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An event could be beneficial but sometimes overwhelming to the audience, especially when the organizer fails to deliver a core message. In this podcast, learn how you can make your event successful and get the results that you truly want.
Dan Dobos and James Schramko
In this podcast:
02:00 – Dan’s concept of offering funnels
03:05 – Can it work for you?
03:57 – The key to success is proof
04:20 – Wide and deep technique
06:09 – How to organize an event
07:00 – Marketers struggle with online events
07:28 – James’s experiment on his SEO services
08:20 – Handling too much volume on free events
09:30 – An ideal length for a seminar
10:08 – Dan’s topic on SuperFastBusiness Live
10:18 – Webinar vs. seminar
11:38 – Dave’s strategy before the event
13:08 – Educating people but not overwhelming them
14:13 – The key to the success of one seminar
15:32 – Know the process to become successful
15:53 – The key to getting a response
16:50 – James strategies on his own events
18:05 – What to do at the end of the seminar?
19:22 – Benefits of doing one-on-one
21:40 – Provide benefits to your audience’s challenges
22:30 – Understanding your customers’ pain
23:40 – Benefits of getting feedback
25:35 – Tailoring testimonials
27:22 – How to do things better
29:35 – What to do when someone responds to your lead generation process
31:40 – Traffic sources
34:46 – The key to keep growing
36:06 – The action steps
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Transcription:
James: James Schramko, here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. In our special guest series of interviews, I love to go find out interesting things from interesting people. And today’s topic is going to be very interesting.
We’re going to learn how to get 60 times more revenue from your campaigns. And this guest is not here for the first time, actually. My guest today has been here before. I’d love to welcome to the call, Dan Dobos from MentalBlank.com.
Dan: Good day, James, how are you doing?
James: Good. You know I got tremendous results from our first discussion where we talked about how to set up training programs so that people can get more from them instead of the traditional step by step mentality. And I’ve had so many occasions to refer people to that training especially within my own Mastermind and my coaching community where I teach people how to put together courses. I learned a lot from that so I’m delighted to have you back.
Dan: Awesome.
James: Now, once I was presenting at an event in Melbourne and you came up to me afterwards and you said, “That was pretty good but you know, there’s a few things you could do differently.” And I’ve always appreciated that about you. You do have a different way of looking at things. You’ve conducted yourself differently in business as well to the typical person.
But what we’re going to be talking about today is your process for, I guess, changing the way that online marketers approach their offer funnel. I guess we’d call it something like that. And I’d love you to sort of outline a little bit for us the concept of what we will be talking about.
The “60 times more revenue” concept
Dan: Sure thing. So, the basic idea is that if you have a website and you’re generating leads through that website, let’s say you have an amazing sales page that converts at, say, 5%, which is making you a hero. And let’s assume you’re selling an $80 product, so, that’s one way of doing things. But if you were to funnel those same leads instead of to an online sales page, but if you were to actually get them to come to a live event, and at that live event which we presently run, we will convert 50% of the attendees to a $480 dollar product.
So, if you do the numbers on that, 50% is 10 times more than 5% and $480 is 6 times more than the $80 product. So the impact is that with the same number of leads, you’re actually able to produce 60 times the revenue.
James: Great. It’s a good concept. Now, who does this work for?
Dan: I think it works for anyone who has a product with information because the basic idea of all sales is that you want to get trust and you want to prove yourself, and a seminar is a great way of proving yourself by delivering that really high quality information, showing people you know your stuff. And then they go, “Look, this guy knows his stuff.” Like, one of the things that we do is we say, “Look, there are 7 things that you need to know to be successful.”
Our particular industry is high school students. And so, we say, “There’s 7 strategies that you need to know, and we do have limited time here, I want you to get the most you possibly can out of today so we’re going to focus on one of them.” So, it’s all good content. It’s not sales-y nonsense. It is there to really add value.
And really, what I find is that the key to success is proof. I mean, anyone can talk, anyone can say that they sound good or that they’re good but at the end of the day, if you can actually prove to someone that they’re on point A, you’ve taken them on a journey, and now they’re on point B and point B is higher than point A, it’s a very compelling proposition to actually continue that journey.
The “wide and deep” technique
James: Yeah. And you don’t strike me as a sales-y person. I love your technique. I call this “wide and deep” which is something that I learned from a very skilled presenter. I made the mistake when I started presenting at seminars of having like 7 points and trying to cover off as much as I could about each of the 7 so I was cramming too much content.
