Learn how to start making course sales now with Jon Schumacher in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Positioning your online course offer is 80% of the work when finding success in sales and marketing. Jon shares methods and takeaways you can apply to position your course to get the most success possible with your sales and marketing campaigns.
We wanted to feature Jon on the LMScast podcast, because a lot of people need help with a couple of things that he specializes in. One of them is just sales in general, and the other is structuring around a sales conversion event (also known as the moment or experience that helps facilitate a sale). Jon shares what needs to happen for a sale to occur in the modern online world of 2022 and beyond for the online entrepreneur, whether they’re building a course, a coaching program, or another type of online business.
80% of the success of a marketing or sales campaign comes down to whether you’re matching the right person with the right offer in an offer that’s so good for their situation that they’d be stupid not to take it. That’s 80% of the success of a selling or marketing campaign. The other 20% are aspects like your persuasion skills, your copy skills, the frosting on the cupcake, communication, and messaging. Having the wrong offer in front of the wrong person will always leave you asking, “What happened?” That’s the highest level as far as what to think about before you do any kind of sales or marketing campaign.
Jon runs a challenge called Grand Slam Webinar Offers, and this applies even if you don’t have a webinar. The focus of this methodology is to position your offer around how it helps your ideal customer instead of what you have to offer. Highlighting and writing the desired outcome that helps the ideal customer get what they’re looking for.
To learn more about Jon, you can Google ”Jon Schumacher webinar” and you’ll find him. You can also head to JonSchumacher.com for his primary personal brand, or head to WorkWithJon.co to meet with Jon to see how he can help you with sales for your online course or membership platform.
And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jon Schumacher. That’s Jon with no H. It’s jonschumacher.com. Welcome to the show, Jon.
Jon Schumacher: Hey, Chris, appreciate it. And yeah, you got my name, right? That’s always a tough one for people to get. So, I appreciate it.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. And if you just want to Google something, just Google Jon Schumacher webinar, and you’ll find him. I want to bring you on because a lot of people need help with a couple things that you specialize in. One of them is just sales in general and the other is structuring, especially around what I would call a sales conversion event, or this moment or experience that helps facilitate a sale. But just to the absolute highest level for the online entrepreneur, whether they’re building a course, a coaching program, or some online business, what needs to happen for a sale to occur in the modern online world of 2021 and beyond?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, it’s a great question, and we’ll just keep it as high as level as I can think of first, and then we can drill down into specifics. In the context of let’s say a marketing or a sales campaign that could be to drive people to conversation, a sales conversation or a course sale or whatever, I look at things at the highest level and then we can go deeper as three elements. The first is who you’re marketing to, understanding them, their situation, their mindset, their current world views, what they think about themselves and their situation. Really understanding the who at the highest, highest level is critical and then getting really good at putting together offers.
If you’re looking at 80% of the success of a marketing or sales campaign, it’s like 80% of it is like, “Okay, are we matching the right person with the right offer in an offer so good, they’d be stupid not to take it, right?” That’s 80% of the success of a selling or marketing campaign. And then the other 20% are things like your persuasion skills, your copy skills, the frosting on the cupcake so to speak to make it… communicating it, the messaging. All these things are really important as well, but you could have all of that stuff dialed. Have the wrong offer in front of the wrong person, you’re going to go, “What happened?” So, that’s the highest level I can think of as far as what to think about before you do any kind of sales or marketing campaign.
Chris Badgett: Well, I’ve been in online business and online marketing specifically for about 15 years, and I’ve recently been revisiting the offer because it is so fundamental and foundational. And it’s easy to get focused on the latest, greatest tactic or some nuance that if the offer is wrong, none of that matters.
Jon Schumacher: Yes.
Chris Badgett: How do we make a winning offer that’s a no-brainer or any tips? And especially for the experts out there, I just noticed a lot of them have a problem with coming up with an offer because they’ve been in their field for sometimes, many decades. And they’re having a hard time just condensing 30, 40 years into a statement. So, how do you do that?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. I have a challenge I run called Grand Slam Webinar Offers actually borrow the title and some of the methodology. And this applies even if you don’t have a webinar, but I’ll share what that is. I got it originally the idea, or the naming rather from a guy named Alex Hormozi. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s blown up a little bit. He has a great book called 100 million dollar offer, so that’s where I got the grand slam title for this, but anyway. Yeah, so I always like to say that people buy your offer. They don’t buy your product or service, and those are not the same things, right? A lot of people say, “Well, I sell coaching on this or I sell a course on this or a software on this.”
