutes. People expand to the size of a meeting.

And then comes basically this stuff. Just what are the days that you won’t work? So oh, sorry. Won’t won’t work.

Won’t have meetings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Which ones are they? If you can set that up front, then everybody who joins your team knows.

We have no meeting Tuesdays, no meeting Wednesdays. I don’t know. You decide what those are. When do you refuse to have meetings as a team?

When is energy highest to do a person’s work versus when is it a good time for team members to meet? As you add in more people who are going to dictate what other people on the team are doing with their day, will that change? Should you always start your meetings at nine in the morning and only go until ten, and that’s a daily thing? That’s the only time, but you have to have rules.

You gotta have these standards set up or people don’t know what to do, and they just go populating meetings all over the place. And your clients are already gonna try to do that. Your clients already do not give a crap what your calendar looks like. So the more control you can have as an agency owner, the better.

Whether you think of yourself as an agency owner or not, if you have services that you produce, even if it’s a very small business, it’s still going to need to operate like an agency. And then what rules do you have about non work, non meetings? So Slack, email. When do you communicate?

What are the rules on scheduling a message versus not scheduling a message and just posting it? Are we allowed to send out anything after five PM or before nine AM? You have to have that rule. And if you have that rule, then everybody knows how to operate.

And if you don’t, then somebody ends up pinging the CMO of one of your companies that you work with at seven PM and interrupting how they live their lives, which is not good. It’s not a good look. So you have to figure that stuff out. It’s good to figure it out.

It really is a checklist with a circle around the thing that’s the starting point of your strategy, and then you just have to start to live it and then creating calendar controls. So this is part of no meetings days. Do you have all meetings in the morning? If so, then afternoons never get meetings.

It’s good to have those rules. Everybody can follow those really clearly. Are meetings only in the afternoon, and all morning time is there for you to work, get in flow, go through stuff while you’ve got high energy?

Or do you believe that your team might not actually show up until eleven in the morning because it’s remote and you don’t actually micromanage them. And if that’s a concern, then you might wanna start your meetings at nine in the morning and have an end of day meeting as well. That’s up to you and how you wanna trust people or not. Trust them.

It’s not your fault or their fault that you don’t trust them. It’s the reality of remote work. We wanna just make sure people are actually working during their work day. You decide that.

That is all. Then I want you to go away from this, and we’ve done in the intensive freelancing. I think it was in the intensive freelancing, but it was during a different week. Anyway, I know that at this point, you’ve drawn an org chart with where you’re going to go for your organization.

Now the time is now to go in and start circling those next hires. We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about who you should hire, how to find the constraints.

So if you can go in there and say, okay. My next four hires are this, this, this, and this, which means forty percent of my time is about to be eaten up with the meetings and other work that it takes to manage people. I’ll have sixty percent left. Is it time is my fifth hire going to be someone who can handle more project management, more people management? That does not have to be a full time person either. That could be a part time person that you hire just to make sure everybody is aligned with the business goals, everybody’s getting their stuff done, they’re feeling heard, etcetera, etcetera.

But you need to know who’s next because you need to know who’s about to take up ten percent of your valuable time. That is all for this week. The takeaway is every new team member takes ten percent of your time.

Alright. And it’s good. If they’re doing good work Mhmm. Then that’s great. If they’re taking up ten percent of your time, but they’re freeing up seventy percent of your time, then it’s a good trade off. That’s brilliant. Okay?

Alright. Any questions, thoughts, concerns?

No? Alright.

And if you think, oh, it’s just really not worth of hiring people. It really is. It really is. Even with all those things considered, it really is. Alright.

Question time. We have forty glorious minutes to talk about what you’re going through in your business. So if you have a question, please put up your hand using, I think, the react button so that happens.

Lower your hand if you no longer have a question, and we’ll go in order. Start with your win, please.

And if we have no questions, then we’ll just call it a day.

Are we good? No quest oh, Marina’s up. Marina, what’s your win?

I already shared my win, but that’s okay.

Hiring a brand person?

Hiring a brand person.

Dig it. It was yeah. Just had lots of epiphanies about what’s holding me back and how to get over myself so I can do it.

So Love it.

Huge win. And K. Thinking about meetings, and, yes, I agree with this.

Well, it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, and it is true that every court takes ten percent of your time.

And I’m wondering about scheduling meetings. I can get really rigid about things.

And thinking about clients, this is not a problem right now ish, but I hope that it will be a problem, so I need to solve for it now.

If you say like, how much time do you leave on your calendar for booking client meetings? Do you say I’m only taking client calls in the morning? Also, I’m thinking about time zones. So I don’t love morning meetings, but all of my meetings end up being in the morning. So I’m like, okay. I just have to have morning meetings because that’s when all of the stuff is.

Yep.

Yeah. And eastern time zone, and they’re not gonna want a meeting at four because it’s after their work time. Yep. So knowing that, then I can still say that okay. What is my succinct question?

How many days do I have to allow for client meetings, and how flexible do you need to be to still have the client meetings, but also manage your calendar, and they’re also paying you?

So how do you That’s why you wanna manage your meetings the best you possibly can.

So you’re in control of when your team meets.

That is controllable.

So if you say, as a team, we never book meetings with each other between this hour and that hour or on this day and that day, etcetera, etcetera, then they know if they have a quick question to ask Marina or they wanna run copy by you that you only book meetings in certain times and always as close to an existing meeting as possible. Like, you have to set those rules up so they know that, because clients will be able to do a lot of dictating around the meetings that you have. Now if you are following having more of a standardized offer with retainer that comes off of that, then you set those meetings up all in advance.

And there’s less reason for a client to want to book an ad hoc meeting with you because there’s nothing ad hoc about what you’re doing. Everything’s planned. Everything’s good to go. Right?

And so if they want to have a meeting with you, it’s probably a meeting that’s critical to keeping them as a client. So they wanna change direction. Okay. Shit.

Okay. Let’s hear about this. Whenever they wanna book that, that’s fine. You can take that call.

And or else it’s, hey. This is going really well. We wanna add more. Or there’s something going on in their business. Like, hey. We just had a new product update, and people hate it. Our email strategy needs to kind of change for a second.

Okay. These are all good things to have, but it’s not gonna be like client has new idea they wanna run by me because that’s not the state of your engagement. Does that make sense, Marina?

Right.

So, basically, anytime a client wants to meet, you have to say yes. Like, if people wish to say no.

Yes. But that’s where you have to control as much of that as you possibly can.

Yeah.

Right. So set up the team meetings, and those are nondemocratic.

You work for me, and this is when we have meetings.

And people like it better when you just tell them things. So, yes. Yes. Democracy here. This is when we meet. Cool.

And then as far as clients go, they rule the calendar at that point.

Okay. And that’s that is in keeping with you charging more and delivering a retainer that is in keeping with what we’ve discussed. So Yes.

As a person paying you ten thousand dollars a month to optimize my emails, I feel like I should be able to talk to you when it’s time to optimize. Like, when I have a question about that, Slack is great for those quick questions, and you should default to Slack wherever possible.

But if I wanna sit down and say, Marina, we’ve got some concerns, then whenever. If I wanna call you at nine at night, that’s your job as an agency owner. You take the call. You give them your phone number so that they can call you anytime.

They’re not going to. They don’t want to call you all the time. Right. But at least they know they can.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Cool?

Yes. Fun.

This is my take on having run a couple agencies, obviously.

So I’m sure others have other takes on it. Not me, though. Okay. Adnan, what’s up? What’s your win?

So this is more of a look good kinda win. So there’s an agency that I, I think they’re based off in South America somewhere, but they have offices in London. But, anyways, through them, I got to write for Uber and Uber Eats.

Nice.

And then they contacted me last week because they have some Google projects Nice. That they want me to write for.

So it looks good. It’s not the most lucrative.

But Never is.

The win.

Big ones never are. Yeah.

Okay.

But I mean They know that.

They’re like, we’re you’re gonna want our logo.

Like, you would do this to create the logo.

The the chance out. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that’s that’s the win.

The question I had, I I guess this relates to both the email services that I offer and also the pricing pages services that I will be offering Mhmm.

Is that over like, all the everyone that I’ve written emails for, I haven’t been able to get any feedback on how they’re performing or if there’s been a jump or any of that stuff. How do I kinda go out there and be able to quickly get that?

Like Why is it because you’ve been writing for large brands and you can’t get into their email platform to Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a couple of smaller ones. I mean, I’m I don’t know how small they are.

Success dot a I, I wrote for them. They reached out directly, but Okay. They haven’t shared anything either.

So Okay.

It’s definitely gonna be tricky, if you can’t get into their tool, to actually look at that. And that’s fair. Uber’s not gonna let you into their email marketing platform. It might even be because I don’t know. I have I have no idea, obviously, what they’re using.

If they’re using something homegrown Yeah.

They’re not even gonna wanna look in that.

Like, you’re looking for a hard pass.

And then, otherwise, it’s just generally gonna be tricky across the board. So who can you get in with who can feed you that information?

And or what can you do at the start of a project to make it clearer that the point of contact you have is responsible for sharing results with you? And I don’t just mean hide that in the contract because no one reads it anyway, except for legal.

They’re not gonna say, like, oh, hey. Point of contact. Did you know you’re supposed to do this? They’re just gonna, like, whatever.

So you need to talk to your point of contact about that right out of the gate. Like, the only way we can do this together is if I can see how it’s working so that I can help you. Maybe there’s something else you build in there. Like, it’s the beginning of a retainer offer or something like that.

But they have to understand that you wanna see it in the first place. Do you know how many copywriters ask to see how it performed? Like, none. Like, nobody ever asked.

They’re just like, I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, please. Like, I hope it did okay, and then they, like, run off. If you’re like, I need to know how this is performing, and here’s why, make it a why that they care about, not like and here’s why I wanna be able to add it to my portfolio.

I don’t give a shit about your portfolio. What do I care about? So make it about what they care about so I can see that I’m getting you the results we are talking about me getting you. And if I’m not, I wanna be able to fix that.

Okay? So I need you to get me results within x period of time of emails launching.

Also, if emails don’t launch, we need to meet so I I can understand why you didn’t send them, and we can revise so that they’re the right emails for your brand.

But you have to make sure that that date is really clear. If it’s a campaign, if it’s a one off, they should be able to share results with you in a week. So seven days after is the time limit you set. If it’s an automation, give it thirty days to run so you can start seeing what’s going on.

But you have to tell them, I need to see results by this time. If the point of contact is not the right person for that, because they’re like, I’m five people removed from whoever implements the thing, Then because they’re maybe in marketing and this happens over in, like, some weird developer part of the organization. It’s not even marketing anymore even though it was five years ago, but now it’s not etcetera etcetera. Things are weird.

Who do you talk to there? Who is in charge of that? And you just ask Ask upfront. And if they’re like, I don’t know.

I’ll get back to you on that, then follow-up. Make a note of it. Follow-up until you know that person’s name, and then you reach out to that person. Say, hey.

Hi. I’m working on these emails. You’re gonna implement.

We should love each other. Let’s have a coffee talk so I can get you on board with what I’m thinking. You can tell me what the limitations are, what you’ve tried. Does that work?

That’s their job. They’re in a large organization. They’re there to have meetings. They know that. So that’s what I would do and have done. Okay. That makes sense?

Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. It’s always like a chicken and egg kind of thing.

Right? So I’ve lost out on some clients because even though my portfolio is good, the the the first question they’ll ask is like, oh, are you guys an agency, or are there any results can you that you can share with us? And then right off the bat, like, I’m on the I’m on the back foot, if you know what I mean. Yep.

Yeah. That’s the constraint. Right? So last week, we talked about constraints. And if you can say a big constraint to me closing business is that they always ask for results, then you gotta solve that.

Because if you solve that, then the pipeline opens up again. So we gotta take that problem and fix it. Great. You’ve identified.

A lot of people don’t know what where leads go. They don’t know why it stops. You know that. So it only makes good sense for you to prioritize that, and that’s where Joel’s old case study buddy was a good thousand dollars spent because a thousand dollars spent gets you a case study that you can now use to close twenty thousand dollar jobs across the board, or you do it.

You follow-up with clients and you say this. And, of course, if all it takes, if part of all that it takes is you adding into your process three new bullet points about at this point, I tell the client this. At this point, I get connected with their technology person for email implementation.

At this point, I follow-up with them for results.

Now you’ve got three little things added to an SOP that could unlock new projects for you. So I think that’s great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Alright.

Go add it to those SOPs.

Any other questions?

Are we feeling the quiet people in the room who I’m looking at?

No. I’m looking at them.

Awkward. Should I call on someone?

Nobody has any questions or concerns? Anything that they’re working on?

Caroline, I haven’t heard from you in so long. One, how was your summer?

You were off for a month. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna put you on the spot to ask a business question, but I do wanna know how your summer is going.

It is good. It is good. We traveled to we spent June in Asia. We were in Japan and Korea Oh. Which is very cool. Yeah. We sent a our oldest kiddo off to college over the weekend.

Wow.

Yep.

Banana’s amazing. How’s that feeling?

Good. He made it very easy to say goodbye. I’ll just leave it at that.

That’s amazing. Well, now you’ll have all this time to work on your business.

Yeah. I have three other kiddos, but yep.

Oh, I thought that was your youngest or your oldest, but No.

That’s my oldest. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Funny.

So I feel like I’m playing catch up. Yeah.

After the That’s fair.

Kids go back the kids go back to school tomorrow.

Amazing.

Glorious.

Okay. Well, it’s good to see you. I was glad to see you pop back in after your month break.

I yes. Cool. Awesome. Good to be back.

Anybody do you have anything you’re working on in your business that you wanna discuss? You were shaking your head madly that I shouldn’t call on you, and then I called on you.

Nothing nothing really great to share at the moment.

Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Cody? Hannah? Stacy?

I don’t have any questions, but I’ve been working on Instagram posts.

Okay. How’s this going?

Last week.

It’s okay. I think I was getting a little far in the weeds with the Gary Vee book, and I’m trying to figure everything out. But I think I I think I have a decent plan at least now. But, yeah, it took me about ten hours last week to create, like, five posts.

Oh, wow.

Do you feel good about the posts?

Yeah. I mean, I’m writing them all out. That’s what takes the longest is to make sure they’re strategic. And then you have to since I don’t have, like, a team, I’m the one in Canva designing all the things and editing the videos, and it’s it’s a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. We’ll talk.

I mean, I know that it’s tricky to hire people to do that, but there’s, like, some really good short term.

Did you watch Shane’s training on hiring overseas?

No.

But I need to because you’re the second person who told me to watch that, so I’m going to do that.

Yeah. Definitely do. He’s built cool businesses that where the people that like, he’s getting to employ people, in situations where they need employment, and it’s just cheaper than it is here. Life is just cheaper in the Philippines, and so it’s cheaper to hire someone there, and he’s done really, really good work with it.

So, yeah, watch that. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be someone local and expensive who spends four dollars on a nectarine.

Can you believe the cost of fruit?

No. It’s crazy.

I know. Okay. Well, cool. Cody, I’m glad you’re working on that. I know it’s, social.

I’m ready.

I have, like, so many videos I have to record this week. I’m dreading it. Yeah.

Hannah, you have a question?

Yeah. I’ve got a win first. Okay. Great.

I set up a Instagram account on Friday.

Nice.

And I have, eleven followers now.

Amazing. That’s great.

Yeah. So Yeah. So that is a big win because I was quite resistant because I used to have an Instagram account, for for a lot of years and then lost it all.

So I haven’t had an Instagram for maybe about three years, I think.

Mhmm. But I got one now, and I’m Yeah. I’m happy. I’m just Great.

Sharing the same stuff, that I usually share on LinkedIn anyway.

So it’s easy with Yeah.

Just repurpose it. Did you read day trading attention, which we talked about last week?

No.

Gary needs a new book?

No. It’s I think I what I like about it so far, and I’ve not done it, but is this new take that the algorithms don’t care as much about your followers as so everybody’s always scared to get on social. They’re like, I don’t have any followers. It’s gonna take forever to get them.

But the algorithms are shifting in such a way that as long as you’re making content someone wants to see and will, like, pause and stay on, then you get served up to all these new audiences. So I find that encouraging because that was why I held off on Instagram as well. I’m like, well, why now? I’ve spent all this time over on Twitter, and Elon messed the whole thing up, and now I have to go find a new platform.

And so I didn’t want to, and then I just did. And now I’m, like, relieved to hear that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s always a good signal, but it’s not critical. So yeah. Cool.

I think, like, in a year’s tie in a year’s time, two years’ time, I’m gonna be really pleased that I did it. So that’s what I’m thinking.

Agreed. Yes.

I I look back now. So I set I I started LinkedIn in two thousand and nineteen, and I’ve got nearly sixteen thousand followers at all, like, all my friends.

That’s why that sounds weird.

But, and so and I’m and I look back, and I think I’m so pleased I did that back then. So pleased. Yeah. So, yeah, my question, you’ve just mentioned I just heard you mention the words, Joel’s case study earned a thousand dollars and spending a thousand dollars.

And I I don’t what what does that mean?

Sorry. So Joel Kletke is a copywriter, and he had a business called Case Study Buddy, but he just sold that. So it’s not his anymore. It’s someone else’s now. So it’s case study buddy by so and so.

And it was a thousand bucks a year or two ago. I don’t know what it is right now, but a thousand and you would, like, give them contact information for a person that you had worked with, and they would do all the work of making the case study. So they did this for a lot of different clients. And, yeah, it’s like, if we can find a thousand dollars to take a big, like, bite out of a big problem that we have, that seems like money really, really well spent.

So but it’s yeah. Joel Pletke, case study buddy, thousand bucks to get a case study made.

Yeah. Nice. And they would do everything too. Like, I used them for one case study. It turned out great.

And I would just have to connect them with this client of mine, and they just took over from there. Made the whole thing easy.

Yeah. Right. Okay. So they reach out to your client and then do everything for you.

Yeah. I think I had to warm intro them, just an email connecting the two. I I had to make sure that the client was okay with giving a case study first, but then I didn’t have to get on a call. I all of the tedium of that.

Man, Joel did a presentation at Content Jam, I think it was, a few years ago on making a case study, and there’s a lot. There’s a lot to her. It’s like, just pay just pay someone to do this for you. So I would look into that if you’re looking for case studies. Yeah.

Interesting. Thank you. Sure.

Thanks, Anna.

Anything else? Anyone? Nothing from Stacy. I saw you came on camera when I said your name.

That was just my courtesy showing my face because you said my name.

That’s all. I thought it might be. I thought it might be. Alright. Cool. Well, let us wrap up today’s session.

We have a whole bunch of people joining Coffee School Pro in September, which is our next official, like, intake.

So we have one more call without a whole bunch of new people in it. So bring any questions that you’ve had that you’ve wanted to tackle, because it’s gonna be a little a little bit noisier, not crazy noisier, little bit noisier.

Cool. Otherwise, hope everybody has a really good rest of your day. Alright, Jill?

Take care. Bye.

Worksheet

The 10% Rule

Worksheet

The 10% Rule

 

Transcript

Today, of course, we are continuing on with August theme for Copy School Pro, which is the people powered month, how to get help and get them to be helpful.

So I’m going to share my screen. You got the worksheet delivered over the weekend. Tina sent that out.

So make sure you reference that and print this out.

Now this is today’s lesson is based on something that I only heard after a good six or seven years of managing people. And that was this whole ten percent rule, which is kind of crazy to me, and it might be to you. So what I learned is that every person that reports to you takes up ten percent of your time to manage. So if you’re managing five people, half of your day is half of your day, half of your time is spent, managing those people.

And that might seem like, woah. That’s a lot. But the reality is there’s a lot that goes into managing people if you wanna do it right. Then you look at companies like Google where there’s, like, twenty eight people reporting into one developer, and you wonder how that could possibly work.

But that’s a whole different story. I think that’s a lot of, like, you just make it work for various purposes and reasons and people.

I would argue that they’re probably not very well managed as people. Probably not getting a lot of time to talk about development, to get one on one with you or with the person who makes decisions about their career, who helps them through their career.

I think it’s really important to remember that everybody that you hire is on a career path. They’re trying to do something in their life, whether that is I’m shifting from a high stress job to a lower stress job or I’m looking at my career ladder and where I wanna go, they’re on a path. And so it’s important for us as employers to respect that.

Thus, we need to give them the time that we would want to have with somebody if we were working for them. So ten percent of your time is real, and, thus, if you are going to continue in an execution role, which I know so many people here are still like, I can’t give up control of research, of synthesis, of planning, of writing, of editing, of talking with the client. If you can’t give that stuff up, how are you ever going to really grow if people are at the heart of where you get that leverage that you need to grow? And so even if you only wanna have a small team, if you’re like, I only want three people reporting into me, that’s thirty percent of your time that’s gone.

It’s gone. So you really have to make sure that the seventy percent that is left is time really well spent. So it’s a really simple lesson today. How can we make sure that the more people you hire, even if that’s one or two, every single if you hire one, it is ten percent of your time gone, possibly more because you’ll be so partnered up with that person and because they’ll really depend on you as, like, a social, like, being in their lives, like, you are the only two that work together, you’re gonna get pretty close.

And if it’s not a close feeling, you’ll probably lose them.

So you have to think about that. And every time you lose somebody and have to replace them, every time you hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, this is all stuff that takes up time, and this is the stuff that will burn you out on people. So we wanna be realistic about people. If you want to get to a place where you’re going to make really good money without doing all the work, you’re going to need people. They’re gonna have to be the right people who are well managed and who feel like they’re part of a bigger vision of growing something. So meetings.

Meetings are how we communicate as remote team members. There’s there’s Slack, of course, but meetings are going to be critical. No one likes a meeting. It’s a rule. Nobody likes a meeting. Only middle managers like meetings because their whole job is to meet with people.

That’s not your job. That’s not an individual contributor’s job. You hire a copywriter. They don’t wanna have meetings. They’re also going to complain a lot about meetings. Oh, it’s interrupting my flow.

And and that’s fair, but the reality is you work in an organization, and that organization needs meetings to grow. So what you need to do is make sure you know what meetings you have and what meetings you don’t have because people adding meetings to your calendar is how things get out of control. No one cares about your calendar like you do. So right out of the gate, we need to make sure we’re making really good calls about what meetings you have as a team. And that could be starting with you as one person.

Having meetings with yourself is huge. So if you have a start of day stand up with yourself, that’s you sitting there looking at your to do list and determining what’s the most important thing to get done, when you can do it, blocking out your calendar for the day, whatever that might be. An end of day stand up could be a thing for you as well. And then just think of all the other meetings that you need to have. If you can start with a strategy now, then every single new team member that you hire, you can just hand this sheet over to them and say, this is how we do meetings here. So you choose, are you gonna do start of day stand up or an end of day stand up? Are you gonna do both?

I would recommend you choose one or the other and you make it daily and you keep it short. So we’ve got how long is it gonna be. If you have a ten person team, you’re gonna need at least thirty minutes for the stand up. And then later, you have to, of course, come up with your own agenda for that stand up.

Because the last thing you wanna do is go into a stand up and just have people say, today, I’m working on this. And you’re like, I could I could see that in Asana. I need to really, like, know what my stand up exists to do. Is it a social stand up to get everybody, like, jazzed for the day or to celebrate what we did at the end of the day?

So you need to decide that as CEO of your business.

When do you do a stand up? And that’s a whole team meeting, and how long is it? Do you need weekly team meetings or biweekly team meetings? What happens in a team meeting? What’s its function? What why are people going to attend this meeting and not be, like, upset that it’s interrupting their work? How long is that team meeting going to be?

There will be a need to have team meetings later.

If you figure this stuff out too late, you’ll always find your meetings are changing. And every new person who comes on says, let’s do meetings differently. Let’s do meetings differently.

You are not running a democracy.

You’re running a business, and you’re in charge of it. So you say, this is when we have meetings, and you get everybody on board. And if you have a good why behind that meeting, when it happens, why it’s as long as it is, what you cover, then it’s not a waste of time meeting. And then we’re not just adding in meetings for the sake of meetings.

So what does the stand up exist to do? What do your team meetings exist to do? When is there a time to socialize? What what happens there?

Things that you would normally do in an office where it’s lunchtime and you go get lunch together. It’s coffee break, you go get coffee together. What can you do to unite your team members? Do you need a large format team meeting, which is more of, like, even if you’ve only got, like, one person in sales, two copywriters, a smallish looking team, sales and account management.

They’re the same thing at this point.

It might feel like, well, all hands is, like, every single meeting we have. But an all hands meeting is a really good chance for you to restate your vision to the team, for individual team members to say, here’s how I fit into this world and, like, teach the rest of the team about their job. So there’s a lot that you can do with that that can better help you communicate. And then things like project briefings.

Those are just whole team meetings. Then you have individual meetings. Do you have a weekly one on one or biweekly one on one? How long is it?

Do you have coffee chats where you just sit down together? If your one on one is not meant to be a time to, like, talk about each other and what you’re going through, If it’s more of a get me up to speed on your projects, then when do you have time to just chat and be social with them? You are somebody that very likely they look up to in some ways. They’re usually going to be confused by the decisions that you make.

What you think is clear, they won’t think is clear. So there’s a lot that you have to consider in managing people, and just having a coffee chat is a good way for them to be like, oh, I think I understand you better. And for you to be like, oh, okay. Got it.

I see who you are now as a person. I’m getting to know you better. And that’s really critical for managing them well.

Quarterly performance reviews, annual performance reviews, what happens with those? Do you want it to be quarterly or annual? Gotta have a performance review at some point. People need to know how they’re doing or they’re not gonna feel well managed, and they won’t have a chance to say, I want more. I want less. I want clarity. Whatever those things might be that they’re looking for.

Goal setting.

They’re your team member.

You have targets for them, I’m sure. You probably have goals for where they go with their career in your organization, what they want to do more of. You won’t know unless you set goals with them. And Then, of course, once you set a goal, do you have growth check ins? Do you have, like okay. You said that you wanted to get better at email copywriting.

Great. We put you in ten x emails. Let’s talk about how that’s going for you. And then they can say, I haven’t taken it yet.

Okay. Now you can manage them towards taking it because they said that they wanted to. What’s getting in the way of them taking it? You have to manage them towards that.

So we gotta have our meetings figured out. Shorter is always better. If it can be done in fifteen minutes, do it in fifteen minutes. People expand to the size of a meeting.

And then comes basically this stuff. Just what are the days that you won’t work? So oh, sorry. Won’t won’t work.

Won’t have meetings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Which ones are they? If you can set that up front, then everybody who joins your team knows.