It was making people get sore arms writing notes but I was still giving so much of a solution that I pretty much left them paralyzed and unable to take further action because they’re like, “Yeah, this is fantastic stuff but I’m like a python…”
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
James: “…that’s, you know, eaten a small animal and I don’t need anything else for now. I’ve got to go and choke on this for a while.” So I like the concept. Going wide is to outline all of the things you can talk about and then going deep on just one shows how capable you are in just one. And I guess, mentally, we’re just doing the arithmetic.
Well, if you can go this deep on one topic and you have six other topics, there must be a huge amount of information that I could access by moving forward into your program. So, it’s a very clever strategy. Now other things that come to mind, we’ve talked about why you might want to do this – you’re going to get more revenue for your lead source.
Just as a side note, I think it’s fascinating you have come up with a way to make substantial revenue from the classic target market who has no money, because the high school student is really penniless to a large extent, and for the most part there, usually, umbilical corded to mom and dad, so you must be marketing also to the parents, I’m guessing.
Dan: Yes. Absolutely.
On finding a venue
James: Right. So, we know why we want to do this, we know what it is, let’s talk a little more on how this happens. Now, one of the things that springs to mind is that you must have a venue, and you must have a cost or a program of some sort that needs to roll out. Is this difficult?
Dan: It’s not difficult. You need to look into a few different venues. You definitely want to see the venue before you go there. And once you’ve booked the venue, it’s a question of really just getting people to register for the seminar. And then the next thing you need to think about is, once they’ve registered, to actually make them attend.
So a lot of people assume that just because they’ve filled in a form online, that they actually will attend. When it’s a free event, that’s not the case. You really do need to worry about getting the registered people to attend and there’s a separate process for that as well.
Getting people to attend your event
James: That’s really interesting. A few things in my mind, and I would like to sort of cross back on this, because what you’re talking about has a few parallels to what many online marketers are doing with their webinar model, where they have an online event so that it’s virtual. There’s a big struggle to get people to attend.
Dan: Yes.
James: I had a guest on yesterday, good friend of both you and me, Taki Moore and we’re talking about Attract, Convert and Deliver. And of course, I think he has 4 phases of webinars that he will be covering at SuperFastBusiness Live. And yeah, you’re right, once you get people to book, getting them to turn up is interesting. One of the experiments I did with my own business was with our search engine optimization services.
We used to do a free website check which was a way of previewing the customer’s website to see if it was suitable for our services. We did it to sift and filter, to only get the customers that we were matched to, so that we could get pretty much guarantee we’re going to get a great result internally. And what we found was when we put on a $20 fee, it cut down the number of website checks by about half but it made no difference to the amount of people who proceeded on and purchased something.
So, I’m wondering if you’ve had trouble with too many people coming, or too many people, like too much volume in the room, or too many people cancelling. What sort of things did you do in the instance that you have a free event?
Dan: Yeah, that’s a really interesting concept and I have heard of the promoters do their same idea where they say, “Look, it’s $100 to attend, but you get that back when you come.” I don’t like that model in the things I do. And, for a seminar, I think it actually is, you’ve got to be careful.
So, for example, I was actually just talking to Taki a couple of days ago and we were talking about how he did this really awesome launch and at the end of it, he offered something for $197. One of the things I said to him was that, when I was watching his launch, he was giving me all this awesome content and then I was literally thinking that the seminar was going to be, you know, $2,000 and then it was like $197. And I thought, “Oh my goodness, you’re just going to sell me something at that?”
And I said to him, “I think that if you actually made it $497, I actually think you would have got more conversion,” because he would have had people thinking, “Oh, this is actually just going to be really valuable.” So, you kind of got to be, if you’re doing, some people like… That’s another thing to think about, how long is the event? Some people do a day, two days, three days.
I actually just do 90 minutes which, for my audience, seems to work really well but that’s another thing to think about. And if you’re going to do a seminar that’s two days, like I’ve been to Taki’s seminar, and they’re really high-value, high-content stuff, so actually charging a real, like a slightly, $497 as opposed to $197, in my opinion, is really something to think about.
But, just switching back I guess to the specifics of what we do, like our philosophy is we just want to get as many people in there as possible. So, we make it totally free. And one of the things that we do to really make sure that people attend which again, in this call, and also in SuperFastBusiness Live, I’m going to talk about lots of differences between a webinar and a seminar.
And so one of the differences here is that we send them a letter in the post. Inside the letter, it’s quite a large letter, there’s a DVD box. And when you open up the DVD box, inside that, there is a sheet of paper that says, “You will receive the DVD that goes with this when you attend the seminar.”