It’s like that’s great, that’s the thing you sell, but that’s not your offer, right? And the offer are all the elements around it that make it more compelling. How do you come up with something like that? Well, the first thing to really understand at the top is what’s the desired outcome that your offer gets people, right? If you have a piece of paper, let’s say you get a piece of paper out or Google Doc or whatever you’re doing, write that out at the top, the desired outcome that my offer helps my ideal customer get is X. And then below that, draw a line down the middle of the paper, or the document or whatever.
On one side, write the problems that would stop that person from getting the outcome, and ideally problems they understand, and then the solutions that you can offer them that remove those problems. And this is what some people would call an offer stack, or creating an offer that clearly addresses all of the potential problems that your ideal buyer would have to getting to that outcome and preferably as easy and with as low effort as possible. If you’re selling a course, I sell a webinar course, very meta of course, right? Selling on webinars with webinar courses. I know what all the problems are for beginners to launch a webinar, right? Like tech, I don’t know how to structure my webinar.
I don’t know what to say to invite people to my webinar. So, I have a checklist, a script, a swipe copy file for every single one of those problems. So, that when I present my offer, I clearly call out the problem, and then here’s the solution problem, here’s the solution. So by the time I’m finished sharing my offer, they understand that my offer solves all of the potential problems with as easy a button and low effort solutions as possible to getting them the results that. That’s how I look at putting together offers now is like okay, what’s the problem, what’s the solution, how can I make this as simple and easy for the buyer as possible, so that they can get to the result faster with less effort that will definitely make your offer more compelling.
Chris Badgett: I love that, and the course itself is really just a mechanism of delivery. It’s not what you’re selling, right? It’s…
Jon Schumacher: Yes.
Chris Badgett: It’s the result that they want. I think it’s easy to lose sight of that and focus on the mechanism or what’s in the box, but not the result.
Jon Schumacher: And most people make the mistake of burying all of that within their core offer, let’s say in their course and then they only talk about the modules and the number of documents in their course. And that’s like the kiss of death, right? Feature based, boring. No one wants more videos and modules. People want to understand that your offer has elements checklists and frameworks and swipe files. And it depends on what you sell a little bit, but easy button solutions that you clearly present to your buyer that’s going to make your offer way more sellable. I mean you’re talking double or as much as 8X your conversion rate. If you can present your offer in the right way, that’s a huge factor.
Chris Badgett: I know you’re an expert in what I call conversion tools. How does one know whether a one-on-one phone call, or schedule a meeting thing versus a webinar, versus just a sales page with no means of contacting the company behind it? Maybe there’s a contact form on another page or something, but how do we know the right conversion tool for our product, or our price point or whatever, or should we do them all or try certain ones, but not certain ones? How do we figure this out?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. I mean there’s no hard, hard rule. I mean I’ve heard people sell crazy expensive stuff from a document, a google document. I mean I’ve heard all kinds of different things. Some things to think about though, one you mentioned is the price point. Is this just an impulse buy? $37, $100. People will usually just buy that kind of thing. If you have a good hook, a good headline and present a decent sales page, in my experience selling those things, people can just buy from an email or something and do that, right? You don’t need to get on a call someone to sell a $30 thing, right? So, that’s usually the case for that. So, part of it is price point.
And then the general rule is if you’re selling something let’s say under a couple thousand dollars, you can sell it directly let’s say from a webinar, or some kind of a workshop or conversion event. Whereas if it’s higher than that, something that requires a little more trust and a little more commitment from them to you, sometimes you’ll need some kind of a sales conversation whether that’s texting, whether that’s instant messaging, whether that’s getting on a Zoom or a phone call or something like that, that can be the case, but really I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen people sell crazy high stuff from just a document too. There really is no hard fast rule.
I would say if it’s a lower ticket item, you look to sell it directly, either on a sales page or if it’s a little higher, let’s say I don’t know $200 to $2000, you can sell that on a webinar or something like that. If it’s higher than that, let’s say it’s a higher price or a higher time commitment or an energy commitment from somebody who maybe doesn’t know you as well, then you might want to look at actually having some kind of a conversation with that person, but those are just general rules.