We have no meeting Tuesdays, no meeting Wednesdays. I don’t know. You decide what those are. When do you refuse to have meetings as a team?

When is energy highest to do a person’s work versus when is it a good time for team members to meet? As you add in more people who are going to dictate what other people on the team are doing with their day, will that change? Should you always start your meetings at nine in the morning and only go until ten, and that’s a daily thing? That’s the only time, but you have to have rules.

You gotta have these standards set up or people don’t know what to do, and they just go populating meetings all over the place. And your clients are already gonna try to do that. Your clients already do not give a crap what your calendar looks like. So the more control you can have as an agency owner, the better.

Whether you think of yourself as an agency owner or not, if you have services that you produce, even if it’s a very small business, it’s still going to need to operate like an agency. And then what rules do you have about non work, non meetings? So Slack, email. When do you communicate?

What are the rules on scheduling a message versus not scheduling a message and just posting it? Are we allowed to send out anything after five PM or before nine AM? You have to have that rule. And if you have that rule, then everybody knows how to operate.

And if you don’t, then somebody ends up pinging the CMO of one of your companies that you work with at seven PM and interrupting how they live their lives, which is not good. It’s not a good look. So you have to figure that stuff out. It’s good to figure it out.

It really is a checklist with a circle around the thing that’s the starting point of your strategy, and then you just have to start to live it and then creating calendar controls. So this is part of no meetings days. Do you have all meetings in the morning? If so, then afternoons never get meetings.

It’s good to have those rules. Everybody can follow those really clearly. Are meetings only in the afternoon, and all morning time is there for you to work, get in flow, go through stuff while you’ve got high energy?

Or do you believe that your team might not actually show up until eleven in the morning because it’s remote and you don’t actually micromanage them. And if that’s a concern, then you might wanna start your meetings at nine in the morning and have an end of day meeting as well. That’s up to you and how you wanna trust people or not. Trust them.

It’s not your fault or their fault that you don’t trust them. It’s the reality of remote work. We wanna just make sure people are actually working during their work day. You decide that.

That is all. Then I want you to go away from this, and we’ve done in the intensive freelancing. I think it was in the intensive freelancing, but it was during a different week. Anyway, I know that at this point, you’ve drawn an org chart with where you’re going to go for your organization.

Now the time is now to go in and start circling those next hires. We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about who you should hire, how to find the constraints.

So if you can go in there and say, okay. My next four hires are this, this, this, and this, which means forty percent of my time is about to be eaten up with the meetings and other work that it takes to manage people. I’ll have sixty percent left. Is it time is my fifth hire going to be someone who can handle more project management, more people management? That does not have to be a full time person either. That could be a part time person that you hire just to make sure everybody is aligned with the business goals, everybody’s getting their stuff done, they’re feeling heard, etcetera, etcetera.

But you need to know who’s next because you need to know who’s about to take up ten percent of your valuable time. That is all for this week. The takeaway is every new team member takes ten percent of your time.

Alright. And it’s good. If they’re doing good work Mhmm. Then that’s great. If they’re taking up ten percent of your time, but they’re freeing up seventy percent of your time, then it’s a good trade off. That’s brilliant. Okay?

Alright. Any questions, thoughts, concerns?

No? Alright.

And if you think, oh, it’s just really not worth of hiring people. It really is. It really is. Even with all those things considered, it really is. Alright.

Question time. We have forty glorious minutes to talk about what you’re going through in your business. So if you have a question, please put up your hand using, I think, the react button so that happens.

Lower your hand if you no longer have a question, and we’ll go in order. Start with your win, please.

And if we have no questions, then we’ll just call it a day.

Are we good? No quest oh, Marina’s up. Marina, what’s your win?

I already shared my win, but that’s okay.

Hiring a brand person?

Hiring a brand person.

Dig it. It was yeah. Just had lots of epiphanies about what’s holding me back and how to get over myself so I can do it.

So Love it.

Huge win. And K. Thinking about meetings, and, yes, I agree with this.

Well, it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, and it is true that every court takes ten percent of your time.

And I’m wondering about scheduling meetings. I can get really rigid about things.

And thinking about clients, this is not a problem right now ish, but I hope that it will be a problem, so I need to solve for it now.

If you say like, how much time do you leave on your calendar for booking client meetings? Do you say I’m only taking client calls in the morning? Also, I’m thinking about time zones. So I don’t love morning meetings, but all of my meetings end up being in the morning. So I’m like, okay. I just have to have morning meetings because that’s when all of the stuff is.

Yep.

Yeah. And eastern time zone, and they’re not gonna want a meeting at four because it’s after their work time. Yep. So knowing that, then I can still say that okay. What is my succinct question?

How many days do I have to allow for client meetings, and how flexible do you need to be to still have the client meetings, but also manage your calendar, and they’re also paying you?

So how do you That’s why you wanna manage your meetings the best you possibly can.

So you’re in control of when your team meets.

That is controllable.

So if you say, as a team, we never book meetings with each other between this hour and that hour or on this day and that day, etcetera, etcetera, then they know if they have a quick question to ask Marina or they wanna run copy by you that you only book meetings in certain times and always as close to an existing meeting as possible. Like, you have to set those rules up so they know that, because clients will be able to do a lot of dictating around the meetings that you have. Now if you are following having more of a standardized offer with retainer that comes off of that, then you set those meetings up all in advance.

And there’s less reason for a client to want to book an ad hoc meeting with you because there’s nothing ad hoc about what you’re doing. Everything’s planned. Everything’s good to go. Right?

And so if they want to have a meeting with you, it’s probably a meeting that’s critical to keeping them as a client. So they wanna change direction. Okay. Shit.

Okay. Let’s hear about this. Whenever they wanna book that, that’s fine. You can take that call.

And or else it’s, hey. This is going really well. We wanna add more. Or there’s something going on in their business. Like, hey. We just had a new product update, and people hate it. Our email strategy needs to kind of change for a second.

Okay. These are all good things to have, but it’s not gonna be like client has new idea they wanna run by me because that’s not the state of your engagement. Does that make sense, Marina?

Right.

So, basically, anytime a client wants to meet, you have to say yes. Like, if people wish to say no.

Yes. But that’s where you have to control as much of that as you possibly can.

Yeah.

Right. So set up the team meetings, and those are nondemocratic.

You work for me, and this is when we have meetings.

And people like it better when you just tell them things. So, yes. Yes. Democracy here. This is when we meet. Cool.

And then as far as clients go, they rule the calendar at that point.

Okay. And that’s that is in keeping with you charging more and delivering a retainer that is in keeping with what we’ve discussed. So Yes.

As a person paying you ten thousand dollars a month to optimize my emails, I feel like I should be able to talk to you when it’s time to optimize. Like, when I have a question about that, Slack is great for those quick questions, and you should default to Slack wherever possible.

But if I wanna sit down and say, Marina, we’ve got some concerns, then whenever. If I wanna call you at nine at night, that’s your job as an agency owner. You take the call. You give them your phone number so that they can call you anytime.

They’re not going to. They don’t want to call you all the time. Right. But at least they know they can.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Cool?

Yes. Fun.

This is my take on having run a couple agencies, obviously.

So I’m sure others have other takes on it. Not me, though. Okay. Adnan, what’s up? What’s your win?

So this is more of a look good kinda win. So there’s an agency that I, I think they’re based off in South America somewhere, but they have offices in London. But, anyways, through them, I got to write for Uber and Uber Eats.

Nice.

And then they contacted me last week because they have some Google projects Nice. That they want me to write for.

So it looks good. It’s not the most lucrative.

But Never is.

The win.

Big ones never are. Yeah.

Okay.

But I mean They know that.

They’re like, we’re you’re gonna want our logo.

Like, you would do this to create the logo.

The the chance out. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that’s that’s the win.

The question I had, I I guess this relates to both the email services that I offer and also the pricing pages services that I will be offering Mhmm.

Is that over like, all the everyone that I’ve written emails for, I haven’t been able to get any feedback on how they’re performing or if there’s been a jump or any of that stuff. How do I kinda go out there and be able to quickly get that?

Like Why is it because you’ve been writing for large brands and you can’t get into their email platform to Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a couple of smaller ones. I mean, I’m I don’t know how small they are.

Success dot a I, I wrote for them. They reached out directly, but Okay. They haven’t shared anything either.

So Okay.

It’s definitely gonna be tricky, if you can’t get into their tool, to actually look at that. And that’s fair. Uber’s not gonna let you into their email marketing platform. It might even be because I don’t know. I have I have no idea, obviously, what they’re using.

If they’re using something homegrown Yeah.

They’re not even gonna wanna look in that.

Like, you’re looking for a hard pass.

And then, otherwise, it’s just generally gonna be tricky across the board. So who can you get in with who can feed you that information?

And or what can you do at the start of a project to make it clearer that the point of contact you have is responsible for sharing results with you? And I don’t just mean hide that in the contract because no one reads it anyway, except for legal.

They’re not gonna say, like, oh, hey. Point of contact. Did you know you’re supposed to do this? They’re just gonna, like, whatever.

So you need to talk to your point of contact about that right out of the gate. Like, the only way we can do this together is if I can see how it’s working so that I can help you. Maybe there’s something else you build in there. Like, it’s the beginning of a retainer offer or something like that.

But they have to understand that you wanna see it in the first place. Do you know how many copywriters ask to see how it performed? Like, none. Like, nobody ever asked.

They’re just like, I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, please. Like, I hope it did okay, and then they, like, run off. If you’re like, I need to know how this is performing, and here’s why, make it a why that they care about, not like and here’s why I wanna be able to add it to my portfolio.

I don’t give a shit about your portfolio. What do I care about? So make it about what they care about so I can see that I’m getting you the results we are talking about me getting you. And if I’m not, I wanna be able to fix that.

Okay? So I need you to get me results within x period of time of emails launching.

Also, if emails don’t launch, we need to meet so I I can understand why you didn’t send them, and we can revise so that they’re the right emails for your brand.

But you have to make sure that that date is really clear. If it’s a campaign, if it’s a one off, they should be able to share results with you in a week. So seven days after is the time limit you set. If it’s an automation, give it thirty days to run so you can start seeing what’s going on.

But you have to tell them, I need to see results by this time. If the point of contact is not the right person for that, because they’re like, I’m five people removed from whoever implements the thing, Then because they’re maybe in marketing and this happens over in, like, some weird developer part of the organization. It’s not even marketing anymore even though it was five years ago, but now it’s not etcetera etcetera. Things are weird.

Who do you talk to there? Who is in charge of that? And you just ask Ask upfront. And if they’re like, I don’t know.

I’ll get back to you on that, then follow-up. Make a note of it. Follow-up until you know that person’s name, and then you reach out to that person. Say, hey.

Hi. I’m working on these emails. You’re gonna implement.

We should love each other. Let’s have a coffee talk so I can get you on board with what I’m thinking. You can tell me what the limitations are, what you’ve tried. Does that work?

That’s their job. They’re in a large organization. They’re there to have meetings. They know that. So that’s what I would do and have done. Okay. That makes sense?

Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. It’s always like a chicken and egg kind of thing.

Right? So I’ve lost out on some clients because even though my portfolio is good, the the the first question they’ll ask is like, oh, are you guys an agency, or are there any results can you that you can share with us? And then right off the bat, like, I’m on the I’m on the back foot, if you know what I mean. Yep.

Yeah. That’s the constraint. Right? So last week, we talked about constraints. And if you can say a big constraint to me closing business is that they always ask for results, then you gotta solve that.

Because if you solve that, then the pipeline opens up again. So we gotta take that problem and fix it. Great. You’ve identified.

A lot of people don’t know what where leads go. They don’t know why it stops. You know that. So it only makes good sense for you to prioritize that, and that’s where Joel’s old case study buddy was a good thousand dollars spent because a thousand dollars spent gets you a case study that you can now use to close twenty thousand dollar jobs across the board, or you do it.

You follow-up with clients and you say this. And, of course, if all it takes, if part of all that it takes is you adding into your process three new bullet points about at this point, I tell the client this. At this point, I get connected with their technology person for email implementation.

At this point, I follow-up with them for results.

Now you’ve got three little things added to an SOP that could unlock new projects for you. So I think that’s great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Alright.

Go add it to those SOPs.

Any other questions?

Are we feeling the quiet people in the room who I’m looking at?

No. I’m looking at them.

Awkward. Should I call on someone?

Nobody has any questions or concerns? Anything that they’re working on?

Caroline, I haven’t heard from you in so long. One, how was your summer?

You were off for a month. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna put you on the spot to ask a business question, but I do wanna know how your summer is going.

It is good. It is good. We traveled to we spent June in Asia. We were in Japan and Korea Oh. Which is very cool. Yeah. We sent a our oldest kiddo off to college over the weekend.

Wow.

Yep.

Banana’s amazing. How’s that feeling?

Good. He made it very easy to say goodbye. I’ll just leave it at that.

That’s amazing. Well, now you’ll have all this time to work on your business.

Yeah. I have three other kiddos, but yep.

Oh, I thought that was your youngest or your oldest, but No.

That’s my oldest. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Funny.

So I feel like I’m playing catch up. Yeah.

After the That’s fair.

Kids go back the kids go back to school tomorrow.

Amazing.

Glorious.

Okay. Well, it’s good to see you. I was glad to see you pop back in after your month break.

I yes. Cool. Awesome. Good to be back.

Anybody do you have anything you’re working on in your business that you wanna discuss? You were shaking your head madly that I shouldn’t call on you, and then I called on you.

Nothing nothing really great to share at the moment.

Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Cody? Hannah? Stacy?

I don’t have any questions, but I’ve been working on Instagram posts.

Okay. How’s this going?

Last week.

It’s okay. I think I was getting a little far in the weeds with the Gary Vee book, and I’m trying to figure everything out. But I think I I think I have a decent plan at least now. But, yeah, it took me about ten hours last week to create, like, five posts.

Oh, wow.

Do you feel good about the posts?

Yeah. I mean, I’m writing them all out. That’s what takes the longest is to make sure they’re strategic. And then you have to since I don’t have, like, a team, I’m the one in Canva designing all the things and editing the videos, and it’s it’s a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. We’ll talk.

I mean, I know that it’s tricky to hire people to do that, but there’s, like, some really good short term.

Did you watch Shane’s training on hiring overseas?

No.

But I need to because you’re the second person who told me to watch that, so I’m going to do that.

Yeah. Definitely do. He’s built cool businesses that where the people that like, he’s getting to employ people, in situations where they need employment, and it’s just cheaper than it is here. Life is just cheaper in the Philippines, and so it’s cheaper to hire someone there, and he’s done really, really good work with it.

So, yeah, watch that. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be someone local and expensive who spends four dollars on a nectarine.

Can you believe the cost of fruit?

No. It’s crazy.

I know. Okay. Well, cool. Cody, I’m glad you’re working on that. I know it’s, social.

I’m ready.

I have, like, so many videos I have to record this week. I’m dreading it. Yeah.

Hannah, you have a question?

Yeah. I’ve got a win first. Okay. Great.

I set up a Instagram account on Friday.

Nice.

And I have, eleven followers now.

Amazing. That’s great.

Yeah. So Yeah. So that is a big win because I was quite resistant because I used to have an Instagram account, for for a lot of years and then lost it all.

So I haven’t had an Instagram for maybe about three years, I think.

Mhmm. But I got one now, and I’m Yeah. I’m happy. I’m just Great.

Sharing the same stuff, that I usually share on LinkedIn anyway.

So it’s easy with Yeah.

Just repurpose it. Did you read day trading attention, which we talked about last week?

No.

Gary needs a new book?

No. It’s I think I what I like about it so far, and I’ve not done it, but is this new take that the algorithms don’t care as much about your followers as so everybody’s always scared to get on social. They’re like, I don’t have any followers. It’s gonna take forever to get them.

But the algorithms are shifting in such a way that as long as you’re making content someone wants to see and will, like, pause and stay on, then you get served up to all these new audiences. So I find that encouraging because that was why I held off on Instagram as well. I’m like, well, why now? I’ve spent all this time over on Twitter, and Elon messed the whole thing up, and now I have to go find a new platform.

And so I didn’t want to, and then I just did. And now I’m, like, relieved to hear that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s always a good signal, but it’s not critical. So yeah. Cool.

I think, like, in a year’s tie in a year’s time, two years’ time, I’m gonna be really pleased that I did it. So that’s what I’m thinking.

Agreed. Yes.

I I look back now. So I set I I started LinkedIn in two thousand and nineteen, and I’ve got nearly sixteen thousand followers at all, like, all my friends.

That’s why that sounds weird.

But, and so and I’m and I look back, and I think I’m so pleased I did that back then. So pleased. Yeah. So, yeah, my question, you’ve just mentioned I just heard you mention the words, Joel’s case study earned a thousand dollars and spending a thousand dollars.

And I I don’t what what does that mean?

Sorry. So Joel Kletke is a copywriter, and he had a business called Case Study Buddy, but he just sold that. So it’s not his anymore. It’s someone else’s now. So it’s case study buddy by so and so.

And it was a thousand bucks a year or two ago. I don’t know what it is right now, but a thousand and you would, like, give them contact information for a person that you had worked with, and they would do all the work of making the case study. So they did this for a lot of different clients. And, yeah, it’s like, if we can find a thousand dollars to take a big, like, bite out of a big problem that we have, that seems like money really, really well spent.

So but it’s yeah. Joel Pletke, case study buddy, thousand bucks to get a case study made.

Yeah. Nice. And they would do everything too. Like, I used them for one case study. It turned out great.

And I would just have to connect them with this client of mine, and they just took over from there. Made the whole thing easy.

Yeah. Right. Okay. So they reach out to your client and then do everything for you.

Yeah. I think I had to warm intro them, just an email connecting the two. I I had to make sure that the client was okay with giving a case study first, but then I didn’t have to get on a call. I all of the tedium of that.

Man, Joel did a presentation at Content Jam, I think it was, a few years ago on making a case study, and there’s a lot. There’s a lot to her. It’s like, just pay just pay someone to do this for you. So I would look into that if you’re looking for case studies. Yeah.

Interesting. Thank you. Sure.

Thanks, Anna.

Anything else? Anyone? Nothing from Stacy. I saw you came on camera when I said your name.

That was just my courtesy showing my face because you said my name.

That’s all. I thought it might be. I thought it might be. Alright. Cool. Well, let us wrap up today’s session.

We have a whole bunch of people joining Coffee School Pro in September, which is our next official, like, intake.

So we have one more call without a whole bunch of new people in it. So bring any questions that you’ve had that you’ve wanted to tackle, because it’s gonna be a little a little bit noisier, not crazy noisier, little bit noisier.

Cool. Otherwise, hope everybody has a really good rest of your day. Alright, Jill?

Take care. Bye.

Pitching Your Workshop Presentations

Pitching Your Workshop: Abi, Marina & Claire Present Their Diagnostics

Transcript

Hey. Hey. Alright. Workshop day. Y’all ready? Yes?

Of course.

Good.

I’m excited. This is gonna be a lot.

We’ve got three p doing this a lot. I don’t know what’s going on with my brain.

My fingers never match what the number is that I say. So three. There. I had to think about it. We have three of you going today, and I know it just hit start time. So we’re just gonna let some people come on in.

Abby, you’re going. Marina, you’re going. And I think Claire is our third, and we’ll, go in that order.

Is that exciting? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Good.

Alright. We’ll let some people file in. How are you all feeling about your present your workshops?

I don’t know why, but I’m, like like, nervous about giving it.

Really? Yeah. I was like, I don’t know why.

They’re just, like, my friends. I can agree. I was saying to my partner, but I’m, like, really nervous.

It’s so much worse when you know the people.

It’s so much worse.

Is that what it is? Maybe.

Yes. Totally.

Three thousand strangers, easy compared to three people you know very well. Like, no. Thanks. I don’t need this. I’m good. I’ll do something else with my life.

Well, also these people, they know what it’s supposed to be. So what if you totally miss the boat?

I guess that’s true. Yeah. That’s fair. That’s fair.

Alright. Thanks everybody who’s attending today and not presenting.

We’re going to be attending as people in that person’s ideal audience. So, Abby, Marina, and when Claire gets here, if the three of you can please just let us know basically who your ICP is and the persona that you believe would be watching this, and we can do our best to sit in those shoes. And, otherwise, we’ll just, like, give other feedback as well.

So that’s our job for everybody who is filing in again.

Yeah. Really simply, we are here to watch and give feedback on three workshops. And if you’re working on your own work workshop, which you should be, it’s a great chance for you to do to see to see. So you can also learn like, oh, wow.

I loved that. Or, oh, okay. That’s gonna be a confusing part. It was confusing for their audience.

It’s probably confusing for mine. I didn’t think of it that way, etcetera, etcetera. So a caught not taught kind of workshop day. It is two hours, because we have three groups, three people going.

Each gets about thirty minutes, then we’ll have about five minutes of discussion time, which could turn into ten, which is why we have two hours blocked out. Thank you for this endurance approach. It’s not a sprint, today. So are we ready?

We’re gonna go Abby, then Marina, and then Claire, if any of you surprised.

And you’re like, wait. What? I’m going today? Yeah. That’s the sign up list I got.

So so, hopefully, that’s right. Going in that order, Abby, then Marina, then Claire. Are we ready? Or does everybody know why we’re here and what we’re doing?

Any confusion?

No? I wouldn’t think so. Alright. We are recording.

Let’s get cracking. If you’re not presenting, please go on mute and do your best to stay on camera if possible so that the presenter can see our faces and not feel like they’re talking to an empty room or people who are busy doing other things. Okay. Thanks.

Abby, take it away.

Cool. Okay. So, my ICP is a course creator, so you’re probably doing about three to four million. You wanna be doing ten million.

But at the moment, you’re just completely stuck with a live lodge roller coaster. You’re getting burned out because every time you live lodge, it just takes out of you, and you just cannot get Evergreen to work, and you don’t know why.

Okay. So can everybody, like, see my screen?

Okay. Cool. Right.

Okay. So this workshop is called how to make five thousand dollars a day with a mid ticket evergreen course.

So I’m Abby. I’m the founder of AT Content and the creator and author of day one evergreen, the only funnel that’s built to convert better every month.

I help course creators add one point eight million a year in revenue, which is five thousand dollars a day, without the nail biting stress of live launches. I’ve worked with hundreds of course creators. I’ve worked on evergreen funnels for Amy Porterfield, Becca Klein, Jel Sid, Coffeehackers, Ingrid Ana, Fast Needs a QBO, and some other names that you might recognize.

So you’re in the right place if you have a mid ticket offer between three hundred and two thousand dollars that you’d love to scale to five thousand dollars a day on Evergreen. The reason I say these amounts is just what I found is when it’s over two thousand, it tends to just take a little bit more nurturing. So the idea of this funnel is that you bring people onto your email list and you sell to them straight away.

So you’re already doing at least a million with your online course, but you really wanna scale with to ten million without relying on the nail biting trust of live launches.

And you’re already using paid advertising to sell your online course. So this isn’t a requirement.

So, generally, to to reach five thousand dollars a day, depending on how much your course is, you wanna be getting at least a hundred, maybe two hundred people into a funnel every day. If you can do this with organic marketing, awesome. Great.

But likely, you’re gonna be using some kind of paid advertising.

So a quick case study.

So one of my clients is Fast and Easy QBI. So back in January, they launched a brand new course with an email list of ten thousand, and we made six hundred thousand dollars. Their sales that month outpaced all of their sales in twenty twenty three. We straightaway took that launch funnel evergreen and made seventy six thousand dollars in month one, keeping in mind that they’d already pretty much exhausted that email list because we literally just live launched.

And then we continue to optimize.

And now in July, they’ve got a six point eight cent conversion rate with a three dollar cost per lead. So for a twelve hundred dollar course, they’re they’ve got a pretty good ROAS there, and they’re making five thousand dollars a day with they on Evergreen.

A few more case studies, which you can get in my book.

So one of my clients, Eric Petrus, he came to me because he he was selling guitar guitar repair course.

I worked on his evergreen sales page, and we tripled his weekly sales. At Harmusch, I wrote his evergreen sales page three years ago. Amazingly, he’s still using the same copy, and it’s converting at thirteen percent. He’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars from that. Becca Klein, I increased her final conversions by a hundred and fifty percent.

Jove said two hundred and forty percent increase in webinar sales.

This was actually for a live launch, but the coffee converted so well. She took Evergreen and actually tripled her course price.

And Fast and Easy QBO, another course I’ve worked on for them is a membership, and we’ve seen a forty percent increase in membership sign ups since setting up day one evergreen.

Okay. So to address the eye roll here, these aren’t friends or colleagues. These are course creators that have come to me to evergreen their funnels. This isn’t another just add a countdown timer, just set up deadline funnel, and it’s gonna convert. This is unique system designed to collect ongoing data via a ten point customer feedback loop so you can legitimately improve your conversions without ripping a funnel apart every month.

So deal with evergreen, the funnel that’s built to convert best every month. So now you can stop relying on unpredictable live launches that burn you and your team out or the unpredictability of them as well. I mean, live launches are fun and exciting when they go well, but, also, if you’re putting you’re counting on one live launch to generate your full year’s revenue. And one link doesn’t work, and then you potentially lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this is to just build a bit more peace into your business. It’s not to say never live lodge, but just to have that one point eight million as well.

Without lining Zuckerberg’s pockets, while barely breaking even on your ad spend, so maybe we’re already running ads to your evergreen course, and it’s kind of converting. But, actually, after you paid your ad spend, you’re not making enough money. Like, yes, you’re getting those leads, but you’re then having to go back to live launching to sell to sell to them.

And without hiring expert after expert in the hope that someone can fix your evergreen funnel problem. And then again, just linking back to live launches because it just doesn’t work.

Okay. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a little slice together. So I’d love you to just grab a notebook and pen.

Okay. So what I want you to do is in the middle of your page is to just draw a circle and write in there five thousand dollars. So that’s that’s what we’re going for here, five thousand dollars a day. And then I will need to draw four leaves.

Make them quite big so you’ve got room to write in them. I guess these are kind of kind of looking like petals here. So you should have what looks like a little flower.

And then in the first, leaf, I want you to write attract.

In the second leaf, I want you to write engage.

And the third, convert.

And then the fourth, optimize.

Okay. So the first thing you’re gonna wanna do, if you if you want to be making sales every day, you need to be bringing people into your funnel, and you need to attract the right leads. So we’re gonna be using Facebook ads to do that.