James: You’re like the master of the incomplete solution.
Dan: Yes. It’s actually quite beautiful when people come to the seminar and actually bring the DVD, they bring the box and I put it in. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I still find that very satisfying, every time that happens.
James: It is one of the classic, the desire to collect, is one of the classic human instincts…
Dan: Exactly.
James: …that we could trigger. I’m going through that with surfboards. I think I need one of each size to match the waves perfectly, you know, even though I can hardly stand up.
Dan: Yeah. We once had one customer who I think he registered for a few seminars and he never attended for some reason. And he once sent us this email about how we’d send him like 3 or 4 DVD boxes that didn’t actually have any DVDs for them because he’d never come, but other than that, it’s been something, when we first implemented it, we actually measured it and we found that before we were implementing it, we were getting about, we were still sending out a confirmation letter, we were still doing a confirmation code, we were still sending a confirmation SMS the day before, but just by implementing it, we found that beforehand, we were getting about 50%.
So 50% percent of the people that registered would actually attend whereas after implementing it, we found that we’re about getting 75% who are actually attending. So, it really did have a big impact.
The one-idea concept
James: Nice. It’s like sending a jigsaw puzzle cut up in the post. A friend of mine, Terry Tillman was telling me about this. It almost guarantees that someone will read your email or your actual mail if you cut up into a jigsaw puzzle and they have to solve it to be able to read the letter. And I think that’s touching on a new topic which is Gamefication.
And I can see this is going to be a part of every business at some point where people get a fun dopamine release – you probably know all about that – when they’re actually able to enjoy the process like painting stairs with piano keys and make them play sounds. And the rubbish bin, when you throw rubbish in, it goes goes (whistles). You know people look around for the next piece of rubbish.
So do you do stuff like that in your seminars? Because, you are, I guess, you know, when I think of you, Dan, I think you’re the thinking man. You’ve got like a super cray computer brand, necktop computer there. I know you can remember the names of every single person in the room which still astounds me.
What do you do to balance your super high intelligence with the game of educating people but not overwhelming them? Because I think that’s something that happens at events a lot, is that we attempted to show people how clever we are and in the process, we just numb them and intimidate them and they feel that they can’t do it and I know you’re quite strategic with this. I’d love to get some insights.
Dan: Sure thing. I guess the first thing I’ll say is I think that, for example, when I’m memorizing everyone’s names and everyone thinks that I’m from a different planet. And It’s the same when you look at a circus performer. You look at them and you think they’re just not human.
But I think really, it’s just that 10,000 hour idea that if you focus on something and you really hone it in and you keep practicing. Like I’ve probably done more than 700 seminars. So, you know, 324 of it probably realize that I’m making some silly mistake. And you know, that’s just part of refining your craft.
So, I really don’t think I’m any more intelligent than anyone. I just think that you know, a seminar is something I’ve done a lot of and so it’s working well, but to get back to your question, yeah, definitely.
One of the keys to the success of an intro seminar is to really just focus on one idea and the idea that we focus on that gets us our 50% conversion is the idea that most people, and this comes from really knowing your audience, so, you know, this might work for me, but your audience, and your business, you really got to think it through. But for our audience, we know that students are distracted.
They’ve got their phone. They’ve got SMS, Facebook. They’ve got, they want to look good in front of other people. Really, everything that they’re doing when it comes study is just haphazard. It’s not really thought through. It’s just, you know, “We’re going to school and we’re given homework and we do the homework.”
And that’s to me one of the great tragedies of our education system, is that the school system will show people what to study – they’ll say study maths, science and English. But they won’t really show people how to do it. They’ll say, you know, you have exams, you’re going to have to memorize stuff, but we’re not actually going to show you how to memorize stuff.
You’re going to have to take notes in class but we’re not going to show you how to take notes in class. So, we really focus on that one idea that there has to be a process. You know, there’s someone who studies and guesses and hopes and they get a certain result but it turns out that when you study, there’s actually 5 parts: reading, understanding, taking notes, memorizing, preparing for exams.
And if you actually know those strategies, if you know the rules, if you know the processes, you’re going to be infinitely more successful than someone who doesn’t know the processes. So, in everything that I do in that seminar, it always comes back to that idea and I think that’s really important because as you said in a seminar, people have a very limited attention. And I’ve also found that you know, one of the keys to actually getting a response, probably the biggest mistake I’ve made with seminars, I remember I had one seminar and I thought, I’ll be really clever here.