Chris Badgett: In terms of more general rules, regardless of whether it’s a phone call with a sales structure, a script or a webinar with a certain path you go down or a sales page, what are the common… and maybe using the webinar as an example, if it was a 3-act play or a 4-act sequence or whatever, what are the common steps you move through in a sales conversion event that doesn’t really change based on the medium?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, I’ll give you a framework. I mean there are some slight tweaks depending on the medium you’re using. Is it a webinar? Is it a 3-day workshop? Is it a 5-day challenge or some… There’s different mediums that does affect the flow a little bit. But as a general rule, you could call it a demand narrative, or I call it magnetic messaging, a messaging that pulls them towards your offer. And there’s a series of things that should happen in order to do that. I call it why, what, how, now. That’s the flow that people can write down from this interview; why, what, how, now. I’ll walk through that at a high level. Just remember this though, your sales narrative whether it’s a sales webinar, whether it’s a workshop, whether it’s something should be 80% context and insights and 20% content, right?
The worst thing you can do is share a bunch of how-to content, spray them in the face with a bunch of granular details on these sales events. You’ll either confuse them, or you’ll give them so much that they’ll think that they have enough to go and try it on their own, and either one of those will absolutely kill your sales conversions. Your sales narrative, whether it’s inside of a webinar, whether it’s inside of a workshop or something like that should be 80% context and insights and 20%… And that’s a general rule. It does adjust a little bit depending on what you’re selling. The why, what, how, now thing really is a high level sales narrative, so basically why. Why means context, right?
You always want to start with context. Why is what you’re sharing with them so important? What do they need to understand about themselves in their situation? What’s their world view? Why is their situation need to change, and why is the opportunity that you’re talking about important for them? I guess you want to start with why, right? Before, you don’t just start with, here’s how you do something. It’s like no, you need to give it some context and some build up. So, that’s the why part. The what part is all about teaching them what to desire. So, you want to teach them what to desire and this is usually built around what I call a paradigm shift, which is basically a big idea.
It’s like okay most people think X, but really it’s Y. Most people think you need a 2-hour webinar to sell your course, but really all you need is a 30-minute presentation with a crazy good offer, and you’ll do just as well. It’s like that’s a shifting of people’s paradigm of what they think they need, and this is really important for you to develop for your business. It’s like most people think X, but really it’s Y. According to the research, most people think that it’s your product or service that makes people loyal to your brand, but really according to the research, according to the challenger sale research, it’s how you sold the person initially that endeared them to your brand the most, right?
And it’s like that’s a paradigm shift for someone who’s selling like a sales system or something. Does that make sense what I shared there?
Chris Badgett: That does, that’s super cool, super cool.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. You need to shift their thinking. And when you shift their thinking, it excites their physiology and opens them up to what you’re about to share with them, which is the how, which is really a road map to results. I call this a road map to results. Usually, it’s a 3-part… either it’s linear, three phases to get a client from being stuck to getting the results, or it’s three elements of your product, or services genius that helps that person. You’re showing a roadmap and then now is really why should they take action now? Why should they either book a call to speak with you right now? Why should they buy your program right on this webinar, or this event right now? Why is now the time for them to take action?
They understand the context. They understand what they should be desiring and how they should be shifting their thinking. You’ve shown them a roadmap for how they can get there to this newly discovered desire. Now, it’s okay why right now? Why is this the time to do this? Because we both know if people leave these kind of events, their excitement and their momentum starts waning pretty quickly. So, that’s a broad level sales narrative that you can look at for your webinar or your event. It does vary a little bit, depending on the medium that you’re using and the promise of the event, but that’ll give people some ideas.
Chris Badgett: On the now piece at the end, I think that’s what people are most contaminated by, closing or feeling like they have to do something pushy or whatever. What’s a graceful why now close that anybody can do that isn’t super pushy, or just feels natural and it’s the obvious thing to do?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. If you’re just using that event to generate sales calls or something, let’s say you’re selling a service or something like that, it’s super simple, right? It’s super easy. You just name your call, describe the benefits to the person for booking the call, reiterate who it’s for, remind them again of where to go. I mean it’s super short. Doesn’t need to be super involved at all. If you’re selling that, it’s totally easy just to invite people to an attractive sounding next step with you, which is to talk with you. If you’re selling directly, let’s say on a webinar or some kind of an event, I do recommend that you have a fairly robust pitch so to speak or offer presentation.