Then the second thing we need is an attraction device. So you need a way to bring these people into your funnel and instantly engage them. So this is like you’re gonna be an opt in page with a workshop.

And then you need a lead monitor. So you need some way of actually seeing, okay, are these good leads as the reason that my funnel isn’t converting because my sales messaging is awful. Am I just bringing in low quality leads?

Okay. And then we have engaged. So you need an irresistible offer.

We’re gonna be talking in a minute about deeper into what these all mean and how to assess, whether you’ve got it set up or not, and then mindset shift.

So rather than doing a traditional how to workshop, you’re gonna do a workshop that’s built out of mindset shifts the audience needs to, go through in order to be ready to buy your course.

And then, oh, sticky story. Sorry.

Brain brain fart.

So because this is you are bringing people in and selling to them straight away, it’s really important you build know, like, and trust here. So this isn’t just like putting a shit’s creep gif in your emails and being like, hey. I have a personality. Like, you wanna build these really sticky stories that, like, win them over to your world and make them feel ready to to buy from you.

Okay. And then we’ve got combat. So we want an easy yes pitch. So at the end of your webinar, you’re gonna pitch your offer, and it’s gonna make it very easy for them to say yes.

And then you’ve got a million dollar sales page. So this isn’t your typical templated sales page. This is a long form sales page that addresses any objections they have that by the time they get to the ends of it, they’re not gonna have any further questions about your course.

And then conversion emails. So, again, not just your generic sales emails, emails that are written to convert.

And then finally, we have optimize.

So data tracking.

Are you tracking your data across the whole funnel?

And then we have your customer feedback loop. So that’s your ten point customer feedback loop, which includes forms and surveys, AB tests to gain as much information about your customer as possible.

And then finally, we have conversion hotspots, which is where you want to implement your customer feedback to have the biggest impact on your conversions.

Okay. So you should have something that looks a bit like this. Maybe a little bit neater. Mine’s a bit. My handwriting’s still great.

And now we’re gonna go through and we’re gonna write where you are for each of these sections. So if you’re feeling really confident, you’ve got it set up, it’s all converting beautifully, you’re gonna give yourself a ten.

If you have it set up but conversions aren’t quite where they should be or you just feel like it could be better, you can give yourself a five. And if it’s not set up or it’s not converting at all, you’re gonna give yourself a zero.

Okay. So the first thing we’ve got is your Facebook ads.

So in order for to hit five thousand thousand dollars a day, your ads need to be profitable. So if you are your current ad spend is ten to twenty dollars a day and you have a five hundred dollar course, you’re just literally flushing away that money and not and not seeing any return on your ad spend. So we wanna ideally get your lead down to around five dollars, five to ten dollars.

And it’s also it’s not just about the cost per lead, but having someone on your team who’s gonna address seasonal changes, who’s gonna keep updating that so that what works in winter can then be made to work in summer. You’re not you’re refreshing the ads, so they can continue to go back, and you’re not just flushing that money away.

And then you want your attraction device. So your opt in page to your workshop. So, ideally, your opt in page conversion rate should be around forty to sixty percent.

You also want to make sure that people are then watching your webinar. So if people aren’t even clicking to watch your on demand webinar, then the chances are that it’s just not desirable enough. So if you have an issue there with people not watching, it might just be that your opt in page isn’t selling it hard enough. And then lead monitor.

So you’re gonna have a thank you page survey embedded after people sign up for your webinar, and this is gonna determine what drove them to to sign up. It’s gonna tell you whether these are good leads. So you might find that lots of people going in there are like, oh, I just wanna make more money or some other kind of quick win, and then this is a sign that actually those leads aren’t the ones that you want in there. You want ones that are ready to buy, they’re ready to invest, and understand that it’s it’s a long term game.

You also wanna be doing very strategic AB testing on your opt in page. So rather than just testing to see if you can get your conversion rate up a little bit, actually looking at the bottom of your funnel and seeing, okay. Is this one bringing in the leads that actually convert?

So, again, if you don’t have that set up, it’s gonna be a zero. If you have some of it set up at five, and if you’re really confident that you know what’s going on with your leads and who’s converting, then you’re gonna be self a ten.

Okay. And then going on to engage. So your irresistible offer.

Do is this something that people will, like, crawl through broken glass to get? Do you have a great offer that’s converted before? And is it converting with Evergreen? So it might be that it converts pretty well when it’s like you live launch, but on evergreen, maybe you don’t have the right kind of urgency set up. Do you have that authentic scarcity that gives people a reason to act now rather than later.

And then mindset shifts. So your workshop, is it built out of the mindset shifts that people need to go through to go from where they are now to where they need to be to say yes to your course, or are you just doing how to content that isn’t actually converting them?

And then sticky stories. So, again, building in that relatability stories that really stick. And you can the way you can tell this is are people staying to the end of your webinar? Are people sticking around? Are they opening your emails? Are they engaging with your offer? And if they’re not, then the chances are you need to just go back and build in more of that storytelling and more of yourself so that people can buy into that.

Okay. And then we’ve got Converse. We’ve got the easiest pitch.

So this is at the end of your webinar. Are you not just are you are you reading through your modules and your bonuses, or are you constantly making sure that you’re connecting the modules and the bonuses to what’s going on in their life at the moment, explaining to them how how it’s gonna improve their life, how it’s gonna aid the transformation that you’re promising. And, again, the way you can measure this is are people sticking around to the end of your webinar, or are they dropping off?

Your million dollar sales page, is this, is it converting? Is is the the first thing to think about? Are you converting at five to eight percent, which is what you should be getting with an evergreen webinar funnel like this?

Is it templated? Are you pulling out generic pain points, or are you have you got your customer research and you’re reading their mind and you’re empathizing with them deeply? You’re as they’re reading through, they’re thinking, oh my god. Yes. This person gets me. Important on an evergreen sales page because again, these people don’t know you. They haven’t been on your list for months and months and months.

So it’s even more important that you show them you understand where they are and that they can trust you to guide to guide them.

And then finally, conversion emails. Again, emails are rich in voice of customer that are addressing different objections objections that are coming up in your customer feedback loop, which we’ll talk about in a second.

Are people opening them? Are people clicking through? Is your click through rate for each email above two percent?

Okay. And finally, optimize. So data tracking. Are you tracking every point of your funnel, and do you understand how it all ties together? So your cost per lead, your click through rate on your ads, your opt in page conversions, how the amount of people that show up for your webinar, and the amount of time they spend on your webinar, your sales pitch, your versions, your open rates for emails, your click through rates. Are you measuring all that, and are you measuring it month monthly and looking at how things are changing each month?

Your customer feedback loop. Do you have a ten point customer feedback loop built in? Do you have survey set up? Do you have opportunities for your customers to engage?

Are you finding out why people are converting versus not converting? Are you running strategic tests? All of these things will help you understand your audience better. So if anything’s not converting, you can use your data tracking to identify where and you know what to change around your messaging.

And this also applies to seasonal changes as well. For example, let’s say you have an outgoing copywriting course, that converted amazing in twenty twenty two. Then in January twenty twenty three, your conversion rates dropped and you don’t know why. If you had that customer feedback loop set up, you could say, oh, okay.

Because everyone’s freaking out about about AI, but I’m not addressing that in my messaging. So do you have these points set up so you understand what is getting in the way for your audience? And then finally, conversion hotspots. Once you’ve got that feedback, do you know where to put it?

Do you know where to put that the voice of customers so that you are having the biggest impact of your conversions and you’re not just constantly randomly rewriting, ripping pile funnels, start again, wasting all this time just hoping, praying that something’s gonna convert.

Okay. Cool.

Thanks. So you should hopefully have something that looks a little bit like this, maybe a bit less colorful unless you you’ve got your crayons. So now we’re you should be able to identify three to four points, for you to now go away and work on. So if your problem is that, okay, you are making some sales, but it’s just not profitable because all of your money is going to Facebook ads. You wanna go and you wanna look at your Facebook ads, you wanna work on your opt in page, see if you can get that conversion rate up, and maybe have a look at your offer. Is there room to put the price up a bit more so you’re more profitable? And then, of course, getting this customer feedback loop built in so you can see why people, why your leads are expensive, what what you can do to actually improve that.

Is your is it the case that your sales are inconsistent? Sometimes, some months are gray, other months are poor.

Again, you wanna build this customer feedback loop in so you can see what’s changing. You want someone working on your Facebook ads so that they can respond to these seasonal changes and then be going through these conversion hotspots through your funnel from the top to the bottom to optimize based on what it is that’s changing.

And if you’re not getting sales at all, then or you’re you’re just making a couple, like, nowhere near that five k that you want, then the chances are you need someone to come in and set up this day one evergreen funnel for you.

So if you do just have a couple of points here, then that’s awesome. Go away. Give give this to your team. Get my book for the to get the ten conversion, the the customer feedback loop.

If you’re thinking, okay. I just really love someone to just set this up for me, then my team has one space available per month. Not only will we set it up, but we’re also available to optimize. So it’ll be like having someone on your team that’s gonna review the customer feedback loop every month and then improve the funnel so that you your comp until your conversion’s where you want them to be, and then, again, respond if anything dips. So I’m gonna be dropping a link to book a call with me, come to that call with your drawing today ready, and, yeah, we’ll have a chat and see if we’re a good fit. Any questions?

Okay. That’s it.

Good job, Abby.

Alright.

Let’s share any notes. Who would like to go first to share feedback for Abby?

Otherwise, I’ll choose you. So put up Andrew’s first and then Claire.

Right.

Yeah. That was really good, Abby. Definitely lit some fire under my butt to to get my workshop going and hopefully get it as good as yours is.

I would say my number one point of feedback, would be to really slow down, a good bit. There were parts where you were going through it really fast, and it’s like, I could keep up with you because I kinda know a lot of this stuff. And what you’re talking about, you know, getting customer feedback or, like, conversion rates and sales pages that add address objections, I’m right there with you. But I feel like if I’m someone who is that’s not marketing is not my main thing, I would need you to go a lot slower so that I can understand what you’re talking about.

I wrote that down when you were going through the diagnostic at the mindset mindset shift. Like, I know what you’re talking about about we need to, like, shift people’s mindsets, but you kinda blew through it a little bit. So I think if you went, like, maybe, like, half the speed, that would probably help, a little bit.

And then in terms of, like, stuff that I really liked was when you’re going through the diagnostic, when you had things like the exit like, when you were doing the customer feedback loop, you had like, you used the example of, like, AI. You know? Oh, is my messaging not resonating anymore? Because everyone’s freaking out about AI, and we haven’t addressed that.

That specificity was helpful.

Same thing with the last one, the conversion hotspots of, like, asking questions. Like, okay. You’ve collected this feedback. Do you know where to put it, where to implement it?

I feel like that was helpful.

And I just wanted to check on in the beginning, would you could you say it was supposed to be three hundred to two thousand dollars, or was it higher than the other typo?

No. Yeah.

You might have a typo.

So Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Three hundred to two thousand.

Yeah. It goes to twenty thousand. I was like, oh, damn. That is a high ticket offer.

Nice. Okay. Yeah. No mid ticket. Thank you.

I didn’t notice that.

But, yeah, big biggest piece of advice would be just, yeah, slow down. Like, the content taught the content is really good, I thought.

So Thank you, Andre.

Her goal was so nice.

Claire.

My feedback is is really simple.

First, like, there were a few points where I really loved. You got, like, super specific. You just gave me an example, and I went like, oh, okay. I get what that is now. But you didn’t do it for all of them. So I some of them, I was like, okay. Following along.

But those super specific points were, like, really convincing, I suppose. And then same feedback on slowing down. I’ve gotten that feedback, like, a million times as well. Slow it down. Say less.

Say say things simpler as well. I think, my biggest piece of advice that I got from Cody was, sometimes they don’t understand what you’re saying because you’re overexplaining, which is, like, kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do when you’re overexplaining.

So just by keeping it to, like, one, I suppose, big idea, per section, it makes it a lot easier to slow down and not catch yourself over explaining.

And then lastly, I really loved your presentation. I haven’t done a presentation at all. I hope that I’m instantly jealous.

But I really loved your presentation. I thought it was super cool to be able to follow along.

I think as you go, you’ll probably find you don’t say as much as you did just as you get, like, more comfortable with the content. But, the end was also really, really great. I love the Calendly visual. I just felt so like, okay. Today.

Yeah. I hate that.

Thank you. Helpful.

Anyone else wanna share some notes for Abby?

No?

Okay. I’ll share mine. Abby, I loved it. I thought you did a great job overall. The opening numbers and the promise right out of the gate, it’s like a super solid hook.

The case studies, well done. I do have a note that you’re talking a blue streak. That’s not what I wrote.

So can you ask questions earlier on? Like, have you experienced this too?

Something like that just to bring people in. I know when it’s recorded in advance, then that’s really, like, tricky, but even maybe slowing down could solve it there.

Okay. So early on, I have at ten o seven my time, which is probably about four minutes into the presentation.

I I would love you to say, hey. Yes. You can work with me and my team directly, and, like, just get ahead of that because I am definitely in your target market. And as somebody who would rather outsource this work, then try to get my team to do it ourselves.

Yeah. I was like, my question was immediately. Can we just hire you for this? So you could say, yeah.

You know, you can work with me directly. I’m gonna walk you through this because we only accept three clients a month. Also, I think you should say three clients a month, not one. So it sounds bigger, like a larger group.

You can only take on one. Then if you want, you can take out as many as you want to at that time, but I would open it up to three.

So then say, yes. You can work with me directly. I would also love, at that point, for you to say what your prices start at.

There’s no reason to not do that. Yeah. So give it a shot, and make it a nice high number.

You’re presenting really well, and you clearly know your stuff, and you have good case studies.

The only thing that would make a person think you should be less than fifty thousand dollars at minimum is you not saying fifty thousand dollars to start. So, like, if you don’t have a fifty thousand dollar budget, you’re not a good fit to work with you. You’re just not. So no. So fifty, sixty, whatever that number goes to, but say it. Even though it’s scary, this is what the whole point of this thing is, not just to get the leads you could otherwise close, but, like, new leads, more money. So I want you to do that.

You need more build up to the fact that you’re gonna be drawing today. So I would say earlier on, hey. By the way, just as we’re kicking off and while people are still filing in, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen today. It’s not that’s not an art class. Don’t worry. But you’re gonna wanna draw something. I’m gonna show it to you.

I don’t understand the leaf the need for the leaf shape.

Because it’s evergreen.

So yeah.

Yeah.

I know. It’s really corny, but I just like No.

Because I I I had a design when it’s not in the green belt.

Leaves are seasonal.

Yeah. I don’t I just gave it to a sign designer. I was like, can you make this, like, not look like Joe’s?

From your from my side of things, I was drawing it, and I didn’t know what the lines off the leaves are meant to be.

So, like, when you have a triangle and you put those lines in there, the triangle is meaningless. As soon as you make something a shape, then everything on it needs to be part of that, like, metaphor.

And so if I’m thinking, okay, these are leaves, what are the three pokey things coming off the side then? So for me, like, I’m just it didn’t connect, and so I didn’t know why I was drawing three leaves. I didn’t know what was expected.

I know Andrew’s really trying to make it evergreen there.

Yeah. So just know that as your audience drawing it, I didn’t give myself enough room possibly because I wasn’t set up to know to draw this thing. The leaves felt like a artsy exercise that I couldn’t do, and it’s one more point of friction. Right? Like, did I draw a good leaf?

That’s just like come on. But I love starting with the circle in the middle. I love the four parts.

What I a couple notes.

When you’re going through, you’ve got, like, metrics and yes, no. I’m gonna look through and see if I can find a blank version of the scorecard that they gave us at their workshop, because you might wanna also follow this workshop up with shipping out that or bring the work and I’ll show it to you, and I’ll send you separate loom so you know what I’m talking about. Simply because what you’re talking about like, you’ve got numbers and how to tell if this is a yes or no. I didn’t love zero five ten either. I I think simplify it down to red, yellow, green.

It’s just like five zero ten.

I was copying it.

I know. I hate it. And I only do it because the sun doesn’t have, like, the sunshine growth model and zero like, the red, yellow, green doesn’t work on a sun. So that’s where it’s bad, like, where it falls apart from me.

But I don’t I know I know that’s what I do. I don’t like it, and so I wanna coach you to do it the easier way, which to me is red, yellow, green, or something really simple like that where there’s a three part thing. Okay.

Bum bum bum. Let me see. I took some good notes on, like, the actual content. Like, that was good. I have notes here for self.

Oh, when we get to oh, yeah. Million dollar sales page, I would love you to rename that for the purposes of this workshop simply because that’s the only thing that has million dollar or a price or, like, a, like, a outcome attached to it. So for me, I was like I mean, easy yes is another thing. Also, it sounded like you were saying easy ass to me. Just so you know, it came off as easy ass. And I was like, let me see what she writes down here.

So there’s that. But million dollar sales page, I would give it something else that sounds different just because I wrote, makes it sound like success is all on this.

Suddenly million dollar sales page had much heavier weighting than anything else, and I was thinking, do we just need a better sales page?

And that’s not the takeaway that you want.

Ta da. Couple more notes, then I’m done.

Oh, yeah. When we get to optimize, I felt like so you opened with data tracking. I needed a story there. Like because you say you can find places where there’s where money is basically hidden is effectively what you were saying there.

Like, you won’t know unless you’re tracking that. And you walked us through a bunch of great metrics, which was great. But then I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if at this point you were to say, for example, or whatever that QBO one was, we noticed x here, we optimized it, and we brought in another twenty thousand dollars in that in the next quarter or something like that. Right?

So I’m like, oh, damn. But then I was like, well, if you could do that.

It closely tied to the data tracking ties to conversion hots hotspots. Once you track data, then you know where to put it in these hotspots. Right? So I was confused about why the ten point thing was between the two.

So I wrote, what if for optimize, you first open with the ten point feedback loop, then you do data tracking, and then conversion hot hot spots, which would allow you to finish with a case study example. Like, oh, and when we did this and now we’re ending on a really high note. Money outcome. I remember why I want you to do this because although I can see that I’m red here, green there, yellow there, I know that I want you to do it if I remember that you you make money for people, which leads me to final notes.

We dropped the model pretty quickly.

What I would love is you spent a lot of time, I think, saying, like, if this is true for you, if that is true for you, etcetera, I had just finished with you should have have an idea of where your weaknesses are and what you should work on next. Don’t say give it to their team. You can imply that. You can say that earlier on.

Like, I’ll give you enough that you can go forward and do this yourself. But at this point, like, close them, and that’s really it. Like, now is the point where I’m like, I’ve seen that I’m really right in a lot of places. Those all seem expensive, and, like, I’m really gonna need to train my team on how to do those things.

So don’t say go give it to your team. Instead, you could say, I mean, the red parts, is your team ready to do those parts? Are they qualified to optimize all of those parts?

Don’t minimize what you do. You started talking using verbs like set up. I’ll set this up for you.

No. Like, you’re not setting it up. That’s even when you do, it’s just not a good verb. Like, we’re we’re we’re this for you as we’re watching.

Like, wow. She, like, knows her shit. She can do this. And then I was brought down to maybe your team can maybe you can buy the book.

Maybe I can set it up for you. You know? So, no. And then book a triage call with team. Don’t put yourself in your Calendly even if you have to make somebody up. Someone else is your setter.

So make sure it’s like you can book a call with so and so from my team, and then go from there. It just elevates your price again and again. Like, oh, damn. Just sales team.

Yep.

The workshop’s selling. It’s doing a great job. I think if you simplify the model, slow down a bit, you’re good.

Tell people. Yes. You can charge me. You you can hire me. It’s fifty thousand to start or whatever the price is. What is the price to start?

Thirty five. To start. That prices start at thirty five.

Right. And then you build on the retainer after that?

Well, I’m gonna I think I’m gonna say like, I’m gonna build in an obligate not not a retainer, but just like, I’m here if you like if things don’t work. Like, I’m on I’m here for forty days just to work with your team if anything’s not working, and then recommend, like, you should really do the three the retainer as well.

Well, you should because your model Andrew knows what’s coming. You know your model.

Your this optimized you’ve sold us on it. It’s in the freaking model. It’s right here. How am I gonna go forward and data track and update those conversion hotspots?

You sold us on a thing here.

Like, you have done the work.

Okay.

That’s all. You know what my take is here.

So, yeah, any other notes or thoughts from anybody else for Abby?

I I just wanna tack on to what you just said, Joe, about, like, making this goes back to that that post that I made a while back about not making your monthly retainer separate from the offer to just make it part of the whole thing from the beginning so that it’s just the natural next stage of your product. It’s not a separate thing.

I so agree with that.

Yeah. Totally. It’s it’s it’s built in. I I attended this both as me here for you, but also as a person who would hire you for this. And if I heard, oh, you don’t necessarily need me for that part. I’d be like like, what are you talking about? But who’s gonna handle my conversion hotspots?

Like, what?

What’s happening? Who’s gonna look over my survey data? What?

So, yeah, Andrew made a really great point. I don’t know if you’re being tentative about selling yourself because you’re in a room with us and maybe with strangers. You’d be, like, more on the nose about how awesome you are, but wherever you do this next, lay it on.

Yeah. Reason to. Okay? Please?

One other tiny thing too. You just said a couple a couple minutes ago, Abby, about I’ll be there in case something’s not working. Like, you don’t even wanna say in case something’s not working because don’t even put that in their mind. Just if you wanna reframe that even as to make sure everything goes smoothly. Mhmm.

Mhmm.

You know?

But don’t even put in the possibility that something might not be working.

Yeah.

Okay. Love it. Good? Thank you. Bye. That’s Abby, nice work.

That’s lots of noise. Very helpful. Thanks.

Awesome. Marina, you’re up. You ready?

Of course.

K. After just a heads up for everybody who’s like, I need a bio break.

After Marina’s talk and our feedback session, we’ll take, like, a five minute break and then come back for Claire’s. Okay?

Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Marina.

Alright.

Take it away.

Tell us who your ICP is and everybody upfront first, please.

Yes. So ICP, CMO, VP marketing, twenty to a hundred million, b two b SaaS, with a reverse trial. So they start with a trial and then go to a freemium kind of model.

So that is who you are.

Alright. Thank you for Sorry, Maureen.

I hate to interrupt you. What remind me just really quickly.

Persona.

Sorry. Just just again. How much the persona who are you talking to at that ICP, and how much do they bring in a year? ICP years?

So we are b to b SaaS brands that are twenty to a hundred million.

Twenty to a hundred million.

And I’m talking to CMO, VP marketing, head of Okay.

Perfect. Sorry. Thank you. I had a restaurant instead of pen. Okay. Thanks.

Okay. All good.

Alright. Today, we’re gonna talk about how you can get more of your free users to convert to paid plans. So for our session today, grab a piece of paper and a pen. Don’t worry.

Not an art class. As long as you can read the notes on your diagram when we’re done, you will be good to go. So we’re specifically going to be talking about using, action triggered emails, message met sales pages to get your free users to to upgrade to a paid plan. Now these are users that have gone through your trial.

They have not converted yet, and there they are. We want them to feel good about the upgrade so they leave you a good review.

Now the next twenty five minutes, they’re gonna be valuable to you if you are a CMO, head of growth, VP of marketing, if you’re a b to b SaaS brand that generates twenty to a hundred million in annual revenue, these types of brands are the ones I work best with. Companies like Bitly, QR code generator, where we’re continuing to increase conversions strategically, by rewriting and optimizing emails and so on. Now I’m not the first person to share big brand names with you. So let me clarify.

These brands are not filled with people I knew before I started working with them. I got this work because this is exactly the type of work I’m building my reputation around. Further, I don’t pretend to have the perfect solution for you right here and now. Your company is not built on templates or you wouldn’t be here right now.

I may have the solution for you, but I’m not gonna hand you like it’s not like a trick where I say, oh, let’s all of a sudden stop letting those nine hundred and ninety five out of every one thousand free users sit in that free plan, sucking support resources indefinitely while taking space in your CRM, space you pay for every month.

Instead, I’m gonna help you see where your challenges are, and you’re going to discover them today for yourself in today’s workshop. So if by the end of our twenty five minutes together, you believe that my team is the only one that can stop the bleeding, fix what’s broken, reshape your conversion program into a superhuman sales generator, then you’ll be invited to book a conversion consultation with my team.

If that call proves that we should work together, you’ll be invited to invest twenty thousand dollars for my team of trained experts to establish your free to paid post convert, post trial free to paid strategy, roll out that strategy, including getting all of the automation set up. You won’t have to do a thing with that. And then five thousand dollars a month thereafter to optimize it. Because as you know, if you set and forget, it’s just going to go downhill.

Now my team has room for two clients. We take on very few clients, so we can serve them extremely well, and we always serve them on an ongoing basis.

Because while what I do seems magical, it’s not a magic trick.

So now let’s see what’s happening with your post trial free to paid program.

We’re gonna use my diagnostic tool to see what’s holding you back from driving more of those free users into paid plans.

So get that piece of paper out, and I’m gonna get you to go ahead and draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper.

So draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper, and here we go.

So we’re going to have, something on this side. We’re gonna say activate.

Don’t worry if your penmanship is awful. It’s alright. As long as you can read it, you’re good to go.

And we’re gonna have a few things on that activate side.

Alright. As we go along, I’m gonna get you to write the things in as we go, and then we’re gonna see where are you at, red, yellow, or green. Red being like, never even thought about this. We don’t have this, or it’s just not performing well.

Yellow is things are just like status quo. They’re not going up or down. We can’t seem to budget. And green, is we are doing great.

Now as we go through, you might think, my goodness. I don’t know the numbers for this.

Or you might be like, oh, I had some of the numbers for the last board meeting. I don’t know where we’re at right this second. No worries. We’re looking for sort of rolling averages. What is the general trend? Because we can always go back and get specific numbers later.

So let’s start over here, and let’s talk about open rates.

So you’re sending your free users emails.

Are they opening them?

Red, yellow, or green, generally?

Are you like, yeah. I’m happy with my open rate. I think people are opening them. We have some pretty cool subject lines. It’s getting them to open them. You might think you’re green.

Great.

Moving along then, we move to click rates.

So once they’re open and they’re in that email, are they actually clicking on the button or clicking on the link? And I don’t mean clicking unsubscribe. I mean, are they clicking on the call to action that you have in that email so they can go and do the thing that you want them to do?

So if your click rates are, like, great. Give yourself a green. If they’re, like, sometimes people are clicking, but it’s not going up at all. Or maybe it’s, not looking good at all, and you’re like, we can get them to open, but they don’t do anything.

So I’m gonna put us a yellow here.

And just on your diagram, put whatever it is that you think for your company.

Now the next thing we’re gonna think about as we are activating because these users, they might have gone through that free trial already. They may have opened things. They may not have opened things, but we know that they didn’t actually understand the value. Otherwise, they would be using or they would have converted to paid. They would have done something.

So now we have this time to value. Do you have your post trial, user journey map mapped out so that those users that went through that trial didn’t really get to value? How are you getting them to value post trial? Because they are there sitting in your free plan. Are they getting to value?

Now if that if you’re like, I don’t even have a map, we send out a few post, trial emails, and that’s it. Probably sitting at red there.

If you have thought about it, have a few things, you might be yellow. And if you’re like, oh, we’ve mapped out the whole process. We know how we can get them to, that value. Great. You’re green.

Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you might be red on that because if we would have had people already experiencing that value, we might not be talking.

Alright. So now this next side of the triangle of our conversion triangle, we’re gonna call it sticky.

How can we get these free users to actually use the product? So we might have them. Maybe we can get them opening, those emails.

K? We’re gonna it’s this progression. Maybe we can get them opening the email. Maybe we can get them clicking. Maybe we can get them to value, but can we get them to stay? Let’s see.

Because if they’re not gonna stay for the freed, they’re definitely not gonna a free plan, they’re definitely not gonna stay for the paid. So over here, we want them to commit to something.

So, they’re committed to something, and this could be maybe, you have as part of your, features that they can invite a team member, and maybe they can do still do that on a free plan. So if they’ve invited a team member, great. Perhaps they are uploading data In order to use your software, appropriately, they need to input data. And if they’re doing that, it shows that they’re somewhat committed. They’re invested in that. Or if they’re including it as part of their tech stack, maybe there’s some integration. They’re starting to integrate that.

So we wanna know, are they committed? And maybe you’re like, you know, some of people are doing this, but it’s not really it’s not really increasing.

Give yourself a yellow. If nobody’s really, taking advantage of it, give yourself a red. And if you’ve got lots of people integrating already, give yourself a green.

Alright.

Next up.

If they are doing that, then we need to look at daily active users or weekly active users. So this is dependent on, what your software is. Do people need to be in there every day? Do they set something up, look at it once a week? What is the process? So for your, software situation, think about how people are, how often people are in, the app doing something.

If they are increasingly doing things in app, give yourself a green. If it’s staying the same, yellow. And if it’s kinda tanking, give it a red. So you might be yellow here.

Alright.

Again, I don’t know your current situation. If we have a chat later on, if you decide to book a call with the team, we can dig into this more at that point.

Now the next thing on this sticky side is we have increased feature usage.

So if they have invited a team, great. If they’re in the app more often, great. They came to your app to solve a problem.

They’ve got your software. They because they think, hey. Your software is the answer to this problem.

If over here, we finally got them some value, they’re like, okay. Yes. I can do this thing.

Now in order for them to stick, we want them to expand that expand the number of your, features that they are using. So they’re using the thing they came for, and they have confidence in that. And now they’re like, I wonder what else we can do. Because as we expand this feature usage, that’s where we can start selling things in the plan. Like, oh, you want the plan because you can also do this other thing.

So, in general, are users using more features? Give yourself a green, staying the same yellow, and kinda decreasing, give it a red.

So you might think, okay. Well, I’m kinda yellow on that on that sticky side. Alright.

And, again, it’s kind of this progression.

Now we come to convert.

So here we are at the bottom, and we have looked at all these things. Now we can finally talk about conversion and what are some other things that are going to be influencing conversion. So now we’ve got them in the product. They have some value, and we’re like, great. They’re ready to convert.

And then we look, and we’re like, oh, but are they?

Let’s look at support tickets. Now you might think, oh, I don’t know. I’m not in there talking about support tickets all the time. I don’t know.

Do we have lots? Do we? K. If you have not heard about the number of support tickets your team is, processing, you’re probably good.

But if you’ve heard a lot of stuff and people are complaining and going like, can you do something about this? Like, our, we can’t handle the volume of support tickets. Like, it’s too much. If that’s the case, we’re looking at red.

If you’ve heard sort of murmurings, maybe it’s yellow. Yellow with the mind of, oh, we need to do something about this. Because if we have lots of support tickets and I don’t mean the support tickets that are asking simple questions. I mean, they’re angry about things because they don’t understand the product.

And so you think, why are they asking us about these things? It’s because look back to this first side, this activate side, we’re obviously not getting them the information they need so that they can see the value. Because once people start seeing the value, we’re gonna have a whole different kind of support ticket coming in. It might just be a simple question rather than a rage against the product.

Alright. The next thing, product reviews, and the review rating.

Now this is something that a quick search of Trustpilot, Capterra, g two, that’s gonna get you your star rating.

And what is it? Maybe think about the last time you looked. What was it? If it was under three, give yourself a red. If it was a three, give yourself a yellow. And four and five, give yourself a green.

We live in a society that people don’t buy stuff without looking for reviews. Think about it. When was the last time you bought something without googling to see a review?

Even simple things. Now think about this. They’re buying this for their business to help them increase their business. Of course, they’re gonna be looking at reviews.

Now, unfortunately, people leave for reviews if they don’t understand the product and don’t think they got value from it. So if we solve the things earlier on, we can get this up. So perhaps right now, you’re thinking, my reviews are not that great.

Don’t worry. It’s something we can do something about.

It is a solvable problem.

And this last thing on the conversion is this time to sale.

Is the time to sale so they finish the trial. They didn’t convert the during the trial. So now you’ve got them on this post trial, road map. You want to get them to that sale.

Perhaps they just needed more time. They didn’t have time to read the emails earlier. Whatever the case, they didn’t get there. Now you’re going to take them on that journey to get to the sale.

Is that time to sale decreasing? So as you look at the number of of users converting in a in a specific time frame, is that number going up, down, or staying the same?

And you might say, you know, it’s just staying the same. We can’t seem to increase the number of conversions in that time frame, meaning you’re having trouble decreasing that, time to sale.

So now at this point, you probably got a pretty good idea of what is happening. There should be no question into your in your mind of what’s getting in the way of you or your team increasing those post trial free to paid conversions.

We talked about perhaps time to value was too long. Users didn’t get there.

Maybe you didn’t have that customer journey mapped out. Maybe there was no plan. Whatever the case, perhaps they finally get to value, but they’re only doing the one thing. They’re not increasing the number of features that they’re using. They’re not exploring those, which means they’re going to sit in that free plan comfortably, sucking your resources forever because they don’t feel the need to, move on to a paid plan.

Perhaps your support tickets through the roof. Angry users feel misinformed, and, research shows that angry users tell nine to fifteen people about their bad experience.

Good experiences, people tell maybe six people.

So what is your customer experience, and can we change that, so that more people are telling about their good experience?

Alright. Here, we’ve gone through this whole conversion triangle in order you know what needs to be happening next.

Some of you, you might think, oh, great. I know what I need to work on.

Maybe share it with your team and they think, oh, yeah. We have capacity to do this. But I’m guessing since you’re here, that might not be the case.

It’s a lot of legwork.

So if you take this away, you think, yes. I don’t wanna leave money on the table. There are huge, possibilities and, for wins on the horizon, you can decide to book a call with my team.

Others are wondering, hey. How can I be one of these two brands that you work with next?

And we say I’m honored to consider, to be considered and say I’m sorry, though, that if we find we cannot work together, I can’t help all the brands that reach out to me. But I can give you a private link to book a call with my team, step one of three. So after you book, after you book, you will have the opportunity to answer three questions.

If you don’t complete the form, I’ll have to cancel the conversion consultation. If, however, you complete the form and my team assesses that we’re unlikely to be a good fit, we’ll have to cancel. But in all other cases, we will proceed with that call. Now bring your drawing from this session to our call because we’re going to use it to create a plan to work towards your goals, using our strategic solutions. So go ahead and start with scheduling your conversion consultation, complete the form, and then be ready to have a candid conversation with me.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Marina. Notes. Who would like to start? Abby. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. First of all, like, well done for doing it without a slide deck. I feel like it’s a lot to remember, and you just did it really calmly. You didn’t even stumble at all.

So that’s really cool. I have, like, some very specific notes. No. I’m not trying to be, like, nitpicky.

I just found it really helpful when I got specific notes. So Oh, please do. Yeah. I really like the superhuman sales generator.

I thought that was very cool. When you were talking about the optimization, you said about setting and forgetting it, like, and this is a note I’m gonna I’ve made for me as well. I’d love to hear, like, more, like, what because you just said it will go downhill. I could love to hear a bit of drama there, like, the worst case scenario if you don’t optimize.

When you were going through the diagnostic, it was quite high up. So where everybody is, I couldn’t actually see the top. So, like, it’s nice.

Like, we just the very, very top. So I just like to, yeah, make sure it’s lower down.

When you’re going through the activate, like, the open rates, click rates, I would have quite liked benchmarks. Like, I know it’s it’s always difficult with benchmarks because, like, everybody’s a different. But when you’re just saying, like, oh, if you’re getting, like, some some opens, it’s kinda I think a bit of specificity there would have been helpful.

And then yeah. Like, I guess, like, a bigger note with the I didn’t feel like there was, like, a very big clear promise. Like, it was kind of increasing the activations, but I’d love, like, something just a bit, like, sexier.

Like, a bit more like, really kind of selling that promise.

And then, like, this might just be a a meeting, but the with the three sections, you’ve got activate, sticky, and convert. Like, for my brain, I just love, like, three verbs. Like, the sticky just kind of like, even if it was just sticky, it just felt a little out of place for me.

And then when you were talking about support tickets, I loved that research point you gave that just really, like, build my confidence in you. I think just sharing those things really makes you seem like an expert.

But then you connected it to activate, instead of convert. And, like, I guess I can I can understand why it’s in the convert a bit, but I would like like you to kind of lay that out a bit? Like, this is why it has to do with conversions.

And then, yeah, just a really stupid thing, like, the traffic lights because you your your red was pink.

Like, I just because you said red, yellow, green. Like, I wanted to see red, yellow, green. But yeah. No. I thought it was really awesome. And like I said, it’s just, like, very impressive to me that you managed to remember all that without any slides or anything.

Thanks, Abby. Andrew?

Yeah. Cool. Just, great job, Marina.

Just a couple quick fire rapid fire thoughts. I thought that maybe, there might have been, like, compared to Abby with talking about, like, this kind of sales pitch part of it, there might have been a little bit of, like, an overcorrection that might have just been for me. But, like, there’s something you said in the beginning about, like, talking about, like, who you work best best with. And it for whatever reason, it felt to me, like, maybe a little bit too early, to to bring that piece in about telling, like, telling us who you work best with because we’re about to, like, get ready to learn from you. That might just be my opinion. Curious to hear what others say.

And I think there also might be some some work to do around, like, smoothing out the part where, like, I can tell that there’s, a part in the beginning where you were talking about, like, who you’ve worked with and that it wasn’t, like, exactly, like, who you’ve worked with isn’t exactly who you want to work with or something like that. And I I don’t necessarily have a good solution, but there was something Yeah. About that that sounded a bit tentative and sent sent a little bit of a signal that, like, you don’t do this all the time kind of thing. Again, might have just been my my opinion.

And I just felt like maybe it raised a little bit of an objection that I didn’t necessarily have. Like, I kind of assumed that you’re the expert, and then it was like, oh, wait. Like, now she’s telling me that she hasn’t worked with with those, with companies like mine or something like that that I don’t have an elegant solution for you yet.

And, two more quick things. One was along with what Abby said, I think that you could dive a little bit deeper into, like, what the problems are. You said something about, like, this you know, paying for space in my CRM. I could be wrong because I don’t know this audience or I don’t know this problem all that well, but, like, I feel like maybe that’s not the biggest manifestation of the problem is, like, they’re not really worried about space in their CRM. They’re worried about, like, getting more money.

And I agree with Abby that having some specific percentages around open rates and click rates, like, rather than just letting it feel like being left to their sub subjective opinion of how they’re doing. I think it can be really helpful to give me some percentages. Like, I think people love benchmarks and knowing, like, where they stand in comparison to other people.

On the reviews part of convert, I felt like that would be a good opportunity to bring in some data because there definitely is data to support the point that you’re making that people look at reviews. So if you had something where you could be, like, you know, x percent of people, say that the of b to b buyers, you know, say that they consult reviews before, making purchase decisions. Something like that could back that claim up.

And I think you could also get a little bit more granular there. Like you said, like, three, you’re kind of, like, yellow.

I feel like there’s a big difference between, like, someone who’s, like, three point nine, rated and someone who’s, like, four point six, or even, like, four point two and four point six. So I feel like you might be able to get a little bit more granular there, and I think that would make me feel like you’re more of an expert if you do, like like, to the to the tenth.

Like, what what signals, good versus bad. But, yeah, I think that’s about it for me. Hope that’s helpful.

Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Todd, you had your hand up and then you put it down. So down?

Yep. I’m here.

Sure I’m here. Can everyone hear me? Because I had to restart. Cool. Yeah. Just didn’t wanna clutter it too much.

Mine are basically what everyone else just said. Pretty much the triangle was cut off. I’m really happy that the red, buzzed pink because I am colorblind.

So I was like, oh, okay.

The only thing for me really, there’s a lot of information.

So, again, everyone’s on on point. The only thing I would say, and it’s just because I come from a PR thing, is, to spell out certain words like daily active users, I think, weekly active users, maybe, time to sale. Just because they’re looking at so much information, if they can see it spelled out, it’s a quick reference for them.

And I think as well, I would say, I think you mentioned I don’t know your current situation at one point for clients, and I you you do, though. You’re the expert. So you do know their situation. You have been in that spot.

I would just maybe, if you want, you know, use a use I always call it pays off. Just maybe agitate it. You know? If you’re like some of my clients and give them a quick solution and agitate it, that’s the only thing.

I would say it was it was great. And I’ll be honest, everyone everyone says slow down here, but we are trying to bolt through this workshop. So I think that’s a given. But, yeah, if you can keep it in your mind just to keep your speech just kinda level throughout.

Also, I wanted to say though, great energy. That was really, really good energy. You had you came in with a smile. You came in with a pen and note, and you just kept great energy throughout.

So that was that’s basically it for me. So good job. Well done, Rena.

Thanks, Todd. Claire?

Yeah. I have two notes. The first one was on the product reviews.

I am not I’ve never worked with a company that has had less than four stars.

So I but I have worked with plenty of companies. We’ve had very few reviews and trouble getting reviews.

So I wonder if that’s also not a good signal of, like, review help, to maybe talk about is something that’s more universal. But, again, I don’t know your specific ICP or personas, so that might be useful. They’re showing me the support tickets.

I have haven’t seen people write into support angry. That’s not an emotion I’ve, like, heard of, but they do write in very confused and overwhelmed.

Also, I worry that your CMO doesn’t care that much about support and their outcomes, but is more, like, I guess, self centered. Like, if they can be the hero, great. But it’s not like a priority for them to remove all of support’s messages.

But if you tie supports like, if you tie that overwhelm and confusion of support, through to the time to sale, or time to value as you as you well did, like, in a more I wanna say in a stronger way, that could be really powerful.

Because support reviews are kind of emotional things for for people to fail at.

Awesome. Perfect. Thanks, Katie.

Hey, Marina. I thought you did a really great job.

Like Todd said, really appreciated your energy and, yeah, just like the comfort that you brought to talking about all of this. Like, props for doing it, some slides. The only thing so I agree with a lot of the feedback you’ve already gotten. The only thing that I found that nobody’s mentioned so far was just at the end. You said if your team doesn’t have capacity, and I feel like that can’t be the only thing that their team doesn’t have. Like, it’s, you know, strategy, vision, you know, and capacity, like, on top of that. So just, like, sure capacity is part of the equation, but not obviously not the only thing that they’re lacking.

Yeah. Thanks, Katie.

Agreed. I think one of the I think we’re out of everybody giving feedback, so I’ll jump in with mine. In addition to what everybody has said, yeah, definitely do check when you share your screen. Just make sure, because nobody will tell you. Like, none of us told you. Right? Because we’re all trying to not interrupt you.

So, yeah, double check. Never hurts.

Okay. You’re selling email, but where but but there was, like, very little push on how awesome email is for businesses.

So, for me, I feel like you you really quickly glossed over anything you had done with Bitly.

Spend some time there. Like, you’ve rewritten countless emails in their life cycle, series.

You’ve mapped a customer journey. You have seen that people get lost. Lots of leads get lost, and there’s real expense there. And yet all I really heard was, like like, twelve seconds max about Bitly and QR code generator.

What? Like, that’s anybody in that audience finds this a sexy topic. So you’re allowed to nerd out and spend some time here. So, like, spend time on that. Bring it back to money. Bring it back to how they’re spending money on bringing people into their flow, trying to attract trial users, and then they’re just sitting there. So have an opinion, and make it all about money because the right people will be sitting in the audience going like, shit.

Yeah. And that’s what you want instead of, oh, yeah. She seems nice.

Like, that’s not the point.

Yeah.

Right? Exactly. Abby’s message there. So you are minimizing the stuff that you need to really emphasize, And when you don’t emphasize it, the other parts land wrong because we haven’t heard that you’re an authority yet, and we haven’t got on side with you yet.

So when you say it’s twenty thousand dollars to start and then five thousand a month, we drop off. Right? Like, what are you talking about? What do you even do?

And because you don’t have slides, it’s very hard to go along with that. Right? Like, it’s hard to keep up, so you need if you’re not sharing a visual, you have to really talk through everything.

Like, make it clear, still have energy. And then there’s times when you just do want to share, I mean, you’re not slides. So I was looking up this thing, and this is I’ve talked a bit about how I’m gonna reward myself with this training at some point.

It’s not open right now. Let me just share this with you in chat.

You know, use the Stream Deck and a few other things. And, so you don’t have to show slides on the screen, but you can pop up things on your screen, and I want you to play with that.

Not necessarily take this, but just, like, follow inside the show and start looking at some of the things that they do. Because with a Stream Deck and a little plugin for Zoom, you can, like, hit a button and the Bitly logo pops up next to you. Right? So there are cool things you can do just like that.

You can pull in a testimonial and flash it on the screen from somebody. So it doesn’t have to be a slide deck, but unless you’re going to take a lot of time really driving things home, you need something on the screen. I also think you need, to show me some emails. Like, here are some examples of emails that I’ve written.

Just really ground me in as a member of your audience and, like, oh, okay. Okay. When she talks about this kind of email, here’s what she means.

So okay. Couple more things. Take a few breaks for breath.

Set more things up upfront too. Just like, if you have your water here with you, that’s great. We’re gonna settle in for twenty five minutes. We’re gonna do some drawing. I’m not gonna share a lot of slides.

Make sure you stop for water. I’m gonna stop every so often. Just, like, set that up up front, and then you can stop.

And you can pretend you’re drinking water and just take a fucking breath. Like, just take a breath, but I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like.

Definitely need a promise up front. Dig into the pain. Set up the desire.

I have a few more notes that I can’t read here. I don’t understand on the triangle, what product review rating and support tickets will have to do with you doing the work later. So you’re gonna go through and make sure that support doesn’t get tickets.

You’re gonna do work to increase their product reviews, but you’re really just saying, no. No. Once you have active activated users, these things will all go up. But if if you’re not working on it and it’s on the model, that’s like a flag.

And if you ignore it, it’s gonna be it’s gonna continue to be like but it’s never gonna feel right for you and maybe even for them. So rethink the convert part. There’s no money showing anywhere on your model. Where at what point?

Like, I’m like, where’s the when do I get the money from them? Like, I want the money from them.

So I would think through that as well. But overall, I mean, I think it’s good. You just need to spend more time on things so we really, really get what you can do. And that also means you have to get what you can do. So go over the stuff that you’ve done in Bitly and QR code generator and, like, come up with your cheat sheet of awesome that you, like, need to remember, and it’ll help you.

Cool?

Everything else everybody else said agreed as well.

Oh, yeah. No. I won’t worry about that. But, yeah, I drew a dollar sign with, like, circles around it galore.

Like, where’s the money? Where’s the money? This is the path we’re able to make money. Help them see that.

Okay. That is all.

Thanks, Marina. Any notes or thoughts, Marina or Abby so far? Or, Abby, go ahead.

Can I just ask a quick question? So because I noticed when I did the diagnostic, I, like, wrote it out and then went and did the review, and then read and I just went straight into the view.

I was just wondering, like No.

Agreed. It was actually one of my bigger notes too. I’m not ready to diagnose as I’m going through. Agreed. First, draw the model, tell them about it, and then walk them through. Now we’re gonna diagnose where you’re at.

Yeah. Not as you go. I was I was actually I lost interest a little bit, because I didn’t know, like it doesn’t feel right. So and that could be just for me because I know how it’s supposed to be presented.

But, yeah, just so you know, just do it the way it’s taught. First, you die first, you document everything. Show them the thing so I can zoom out, see that there’s, like, a map of my life cycle right here. And then you can zoom into the parts and say, are you red, yellow, green here, and give your examples in there.

For example, you might be yellow if your numbers are this. Yeah. Totally agree. Thanks for bringing that up, Abby.

Okay.

Abby, Marina, how are you feeling?

Well, I’m glad I have not pitched anybody yet, and I’m thankful for all the feedback because it’s actually helpful Good.

Because I know what to do now. And I think it it is a confidence thing.

Mhmm. Like, as far as, like, pulling out and saying, oh, I’ve done this and that.

So I just need to You just need to write it down and look at it.

Put it on sticky notes all over the place then. Like, I know that might seem like gel.

Why not? If you need to build your confidence, build your confidence, like, actively. It doesn’t build itself.

No.

But I wanted to do this today so that I could get Oh, and you did great. Let me be very clear.

Feedback. Totally.

Because I was just trying to follow that form formula that you add, and I was like, okay. Are these actually my words? I’m like, I’m just gonna do the thing, and then I can review. So thank you everybody for all the feedback. Super helpful.

And just to be clear, these notes are, like sometimes the the formula just needs to be adjusted for you. There are things that I mentioned to Abby for Abby to change, and I’m sure she’s like, but, Joe, I took that from what you taught me. Then she’s like, I’m just not gonna say anything, but this is annoying.

But so just know, like, that’s why we’re doing it live. Not to say, did you follow it exactly, but cool. Was cool. Here’s how you can make it cooler.

Yeah. Cool. Abby, how are you doing?

Yeah. I’m glad I did it because I was like, okay. If I if I, like, book it Monday, then that means I’ll actually make the damn thing. So, yeah, I think, like, tomorrow, I’m gonna start doing pitching five people every day and just see what happens and work on my closing because I know that’s my my week there anyway.

Love it. Amazing.

Okay. So we’ll take three minutes. We’ll be back at twenty two after the hour when Claire will be our final presenter.

Alright? Three minutes. Thanks, everyone.

Oh, a little bit overtime there.

Okay. We are back. We’re here. Good stuff. Ready? Where’s Claire? Claire’s not here. Karen. Oh, there you are.

I just like to lost it in calculation.

Awesome. Okay. Claire, are you ready to go?

I am ready.

I’m gonna stop this all by saying I’m very nuts for some bizarre reason. I was so confident up until, like, well, seven o’clock, which is when this started.

Okay. Wicked. Well, I’m excited. So, tell us who your ICP is, who you’re targeting this toward, and then we’ll dive in.

Sure. My ICP is pretty similar to Marina’s. So it is b to b SaaS companies within the twenty five to fifty million range, so a little bit tighter.

They are either doing a freemium or a free trial, sort of setup at the moment. And I’m talking specifically to the CMO or director of growth, head of growth, that kind of person.

Cool.

Awesome.

Then okay.

Okay.

Today, I’m gonna talk about onboarding your free trial and premium users so that more of them stick around, log back in tomorrow and the next day and the next because the reality is that eighty percent of the users that you’ve worked really hard to get through the front door and to click start trial or sign up now, eighty percent of those users don’t come back tomorrow. They try your product once, give you twenty minutes, and that’s it. They’re out the door, and they are never coming back, unless you can win them back. And using email is a great way to do that.

So specifically using triggered emails, I’ll explain more about that later, but it’s stepping away from the concept of timed emails and dripping things out slowly but surely and more than focusing on sending more relevant, messages at the right time and right context.

So this is gonna be a great use of your time if you are a CMO or head of growth at a b two b SaaS company doing around twenty to fifty million dollars a year.

Companies have worked with me to get results like a thirty seven percent lift in product adoption that was with Invoice Simple.

And then Synthesia has also worked with me to sorry.

For messaging optimization.

And I’ve also partnered with Forget the Funnel and worked on over twenty start ups, onboarding flows to optimize for their growth and retention.

So if this I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve caught email or that the email channel might be useful to you.

But there are some things that you need to remember. First, people do read. Else, LinkedIn wouldn’t exist, and it wouldn’t send you those annoying yet effective notifications to check your feed.

Secondly, you do not have to guess at what to put in your email, and you don’t have to worry that you’re going too long or too short, you’re including too many pictures, no pictures at all. All that is something that you can definitively answer through optimization and testing.

And then just so you know, email is also a seven billion dollar industry at the moment. So it is, again, really clear that people do still check their email inboxes.

Inboxes. So this is gonna be great if you are looking to improve your user activation, free to pay conversion rate, and ultimately conversion, what I’m not gonna do is give you another template or the two minute secret to a sixty eight percent reduction in churn.

This is going to be a bit of a hands on workshop, so get a pen and paper ready while I continue talking.

What we’re gonna walk through today is something called the overpowered onboarding framework. Now if you haven’t heard about what overpowered means, it is a term used for superheroes, and it basically means a character or an object that is so powerful it makes the game easy.

So Superman would be a great example of an overpowered character, and this is going to be something that really makes the email channel easy. It’s gonna answer all the questions and make it simple for you to prioritize what to do next.

So it’s not gonna be a game changer for your acquisition, but rather a game changer for your activation.

Okay. Let me go ahead and share my screen, and we can get into it.

There we go.

Alrighty.

Can everyone see my screen?

Yes. Okay.

Alright. So first step is to draw a big old circle.

Don’t worry if your circle is not perfect. That would prove to you’re insane.

And then another circle on the inside.

Here, I’m gonna write down and say our goal for today is a thirty percent lift in free to paid paid. You’re wondering how much that’s worth if you have, say, ten thousand users who are, signing up and actually paying every month, and they’re on on average paying seventy nine or sixty nine dollars each, then a thirty percent lift is equivalent monthly lift is equivalent to just over two hundred thousand dollars worth of revenue. So it’s a pretty big difference that you could be getting very, very quickly.