This is how I’m currently doing it and advising others to do it because it works, right? Part of it is a mindset thing. You need to get past that and be able to just start… If you have a good offer that’s helpful to people, you need to do your very best to describe and present that offer in as compelling of a way as possible, whether that’s through an offer stack. I don’t know, you’re probably familiar with what that is. I’m sure some of the people here listening are as well, but it’s really presenting all of the elements, again all the elements of your offer that solve all of the potential problems in as easy as possible manner to get the result for that person. You do need to spend some significant time.
And again, this is if you’re selling something directly from a webinar let’s say or a workshop, people are going to a sales page or a checkout page and you’re saying go over there and buy this thing right now, that is one way to do it. Having a great fast action bonus is another way to increase your conversions.
Chris Badgett: What’s an example of fast action bonus that you could go in?
Jon Schumacher: If you’re a coach or consultant or course seller or something which I imagine a lot of your audience is through your LifterLMS, right? A lot of them build online courses.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Jon Schumacher: Giving access to you as the expert is probably one of the better fast action bonuses that you can give.
Chris Badgett: I’ve done that before myself with our software, and it works.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, it works really well. It’s really if you’re looking to increase your live webinar conversions let’s say, presenting your offer correctly which is hugely important. And then presenting the fast action bonus at the right moment, just boom, it just takes people over the edge. And people will rush in and buy [crosstalk].
Chris Badgett: What do you recommend on that in terms of time? Is that before the call ends or within 24 hours, or within three days? What is the timezone of that?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. Before the end of the webinar, so what I’ll usually do is I’ll if it… I just did a webinar recently. I had 730 people registered for a webinar, and I had 10. The first 10 who joined got a personal, and this was a webinar and webinars, very meta, first 10 who joined got a personal Zoom call with me to review their slide deck once they’re finished and people were like…
Chris Badgett: For how long?
Jon Schumacher: And I sell that for $5000 on the low end for consulting companies and stuff like that. It was [inaudible]. I sold 10 like this because it was very attractive. You want your most attractive element of your offer to be your fast action bonus you could set a limit, like a first… depending on the size of your webinar, 10 or 15 or 20 would be one if you have a bigger webinar, or bigger events. Whereas maybe the first three to five or something for a smaller event, but that does push people a little bit to get in and it works. And that can be either a review or an audit from you, or it could be a personal clarity session with you, or strategy session or something like that.
Depending on what you sell or do, that will definitely increase your live conversions significantly. To answer your question, how do you sell without being salesy, I mean if you’re doing lead gen webinars, it’s easy. If you’re selling a course or program, you have to get over it a little bit and put your best foot forward. Part of it’s how you deliver it too with your voice, and are you this used car salesman sounding person? Are you somebody who understands your client and has a great offer, and is not ashamed to present that offer in a strong way? I’ve gotten to that point where I’m okay doing that, so that’s just me.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, the first sale you make is to yourself and yeah, that makes sense.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about online events, and I wanted to talk about challenges and summits particularly. Do we think of these things as before… sometimes, those things are free, sometimes they’re paid. Are these products or are they sales conversion events, or are they part of the ladder of what we offer? Where do they sit?
Jon Schumacher: Yes, it depends on the type of event.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: So, you want to talk about challenges and summits, those two in particular?
Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah.
Jon Schumacher: Those two?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, so those are more what I would call audience events, so building your audience. A challenge with just for people listening usually, usually is five days. It’s usually a short little assignment that you drip out, and then there’s live Q and A around it and stuff like that. Sometimes, you’ll have promotional partners send traffic to it or you can run ads to it, or you can promote it to your own audience, all of those things.
Chris Badgett: Quick question just on the nuance of that.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: I’ve seen people use it LMS for that. If it’s a 5-day challenge, let’s say we had a five lesson course, do you recommend that they have already seen some content on the day, and then there’s a coaching session that follows, or the content is delivered live? I know you could do it lots of different ways, but what do you see that works the best?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, so you can do it either way. What I’m currently doing and what I see working best for my own stuff and also, I collaborate with others in the industry who are like they look at a lot of this kind of stuff, is to record the lesson for the day. And that’s usually a short video on a challenge, so under 10 minutes with a little document, or a little task for that day. And then have a Q and A session later in the day on that specific topic.
Chris Badgett: To help people get through it?
Jon Schumacher: To answer questions and to get help people get through it. Plus, when you record things, people have multiple timezones and stuff like that can access it and things. And the big goal also of the challenge is not only is to have a challenge built around one promise. Mine is the Grand Slam Webinar Offer challenge. Even if you have a webinar or not, I’m going to help you make your offer two to five times more sellable from your webinar, or from your online event. That’s really the promise of that and I tell people…
Chris Badgett: Is that a free or paid challenge?
Jon Schumacher: I offer mine free, and then I sell the recordings as an upgrade. I’ll have an upgrade for the recordings and/or a VIP session after the challenge that I’ll sell as an upgrade. I do it for free because I have my joint venture partners email to it. And that gives me the widest net to capture as big a list as possible, and then I’ll segment out the buyers based on if they want to buy the recordings, or the VIP session. There is some selling on the front end of this, but it’s usually I’m currently doing it for free. Some people are doing it for $17 or something very low ticket, but I’m currently seeing the best practices doing it for free, and then having an upgrade in that.
And the goal of the challenge is to build rapport and connection that’s really the goal. Build it around one simple topic that is a win, and you want to position your challenge as the promise of your challenge as the step before the thing you’re going to sell after. It’s like…
Chris Badgett: Yeah. If you’re selling it, you’re almost getting paid to get your customer in the perfect position to be able to buy from you, or if it’s free…
Jon Schumacher: It’s about.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: It’s about building rapport, and you want to get as many people as you can on the live sessions with you. It needs to be good content, but it needs to be very light, not too intense with a challenge. Otherwise, people check out, or they’ll drop off. So, it needs to be something that’s really good. If you’re in marketing and sales like you and I are Chris, helping people create their offer or clarifying their big idea or something simple, but profound is so good as a challenge. And then of course, the next step would be come up with your course idea. Could be for you, and then the next thing is you sell LifterLMS as part of the solution with maybe an offer stack around that.
You could do a 5-day challenge Chris, and then look to sell your software, or your programs behind that. Because I mean coming up with the idea for your course or the framework for your course, cool, I have the idea now or I have the offer, but I don’t know how to put it together and implement it. That’s the second step, right? That could be where you come in and be like, “Well, here’s the next step right and just to do my stuff, or buy my stuff.”
Chris Badgett: You raised my mind. You’re jumping ahead to the free consulting part of the interview where… I think this is important for anybody watching and this is part of the whole expert’s curse. And if you have more of a complex thing, for me as an example, I got software, you can do a lot with it. If I only have five days and I have 10 minutes a day of content, it’s highly unlikely I could get somebody to build their first course in 50 minutes or…
Jon Schumacher: No.
Chris Badgett: But what you’re saying what works for you, for the webinar thing, all the webinar stuff in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have a good offer. So, let’s get that dialed first. So, go ahead. What are you going to say?
Jon Schumacher: The biggest mistake you’ll make is you give away the primary promise on your challenge. In your case, it could be we’ll help you build your course in five days. One, you’re probably not going to do that. I mean you would know better than me yeah, but two, you’re killing the next step which is you want people to work with you to do that, right? You got to ask yourself, what’s the step before the thing I’m selling? That’s your challenge, and it needs to make sense obviously. again, as I mentioned for people in marketing and sales, it’s usually around creating an idea, or creating an offer, or creating something like that so that they have the initial seed in place. And then your next step is to sell your stuff.
For you, it could be your… and this could be cheesy, but your 6-figure course idea or whatever it is, right? And six-figure course idea could be the name of your challenge, a 5-day challenge on crafting and coming up with your best course. or your signature course, right? And that could be you because of course, you have a learning management system company, right? So, that’s the seed. That would kill it by the way. Five days and then after the five days, you’ve built some rapport, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then you host a webinar selling an offer that it could include LifterLMS, and I don’t know if you have any other training programs. You probably do yourself.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: You put together an offer for that. That would be a marketing campaign that you could use, and then you could leverage partners or others traffic sources to fill that challenge.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I think one of the cool things, I’ve thought a lot about this is something that’s on my to-do list is I would want my challenge to be valuable even if they didn’t choose-
Jon Schumacher: It is.
Chris Badgett: … my software. They went somewhere else because like you said, you want the widest net as possible. It’s not a lift or pitch fist.
Jon Schumacher: No.
Chris Badgett: It’s like let’s get you further along the course creator path.
Jon Schumacher: You may not even mention lifter much. I mean you could say it’s sponsored by. You could have it just subtly put through the 6-figure course idea, 5-day challenge sponsored by LifterLMS. It can be lightly seated, but yeah, everything you do should be valuable, right? Everything you do should add to the people. Otherwise, they’re going to get sick of you, right?