One of the best things about onboarding people effectively is that that revenue actually stacks up because your retention naturally increases now that your users fully understand and realize the value that you’re giving them.

Next is to draw a nice Mercedes symbol because we are winners.

And I’m just gonna go ahead and label, so please label with me as we go. Up at the top, we have foundation.

This is what sets the tone for your entire onboarding flow and what is a great foundation.

Next up, we have conversation, which is where you start talking to your oh, talking and writing is difficult. Conversation, let’s just pretend I wrote that correctly.

Where you are, actually talking to your customers and convincing them that creating this great idea. And then finally, on the left, we have personalization.

Sorry, optimization.

Alright. We’re gonna go ahead and divide this diagram in hop again, just each section, a nice little line.

Up at the top, we have insight.

And down below, we have journey.

Next up, we have triggers, and then we have personalization.

Then we have tracking.

And finally, we have testing.

K. I’ll give you all a second to finish writing down.

If you have some colored pens nearby, please feel free to grab those. You can do red, for poor or not so great, orange for it’s kind of okay, and then green for everything is absolutely rosy. I’ll also give you some examples so you’ll know which one you want. If you don’t have colored pens nearby, feel free to do a star system. Just one, two, three stars, three for excellent, one for so good, and two for okay.

Alright. We’re changing over.

Okay. Scientists.

When you are struggling to understand your customers, that means that ultimately what you’re struggling to do is connect your what with your why.

So insight predominantly consists of customer interviews, customer surveys. You could even do some social listening.

You could even do some analysis of your heat maps, basically understanding what people are doing.

You could keep recording and analyzing your demo calls or your sales calls. All of that stuff gives you insight into who you’re talking to, what they value, and what they care about most. So if you’re currently doing one or more of those and you are, actually analyzing it with a regular occurrence, then you can go ahead and give yourself a green. If you are recording things, but maybe not finding the time to analyze them because you’ve got a million other things on your plate, which is totally understandable, think of yourself in orange. And if you haven’t conducted any kind of customer research in the last six to twelve months, that would be a red.

Alright. Next up is journey.

So the customer journey is a very well known phenomenon at this point. It is, however you’re currently tracking it, what you need to hit on for your onboarding is to understand at what points your customer is seeing value. So if you have a customer journey map that walks someone that walks you through exactly where your users are seeing value when they sign up, fantastic.

Give yourself a green. If you’re not so sure and you’re kind of implementing a bit of guesswork, chances are that guesswork is gonna bleed over into the rest of the circle. Right? You’re gonna stop making more and more educated guesses, and they’re gonna start getting less and less educated and more and more guessy.

So give yourself an orange there, that’s something to look at. And if you are not sure about your customer journey at all, you’ve maybe undergone a lot of changes recently, a lot of product updates, If you saw a red, that’s something to prioritize.

Onto triggers.

So historically, we’ve all we’re all very familiar with sending out timed emails. Right? Those are the direct emails sent to you. Maybe you get eight, when you sign up to a new product.

The thing with timed emails is that their quality degrades exceptionally quickly. So sorry. Not quality, but their their metrics. So the open rate, the click through rate, how many people even look at them in their inbox. So if you’re sending more than three emails in a in a row to someone without any kind of interaction from them, so you’re not triggering any, chain reaction in your in your email marketing system, then that would be a red.

If you are sending, emails that are email chains or sequences that are for emails or less, so maybe you’ve only got one welcome sequence and it’s for emails. That’s great. That’s an orange.

If you are sending triggered emails, so you’re tracking your product, you’re tracking your product.

Usage. Sorry about that. You’re tracking your product usage, seeing what features they’re using, what what they’re actually onboarding onto. Maybe if you have multiple products within your within your software suite, then you could trigger emails based on how they sign up to things and and play around. You could also be triggering Winmax, when someone doesn’t hit a certain, beat of of your customer journey, that would be a green.

Next up, personalization.

So it’s very easy to generalize an email and very easy to say something very generic. Right? And the problem of saying things that are generic is that they’re specific to absolutely nobody.

For example, let’s say you are and this is a situation that I ran into with a client the other day. Right? They are serving lots of different types of businesses with lots of different types of use cases. Now the triggers are all the same, but the context is slightly different because these businesses are different types of businesses. We have a food truck or a nail salon.

So instead of saying businesses for every email here, how is how are things going in your business? We say, how are things going in your food truck? How are things going at your nail salon? It’s much more specific, much more personalized.

And that kind of attention to detail is what gets your open rates higher, your click through rates higher.

So if you are personalizing the if you’re personalizing your emails, then you can go ahead and, give yourself a green for segmenting by use case. Right? So if you’re separating people out into use cases like I just described, it could be yourself agree.

If you are not doing anything beyond maybe the name that’s getting personalized in every email and perhaps you’re also doing a trial date in every email, then you can go ahead and give yourself an orange. You’re on the way.

If you’re not doing anything at all, give yourself a red.

Alright. Onto tracking. Now most people are tracking the free to pay conversion rate.

That’s pretty common and pretty easy to do. Some people are also tracking the product adoption rate. Now if you haven’t bumped into that term yet, it’s another fun acronym. You know, marketers love them.

But the product adoption rate or PAI is what we use to tell if someone has truly adopted the software. Doesn’t mean that they’re paying for it yet, but they’ve adopted it. So, for example, Slack only considers someone debated, if they hit the product adoption indicator of getting sort of sending two thousand messages. Right? Anything less, they are not considered activated.

So are you tracking your free to page? Are you tracking your, product adoption indicator? If so, great. You are currently in orange. To take you to green, you will need to be tracking a few more details, something like the engagement rate, how often people are logging back into your software, how long they’re taking to get to various stages of their customer journey, and then as well as their time to value. Right? How long does it take for them to create ultimately?

K. So hopefully that was clear to you all.

Next up is testing.

Testing is really where the magic happens. Right?

So if you are not currently testing, then you’re probably really struggling with the guesswork that’s started over at Journey.

If you if you haven’t really looked at your welcome email in six to twelve months, Your new newest user who signed up, like, three seconds ago has just read it. Right?

Testing means that you can continuously maintain and optimize your results. And if you don’t test, the thing that will happen is that your, your metrics will just slowly decline. It’s like a slow gradual hill of sadness. And at the end of that sadness hill is, unfortunately, the sandbox, which is exceptionally difficult to get out of.

So in testing, you are doing a great job if you are currently checking on your open rate and click through rates every and deliverability every month.

You are also possibly, making some hypotheses about your customers, testing those up, disproving them, or approving them.

If you’re not doing that, but you are checking on things monthly just to see how things are going, or maybe, you have pretty regular product updates, which means that you’re going to be checking.

It means you’re gonna be updating your emails fairly regularly with new screenshots or new messaging, then that’s great. Give yourself a orange. If you’re not doing any testing at all, then you’d be a red.

So this is the onboarding to, the show about onboarding framework.

And it’s great. It’s a circle because you are going to start way back at inside once you’ve gone all the way around and keep going around, keep optimizing, and keep improving with time. And that ultimately is what makes that thirty percent lift a recurring lift rather than just a one sole win.

Alright.

So I haven’t practiced the closing very much.

In true honesty so let me just get my notes. Alright. By this point, you shall know, should know what’s getting in your way the most. Right? It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with a hundred different things, grabbing your focus. And the last thing you wanna do is walk into your next boardroom meeting and give your presentation and watch your CEO kinda glaze over in confusion as you go over the numbers in immaculate detail.

So now you know where to put your focus. You know how to explain what’s going wrong, what’s going right, and how you’re gonna improve it. If that’s something that you need help with or that you’d like to outsource, then you are welcome to book a call with me. I will pop it kindly into a spreadsheet slideshow later on for you to go ahead and click on.

And I’ve lost my track completely. I’m very sorry, but thank you.

Thanks, Claire.

Alright. Okay. Notes for Claire. Who’s up first?

Yeah.

I’ll I’ll I’ll go.

Yeah. Claire, I thought that was that was really good. Like, you’re so funny. I really wanna get coffee with you.

And we can work on our, like, shy girl energy together.

But yeah. No. It was really engaging. That was really fun. I took quite a few, like, notes or just bits I really like. Like, I love the overpowered onboarding framework. And if you do use that tool that Joe said when you, like, describe Superman, if you have a Superman come up, I just love that so much.

There was a bit when you’re talking about insights and you’re talking insights. Sorry. You’re talking about the customer research that you could do. You say you could do this. I kinda wanna be told, like, what I should do, not what I could do.

And then when you’re talking about personalization, like, that just felt like a really good place for a case study to just when you’re saying about specificity, if you could just say I did this for so and so.

And I thought the fact that it’s a circle is brilliant, like, the ongoing going round and round. Like, really, really like that. So, yeah, it it was good. And if you do wanna, like, work on the clothes together, because I just I just get so shy when, like, I’d be happy to do that.

Oh, and just another thing as well, like, because you seem to get a lot more confident as you went on. Like, that’s why I always use a slide deck at the beginning because it just I don’t know. It just makes me feel which, you know, maybe I need to go over that this well. But, yeah, just a tip if if you, like, need something at the beginning to yeah.

But, anyway, I thought it was really good.

That’s so helpful. Thank you. I have a quick question. I don’t just okay.

I went back and forth between personalizing personalization and segmentation for emails and ultimately decided that personalization is very different to segmentation, obviously, and that if different segments are identified in the insights area or the customer journey area, that those should have their own circle. So it’s like other circles for other for other, segments.

Does that track with everyone, or is that sounding fairly confusing and counterintuitive?

So you’re saying so you’re saying this is the core model, and then you’d have a separate one for the personalization part of the model. Like, let’s dig into that, and here’s what that looks like? No.

Like like a big circle is, like, the main say that’s their main identified job to be done. They know very clearly who they’re targeting, But they have all these little satellite ones to the side, which on that important.

Our first engagement would be focusing on the main one. But in future, if they realize that one of their satellites is actually a bit bigger than they thought, we could do the same thing for that one, but it would be a whole new process.

Yeah.

So I don’t know if I’ll I can’t answer that, but what I can say is each one of these sections you have is likely to have its own thing that you would draw. So insights, As you dig in and you’re working with the client more and more, then you’ll do you’ll help their team get up to speed on what you mean by how to tell if we’re doing insight right. So you’ll have a new model that’s, like, breaking down insight, and that might be speaking to, like, the satellite thing that you’re talking to.

But I wouldn’t I wouldn’t draw a satellite in here. I wouldn’t say anything more about these other parts. I might just call it personalization and segmentation just for the sake of, like, simplicity here with your audience.

But don’t I wouldn’t have more stuff going off the side.

You’ve also, like, the circle is in segments, so you could even say, like, the sec you know, segmentation is part of it.

That’s That’s cute.

Little orange segments. Cute. Awesome. Okay. Any other notes for Claire? Katie?

Hey, Claire. Just like kudos for putting yourself out there and doing it. I thought you did really well.

Okay. So things I thought were great. I love when you said, like, how much that’s worth and have that concrete number of, like like, we’re talking about a thirty percent lift, but here’s the what that would be worth to you. I thought that was a great way of bringing the money in.

And I’m sure, like yeah. I don’t know, not much about your client history, but I’m sure that there is room to bring in other case studies. But I did like how you had the food truck versus hair salon example just to give me something concrete, to work with when you’re talking about the personalization.

I also like the example with Slack. Like, Slack doesn’t consider, was it product adoption metric reached until two thousand messages?

So one thing I thought you could work on was, and I’m just looking at myself. Like, I don’t think I have actually had any other, like, changes. But I wrote the drama that moment that you talked about, like, your you have looked in your onboarding emails for six months, but the person who just signed up looked at them a few minutes ago.

I just felt like that’s such a good moment, and I felt like it needed a little bit more build up to really hammer home, like, what kind of, you know, how we, like, build up that moment of high attention. Like, why does that matter?

What is that worst case scenario? Like, what are the implications of that, versus just, like, locating me in that moment, but not really, like, having me realize why it has been important for me to inhabit from that moment. Does that make sense? So, like okay.

So I’m thinking about that. I’m like, oh, shit. Yeah. Who knows if I have, like, COVID references in my in my onboarding emails or something?

But if that new user looks at it, what is what is that irrelevant is going to cost me, basically.

Yeah. And then so I just wonder I have a question mark if that if where you at it was the best place for that or if building that moment up more towards the end could be a great segue into your pitch of, like, this is your worst case scenario.

Don’t have that. Hire me. So maybe moving that from where you had it, I believe you had that within testing.

I wasn’t really clear on its relevance to testing. I saw it as more of, like, keeping your onboarding fresh and, you know, optimized.

So for me, it just felt like it should have been pulled out of testing and then use more as that pivot into your closed.

Does that make sense?

That makes total sense. Yeah. So I pull it out of the pull it out of the circle and use it for the close?

Use it to the pivot. Yeah.

That’s so helpful. Thank you. Because I have no idea how to transition. That’s kinda where I went like, oh, crap. It’s done. What?

Do you know?

That’s really helpful. Thank you.

Perfect. Thanks, Katie. Marina.

Hey, Claire.

You’ve got so many gems in there, and I was like, oh, that’s how you could say that. Oh, that’s how you could say that. But I had to listen so carefully because they were sort of hidden in just, like, I think a little bit of, like, vocal variety or, change in speed of saying things or, like, varying the energy so that, like, you’ve got a ton of good things in there. And I was like, oh, that’s really cool.

That if they just, like I know you’re nervous. I get it. You’re probably probably throwing up too.

Maybe I’m projecting. But, anyway I don’t know.

But but it would totally then it would be like these little zingers, And then you’ve got, like, this wicked under, like, quiet sense of humor that then it would bring that out too. And so then I I don’t know. I just think you’ve got a lot of good things going in there. And it’s kind of like, maybe just think about it as taking a highlighter mentally and go going, okay. I need to highlight these bits and, like, really, like, come out a bit more instead of ending, like, with your kind of, like, a question.

Right? And just Yeah. Yeah. This is me telling you. So this like, I’m try I I’m not one to talk.

But seeing it in yours, I was like, oh, okay. She could totally if you’re just, like, pushing this one little bit and pushing this one little bit. And I can’t remember all the things because I was, like, listening and going, oh, that’s how you can include something without it coming across seeming like, you were bragging on yourself, but it didn’t come across as like, oh, I’m so great, and I did this in a bad way. It came across as like, oh, she knows what she’s she’s talking about.

But then just, like, zing it out a little bit more so I don’t have to, like, listen for it quite so deeply, if that makes sense.

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I I I’m really grateful for that feedback. It’s so specifically helpful.

Sun Sinic actually has a new course I’m presenting, which I’m desperate to do.

Yeah. He’s so convincing.

Yes.

Anyway, nice nice work. Obviously, lots of work has gone into it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks, Marina. Todd.

Yeah. Mine is pretty quick, Claire. And I could be wrong. It might not be relevant, but I believe you spoke to email as a seven billion dollar industry.

And, you know, I will kinda just look at Joe for this one. In ten x emails, you speak to for every, know, every dollar you spend on email marketing, and the average return is, like, forty four dollars and twenty five cents or something. So maybe it could be a setup for ADA as you move them through. Like, did you know if you do this, you get this back?

And let them know, like, there’s not just we’re not just selling your service, but you should expect a return on what you’re getting kind of idea and just set them up. Like, you’re the expert again in it and just like, yeah. Come with me, and this is not a cost. This is an investment kind of idea and just really set it up because you’ve talked to such a big number.

But if you can bring that back and just put that in their in their court and let them know, like, we’re expensive for a reason kind of idea, but I’m not sure if that’s relevant or not.

Love that. Agreed. I think there were a few number of points in there that needed more, like, push on. That’s one of them. Your line eighty percent don’t come back. I wrote down and circled like, damn, that’s terrifying.

Eighty percent don’t come back.

So there are a lot of moments there. I was like, if you need calculators, you need, like, to show what that adds up to, how much you spent only to have them vanish. Like, no wonder marketing looks flat.

You early on, you picked a fight sort of with blast emails, but then it wasn’t until you were getting to the trigger part of the model that you really dug into why, like, a broadcast or blast email isn’t as good as a triggered one. I would have liked you to pick a fight with it earlier and then just continue the fight when you get to triggers.

So, like, bring me into the problem with blast or broadcast emails, which the vast majority of these people are doing.

So why they should stop doing that.

What else have we got?

You said it’s a game changer for activation, but not for acquisition. And I didn’t know why you bring up acquisition at all, just, like, focus on activation when you were talking about the overpowered onboarding framework. You’re like, this is a game changer for activation.

It is not for act for acquisition. It’s like, shush. Shush. Don’t talk about acquisition. No. No. That’s not actually activating.

I’ve got a great diagram if we have, like, a few minutes afterwards that I wanted to quickly If it shows up on the slide, then that’s one thing.

But I’m like, I don’t know if you’ve read straight line selling. I’m talking about it a lot these days, the Jordan Belfort book. But, it’s it’s what he would call Pluto.

So it’s too far out. Don’t bring come back. Come back. Let’s not talk about that part.

I also thought that you could okay. Two things and we’ll wrap up.

You did get more confident as you went. I totally noticed that. The more you practice, the more the parts are, like, second nature to you, the better and more engaging the whole thing is. And I know you hadn’t practiced the clothes or things like that, so that’s fair.

But just know that if it ever feels like, is it even worth it? The more you practice it, the you’ll it’ll be a natural thing. You are funny, and you’re friendly and likable. There’s a lot of good stuff there, but now we just gotta nail your delivery.

Like, that’s it. Just practice a bunch of times.

The thirty percent lift in the middle, I’d love to see you pause, and I think you’ll do that more as you get more chill with, like, presenting like this.

What’s nice about, like, Abby’s five k in the middle is it’s a number that I want. I want that number. Thirty seven thirty percent lift is not yet a number. It’s just like this wonder like, this great idea.

I would love you to be able to before you even draw your model, to put them through a very simple calculation, and just say, like, look. Don’t worry. We’re not using this for, like, the wrong purposes. Just set up just put context around it, but what you want is them to have a number to put in the middle of the circle.

So if you can help them do the calculation of what a thirty percent lift would look like and then extrapolate that, like, maybe say, okay. Now annual. Like, just figure it out how you can get that number in the middle to look really compelling. Like, oh, I could make eight thousand dollars a day, and I’m currently making four dollars a day.

That sounds awesome. Thanks.

But if you can do the calculation now, I’m, like, very keen on this instead of thirty percent lift.

My final note here is I’m not in love with some of the word choices across the model.

Foundation threw me because it was up high, and I want a foundation to be down low.

So I’m like, no. That’s a sky up there. I’m very literal.

But I thought that you could do a, like, a SaaS sweep.

Now that you’ve got these six parts in place with their three labels, go back through and make it feel what words can you use? Because right now, what we have for foundation conversation optimization, insights, journey, triggers, personalization, tracking, and testing, that’s all like, a course creator could follow the same thing, and an ecommerce business could follow the same thing. Right?

Lower journey might be replaced with funnel if you were really getting into it for, like, a specific course creator group. So to me, it felt too generic still. It feels like, good. You’ve got this, like, poor model in place. Now let’s SaaSify it. Now that twenty five to fifty million dollar group, what words will feel better?

Foundation doesn’t feel right.

Conversation might.

Optimization does, I think. But then inside of that, insight, I want you to work on that word.

Journey is good. Triggers are good. You already know you’re gonna work on personalization and segmentation and figure that out. Tracking and testing, can you do something that feels more if you know these people are using intercom, for example, intercom e language.

So, like and that’s your job. Just sweep through it and see if you can make it sound more sassy so I can see myself. Sassy this sassy, not Stacy’s sassy. But so I can see myself as a SaaS founder or marketer or whatever when I look at this model.

Does that make sense?

Just a little more pointed on your word choice.

Okay. That’s super helpful because I I like I’ve taken it way back. Do you know how how long it took to get like three shuns?

Sorry.

What did you say?

Three shuns. Three, like, activation. What is it? Conversation, foundation.

Oh, the shuns. Foundation. Oh, I see.

Yeah. But I can find a new shuns. I’ve done it now.

Find a new shuns. There are more shuns.

Yeah. K. Cool.

I’m a new shin.

Awesome. Good. How are you feeling, Claire?

Great. Great. Yeah. I’m really really excited to actually do this well.

Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got a really good starting point here. And, oh, Todd.

Nice job. Nice way to finish the meeting.

You’ve got great case studies too. Oh, one other note, the over twenty startups with, on the or onboarding flows with Forget the Funnel. I don’t know that you have to say it with Forget the Funnel because I’m just gonna go look up Forget the Funnel. So just say, like, twenty more onboarding flows. Like, wow. It’s a lot of onboarding flows.

Yeah. Nobody’s listening anymore because there’s a puppy in the room. So, we’re just gonna go look at the puppy now. But good job, Claire and Marina and Abby. Thank you. Well done, everybody. And thanks for giving your notes as well and tuning in to help your fellow to help your peers out here.

Good. Alright.

So next month kicks off a whole new month for, Coffee School Pro. We’ll be posting about that very soon.

Cool. Awesome. And, Todd, you have to tell us about this puppy. What’s going on here?

Sorry. We she’s a week and two days old, and we’re renovating the house. We’re actually getting a podcast studio ready for me in the basement, and, she sleeps at my feet. She’s on her little bed.

And, yeah, she’s she’s a great little dog. She’s learning quickly. And she’s just been at my feet all things, so I you might see me looking down. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but she just woke up.

So yeah. And she’s licking me like crazy.

So She is. But she’s got those little shark teeth too.

Yeah. She’s got little pearls as Tina said.

Oh my gosh. What’s her name?

Patty. Patty. Patty. Patty. The patty.

Yeah. Patty? Yeah. It’s a yeah. It’s a new dog for us. So, yeah, she’s she’s a great dog.

So Oh. Try and sorry if I interrupted everyone.

It’s just It’s end of meeting.

I’m amazed you were able to hold off this whole time.

Oh, it’s tough. You have no idea when she’s at my feet and she’s, like, nudging me with a bone, and then she’s nudging me with a toy, then another toy, and then she’s out cold and looking at her. So, yeah.

Oh, so cute.

So cute. Well, I saw your two as well.

So Oh, yes.

They just came in from Yeah.

Playing out at the lake.

Yeah. We’ll do it. Tina was the first one to meet her, I believe, as well. Uh-huh. So yeah.

Patty. Yeah. Super cute.

Patty is welcome to the crew.

Absolutely.

Awesome.

Okay. Thanks, y’all. Thanks so much. Well done, everybody. If you haven’t worked on your workshop, go do it.

And if you have, keep practicing. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

Thank you.

Transcript

Hey. Hey. Alright. Workshop day. Y’all ready? Yes?

Of course.

Good.

I’m excited. This is gonna be a lot.

We’ve got three p doing this a lot. I don’t know what’s going on with my brain.

My fingers never match what the number is that I say. So three. There. I had to think about it. We have three of you going today, and I know it just hit start time. So we’re just gonna let some people come on in.

Abby, you’re going. Marina, you’re going. And I think Claire is our third, and we’ll, go in that order.

Is that exciting? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Good.

Alright. We’ll let some people file in. How are you all feeling about your present your workshops?

I don’t know why, but I’m, like like, nervous about giving it.

Really? Yeah. I was like, I don’t know why.

They’re just, like, my friends. I can agree. I was saying to my partner, but I’m, like, really nervous.

It’s so much worse when you know the people.

It’s so much worse.

Is that what it is? Maybe.

Yes. Totally.

Three thousand strangers, easy compared to three people you know very well. Like, no. Thanks. I don’t need this. I’m good. I’ll do something else with my life.

Well, also these people, they know what it’s supposed to be. So what if you totally miss the boat?

I guess that’s true. Yeah. That’s fair. That’s fair.

Alright. Thanks everybody who’s attending today and not presenting.

We’re going to be attending as people in that person’s ideal audience. So, Abby, Marina, and when Claire gets here, if the three of you can please just let us know basically who your ICP is and the persona that you believe would be watching this, and we can do our best to sit in those shoes. And, otherwise, we’ll just, like, give other feedback as well.

So that’s our job for everybody who is filing in again.

Yeah. Really simply, we are here to watch and give feedback on three workshops. And if you’re working on your own work workshop, which you should be, it’s a great chance for you to do to see to see. So you can also learn like, oh, wow.

I loved that. Or, oh, okay. That’s gonna be a confusing part. It was confusing for their audience.

It’s probably confusing for mine. I didn’t think of it that way, etcetera, etcetera. So a caught not taught kind of workshop day. It is two hours, because we have three groups, three people going.

Each gets about thirty minutes, then we’ll have about five minutes of discussion time, which could turn into ten, which is why we have two hours blocked out. Thank you for this endurance approach. It’s not a sprint, today. So are we ready?

We’re gonna go Abby, then Marina, and then Claire, if any of you surprised.

And you’re like, wait. What? I’m going today? Yeah. That’s the sign up list I got.

So so, hopefully, that’s right. Going in that order, Abby, then Marina, then Claire. Are we ready? Or does everybody know why we’re here and what we’re doing?

Any confusion?

No? I wouldn’t think so. Alright. We are recording.

Let’s get cracking. If you’re not presenting, please go on mute and do your best to stay on camera if possible so that the presenter can see our faces and not feel like they’re talking to an empty room or people who are busy doing other things. Okay. Thanks.

Abby, take it away.

Cool. Okay. So, my ICP is a course creator, so you’re probably doing about three to four million. You wanna be doing ten million.

But at the moment, you’re just completely stuck with a live lodge roller coaster. You’re getting burned out because every time you live lodge, it just takes out of you, and you just cannot get Evergreen to work, and you don’t know why.

Okay. So can everybody, like, see my screen?

Okay. Cool. Right.

Okay. So this workshop is called how to make five thousand dollars a day with a mid ticket evergreen course.

So I’m Abby. I’m the founder of AT Content and the creator and author of day one evergreen, the only funnel that’s built to convert better every month.

I help course creators add one point eight million a year in revenue, which is five thousand dollars a day, without the nail biting stress of live launches. I’ve worked with hundreds of course creators. I’ve worked on evergreen funnels for Amy Porterfield, Becca Klein, Jel Sid, Coffeehackers, Ingrid Ana, Fast Needs a QBO, and some other names that you might recognize.

So you’re in the right place if you have a mid ticket offer between three hundred and two thousand dollars that you’d love to scale to five thousand dollars a day on Evergreen. The reason I say these amounts is just what I found is when it’s over two thousand, it tends to just take a little bit more nurturing. So the idea of this funnel is that you bring people onto your email list and you sell to them straight away.