Chris Badgett: Right.
Jon Schumacher: I agree. Yeah, you definitely want it to be really good, but how powerful would it be, how inspiring would it be for someone to come up with that idea, that initial things? It’s like yes, I can see it, I have some clarity and then someone…
Chris Badgett: [Crosstalk] a tool to implement it.
Jon Schumacher: Now, I need a tool and some guidance to actually create it. That’s what your company does. If you could run that event a couple times a year two or three times a year, be no problem. You could probably do really well with that. Yeah.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool, and you mentioned something talking to another sales professional I wanted to ask you about this. It’s come up a lot lately, and you even hedged it in your comment. You said it may sound cheesy 6-figure course. I’ve been struggling with how do I say create a valuable course or premium course, or there’s a couple layers to it. One of it is there are in our industry business opportunity type things, where you have to be careful about making income claims. And I know you’re not a lawyer. We’re not going to get legal right here. And then there’s also people feeling a little jaded, a little burnt around some people call it the guru market or something like that.
I’m struggling to come up with how do I say that without saying that? And I see some people saying things high ticket, and I can water it down with words premium or high value, but any tips on how to say that, create a super valuable course that has a high likelihood of making good money without sounding cheesy?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, I mean I think so you’re asking how would you name your challenge or something like that?
Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah without saying 6-figure challenge, even though that’s what I would want to create something that would give people a very high likelihood of being able to do that.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, no and partly it depends on who you’re marketing to. I mean yeah, there’s a lot of cheese in the marketing industry, so maybe you don’t say 6-figure course challenge or something like that. It could be the signature, and part of it’s the headline could be your signature course challenge, or create your signature course challenge, or you could even say creating your signature course or… I’ve had workshops, I could sell with virtual presentations. That was one of the name of one of mine, that’s not super cheesy.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Jon Schumacher: But I have a good sub head too. So, you don’t have to put everything in the headline. You can have a sub head that describes a little bit more, right? My next workshop I’m hosting in February is called profitable online events.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: Simple?
Chris Badgett: Not…
Jon Schumacher: And then it describes underneath it, it’s a 3-day workshop where we’re going to help you just select and start putting together your own profitable event. For you, it could be profitable online courses. It should have some an outline or an outcome in the headline though, and it’s clear. It needs to have passed the two second tests like, “Oh, I get what this is or yeah Chris is going to show me how to create a profitable online course, or something like that.” It doesn’t have to be six figure, blah. I mean depends on who you’re marketing to, some people that resonates with too. Yeah. So, I found that that works fine for me. One of my colleagues Alina Vincent, she’s a challenge expert.
I think the name of her workshop is Profitable Online Programs I think is what hers is, and she helps you basically put together the structure for an online coaching program and things like that. Yeah.
Chris Badgett: I’m pretty high touch with the market and my customers and my prospects. So, I hear the words they use all the times, and one thing that stuck with me is I heard somebody who was struggling to get started and it’s taking longer than they thought. They just wanted to know the fastest path to revenue. It’s not that they don’t need to make millions. They just want to get it to market, and I don’t know. The customers give you hints of what it should be.
Jon Schumacher: But yeah, I’m not a super hypey. I sell with force now, but I don’t promise the moon or anything.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Jon Schumacher: I try not to be overly hypey. So, it depends a little bit on who you’re marketing to. What I do won’t resonate as much with the biz up or make money online crowd, but I resonate more with coaches and consultants and service providers who already have a business, but they want to get more clients online and stuff. That tends to be who I work with more.
Chris Badgett: That’s more my crew too, so that’s…
Jon Schumacher: They appreciate the clarity and a little more directness than the, “Hey, here’s the best opportunity in the world. Like…”
Chris Badgett: Here’s my house and my car.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: I don’t do any of that. I mean you don’t have to either man, but the structure makes sense, but you do need to think about what’s their desired outcome. A lot of people following you would probably like to map out an online program or an online course, and that aligns very well with your business, right? A lot of things are how you deliver it. You don’t have to be use car salesmen to do it. Challenges or webinars or a platform that we can use how we want for our own brand and our own following, they get a bad rap, but that’s because a lot of people use them-
Chris Badgett: Poorly.
Jon Schumacher: … crazy ways.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. You mentioned working with partners and stuff. If somebody’s an expert and they’re like, “Okay, why would a partner promote my challenge?” Let’s say they’re at the beginning, maybe I need to make a list of certain people to approach, and then what’s my offer to those potential partners? How do we build this machine in a win-win way for everybody?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. So, people partner with you for different reasons. Some of it is just the relationship that you develop. They like you, or they like what you sell. I mean when I started doing JV webinars back, I think in 2014 was when I started, I didn’t have a list really or anything. I couldn’t reciprocate. His list was way bigger than mine, but he liked me and he liked my product. He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll promote you,” and I gave him a cut of the money to promote me. So, that’s one way you can do it, is to share some revenue with a partner. Another way to do it is to do what I call swaps. You’ll send some emails to your list, they’ll send some to theirs. It could be all for the webinar, it could be for a lead magnet or something else.
There’s a bit of an exchange. You try to keep that with people that are similar size as you, but that doesn’t always work out. And some people get mad about that and some people are cool with that. But I would recommend for most people out here listening, if you want to get involved in partnerships which I do recommend everybody do because one, no algorithm will ever screw that up. It’s evergreen, and the lead quality tends to be a little higher than paid traffic. It’s not quite as scalable as paid traffic, but it is an evergreen source. It’ll work 10 years from now as it works today sort of thing, but most people out there, I recommend you do a couple things. One is there are JV networks that you can join.
If you’re in health, if you’re a speaker, you’re an author, you’re selling services or marketing business, any of those, there are partnership networks out there that you can join usually for a reasonable cost. Some of them are free even, that you can start collaborating and connecting with partners. That’s been my number one way. I’m in a group right now. There’s 150 of us, and I’d say my top 10 to 15 partners are all from that one group. And they’ve added literally thousands of subscribers, and lots of money and stuff too from promoting my stuff over the years. So, that’s a great way to meet people is to go where they are. Networks, there are virtual networks out there as well that you can join.
Another is to interview them. Invite them like you’re doing Chris. I mean you’ve met me. I’m sure you’ve met a lot of your just friends and colleagues and potential partners, and all that kind of stuff by doing interviews, right? I’ve done interview content for a long time as well through my summits, and I’ve had podcasts and stuff in the past that I’ve used to get to know people, right? I think those are two great strategies if you’re new and you’re looking to grow your network, start become a reporter, have a podcast or it could be a YouTube series. All it is firing up Zoom like we’re on right now. There’s nothing too crazy about it, and a lot of people will say yes to an interview.
Whereas if you just hit them with, “Hey, would you promote my thing or do this,” it’s a lot less likely for them to… because they don’t know you to do that. So, those are a couple of strategies for meeting people.
Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, and relationships take time, right? It’s not like…
Jon Schumacher: It does, yeah. It’s not as scalable as they had and just flip a switch.
Chris Badgett: Right. You mentioned summits there. I guess I say I’ve seen people do summits. It’s common that with it, they’re free, but then the replay or the evergreen is paid. I know there’s different ways to do it. I’ve also heard lately in current times that oh people have Zoom fatigue or whatever. But just whenever somebody says a certain thing is dead, email marketing is dead or summits are dead or Facebook ads, they’re not dead, but take us into the world of summits and how do we think about it, and how do we build one, or at least our first version of one that’s not insanely huge. If we want to commit and we want to use that strategy, how do we get started?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. Yeah, so I’ll let you know there are a lot of work. Putting together an online conference is a lot of work to do. So, you’re looking at a four-month, I’d say especially for your first one, around four months of work, gathering up speakers, interviewing them, putting the marketing materials together. I do recommend…
Chris Badgett: Pre-recorded or do it live?
Jon Schumacher: The main sessions are recorded, that’s how I do it. And then I have live sessions throughout. So, all of my challenges and stuff, same thing with the summits, I record the… The last one I did, I had 34 I think speaker sessions. So, I had to record quite a bit, right? Thirty-four sessions, I interviewed them and we collaborated…
Chris Badgett: Quick question there. Sorry, I’m going to ask you a bunch of tactical stuff as you go. When you interviewed them, or how much of their content was like they just showed up and they had a presentation that they probably have done before, they’re ready to go, or how much of it was did you have to pull the content out of them through an interview?