So you’re already doing at least a million with your online course, but you really wanna scale with to ten million without relying on the nail biting trust of live launches.

And you’re already using paid advertising to sell your online course. So this isn’t a requirement.

So, generally, to to reach five thousand dollars a day, depending on how much your course is, you wanna be getting at least a hundred, maybe two hundred people into a funnel every day. If you can do this with organic marketing, awesome. Great.

But likely, you’re gonna be using some kind of paid advertising.

So a quick case study.

So one of my clients is Fast and Easy QBI. So back in January, they launched a brand new course with an email list of ten thousand, and we made six hundred thousand dollars. Their sales that month outpaced all of their sales in twenty twenty three. We straightaway took that launch funnel evergreen and made seventy six thousand dollars in month one, keeping in mind that they’d already pretty much exhausted that email list because we literally just live launched.

And then we continue to optimize.

And now in July, they’ve got a six point eight cent conversion rate with a three dollar cost per lead. So for a twelve hundred dollar course, they’re they’ve got a pretty good ROAS there, and they’re making five thousand dollars a day with they on Evergreen.

A few more case studies, which you can get in my book.

So one of my clients, Eric Petrus, he came to me because he he was selling guitar guitar repair course.

I worked on his evergreen sales page, and we tripled his weekly sales. At Harmusch, I wrote his evergreen sales page three years ago. Amazingly, he’s still using the same copy, and it’s converting at thirteen percent. He’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars from that. Becca Klein, I increased her final conversions by a hundred and fifty percent.

Jove said two hundred and forty percent increase in webinar sales.

This was actually for a live launch, but the coffee converted so well. She took Evergreen and actually tripled her course price.

And Fast and Easy QBO, another course I’ve worked on for them is a membership, and we’ve seen a forty percent increase in membership sign ups since setting up day one evergreen.

Okay. So to address the eye roll here, these aren’t friends or colleagues. These are course creators that have come to me to evergreen their funnels. This isn’t another just add a countdown timer, just set up deadline funnel, and it’s gonna convert. This is unique system designed to collect ongoing data via a ten point customer feedback loop so you can legitimately improve your conversions without ripping a funnel apart every month.

So deal with evergreen, the funnel that’s built to convert best every month. So now you can stop relying on unpredictable live launches that burn you and your team out or the unpredictability of them as well. I mean, live launches are fun and exciting when they go well, but, also, if you’re putting you’re counting on one live launch to generate your full year’s revenue. And one link doesn’t work, and then you potentially lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this is to just build a bit more peace into your business. It’s not to say never live lodge, but just to have that one point eight million as well.

Without lining Zuckerberg’s pockets, while barely breaking even on your ad spend, so maybe we’re already running ads to your evergreen course, and it’s kind of converting. But, actually, after you paid your ad spend, you’re not making enough money. Like, yes, you’re getting those leads, but you’re then having to go back to live launching to sell to sell to them.

And without hiring expert after expert in the hope that someone can fix your evergreen funnel problem. And then again, just linking back to live launches because it just doesn’t work.

Okay. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a little slice together. So I’d love you to just grab a notebook and pen.

Okay. So what I want you to do is in the middle of your page is to just draw a circle and write in there five thousand dollars. So that’s that’s what we’re going for here, five thousand dollars a day. And then I will need to draw four leaves.

Make them quite big so you’ve got room to write in them. I guess these are kind of kind of looking like petals here. So you should have what looks like a little flower.

And then in the first, leaf, I want you to write attract.

In the second leaf, I want you to write engage.

And the third, convert.

And then the fourth, optimize.

Okay. So the first thing you’re gonna wanna do, if you if you want to be making sales every day, you need to be bringing people into your funnel, and you need to attract the right leads. So we’re gonna be using Facebook ads to do that.

Then the second thing we need is an attraction device. So you need a way to bring these people into your funnel and instantly engage them. So this is like you’re gonna be an opt in page with a workshop.

And then you need a lead monitor. So you need some way of actually seeing, okay, are these good leads as the reason that my funnel isn’t converting because my sales messaging is awful. Am I just bringing in low quality leads?

Okay. And then we have engaged. So you need an irresistible offer.

We’re gonna be talking in a minute about deeper into what these all mean and how to assess, whether you’ve got it set up or not, and then mindset shift.

So rather than doing a traditional how to workshop, you’re gonna do a workshop that’s built out of mindset shifts the audience needs to, go through in order to be ready to buy your course.

And then, oh, sticky story. Sorry.

Brain brain fart.

So because this is you are bringing people in and selling to them straight away, it’s really important you build know, like, and trust here. So this isn’t just like putting a shit’s creep gif in your emails and being like, hey. I have a personality. Like, you wanna build these really sticky stories that, like, win them over to your world and make them feel ready to to buy from you.

Okay. And then we’ve got combat. So we want an easy yes pitch. So at the end of your webinar, you’re gonna pitch your offer, and it’s gonna make it very easy for them to say yes.

And then you’ve got a million dollar sales page. So this isn’t your typical templated sales page. This is a long form sales page that addresses any objections they have that by the time they get to the ends of it, they’re not gonna have any further questions about your course.

And then conversion emails. So, again, not just your generic sales emails, emails that are written to convert.

And then finally, we have optimize.

So data tracking.

Are you tracking your data across the whole funnel?

And then we have your customer feedback loop. So that’s your ten point customer feedback loop, which includes forms and surveys, AB tests to gain as much information about your customer as possible.

And then finally, we have conversion hotspots, which is where you want to implement your customer feedback to have the biggest impact on your conversions.

Okay. So you should have something that looks a bit like this. Maybe a little bit neater. Mine’s a bit. My handwriting’s still great.

And now we’re gonna go through and we’re gonna write where you are for each of these sections. So if you’re feeling really confident, you’ve got it set up, it’s all converting beautifully, you’re gonna give yourself a ten.

If you have it set up but conversions aren’t quite where they should be or you just feel like it could be better, you can give yourself a five. And if it’s not set up or it’s not converting at all, you’re gonna give yourself a zero.

Okay. So the first thing we’ve got is your Facebook ads.

So in order for to hit five thousand thousand dollars a day, your ads need to be profitable. So if you are your current ad spend is ten to twenty dollars a day and you have a five hundred dollar course, you’re just literally flushing away that money and not and not seeing any return on your ad spend. So we wanna ideally get your lead down to around five dollars, five to ten dollars.

And it’s also it’s not just about the cost per lead, but having someone on your team who’s gonna address seasonal changes, who’s gonna keep updating that so that what works in winter can then be made to work in summer. You’re not you’re refreshing the ads, so they can continue to go back, and you’re not just flushing that money away.

And then you want your attraction device. So your opt in page to your workshop. So, ideally, your opt in page conversion rate should be around forty to sixty percent.

You also want to make sure that people are then watching your webinar. So if people aren’t even clicking to watch your on demand webinar, then the chances are that it’s just not desirable enough. So if you have an issue there with people not watching, it might just be that your opt in page isn’t selling it hard enough. And then lead monitor.

So you’re gonna have a thank you page survey embedded after people sign up for your webinar, and this is gonna determine what drove them to to sign up. It’s gonna tell you whether these are good leads. So you might find that lots of people going in there are like, oh, I just wanna make more money or some other kind of quick win, and then this is a sign that actually those leads aren’t the ones that you want in there. You want ones that are ready to buy, they’re ready to invest, and understand that it’s it’s a long term game.

You also wanna be doing very strategic AB testing on your opt in page. So rather than just testing to see if you can get your conversion rate up a little bit, actually looking at the bottom of your funnel and seeing, okay. Is this one bringing in the leads that actually convert?

So, again, if you don’t have that set up, it’s gonna be a zero. If you have some of it set up at five, and if you’re really confident that you know what’s going on with your leads and who’s converting, then you’re gonna be self a ten.

Okay. And then going on to engage. So your irresistible offer.

Do is this something that people will, like, crawl through broken glass to get? Do you have a great offer that’s converted before? And is it converting with Evergreen? So it might be that it converts pretty well when it’s like you live launch, but on evergreen, maybe you don’t have the right kind of urgency set up. Do you have that authentic scarcity that gives people a reason to act now rather than later.

And then mindset shifts. So your workshop, is it built out of the mindset shifts that people need to go through to go from where they are now to where they need to be to say yes to your course, or are you just doing how to content that isn’t actually converting them?

And then sticky stories. So, again, building in that relatability stories that really stick. And you can the way you can tell this is are people staying to the end of your webinar? Are people sticking around? Are they opening your emails? Are they engaging with your offer? And if they’re not, then the chances are you need to just go back and build in more of that storytelling and more of yourself so that people can buy into that.

Okay. And then we’ve got Converse. We’ve got the easiest pitch.

So this is at the end of your webinar. Are you not just are you are you reading through your modules and your bonuses, or are you constantly making sure that you’re connecting the modules and the bonuses to what’s going on in their life at the moment, explaining to them how how it’s gonna improve their life, how it’s gonna aid the transformation that you’re promising. And, again, the way you can measure this is are people sticking around to the end of your webinar, or are they dropping off?

Your million dollar sales page, is this, is it converting? Is is the the first thing to think about? Are you converting at five to eight percent, which is what you should be getting with an evergreen webinar funnel like this?

Is it templated? Are you pulling out generic pain points, or are you have you got your customer research and you’re reading their mind and you’re empathizing with them deeply? You’re as they’re reading through, they’re thinking, oh my god. Yes. This person gets me. Important on an evergreen sales page because again, these people don’t know you. They haven’t been on your list for months and months and months.

So it’s even more important that you show them you understand where they are and that they can trust you to guide to guide them.

And then finally, conversion emails. Again, emails are rich in voice of customer that are addressing different objections objections that are coming up in your customer feedback loop, which we’ll talk about in a second.

Are people opening them? Are people clicking through? Is your click through rate for each email above two percent?

Okay. And finally, optimize. So data tracking. Are you tracking every point of your funnel, and do you understand how it all ties together? So your cost per lead, your click through rate on your ads, your opt in page conversions, how the amount of people that show up for your webinar, and the amount of time they spend on your webinar, your sales pitch, your versions, your open rates for emails, your click through rates. Are you measuring all that, and are you measuring it month monthly and looking at how things are changing each month?

Your customer feedback loop. Do you have a ten point customer feedback loop built in? Do you have survey set up? Do you have opportunities for your customers to engage?

Are you finding out why people are converting versus not converting? Are you running strategic tests? All of these things will help you understand your audience better. So if anything’s not converting, you can use your data tracking to identify where and you know what to change around your messaging.

And this also applies to seasonal changes as well. For example, let’s say you have an outgoing copywriting course, that converted amazing in twenty twenty two. Then in January twenty twenty three, your conversion rates dropped and you don’t know why. If you had that customer feedback loop set up, you could say, oh, okay.

Because everyone’s freaking out about about AI, but I’m not addressing that in my messaging. So do you have these points set up so you understand what is getting in the way for your audience? And then finally, conversion hotspots. Once you’ve got that feedback, do you know where to put it?

Do you know where to put that the voice of customers so that you are having the biggest impact of your conversions and you’re not just constantly randomly rewriting, ripping pile funnels, start again, wasting all this time just hoping, praying that something’s gonna convert.

Okay. Cool.

Thanks. So you should hopefully have something that looks a little bit like this, maybe a bit less colorful unless you you’ve got your crayons. So now we’re you should be able to identify three to four points, for you to now go away and work on. So if your problem is that, okay, you are making some sales, but it’s just not profitable because all of your money is going to Facebook ads. You wanna go and you wanna look at your Facebook ads, you wanna work on your opt in page, see if you can get that conversion rate up, and maybe have a look at your offer. Is there room to put the price up a bit more so you’re more profitable? And then, of course, getting this customer feedback loop built in so you can see why people, why your leads are expensive, what what you can do to actually improve that.

Is your is it the case that your sales are inconsistent? Sometimes, some months are gray, other months are poor.

Again, you wanna build this customer feedback loop in so you can see what’s changing. You want someone working on your Facebook ads so that they can respond to these seasonal changes and then be going through these conversion hotspots through your funnel from the top to the bottom to optimize based on what it is that’s changing.

And if you’re not getting sales at all, then or you’re you’re just making a couple, like, nowhere near that five k that you want, then the chances are you need someone to come in and set up this day one evergreen funnel for you.

So if you do just have a couple of points here, then that’s awesome. Go away. Give give this to your team. Get my book for the to get the ten conversion, the the customer feedback loop.

If you’re thinking, okay. I just really love someone to just set this up for me, then my team has one space available per month. Not only will we set it up, but we’re also available to optimize. So it’ll be like having someone on your team that’s gonna review the customer feedback loop every month and then improve the funnel so that you your comp until your conversion’s where you want them to be, and then, again, respond if anything dips. So I’m gonna be dropping a link to book a call with me, come to that call with your drawing today ready, and, yeah, we’ll have a chat and see if we’re a good fit. Any questions?

Okay. That’s it.

Good job, Abby.

Alright.

Let’s share any notes. Who would like to go first to share feedback for Abby?

Otherwise, I’ll choose you. So put up Andrew’s first and then Claire.

Right.

Yeah. That was really good, Abby. Definitely lit some fire under my butt to to get my workshop going and hopefully get it as good as yours is.

I would say my number one point of feedback, would be to really slow down, a good bit. There were parts where you were going through it really fast, and it’s like, I could keep up with you because I kinda know a lot of this stuff. And what you’re talking about, you know, getting customer feedback or, like, conversion rates and sales pages that add address objections, I’m right there with you. But I feel like if I’m someone who is that’s not marketing is not my main thing, I would need you to go a lot slower so that I can understand what you’re talking about.

I wrote that down when you were going through the diagnostic at the mindset mindset shift. Like, I know what you’re talking about about we need to, like, shift people’s mindsets, but you kinda blew through it a little bit. So I think if you went, like, maybe, like, half the speed, that would probably help, a little bit.

And then in terms of, like, stuff that I really liked was when you’re going through the diagnostic, when you had things like the exit like, when you were doing the customer feedback loop, you had like, you used the example of, like, AI. You know? Oh, is my messaging not resonating anymore? Because everyone’s freaking out about AI, and we haven’t addressed that.

That specificity was helpful.

Same thing with the last one, the conversion hotspots of, like, asking questions. Like, okay. You’ve collected this feedback. Do you know where to put it, where to implement it?

I feel like that was helpful.

And I just wanted to check on in the beginning, would you could you say it was supposed to be three hundred to two thousand dollars, or was it higher than the other typo?

No. Yeah.

You might have a typo.

So Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Three hundred to two thousand.

Yeah. It goes to twenty thousand. I was like, oh, damn. That is a high ticket offer.

Nice. Okay. Yeah. No mid ticket. Thank you.

I didn’t notice that.

But, yeah, big biggest piece of advice would be just, yeah, slow down. Like, the content taught the content is really good, I thought.

So Thank you, Andre.

Her goal was so nice.

Claire.

My feedback is is really simple.

First, like, there were a few points where I really loved. You got, like, super specific. You just gave me an example, and I went like, oh, okay. I get what that is now. But you didn’t do it for all of them. So I some of them, I was like, okay. Following along.

But those super specific points were, like, really convincing, I suppose. And then same feedback on slowing down. I’ve gotten that feedback, like, a million times as well. Slow it down. Say less.

Say say things simpler as well. I think, my biggest piece of advice that I got from Cody was, sometimes they don’t understand what you’re saying because you’re overexplaining, which is, like, kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do when you’re overexplaining.

So just by keeping it to, like, one, I suppose, big idea, per section, it makes it a lot easier to slow down and not catch yourself over explaining.

And then lastly, I really loved your presentation. I haven’t done a presentation at all. I hope that I’m instantly jealous.

But I really loved your presentation. I thought it was super cool to be able to follow along.

I think as you go, you’ll probably find you don’t say as much as you did just as you get, like, more comfortable with the content. But, the end was also really, really great. I love the Calendly visual. I just felt so like, okay. Today.

Yeah. I hate that.

Thank you. Helpful.

Anyone else wanna share some notes for Abby?

No?

Okay. I’ll share mine. Abby, I loved it. I thought you did a great job overall. The opening numbers and the promise right out of the gate, it’s like a super solid hook.

The case studies, well done. I do have a note that you’re talking a blue streak. That’s not what I wrote.

So can you ask questions earlier on? Like, have you experienced this too?

Something like that just to bring people in. I know when it’s recorded in advance, then that’s really, like, tricky, but even maybe slowing down could solve it there.

Okay. So early on, I have at ten o seven my time, which is probably about four minutes into the presentation.

I I would love you to say, hey. Yes. You can work with me and my team directly, and, like, just get ahead of that because I am definitely in your target market. And as somebody who would rather outsource this work, then try to get my team to do it ourselves.

Yeah. I was like, my question was immediately. Can we just hire you for this? So you could say, yeah.

You know, you can work with me directly. I’m gonna walk you through this because we only accept three clients a month. Also, I think you should say three clients a month, not one. So it sounds bigger, like a larger group.

You can only take on one. Then if you want, you can take out as many as you want to at that time, but I would open it up to three.

So then say, yes. You can work with me directly. I would also love, at that point, for you to say what your prices start at.

There’s no reason to not do that. Yeah. So give it a shot, and make it a nice high number.

You’re presenting really well, and you clearly know your stuff, and you have good case studies.

The only thing that would make a person think you should be less than fifty thousand dollars at minimum is you not saying fifty thousand dollars to start. So, like, if you don’t have a fifty thousand dollar budget, you’re not a good fit to work with you. You’re just not. So no. So fifty, sixty, whatever that number goes to, but say it. Even though it’s scary, this is what the whole point of this thing is, not just to get the leads you could otherwise close, but, like, new leads, more money. So I want you to do that.

You need more build up to the fact that you’re gonna be drawing today. So I would say earlier on, hey. By the way, just as we’re kicking off and while people are still filing in, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen today. It’s not that’s not an art class. Don’t worry. But you’re gonna wanna draw something. I’m gonna show it to you.

I don’t understand the leaf the need for the leaf shape.

Because it’s evergreen.

So yeah.

Yeah.

I know. It’s really corny, but I just like No.

Because I I I had a design when it’s not in the green belt.

Leaves are seasonal.

Yeah. I don’t I just gave it to a sign designer. I was like, can you make this, like, not look like Joe’s?

From your from my side of things, I was drawing it, and I didn’t know what the lines off the leaves are meant to be.

So, like, when you have a triangle and you put those lines in there, the triangle is meaningless. As soon as you make something a shape, then everything on it needs to be part of that, like, metaphor.

And so if I’m thinking, okay, these are leaves, what are the three pokey things coming off the side then? So for me, like, I’m just it didn’t connect, and so I didn’t know why I was drawing three leaves. I didn’t know what was expected.

I know Andrew’s really trying to make it evergreen there.

Yeah. So just know that as your audience drawing it, I didn’t give myself enough room possibly because I wasn’t set up to know to draw this thing. The leaves felt like a artsy exercise that I couldn’t do, and it’s one more point of friction. Right? Like, did I draw a good leaf?

That’s just like come on. But I love starting with the circle in the middle. I love the four parts.

What I a couple notes.

When you’re going through, you’ve got, like, metrics and yes, no. I’m gonna look through and see if I can find a blank version of the scorecard that they gave us at their workshop, because you might wanna also follow this workshop up with shipping out that or bring the work and I’ll show it to you, and I’ll send you separate loom so you know what I’m talking about. Simply because what you’re talking about like, you’ve got numbers and how to tell if this is a yes or no. I didn’t love zero five ten either. I I think simplify it down to red, yellow, green.

It’s just like five zero ten.

I was copying it.

I know. I hate it. And I only do it because the sun doesn’t have, like, the sunshine growth model and zero like, the red, yellow, green doesn’t work on a sun. So that’s where it’s bad, like, where it falls apart from me.

But I don’t I know I know that’s what I do. I don’t like it, and so I wanna coach you to do it the easier way, which to me is red, yellow, green, or something really simple like that where there’s a three part thing. Okay.

Bum bum bum. Let me see. I took some good notes on, like, the actual content. Like, that was good. I have notes here for self.

Oh, when we get to oh, yeah. Million dollar sales page, I would love you to rename that for the purposes of this workshop simply because that’s the only thing that has million dollar or a price or, like, a, like, a outcome attached to it. So for me, I was like I mean, easy yes is another thing. Also, it sounded like you were saying easy ass to me. Just so you know, it came off as easy ass. And I was like, let me see what she writes down here.

So there’s that. But million dollar sales page, I would give it something else that sounds different just because I wrote, makes it sound like success is all on this.

Suddenly million dollar sales page had much heavier weighting than anything else, and I was thinking, do we just need a better sales page?

And that’s not the takeaway that you want.

Ta da. Couple more notes, then I’m done.

Oh, yeah. When we get to optimize, I felt like so you opened with data tracking. I needed a story there. Like because you say you can find places where there’s where money is basically hidden is effectively what you were saying there.

Like, you won’t know unless you’re tracking that. And you walked us through a bunch of great metrics, which was great. But then I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if at this point you were to say, for example, or whatever that QBO one was, we noticed x here, we optimized it, and we brought in another twenty thousand dollars in that in the next quarter or something like that. Right?

So I’m like, oh, damn. But then I was like, well, if you could do that.

It closely tied to the data tracking ties to conversion hots hotspots. Once you track data, then you know where to put it in these hotspots. Right? So I was confused about why the ten point thing was between the two.

So I wrote, what if for optimize, you first open with the ten point feedback loop, then you do data tracking, and then conversion hot hot spots, which would allow you to finish with a case study example. Like, oh, and when we did this and now we’re ending on a really high note. Money outcome. I remember why I want you to do this because although I can see that I’m red here, green there, yellow there, I know that I want you to do it if I remember that you you make money for people, which leads me to final notes.

We dropped the model pretty quickly.

What I would love is you spent a lot of time, I think, saying, like, if this is true for you, if that is true for you, etcetera, I had just finished with you should have have an idea of where your weaknesses are and what you should work on next. Don’t say give it to their team. You can imply that. You can say that earlier on.

Like, I’ll give you enough that you can go forward and do this yourself. But at this point, like, close them, and that’s really it. Like, now is the point where I’m like, I’ve seen that I’m really right in a lot of places. Those all seem expensive, and, like, I’m really gonna need to train my team on how to do those things.

So don’t say go give it to your team. Instead, you could say, I mean, the red parts, is your team ready to do those parts? Are they qualified to optimize all of those parts?

Don’t minimize what you do. You started talking using verbs like set up. I’ll set this up for you.

No. Like, you’re not setting it up. That’s even when you do, it’s just not a good verb. Like, we’re we’re we’re this for you as we’re watching.

Like, wow. She, like, knows her shit. She can do this. And then I was brought down to maybe your team can maybe you can buy the book.

Maybe I can set it up for you. You know? So, no. And then book a triage call with team. Don’t put yourself in your Calendly even if you have to make somebody up. Someone else is your setter.

So make sure it’s like you can book a call with so and so from my team, and then go from there. It just elevates your price again and again. Like, oh, damn. Just sales team.

Yep.

The workshop’s selling. It’s doing a great job. I think if you simplify the model, slow down a bit, you’re good.

Tell people. Yes. You can charge me. You you can hire me. It’s fifty thousand to start or whatever the price is. What is the price to start?

Thirty five. To start. That prices start at thirty five.

Right. And then you build on the retainer after that?

Well, I’m gonna I think I’m gonna say like, I’m gonna build in an obligate not not a retainer, but just like, I’m here if you like if things don’t work. Like, I’m on I’m here for forty days just to work with your team if anything’s not working, and then recommend, like, you should really do the three the retainer as well.

Well, you should because your model Andrew knows what’s coming. You know your model.

Your this optimized you’ve sold us on it. It’s in the freaking model. It’s right here. How am I gonna go forward and data track and update those conversion hotspots?

You sold us on a thing here.

Like, you have done the work.

Okay.

That’s all. You know what my take is here.

So, yeah, any other notes or thoughts from anybody else for Abby?

I I just wanna tack on to what you just said, Joe, about, like, making this goes back to that that post that I made a while back about not making your monthly retainer separate from the offer to just make it part of the whole thing from the beginning so that it’s just the natural next stage of your product. It’s not a separate thing.

I so agree with that.

Yeah. Totally. It’s it’s it’s built in. I I attended this both as me here for you, but also as a person who would hire you for this. And if I heard, oh, you don’t necessarily need me for that part. I’d be like like, what are you talking about? But who’s gonna handle my conversion hotspots?

Like, what?

What’s happening? Who’s gonna look over my survey data? What?

So, yeah, Andrew made a really great point. I don’t know if you’re being tentative about selling yourself because you’re in a room with us and maybe with strangers. You’d be, like, more on the nose about how awesome you are, but wherever you do this next, lay it on.

Yeah. Reason to. Okay? Please?

One other tiny thing too. You just said a couple a couple minutes ago, Abby, about I’ll be there in case something’s not working. Like, you don’t even wanna say in case something’s not working because don’t even put that in their mind. Just if you wanna reframe that even as to make sure everything goes smoothly. Mhmm.

Mhmm.

You know?

But don’t even put in the possibility that something might not be working.

Yeah.

Okay. Love it. Good? Thank you. Bye. That’s Abby, nice work.

That’s lots of noise. Very helpful. Thanks.

Awesome. Marina, you’re up. You ready?

Of course.

K. After just a heads up for everybody who’s like, I need a bio break.

After Marina’s talk and our feedback session, we’ll take, like, a five minute break and then come back for Claire’s. Okay?

Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Marina.

Alright.

Take it away.

Tell us who your ICP is and everybody upfront first, please.

Yes. So ICP, CMO, VP marketing, twenty to a hundred million, b two b SaaS, with a reverse trial. So they start with a trial and then go to a freemium kind of model.

So that is who you are.

Alright. Thank you for Sorry, Maureen.

I hate to interrupt you. What remind me just really quickly.

Persona.

Sorry. Just just again. How much the persona who are you talking to at that ICP, and how much do they bring in a year? ICP years?

So we are b to b SaaS brands that are twenty to a hundred million.

Twenty to a hundred million.

And I’m talking to CMO, VP marketing, head of Okay.

Perfect. Sorry. Thank you. I had a restaurant instead of pen. Okay. Thanks.

Okay. All good.

Alright. Today, we’re gonna talk about how you can get more of your free users to convert to paid plans. So for our session today, grab a piece of paper and a pen. Don’t worry.