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, so it depends. I always find out beforehand, do you have a presentation that is relevant to the theme of the summit? My summit was the Webinar Mastery Summit. One of the things is what do you want to be known for when you do a summit? So, that was my niche, but to answer your question, I asked beforehand, do you have a presentation you’d like to use? Some people did. I’m like, “Cool, that’s great. Let’s screen share and do an actual visual.” I like it when they have that actually because people can follow along a little more easily. If they don’t, then we do a talking head you and I are right now. In which case, I come up with a series of questions that they can tweak on a Google document beforehand, and we go through that to keep it organized.
I try to keep it higher level if it’s just talking head because there’s no visuals, and I try to recap some of the main points as we go along, just so the viewer of the talking head style video can extract what they can from it. But yes, we record them ahead of time. And then I do, do usually three live sessions. Well, make that four live sessions. I do a pre-party before the summit, and then I have three live sessions with me to answer questions and again, build rapport with some of these people that are coming into my audience. A summit is really you could make…
Chris Badgett: So, is this a 3-day event?
Jon Schumacher: The summit was a 5-day summit
Chris Badgett: Five -day event. So, during the work week or…
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, Monday through Friday.
Chris Badgett: Okay.
Jon Schumacher: Yep, yep So, that’s how I did it, but yeah. I mean as far as the summit goes, I mean think about what you wanted to be known for. Summits work really well in certain niches. The marketing and sales world like you and I are in Chris, a little more saturated, right? It’s a little harder to get tons of people, but the last one I did this year. I mean we had 4900 people register for it, so not…
Chris Badgett: That’s a lot.
Jon Schumacher: Not bad, right? And a lot of those come are new people, coming to me it. So, that grows my audience and my visibility. And yes, I make some sales, there are some things to sell during the summit.
Chris Badgett: Do we prioritize building an email list or an audience, or is it more about selling out the back end or both, or do you have to choose what you want to prioritize, or how do you think about that?
Jon Schumacher: I don’t think you get to choose. It’s mostly for me an audience building thing.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Jon Schumacher: It’s an audience event, like a challenge is an audience building, rapport building event and then the conversion event. So, there’s audience events and conversion events. The conversion event would come later. Now, the summit is free to sign up for. I have what I call a premium pass that I offer people that they want lifetime access to all the stuff instantly. I also have an offer stack that’s pretty compelling. I think we had about 8% of people take that who upped it in for free last year, which isn’t bad for a low ticket front-end offer. So, you can sell little things off the front of the summit, but the main thing is the audience and building rapport with them.
And then after the summit’s over, I would do webinars or other things to sell the next step into what we’re doing together. Yeah, you can make money from the summit directly, but usually, it’s more of an awareness and a audience building strategy.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. And do you ask the speakers to be available at all during this summit, or even during the time theirs is supposed to drop or whatever, or are they just that’s the recording and they’re done kind of thing?
Jon Schumacher: That’s how I usually run it. I know others do have panels and stuff. They’ll interview multiple people and stuff. I don’t think it’s a bad idea. The way I run my summits now is like you say, I try to keep it as easy for the speaker as possible. Now, there are some people that want to participate. I guess I could do that and I’ll consider that moving forward, but mainly, it’s just like you say a recording. And most of them promote the summit as well. So, I select my speakers based on what are the experts in the topic and two, do they have an audience that they’d be willing to share the event with, because that’s how a lot of the new list growth and audience growth is coming from is those people’s audiences. So, that’s how I do it.
Chris Badgett: Jon, you’ve added a ton of value today. You really gave me a lot of clarity around some challenge funnel idea I’ve been playing with.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah. I think you’d do really well with that. That’d be a great model for you I think.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, appreciate it. What’s the best way for people to connect with you and if you could drop your name spelling again, so people definitely find it.
Jon Schumacher: Yeah, yeah. So you’re welcome to just Google my name, Jon that’s J-O-N, Schumacher S-C-H-U-M-A-C-H-E-R. That’s Jon Schumacher ad yeah, you can go to Jonschumaacher.com. That’s my primary personal brand, or just Google me, or you can just go to workwithjon.co work, workwithjon.co work.
Chris Badgett: It’s good to…
Jon Schumacher: That’ll take you to my calendar page, which will then you can click around on my website and those kind of things as well too, but my specialty is in webinars and online events from a consulting perspective and a training perspective. So, that’s my primary focus for people if they want to check me out more.
Chris Badgett: Awesome, Jon. Well, thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.
Jon Schumacher: You’re welcome, Chris. Thank you so much.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