Not an art class. As long as you can read the notes on your diagram when we’re done, you will be good to go. So we’re specifically going to be talking about using, action triggered emails, message met sales pages to get your free users to to upgrade to a paid plan. Now these are users that have gone through your trial.

They have not converted yet, and there they are. We want them to feel good about the upgrade so they leave you a good review.

Now the next twenty five minutes, they’re gonna be valuable to you if you are a CMO, head of growth, VP of marketing, if you’re a b to b SaaS brand that generates twenty to a hundred million in annual revenue, these types of brands are the ones I work best with. Companies like Bitly, QR code generator, where we’re continuing to increase conversions strategically, by rewriting and optimizing emails and so on. Now I’m not the first person to share big brand names with you. So let me clarify.

These brands are not filled with people I knew before I started working with them. I got this work because this is exactly the type of work I’m building my reputation around. Further, I don’t pretend to have the perfect solution for you right here and now. Your company is not built on templates or you wouldn’t be here right now.

I may have the solution for you, but I’m not gonna hand you like it’s not like a trick where I say, oh, let’s all of a sudden stop letting those nine hundred and ninety five out of every one thousand free users sit in that free plan, sucking support resources indefinitely while taking space in your CRM, space you pay for every month.

Instead, I’m gonna help you see where your challenges are, and you’re going to discover them today for yourself in today’s workshop. So if by the end of our twenty five minutes together, you believe that my team is the only one that can stop the bleeding, fix what’s broken, reshape your conversion program into a superhuman sales generator, then you’ll be invited to book a conversion consultation with my team.

If that call proves that we should work together, you’ll be invited to invest twenty thousand dollars for my team of trained experts to establish your free to paid post convert, post trial free to paid strategy, roll out that strategy, including getting all of the automation set up. You won’t have to do a thing with that. And then five thousand dollars a month thereafter to optimize it. Because as you know, if you set and forget, it’s just going to go downhill.

Now my team has room for two clients. We take on very few clients, so we can serve them extremely well, and we always serve them on an ongoing basis.

Because while what I do seems magical, it’s not a magic trick.

So now let’s see what’s happening with your post trial free to paid program.

We’re gonna use my diagnostic tool to see what’s holding you back from driving more of those free users into paid plans.

So get that piece of paper out, and I’m gonna get you to go ahead and draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper.

So draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper, and here we go.

So we’re going to have, something on this side. We’re gonna say activate.

Don’t worry if your penmanship is awful. It’s alright. As long as you can read it, you’re good to go.

And we’re gonna have a few things on that activate side.

Alright. As we go along, I’m gonna get you to write the things in as we go, and then we’re gonna see where are you at, red, yellow, or green. Red being like, never even thought about this. We don’t have this, or it’s just not performing well.

Yellow is things are just like status quo. They’re not going up or down. We can’t seem to budget. And green, is we are doing great.

Now as we go through, you might think, my goodness. I don’t know the numbers for this.

Or you might be like, oh, I had some of the numbers for the last board meeting. I don’t know where we’re at right this second. No worries. We’re looking for sort of rolling averages. What is the general trend? Because we can always go back and get specific numbers later.

So let’s start over here, and let’s talk about open rates.

So you’re sending your free users emails.

Are they opening them?

Red, yellow, or green, generally?

Are you like, yeah. I’m happy with my open rate. I think people are opening them. We have some pretty cool subject lines. It’s getting them to open them. You might think you’re green.

Great.

Moving along then, we move to click rates.

So once they’re open and they’re in that email, are they actually clicking on the button or clicking on the link? And I don’t mean clicking unsubscribe. I mean, are they clicking on the call to action that you have in that email so they can go and do the thing that you want them to do?

So if your click rates are, like, great. Give yourself a green. If they’re, like, sometimes people are clicking, but it’s not going up at all. Or maybe it’s, not looking good at all, and you’re like, we can get them to open, but they don’t do anything.

So I’m gonna put us a yellow here.

And just on your diagram, put whatever it is that you think for your company.

Now the next thing we’re gonna think about as we are activating because these users, they might have gone through that free trial already. They may have opened things. They may not have opened things, but we know that they didn’t actually understand the value. Otherwise, they would be using or they would have converted to paid. They would have done something.

So now we have this time to value. Do you have your post trial, user journey map mapped out so that those users that went through that trial didn’t really get to value? How are you getting them to value post trial? Because they are there sitting in your free plan. Are they getting to value?

Now if that if you’re like, I don’t even have a map, we send out a few post, trial emails, and that’s it. Probably sitting at red there.

If you have thought about it, have a few things, you might be yellow. And if you’re like, oh, we’ve mapped out the whole process. We know how we can get them to, that value. Great. You’re green.

Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you might be red on that because if we would have had people already experiencing that value, we might not be talking.

Alright. So now this next side of the triangle of our conversion triangle, we’re gonna call it sticky.

How can we get these free users to actually use the product? So we might have them. Maybe we can get them opening, those emails.

K? We’re gonna it’s this progression. Maybe we can get them opening the email. Maybe we can get them clicking. Maybe we can get them to value, but can we get them to stay? Let’s see.

Because if they’re not gonna stay for the freed, they’re definitely not gonna a free plan, they’re definitely not gonna stay for the paid. So over here, we want them to commit to something.

So, they’re committed to something, and this could be maybe, you have as part of your, features that they can invite a team member, and maybe they can do still do that on a free plan. So if they’ve invited a team member, great. Perhaps they are uploading data In order to use your software, appropriately, they need to input data. And if they’re doing that, it shows that they’re somewhat committed. They’re invested in that. Or if they’re including it as part of their tech stack, maybe there’s some integration. They’re starting to integrate that.

So we wanna know, are they committed? And maybe you’re like, you know, some of people are doing this, but it’s not really it’s not really increasing.

Give yourself a yellow. If nobody’s really, taking advantage of it, give yourself a red. And if you’ve got lots of people integrating already, give yourself a green.

Alright.

Next up.

If they are doing that, then we need to look at daily active users or weekly active users. So this is dependent on, what your software is. Do people need to be in there every day? Do they set something up, look at it once a week? What is the process? So for your, software situation, think about how people are, how often people are in, the app doing something.

If they are increasingly doing things in app, give yourself a green. If it’s staying the same, yellow. And if it’s kinda tanking, give it a red. So you might be yellow here.

Alright.

Again, I don’t know your current situation. If we have a chat later on, if you decide to book a call with the team, we can dig into this more at that point.

Now the next thing on this sticky side is we have increased feature usage.

So if they have invited a team, great. If they’re in the app more often, great. They came to your app to solve a problem.

They’ve got your software. They because they think, hey. Your software is the answer to this problem.

If over here, we finally got them some value, they’re like, okay. Yes. I can do this thing.

Now in order for them to stick, we want them to expand that expand the number of your, features that they are using. So they’re using the thing they came for, and they have confidence in that. And now they’re like, I wonder what else we can do. Because as we expand this feature usage, that’s where we can start selling things in the plan. Like, oh, you want the plan because you can also do this other thing.

So, in general, are users using more features? Give yourself a green, staying the same yellow, and kinda decreasing, give it a red.

So you might think, okay. Well, I’m kinda yellow on that on that sticky side. Alright.

And, again, it’s kind of this progression.

Now we come to convert.

So here we are at the bottom, and we have looked at all these things. Now we can finally talk about conversion and what are some other things that are going to be influencing conversion. So now we’ve got them in the product. They have some value, and we’re like, great. They’re ready to convert.

And then we look, and we’re like, oh, but are they?

Let’s look at support tickets. Now you might think, oh, I don’t know. I’m not in there talking about support tickets all the time. I don’t know.

Do we have lots? Do we? K. If you have not heard about the number of support tickets your team is, processing, you’re probably good.

But if you’ve heard a lot of stuff and people are complaining and going like, can you do something about this? Like, our, we can’t handle the volume of support tickets. Like, it’s too much. If that’s the case, we’re looking at red.

If you’ve heard sort of murmurings, maybe it’s yellow. Yellow with the mind of, oh, we need to do something about this. Because if we have lots of support tickets and I don’t mean the support tickets that are asking simple questions. I mean, they’re angry about things because they don’t understand the product.

And so you think, why are they asking us about these things? It’s because look back to this first side, this activate side, we’re obviously not getting them the information they need so that they can see the value. Because once people start seeing the value, we’re gonna have a whole different kind of support ticket coming in. It might just be a simple question rather than a rage against the product.

Alright. The next thing, product reviews, and the review rating.

Now this is something that a quick search of Trustpilot, Capterra, g two, that’s gonna get you your star rating.

And what is it? Maybe think about the last time you looked. What was it? If it was under three, give yourself a red. If it was a three, give yourself a yellow. And four and five, give yourself a green.

We live in a society that people don’t buy stuff without looking for reviews. Think about it. When was the last time you bought something without googling to see a review?

Even simple things. Now think about this. They’re buying this for their business to help them increase their business. Of course, they’re gonna be looking at reviews.

Now, unfortunately, people leave for reviews if they don’t understand the product and don’t think they got value from it. So if we solve the things earlier on, we can get this up. So perhaps right now, you’re thinking, my reviews are not that great.

Don’t worry. It’s something we can do something about.

It is a solvable problem.

And this last thing on the conversion is this time to sale.

Is the time to sale so they finish the trial. They didn’t convert the during the trial. So now you’ve got them on this post trial, road map. You want to get them to that sale.

Perhaps they just needed more time. They didn’t have time to read the emails earlier. Whatever the case, they didn’t get there. Now you’re going to take them on that journey to get to the sale.

Is that time to sale decreasing? So as you look at the number of of users converting in a in a specific time frame, is that number going up, down, or staying the same?

And you might say, you know, it’s just staying the same. We can’t seem to increase the number of conversions in that time frame, meaning you’re having trouble decreasing that, time to sale.

So now at this point, you probably got a pretty good idea of what is happening. There should be no question into your in your mind of what’s getting in the way of you or your team increasing those post trial free to paid conversions.

We talked about perhaps time to value was too long. Users didn’t get there.

Maybe you didn’t have that customer journey mapped out. Maybe there was no plan. Whatever the case, perhaps they finally get to value, but they’re only doing the one thing. They’re not increasing the number of features that they’re using. They’re not exploring those, which means they’re going to sit in that free plan comfortably, sucking your resources forever because they don’t feel the need to, move on to a paid plan.

Perhaps your support tickets through the roof. Angry users feel misinformed, and, research shows that angry users tell nine to fifteen people about their bad experience.

Good experiences, people tell maybe six people.

So what is your customer experience, and can we change that, so that more people are telling about their good experience?

Alright. Here, we’ve gone through this whole conversion triangle in order you know what needs to be happening next.

Some of you, you might think, oh, great. I know what I need to work on.

Maybe share it with your team and they think, oh, yeah. We have capacity to do this. But I’m guessing since you’re here, that might not be the case.

It’s a lot of legwork.

So if you take this away, you think, yes. I don’t wanna leave money on the table. There are huge, possibilities and, for wins on the horizon, you can decide to book a call with my team.

Others are wondering, hey. How can I be one of these two brands that you work with next?

And we say I’m honored to consider, to be considered and say I’m sorry, though, that if we find we cannot work together, I can’t help all the brands that reach out to me. But I can give you a private link to book a call with my team, step one of three. So after you book, after you book, you will have the opportunity to answer three questions.

If you don’t complete the form, I’ll have to cancel the conversion consultation. If, however, you complete the form and my team assesses that we’re unlikely to be a good fit, we’ll have to cancel. But in all other cases, we will proceed with that call. Now bring your drawing from this session to our call because we’re going to use it to create a plan to work towards your goals, using our strategic solutions. So go ahead and start with scheduling your conversion consultation, complete the form, and then be ready to have a candid conversation with me.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Marina. Notes. Who would like to start? Abby. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. First of all, like, well done for doing it without a slide deck. I feel like it’s a lot to remember, and you just did it really calmly. You didn’t even stumble at all.

So that’s really cool. I have, like, some very specific notes. No. I’m not trying to be, like, nitpicky.

I just found it really helpful when I got specific notes. So Oh, please do. Yeah. I really like the superhuman sales generator.

I thought that was very cool. When you were talking about the optimization, you said about setting and forgetting it, like, and this is a note I’m gonna I’ve made for me as well. I’d love to hear, like, more, like, what because you just said it will go downhill. I could love to hear a bit of drama there, like, the worst case scenario if you don’t optimize.

When you were going through the diagnostic, it was quite high up. So where everybody is, I couldn’t actually see the top. So, like, it’s nice.

Like, we just the very, very top. So I just like to, yeah, make sure it’s lower down.

When you’re going through the activate, like, the open rates, click rates, I would have quite liked benchmarks. Like, I know it’s it’s always difficult with benchmarks because, like, everybody’s a different. But when you’re just saying, like, oh, if you’re getting, like, some some opens, it’s kinda I think a bit of specificity there would have been helpful.

And then yeah. Like, I guess, like, a bigger note with the I didn’t feel like there was, like, a very big clear promise. Like, it was kind of increasing the activations, but I’d love, like, something just a bit, like, sexier.

Like, a bit more like, really kind of selling that promise.

And then, like, this might just be a a meeting, but the with the three sections, you’ve got activate, sticky, and convert. Like, for my brain, I just love, like, three verbs. Like, the sticky just kind of like, even if it was just sticky, it just felt a little out of place for me.

And then when you were talking about support tickets, I loved that research point you gave that just really, like, build my confidence in you. I think just sharing those things really makes you seem like an expert.

But then you connected it to activate, instead of convert. And, like, I guess I can I can understand why it’s in the convert a bit, but I would like like you to kind of lay that out a bit? Like, this is why it has to do with conversions.

And then, yeah, just a really stupid thing, like, the traffic lights because you your your red was pink.

Like, I just because you said red, yellow, green. Like, I wanted to see red, yellow, green. But yeah. No. I thought it was really awesome. And like I said, it’s just, like, very impressive to me that you managed to remember all that without any slides or anything.

Thanks, Abby. Andrew?

Yeah. Cool. Just, great job, Marina.

Just a couple quick fire rapid fire thoughts. I thought that maybe, there might have been, like, compared to Abby with talking about, like, this kind of sales pitch part of it, there might have been a little bit of, like, an overcorrection that might have just been for me. But, like, there’s something you said in the beginning about, like, talking about, like, who you work best best with. And it for whatever reason, it felt to me, like, maybe a little bit too early, to to bring that piece in about telling, like, telling us who you work best with because we’re about to, like, get ready to learn from you. That might just be my opinion. Curious to hear what others say.

And I think there also might be some some work to do around, like, smoothing out the part where, like, I can tell that there’s, a part in the beginning where you were talking about, like, who you’ve worked with and that it wasn’t, like, exactly, like, who you’ve worked with isn’t exactly who you want to work with or something like that. And I I don’t necessarily have a good solution, but there was something Yeah. About that that sounded a bit tentative and sent sent a little bit of a signal that, like, you don’t do this all the time kind of thing. Again, might have just been my my opinion.

And I just felt like maybe it raised a little bit of an objection that I didn’t necessarily have. Like, I kind of assumed that you’re the expert, and then it was like, oh, wait. Like, now she’s telling me that she hasn’t worked with with those, with companies like mine or something like that that I don’t have an elegant solution for you yet.

And, two more quick things. One was along with what Abby said, I think that you could dive a little bit deeper into, like, what the problems are. You said something about, like, this you know, paying for space in my CRM. I could be wrong because I don’t know this audience or I don’t know this problem all that well, but, like, I feel like maybe that’s not the biggest manifestation of the problem is, like, they’re not really worried about space in their CRM. They’re worried about, like, getting more money.

And I agree with Abby that having some specific percentages around open rates and click rates, like, rather than just letting it feel like being left to their sub subjective opinion of how they’re doing. I think it can be really helpful to give me some percentages. Like, I think people love benchmarks and knowing, like, where they stand in comparison to other people.

On the reviews part of convert, I felt like that would be a good opportunity to bring in some data because there definitely is data to support the point that you’re making that people look at reviews. So if you had something where you could be, like, you know, x percent of people, say that the of b to b buyers, you know, say that they consult reviews before, making purchase decisions. Something like that could back that claim up.

And I think you could also get a little bit more granular there. Like you said, like, three, you’re kind of, like, yellow.

I feel like there’s a big difference between, like, someone who’s, like, three point nine, rated and someone who’s, like, four point six, or even, like, four point two and four point six. So I feel like you might be able to get a little bit more granular there, and I think that would make me feel like you’re more of an expert if you do, like like, to the to the tenth.

Like, what what signals, good versus bad. But, yeah, I think that’s about it for me. Hope that’s helpful.

Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Todd, you had your hand up and then you put it down. So down?

Yep. I’m here.

Sure I’m here. Can everyone hear me? Because I had to restart. Cool. Yeah. Just didn’t wanna clutter it too much.

Mine are basically what everyone else just said. Pretty much the triangle was cut off. I’m really happy that the red, buzzed pink because I am colorblind.

So I was like, oh, okay.

The only thing for me really, there’s a lot of information.

So, again, everyone’s on on point. The only thing I would say, and it’s just because I come from a PR thing, is, to spell out certain words like daily active users, I think, weekly active users, maybe, time to sale. Just because they’re looking at so much information, if they can see it spelled out, it’s a quick reference for them.

And I think as well, I would say, I think you mentioned I don’t know your current situation at one point for clients, and I you you do, though. You’re the expert. So you do know their situation. You have been in that spot.

I would just maybe, if you want, you know, use a use I always call it pays off. Just maybe agitate it. You know? If you’re like some of my clients and give them a quick solution and agitate it, that’s the only thing.

I would say it was it was great. And I’ll be honest, everyone everyone says slow down here, but we are trying to bolt through this workshop. So I think that’s a given. But, yeah, if you can keep it in your mind just to keep your speech just kinda level throughout.

Also, I wanted to say though, great energy. That was really, really good energy. You had you came in with a smile. You came in with a pen and note, and you just kept great energy throughout.

So that was that’s basically it for me. So good job. Well done, Rena.

Thanks, Todd. Claire?

Yeah. I have two notes. The first one was on the product reviews.

I am not I’ve never worked with a company that has had less than four stars.

So I but I have worked with plenty of companies. We’ve had very few reviews and trouble getting reviews.

So I wonder if that’s also not a good signal of, like, review help, to maybe talk about is something that’s more universal. But, again, I don’t know your specific ICP or personas, so that might be useful. They’re showing me the support tickets.

I have haven’t seen people write into support angry. That’s not an emotion I’ve, like, heard of, but they do write in very confused and overwhelmed.

Also, I worry that your CMO doesn’t care that much about support and their outcomes, but is more, like, I guess, self centered. Like, if they can be the hero, great. But it’s not like a priority for them to remove all of support’s messages.

But if you tie supports like, if you tie that overwhelm and confusion of support, through to the time to sale, or time to value as you as you well did, like, in a more I wanna say in a stronger way, that could be really powerful.

Because support reviews are kind of emotional things for for people to fail at.

Awesome. Perfect. Thanks, Katie.

Hey, Marina. I thought you did a really great job.

Like Todd said, really appreciated your energy and, yeah, just like the comfort that you brought to talking about all of this. Like, props for doing it, some slides. The only thing so I agree with a lot of the feedback you’ve already gotten. The only thing that I found that nobody’s mentioned so far was just at the end. You said if your team doesn’t have capacity, and I feel like that can’t be the only thing that their team doesn’t have. Like, it’s, you know, strategy, vision, you know, and capacity, like, on top of that. So just, like, sure capacity is part of the equation, but not obviously not the only thing that they’re lacking.

Yeah. Thanks, Katie.

Agreed. I think one of the I think we’re out of everybody giving feedback, so I’ll jump in with mine. In addition to what everybody has said, yeah, definitely do check when you share your screen. Just make sure, because nobody will tell you. Like, none of us told you. Right? Because we’re all trying to not interrupt you.

So, yeah, double check. Never hurts.

Okay. You’re selling email, but where but but there was, like, very little push on how awesome email is for businesses.

So, for me, I feel like you you really quickly glossed over anything you had done with Bitly.

Spend some time there. Like, you’ve rewritten countless emails in their life cycle, series.

You’ve mapped a customer journey. You have seen that people get lost. Lots of leads get lost, and there’s real expense there. And yet all I really heard was, like like, twelve seconds max about Bitly and QR code generator.

What? Like, that’s anybody in that audience finds this a sexy topic. So you’re allowed to nerd out and spend some time here. So, like, spend time on that. Bring it back to money. Bring it back to how they’re spending money on bringing people into their flow, trying to attract trial users, and then they’re just sitting there. So have an opinion, and make it all about money because the right people will be sitting in the audience going like, shit.

Yeah. And that’s what you want instead of, oh, yeah. She seems nice.

Like, that’s not the point.

Yeah.

Right? Exactly. Abby’s message there. So you are minimizing the stuff that you need to really emphasize, And when you don’t emphasize it, the other parts land wrong because we haven’t heard that you’re an authority yet, and we haven’t got on side with you yet.

So when you say it’s twenty thousand dollars to start and then five thousand a month, we drop off. Right? Like, what are you talking about? What do you even do?

And because you don’t have slides, it’s very hard to go along with that. Right? Like, it’s hard to keep up, so you need if you’re not sharing a visual, you have to really talk through everything.

Like, make it clear, still have energy. And then there’s times when you just do want to share, I mean, you’re not slides. So I was looking up this thing, and this is I’ve talked a bit about how I’m gonna reward myself with this training at some point.

It’s not open right now. Let me just share this with you in chat.

You know, use the Stream Deck and a few other things. And, so you don’t have to show slides on the screen, but you can pop up things on your screen, and I want you to play with that.

Not necessarily take this, but just, like, follow inside the show and start looking at some of the things that they do. Because with a Stream Deck and a little plugin for Zoom, you can, like, hit a button and the Bitly logo pops up next to you. Right? So there are cool things you can do just like that.

You can pull in a testimonial and flash it on the screen from somebody. So it doesn’t have to be a slide deck, but unless you’re going to take a lot of time really driving things home, you need something on the screen. I also think you need, to show me some emails. Like, here are some examples of emails that I’ve written.

Just really ground me in as a member of your audience and, like, oh, okay. Okay. When she talks about this kind of email, here’s what she means.

So okay. Couple more things. Take a few breaks for breath.

Set more things up upfront too. Just like, if you have your water here with you, that’s great. We’re gonna settle in for twenty five minutes. We’re gonna do some drawing. I’m not gonna share a lot of slides.

Make sure you stop for water. I’m gonna stop every so often. Just, like, set that up up front, and then you can stop.

And you can pretend you’re drinking water and just take a fucking breath. Like, just take a breath, but I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like.

Definitely need a promise up front. Dig into the pain. Set up the desire.

I have a few more notes that I can’t read here. I don’t understand on the triangle, what product review rating and support tickets will have to do with you doing the work later. So you’re gonna go through and make sure that support doesn’t get tickets.

You’re gonna do work to increase their product reviews, but you’re really just saying, no. No. Once you have active activated users, these things will all go up. But if if you’re not working on it and it’s on the model, that’s like a flag.

And if you ignore it, it’s gonna be it’s gonna continue to be like but it’s never gonna feel right for you and maybe even for them. So rethink the convert part. There’s no money showing anywhere on your model. Where at what point?

Like, I’m like, where’s the when do I get the money from them? Like, I want the money from them.

So I would think through that as well. But overall, I mean, I think it’s good. You just need to spend more time on things so we really, really get what you can do. And that also means you have to get what you can do. So go over the stuff that you’ve done in Bitly and QR code generator and, like, come up with your cheat sheet of awesome that you, like, need to remember, and it’ll help you.

Cool?

Everything else everybody else said agreed as well.

Oh, yeah. No. I won’t worry about that. But, yeah, I drew a dollar sign with, like, circles around it galore.

Like, where’s the money? Where’s the money? This is the path we’re able to make money. Help them see that.

Okay. That is all.

Thanks, Marina. Any notes or thoughts, Marina or Abby so far? Or, Abby, go ahead.

Can I just ask a quick question? So because I noticed when I did the diagnostic, I, like, wrote it out and then went and did the review, and then read and I just went straight into the view.

I was just wondering, like No.

Agreed. It was actually one of my bigger notes too. I’m not ready to diagnose as I’m going through. Agreed. First, draw the model, tell them about it, and then walk them through. Now we’re gonna diagnose where you’re at.

Yeah. Not as you go. I was I was actually I lost interest a little bit, because I didn’t know, like it doesn’t feel right. So and that could be just for me because I know how it’s supposed to be presented.

But, yeah, just so you know, just do it the way it’s taught. First, you die first, you document everything. Show them the thing so I can zoom out, see that there’s, like, a map of my life cycle right here. And then you can zoom into the parts and say, are you red, yellow, green here, and give your examples in there.

For example, you might be yellow if your numbers are this. Yeah. Totally agree. Thanks for bringing that up, Abby.

Okay.

Abby, Marina, how are you feeling?

Well, I’m glad I have not pitched anybody yet, and I’m thankful for all the feedback because it’s actually helpful Good.

Because I know what to do now. And I think it it is a confidence thing.

Mhmm. Like, as far as, like, pulling out and saying, oh, I’ve done this and that.

So I just need to You just need to write it down and look at it.

Put it on sticky notes all over the place then. Like, I know that might seem like gel.

Why not? If you need to build your confidence, build your confidence, like, actively. It doesn’t build itself.

No.

But I wanted to do this today so that I could get Oh, and you did great. Let me be very clear.

Feedback. Totally.

Because I was just trying to follow that form formula that you add, and I was like, okay. Are these actually my words? I’m like, I’m just gonna do the thing, and then I can review. So thank you everybody for all the feedback. Super helpful.

And just to be clear, these notes are, like sometimes the the formula just needs to be adjusted for you. There are things that I mentioned to Abby for Abby to change, and I’m sure she’s like, but, Joe, I took that from what you taught me. Then she’s like, I’m just not gonna say anything, but this is annoying.

But so just know, like, that’s why we’re doing it live. Not to say, did you follow it exactly, but cool. Was cool. Here’s how you can make it cooler.

Yeah. Cool. Abby, how are you doing?

Yeah. I’m glad I did it because I was like, okay. If I if I, like, book it Monday, then that means I’ll actually make the damn thing. So, yeah, I think, like, tomorrow, I’m gonna start doing pitching five people every day and just see what happens and work on my closing because I know that’s my my week there anyway.

Love it. Amazing.

Okay. So we’ll take three minutes. We’ll be back at twenty two after the hour when Claire will be our final presenter.

Alright? Three minutes. Thanks, everyone.

Oh, a little bit overtime there.

Okay. We are back. We’re here. Good stuff. Ready? Where’s Claire? Claire’s not here. Karen. Oh, there you are.

I just like to lost it in calculation.

Awesome. Okay. Claire, are you ready to go?

I am ready.

I’m gonna stop this all by saying I’m very nuts for some bizarre reason. I was so confident up until, like, well, seven o’clock, which is when this started.

Okay. Wicked. Well, I’m excited. So, tell us who your ICP is, who you’re targeting this toward, and then we’ll dive in.

Sure. My ICP is pretty similar to Marina’s. So it is b to b SaaS companies within the twenty five to fifty million range, so a little bit tighter.

They are either doing a freemium or a free trial, sort of setup at the moment. And I’m talking specifically to the CMO or director of growth, head of growth, that kind of person.

Cool.

Awesome.

Then okay.

Okay.

Today, I’m gonna talk about onboarding your free trial and premium users so that more of them stick around, log back in tomorrow and the next day and the next because the reality is that eighty percent of the users that you’ve worked really hard to get through the front door and to click start trial or sign up now, eighty percent of those users don’t come back tomorrow. They try your product once, give you twenty minutes, and that’s it. They’re out the door, and they are never coming back, unless you can win them back. And using email is a great way to do that.

So specifically using triggered emails, I’ll explain more about that later, but it’s stepping away from the concept of timed emails and dripping things out slowly but surely and more than focusing on sending more relevant, messages at the right time and right context.

So this is gonna be a great use of your time if you are a CMO or head of growth at a b two b SaaS company doing around twenty to fifty million dollars a year.

Companies have worked with me to get results like a thirty seven percent lift in product adoption that was with Invoice Simple.

And then Synthesia has also worked with me to sorry.

For messaging optimization.

And I’ve also partnered with Forget the Funnel and worked on over twenty start ups, onboarding flows to optimize for their growth and retention.

So if this I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve caught email or that the email channel might be useful to you.

But there are some things that you need to remember. First, people do read. Else, LinkedIn wouldn’t exist, and it wouldn’t send you those annoying yet effective notifications to check your feed.

Secondly, you do not have to guess at what to put in your email, and you don’t have to worry that you’re going too long or too short, you’re including too many pictures, no pictures at all. All that is something that you can definitively answer through optimization and testing.

And then just so you know, email is also a seven billion dollar industry at the moment. So it is, again, really clear that people do still check their email inboxes.

Inboxes. So this is gonna be great if you are looking to improve your user activation, free to pay conversion rate, and ultimately conversion, what I’m not gonna do is give you another template or the two minute secret to a sixty eight percent reduction in churn.

This is going to be a bit of a hands on workshop, so get a pen and paper ready while I continue talking.

What we’re gonna walk through today is something called the overpowered onboarding framework. Now if you haven’t heard about what overpowered means, it is a term used for superheroes, and it basically means a character or an object that is so powerful it makes the game easy.

So Superman would be a great example of an overpowered character, and this is going to be something that really makes the email channel easy. It’s gonna answer all the questions and make it simple for you to prioritize what to do next.

So it’s not gonna be a game changer for your acquisition, but rather a game changer for your activation.

Okay. Let me go ahead and share my screen, and we can get into it.

There we go.

Alrighty.

Can everyone see my screen?

Yes. Okay.

Alright. So first step is to draw a big old circle.

Don’t worry if your circle is not perfect. That would prove to you’re insane.

And then another circle on the inside.

Here, I’m gonna write down and say our goal for today is a thirty percent lift in free to paid paid. You’re wondering how much that’s worth if you have, say, ten thousand users who are, signing up and actually paying every month, and they’re on on average paying seventy nine or sixty nine dollars each, then a thirty percent lift is equivalent monthly lift is equivalent to just over two hundred thousand dollars worth of revenue. So it’s a pretty big difference that you could be getting very, very quickly.

One of the best things about onboarding people effectively is that that revenue actually stacks up because your retention naturally increases now that your users fully understand and realize the value that you’re giving them.

Next is to draw a nice Mercedes symbol because we are winners.

And I’m just gonna go ahead and label, so please label with me as we go. Up at the top, we have foundation.

This is what sets the tone for your entire onboarding flow and what is a great foundation.

Next up, we have conversation, which is where you start talking to your oh, talking and writing is difficult. Conversation, let’s just pretend I wrote that correctly.

Where you are, actually talking to your customers and convincing them that creating this great idea. And then finally, on the left, we have personalization.

Sorry, optimization.

Alright. We’re gonna go ahead and divide this diagram in hop again, just each section, a nice little line.

Up at the top, we have insight.

And down below, we have journey.

Next up, we have triggers, and then we have personalization.

Then we have tracking.

And finally, we have testing.

K. I’ll give you all a second to finish writing down.

If you have some colored pens nearby, please feel free to grab those. You can do red, for poor or not so great, orange for it’s kind of okay, and then green for everything is absolutely rosy. I’ll also give you some examples so you’ll know which one you want. If you don’t have colored pens nearby, feel free to do a star system. Just one, two, three stars, three for excellent, one for so good, and two for okay.

Alright. We’re changing over.

Okay. Scientists.

When you are struggling to understand your customers, that means that ultimately what you’re struggling to do is connect your what with your why.

So insight predominantly consists of customer interviews, customer surveys. You could even do some social listening.

You could even do some analysis of your heat maps, basically understanding what people are doing.

You could keep recording and analyzing your demo calls or your sales calls. All of that stuff gives you insight into who you’re talking to, what they value, and what they care about most. So if you’re currently doing one or more of those and you are, actually analyzing it with a regular occurrence, then you can go ahead and give yourself a green. If you are recording things, but maybe not finding the time to analyze them because you’ve got a million other things on your plate, which is totally understandable, think of yourself in orange. And if you haven’t conducted any kind of customer research in the last six to twelve months, that would be a red.

Alright. Next up is journey.

So the customer journey is a very well known phenomenon at this point. It is, however you’re currently tracking it, what you need to hit on for your onboarding is to understand at what points your customer is seeing value. So if you have a customer journey map that walks someone that walks you through exactly where your users are seeing value when they sign up, fantastic.

Give yourself a green. If you’re not so sure and you’re kind of implementing a bit of guesswork, chances are that guesswork is gonna bleed over into the rest of the circle. Right? You’re gonna stop making more and more educated guesses, and they’re gonna start getting less and less educated and more and more guessy.

So give yourself an orange there, that’s something to look at. And if you are not sure about your customer journey at all, you’ve maybe undergone a lot of changes recently, a lot of product updates, If you saw a red, that’s something to prioritize.

Onto triggers.

So historically, we’ve all we’re all very familiar with sending out timed emails. Right? Those are the direct emails sent to you. Maybe you get eight, when you sign up to a new product.

The thing with timed emails is that their quality degrades exceptionally quickly. So sorry. Not quality, but their their metrics. So the open rate, the click through rate, how many people even look at them in their inbox. So if you’re sending more than three emails in a in a row to someone without any kind of interaction from them, so you’re not triggering any, chain reaction in your in your email marketing system, then that would be a red.

If you are sending, emails that are email chains or sequences that are for emails or less, so maybe you’ve only got one welcome sequence and it’s for emails. That’s great. That’s an orange.

If you are sending triggered emails, so you’re tracking your product, you’re tracking your product.

Usage. Sorry about that. You’re tracking your product usage, seeing what features they’re using, what what they’re actually onboarding onto. Maybe if you have multiple products within your within your software suite, then you could trigger emails based on how they sign up to things and and play around. You could also be triggering Winmax, when someone doesn’t hit a certain, beat of of your customer journey, that would be a green.

Next up, personalization.

So it’s very easy to generalize an email and very easy to say something very generic. Right? And the problem of saying things that are generic is that they’re specific to absolutely nobody.

For example, let’s say you are and this is a situation that I ran into with a client the other day. Right? They are serving lots of different types of businesses with lots of different types of use cases. Now the triggers are all the same, but the context is slightly different because these businesses are different types of businesses. We have a food truck or a nail salon.

So instead of saying businesses for every email here, how is how are things going in your business? We say, how are things going in your food truck? How are things going at your nail salon? It’s much more specific, much more personalized.

And that kind of attention to detail is what gets your open rates higher, your click through rates higher.

So if you are personalizing the if you’re personalizing your emails, then you can go ahead and, give yourself a green for segmenting by use case. Right? So if you’re separating people out into use cases like I just described, it could be yourself agree.

If you are not doing anything beyond maybe the name that’s getting personalized in every email and perhaps you’re also doing a trial date in every email, then you can go ahead and give yourself an orange. You’re on the way.

If you’re not doing anything at all, give yourself a red.

Alright. Onto tracking. Now most people are tracking the free to pay conversion rate.

That’s pretty common and pretty easy to do. Some people are also tracking the product adoption rate. Now if you haven’t bumped into that term yet, it’s another fun acronym. You know, marketers love them.

But the product adoption rate or PAI is what we use to tell if someone has truly adopted the software. Doesn’t mean that they’re paying for it yet, but they’ve adopted it. So, for example, Slack only considers someone debated, if they hit the product adoption indicator of getting sort of sending two thousand messages. Right? Anything less, they are not considered activated.

So are you tracking your free to page? Are you tracking your, product adoption indicator? If so, great. You are currently in orange. To take you to green, you will need to be tracking a few more details, something like the engagement rate, how often people are logging back into your software, how long they’re taking to get to various stages of their customer journey, and then as well as their time to value. Right? How long does it take for them to create ultimately?

K. So hopefully that was clear to you all.

Next up is testing.

Testing is really where the magic happens. Right?

So if you are not currently testing, then you’re probably really struggling with the guesswork that’s started over at Journey.

If you if you haven’t really looked at your welcome email in six to twelve months, Your new newest user who signed up, like, three seconds ago has just read it. Right?

Testing means that you can continuously maintain and optimize your results. And if you don’t test, the thing that will happen is that your, your metrics will just slowly decline. It’s like a slow gradual hill of sadness. And at the end of that sadness hill is, unfortunately, the sandbox, which is exceptionally difficult to get out of.

So in testing, you are doing a great job if you are currently checking on your open rate and click through rates every and deliverability every month.

You are also possibly, making some hypotheses about your customers, testing those up, disproving them, or approving them.

If you’re not doing that, but you are checking on things monthly just to see how things are going, or maybe, you have pretty regular product updates, which means that you’re going to be checking.

It means you’re gonna be updating your emails fairly regularly with new screenshots or new messaging, then that’s great. Give yourself a orange. If you’re not doing any testing at all, then you’d be a red.

So this is the onboarding to, the show about onboarding framework.

And it’s great. It’s a circle because you are going to start way back at inside once you’ve gone all the way around and keep going around, keep optimizing, and keep improving with time. And that ultimately is what makes that thirty percent lift a recurring lift rather than just a one sole win.

Alright.

So I haven’t practiced the closing very much.

In true honesty so let me just get my notes. Alright. By this point, you shall know, should know what’s getting in your way the most. Right? It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with a hundred different things, grabbing your focus. And the last thing you wanna do is walk into your next boardroom meeting and give your presentation and watch your CEO kinda glaze over in confusion as you go over the numbers in immaculate detail.

So now you know where to put your focus. You know how to explain what’s going wrong, what’s going right, and how you’re gonna improve it. If that’s something that you need help with or that you’d like to outsource, then you are welcome to book a call with me. I will pop it kindly into a spreadsheet slideshow later on for you to go ahead and click on.

And I’ve lost my track completely. I’m very sorry, but thank you.

Thanks, Claire.

Alright. Okay. Notes for Claire. Who’s up first?

Yeah.

I’ll I’ll I’ll go.

Yeah. Claire, I thought that was that was really good. Like, you’re so funny. I really wanna get coffee with you.

And we can work on our, like, shy girl energy together.

But yeah. No. It was really engaging. That was really fun. I took quite a few, like, notes or just bits I really like. Like, I love the overpowered onboarding framework. And if you do use that tool that Joe said when you, like, describe Superman, if you have a Superman come up, I just love that so much.

There was a bit when you’re talking about insights and you’re talking insights. Sorry. You’re talking about the customer research that you could do. You say you could do this. I kinda wanna be told, like, what I should do, not what I could do.

And then when you’re talking about personalization, like, that just felt like a really good place for a case study to just when you’re saying about specificity, if you could just say I did this for so and so.

And I thought the fact that it’s a circle is brilliant, like, the ongoing going round and round. Like, really, really like that. So, yeah, it it was good. And if you do wanna, like, work on the clothes together, because I just I just get so shy when, like, I’d be happy to do that.

Oh, and just another thing as well, like, because you seem to get a lot more confident as you went on. Like, that’s why I always use a slide deck at the beginning because it just I don’t know. It just makes me feel which, you know, maybe I need to go over that this well. But, yeah, just a tip if if you, like, need something at the beginning to yeah.

But, anyway, I thought it was really good.

That’s so helpful. Thank you. I have a quick question. I don’t just okay.

I went back and forth between personalizing personalization and segmentation for emails and ultimately decided that personalization is very different to segmentation, obviously, and that if different segments are identified in the insights area or the customer journey area, that those should have their own circle. So it’s like other circles for other for other, segments.

Does that track with everyone, or is that sounding fairly confusing and counterintuitive?

So you’re saying so you’re saying this is the core model, and then you’d have a separate one for the personalization part of the model. Like, let’s dig into that, and here’s what that looks like? No.

Like like a big circle is, like, the main say that’s their main identified job to be done. They know very clearly who they’re targeting, But they have all these little satellite ones to the side, which on that important.

Our first engagement would be focusing on the main one. But in future, if they realize that one of their satellites is actually a bit bigger than they thought, we could do the same thing for that one, but it would be a whole new process.

Yeah.

So I don’t know if I’ll I can’t answer that, but what I can say is each one of these sections you have is likely to have its own thing that you would draw. So insights, As you dig in and you’re working with the client more and more, then you’ll do you’ll help their team get up to speed on what you mean by how to tell if we’re doing insight right. So you’ll have a new model that’s, like, breaking down insight, and that might be speaking to, like, the satellite thing that you’re talking to.

But I wouldn’t I wouldn’t draw a satellite in here. I wouldn’t say anything more about these other parts. I might just call it personalization and segmentation just for the sake of, like, simplicity here with your audience.

But don’t I wouldn’t have more stuff going off the side.

You’ve also, like, the circle is in segments, so you could even say, like, the sec you know, segmentation is part of it.

That’s That’s cute.

Little orange segments. Cute. Awesome. Okay. Any other notes for Claire? Katie?

Hey, Claire. Just like kudos for putting yourself out there and doing it. I thought you did really well.

Okay. So things I thought were great. I love when you said, like, how much that’s worth and have that concrete number of, like like, we’re talking about a thirty percent lift, but here’s the what that would be worth to you. I thought that was a great way of bringing the money in.

And I’m sure, like yeah. I don’t know, not much about your client history, but I’m sure that there is room to bring in other case studies. But I did like how you had the food truck versus hair salon example just to give me something concrete, to work with when you’re talking about the personalization.

I also like the example with Slack. Like, Slack doesn’t consider, was it product adoption metric reached until two thousand messages?

So one thing I thought you could work on was, and I’m just looking at myself. Like, I don’t think I have actually had any other, like, changes. But I wrote the drama that moment that you talked about, like, your you have looked in your onboarding emails for six months, but the person who just signed up looked at them a few minutes ago.

I just felt like that’s such a good moment, and I felt like it needed a little bit more build up to really hammer home, like, what kind of, you know, how we, like, build up that moment of high attention. Like, why does that matter?

What is that worst case scenario? Like, what are the implications of that, versus just, like, locating me in that moment, but not really, like, having me realize why it has been important for me to inhabit from that moment. Does that make sense? So, like okay.

So I’m thinking about that. I’m like, oh, shit. Yeah. Who knows if I have, like, COVID references in my in my onboarding emails or something?

But if that new user looks at it, what is what is that irrelevant is going to cost me, basically.

Yeah. And then so I just wonder I have a question mark if that if where you at it was the best place for that or if building that moment up more towards the end could be a great segue into your pitch of, like, this is your worst case scenario.

Don’t have that. Hire me. So maybe moving that from where you had it, I believe you had that within testing.

I wasn’t really clear on its relevance to testing. I saw it as more of, like, keeping your onboarding fresh and, you know, optimized.

So for me, it just felt like it should have been pulled out of testing and then use more as that pivot into your closed.

Does that make sense?

That makes total sense. Yeah. So I pull it out of the pull it out of the circle and use it for the close?

Use it to the pivot. Yeah.

That’s so helpful. Thank you. Because I have no idea how to transition. That’s kinda where I went like, oh, crap. It’s done. What?

Do you know?

That’s really helpful. Thank you.

Perfect. Thanks, Katie. Marina.

Hey, Claire.

You’ve got so many gems in there, and I was like, oh, that’s how you could say that. Oh, that’s how you could say that. But I had to listen so carefully because they were sort of hidden in just, like, I think a little bit of, like, vocal variety or, change in speed of saying things or, like, varying the energy so that, like, you’ve got a ton of good things in there. And I was like, oh, that’s really cool.

That if they just, like I know you’re nervous. I get it. You’re probably probably throwing up too.

Maybe I’m projecting. But, anyway I don’t know.

But but it would totally then it would be like these little zingers, And then you’ve got, like, this wicked under, like, quiet sense of humor that then it would bring that out too. And so then I I don’t know. I just think you’ve got a lot of good things going in there. And it’s kind of like, maybe just think about it as taking a highlighter mentally and go going, okay. I need to highlight these bits and, like, really, like, come out a bit more instead of ending, like, with your kind of, like, a question.

Right? And just Yeah. Yeah. This is me telling you. So this like, I’m try I I’m not one to talk.

But seeing it in yours, I was like, oh, okay. She could totally if you’re just, like, pushing this one little bit and pushing this one little bit. And I can’t remember all the things because I was, like, listening and going, oh, that’s how you can include something without it coming across seeming like, you were bragging on yourself, but it didn’t come across as like, oh, I’m so great, and I did this in a bad way. It came across as like, oh, she knows what she’s she’s talking about.

But then just, like, zing it out a little bit more so I don’t have to, like, listen for it quite so deeply, if that makes sense.

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I I I’m really grateful for that feedback. It’s so specifically helpful.

Sun Sinic actually has a new course I’m presenting, which I’m desperate to do.

Yeah. He’s so convincing.

Yes.

Anyway, nice nice work. Obviously, lots of work has gone into it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks, Marina. Todd.

Yeah. Mine is pretty quick, Claire. And I could be wrong. It might not be relevant, but I believe you spoke to email as a seven billion dollar industry.

And, you know, I will kinda just look at Joe for this one. In ten x emails, you speak to for every, know, every dollar you spend on email marketing, and the average return is, like, forty four dollars and twenty five cents or something. So maybe it could be a setup for ADA as you move them through. Like, did you know if you do this, you get this back?

And let them know, like, there’s not just we’re not just selling your service, but you should expect a return on what you’re getting kind of idea and just set them up. Like, you’re the expert again in it and just like, yeah. Come with me, and this is not a cost. This is an investment kind of idea and just really set it up because you’ve talked to such a big number.

But if you can bring that back and just put that in their in their court and let them know, like, we’re expensive for a reason kind of idea, but I’m not sure if that’s relevant or not.

Love that. Agreed. I think there were a few number of points in there that needed more, like, push on. That’s one of them. Your line eighty percent don’t come back. I wrote down and circled like, damn, that’s terrifying.

Eighty percent don’t come back.

So there are a lot of moments there. I was like, if you need calculators, you need, like, to show what that adds up to, how much you spent only to have them vanish. Like, no wonder marketing looks flat.

You early on, you picked a fight sort of with blast emails, but then it wasn’t until you were getting to the trigger part of the model that you really dug into why, like, a broadcast or blast email isn’t as good as a triggered one. I would have liked you to pick a fight with it earlier and then just continue the fight when you get to triggers.

So, like, bring me into the problem with blast or broadcast emails, which the vast majority of these people are doing.

So why they should stop doing that.

What else have we got?

You said it’s a game changer for activation, but not for acquisition. And I didn’t know why you bring up acquisition at all, just, like, focus on activation when you were talking about the overpowered onboarding framework. You’re like, this is a game changer for activation.

It is not for act for acquisition. It’s like, shush. Shush. Don’t talk about acquisition. No. No. That’s not actually activating.

I’ve got a great diagram if we have, like, a few minutes afterwards that I wanted to quickly If it shows up on the slide, then that’s one thing.

But I’m like, I don’t know if you’ve read straight line selling. I’m talking about it a lot these days, the Jordan Belfort book. But, it’s it’s what he would call Pluto.

So it’s too far out. Don’t bring come back. Come back. Let’s not talk about that part.

I also thought that you could okay. Two things and we’ll wrap up.

You did get more confident as you went. I totally noticed that. The more you practice, the more the parts are, like, second nature to you, the better and more engaging the whole thing is. And I know you hadn’t practiced the clothes or things like that, so that’s fair.

But just know that if it ever feels like, is it even worth it? The more you practice it, the you’ll it’ll be a natural thing. You are funny, and you’re friendly and likable. There’s a lot of good stuff there, but now we just gotta nail your delivery.

Like, that’s it. Just practice a bunch of times.

The thirty percent lift in the middle, I’d love to see you pause, and I think you’ll do that more as you get more chill with, like, presenting like this.

What’s nice about, like, Abby’s five k in the middle is it’s a number that I want. I want that number. Thirty seven thirty percent lift is not yet a number. It’s just like this wonder like, this great idea.

I would love you to be able to before you even draw your model, to put them through a very simple calculation, and just say, like, look. Don’t worry. We’re not using this for, like, the wrong purposes. Just set up just put context around it, but what you want is them to have a number to put in the middle of the circle.

So if you can help them do the calculation of what a thirty percent lift would look like and then extrapolate that, like, maybe say, okay. Now annual. Like, just figure it out how you can get that number in the middle to look really compelling. Like, oh, I could make eight thousand dollars a day, and I’m currently making four dollars a day.

That sounds awesome. Thanks.

But if you can do the calculation now, I’m, like, very keen on this instead of thirty percent lift.

My final note here is I’m not in love with some of the word choices across the model.

Foundation threw me because it was up high, and I want a foundation to be down low.

So I’m like, no. That’s a sky up there. I’m very literal.

But I thought that you could do a, like, a SaaS sweep.

Now that you’ve got these six parts in place with their three labels, go back through and make it feel what words can you use? Because right now, what we have for foundation conversation optimization, insights, journey, triggers, personalization, tracking, and testing, that’s all like, a course creator could follow the same thing, and an ecommerce business could follow the same thing. Right?

Lower journey might be replaced with funnel if you were really getting into it for, like, a specific course creator group. So to me, it felt too generic still. It feels like, good. You’ve got this, like, poor model in place. Now let’s SaaSify it. Now that twenty five to fifty million dollar group, what words will feel better?

Foundation doesn’t feel right.

Conversation might.

Optimization does, I think. But then inside of that, insight, I want you to work on that word.

Journey is good. Triggers are good. You already know you’re gonna work on personalization and segmentation and figure that out. Tracking and testing, can you do something that feels more if you know these people are using intercom, for example, intercom e language.

So, like and that’s your job. Just sweep through it and see if you can make it sound more sassy so I can see myself. Sassy this sassy, not Stacy’s sassy. But so I can see myself as a SaaS founder or marketer or whatever when I look at this model.

Does that make sense?

Just a little more pointed on your word choice.

Okay. That’s super helpful because I I like I’ve taken it way back. Do you know how how long it took to get like three shuns?

Sorry.

What did you say?

Three shuns. Three, like, activation. What is it? Conversation, foundation.

Oh, the shuns. Foundation. Oh, I see.

Yeah. But I can find a new shuns. I’ve done it now.

Find a new shuns. There are more shuns.

Yeah. K. Cool.

I’m a new shin.

Awesome. Good. How are you feeling, Claire?

Great. Great. Yeah. I’m really really excited to actually do this well.

Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got a really good starting point here. And, oh, Todd.

Nice job. Nice way to finish the meeting.

You’ve got great case studies too. Oh, one other note, the over twenty startups with, on the or onboarding flows with Forget the Funnel. I don’t know that you have to say it with Forget the Funnel because I’m just gonna go look up Forget the Funnel. So just say, like, twenty more onboarding flows. Like, wow. It’s a lot of onboarding flows.

Yeah. Nobody’s listening anymore because there’s a puppy in the room. So, we’re just gonna go look at the puppy now. But good job, Claire and Marina and Abby. Thank you. Well done, everybody. And thanks for giving your notes as well and tuning in to help your fellow to help your peers out here.

Good. Alright.

So next month kicks off a whole new month for, Coffee School Pro. We’ll be posting about that very soon.

Cool. Awesome. And, Todd, you have to tell us about this puppy. What’s going on here?

Sorry. We she’s a week and two days old, and we’re renovating the house. We’re actually getting a podcast studio ready for me in the basement, and, she sleeps at my feet. She’s on her little bed.

And, yeah, she’s she’s a great little dog. She’s learning quickly. And she’s just been at my feet all things, so I you might see me looking down. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but she just woke up.

So yeah. And she’s licking me like crazy.

So She is. But she’s got those little shark teeth too.

Yeah. She’s got little pearls as Tina said.

Oh my gosh. What’s her name?

Patty. Patty. Patty. Patty. The patty.

Yeah. Patty? Yeah. It’s a yeah. It’s a new dog for us. So, yeah, she’s she’s a great dog.

So Oh. Try and sorry if I interrupted everyone.

It’s just It’s end of meeting.

I’m amazed you were able to hold off this whole time.

Oh, it’s tough. You have no idea when she’s at my feet and she’s, like, nudging me with a bone, and then she’s nudging me with a toy, then another toy, and then she’s out cold and looking at her. So, yeah.

Oh, so cute.

So cute. Well, I saw your two as well.

So Oh, yes.

They just came in from Yeah.

Playing out at the lake.

Yeah. We’ll do it. Tina was the first one to meet her, I believe, as well. Uh-huh. So yeah.

Patty. Yeah. Super cute.

Patty is welcome to the crew.

Absolutely.

Awesome.

Okay. Thanks, y’all. Thanks so much. Well done, everybody. If you haven’t worked on your workshop, go do it.

And if you have, keep practicing. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

Thank you.