Latest / Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention / Pivot Era: What to Do When Your Launch Goes Sideways

Transcript

Pivot Era: What to Do When Your Launch Goes Sideways · Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention

• 0:00
  Rachel: I want y'all to picture this.
• 0:01
  Rachel: It's day four of your launch.
• 0:03
  Rachel: You've got maybe two people enrolled with a goal of 12.
• 0:08
  Rachel: You're sitting there refreshing your dashboard so many times, your phone is glitching left and right.
• 0:14
  Rachel: Somewhere around maybe 9:00 PM, you start to write an email, you know, the one where about to drop the price, where you're feeling like you should extend the deadline, or you mention, "Oh, we're just gonna do a few
• 0:25
  Rachel: more payment plans."
• 0:26
  Rachel: And you tell yourself, Ah, this is launch strategy."
• 0:30
  Rachel: We're here to tell you that that is not launch strategy.
• 0:33
  Rachel: That is decision-making made by a very tired, very stressed person around 9:00 PM.
• 0:38
  Rachel: And what we want you to hear before the rest of this episode takes place is that a launch going sideways or not to plan is not a verdict or a decision or anything based off of your offer.
• 0:52
  Rachel: It's usually not even really always about your marketing.
• 0:56
  Rachel: It is data.
• 0:58
  Rachel: However, it may be data arriving at a very inconvenient hour.
• 1:02
  Rachel: The problem is, is that you're trying to receive the data.
• 1:05
  Rachel: You're trying to make decisions at an already energetically tense time, which is mid-launch.
• 1:13
  Rachel: So, what we're gonna do today is fix that sequence.
• 1:16
  Rachel: We're gonna tell you how to know your numbers before you go into a launch, decide your pivots before you actually need them, and go manual in that middle lull when things start to get a little crickety.
• 1:31
  Jessica: But before we do, welcome back to another episode of Growing a Deeply Rooted Business.
• 1:35
  Jessica: I am Jess, your systems and sustainable growth strategist, and I'm here with our lovely marketing mastermind, Rachel.
• 1:43
  Jessica: Before we get into all of our launch, we wanna do a quick energy check because we know that launching can bring up a lot of stressful, tense feelings as you go into it.
• 1:53
  Jessica: There's a lot of time, energy, effort expended during a launch that you want to see that ROI on.
• 1:59
  Jessica: And I think if you've ever had a launch go sideways or go not the way that you've planned, you may have a little tension or fear or resistance built up even thinking about launching.
• 2:09
  Jessica: So I want you to kinda just bring that to mind, take a deep breath in, and then exhale, let it go.
• 2:16
  Jessica: Because I promise you, launches do not have to be stressful, and there is a way to pivot gracefully and deal with all the bumps and waves and fun adventures that launching has to bring.
• 2:27
  Jessica: And today, we're gonna walk you through all of them.
• 2:29
  Jessica: So before we get into it, let's talk about the emotional flow that the launches will take you on.
• 2:36
  Jessica: We kinda see the same thing.
• 2:37
  Jessica: It's not a unique experience.
• 2:38
  Jessica: We see the same thing across all of our clients.
• 2:40
  Jessica: So what does phase one look like, Rachel?
• 2:42
  Rachel: Yeah, so phase one is that open cart, big energy.
• 2:47
  Rachel: Whether it is you just had a really super successful masterclass or top of the launch event, You're getting excited, whether that means, you hit send on that open cart and you're checking your open rate, hitting refresh every hour,
• 3:01
  Rachel: and you're like, "Oh my God, people are engaging.
• 3:03
  Rachel: People are converting."
• 3:04
  Rachel: That is the top.
• 3:05
  Rachel: That's what everybody kind of experiences is that open cart, high energy moment.
• 3:11
  Rachel: Typically, in the middle of the launch is what we call phase two, the lull.
• 3:17
  Rachel: And this is the part where despite it being consistent across every single launch I've ever ran, people are still always surprised about it.
• 3:27
  Rachel: You're sending those FAQ emails.
• 3:30
  Rachel: You're sending some sales emails that are just not being received in the way that that initial open cart email did, and it really kind of leaves you anxious.
• 3:42
  Rachel: And I've heard so many people in this space just think, "Oh my God, something's wrong.
• 3:47
  Rachel: Something's wrong."
• 3:48
  Rachel: And this is typically where either people will abandon launches because they think something's wrong, and it's not gonna work, or they will do some pivot that already destroys a lot of that buying decision that people are marinating in
• 4:05
  Rachel: mid-launch.
• 4:06
  Rachel: Lastly is that phase three last call.
• 4:10
  Rachel: These are where those deadline-driven buyers actually show up.
• 4:15
  Rachel: These are the people that are genuinely intending to buy but will not move until they see those clocks.
• 4:22
  Rachel: It's the final countdown kind of thing.
• 4:25
  Rachel: That is pretty typical across every single launch I've ever done.
• 4:30
  Jessica: Yep.
• 4:30
  Jessica: And it is, and I will tell you, every single client, we have to talk off the edge of not shutting the doors down early, that those last sales will come.
• 4:38
  Jessica: There will be some times where we're not even seeing the numbers that we expected at that open cart, and we truly do have to make some pivots and talk off the ledge.
• 4:45
  Jessica: But I promise you, you will not learn anything by abandoning midstream and not going that full cycle.
• 4:51
  Jessica: I've had clients where it has literally been crickets those two days, and I'm like, "Oh, we should just give up.
• 4:57
  Jessica: I know cart's supposed to close Tuesday, but let's break it down.
• 4:59
  Jessica: I don't wanna think about it over the weekend."
• 5:01
  Jessica: And then Monday and Tuesday, wham, 50 sales come in.
• 5:04
  Jessica: People just.
• 5:04
  Jessica: Wait till the last minute to do things because that's kind of human nature and what we are.
• 5:08
  Jessica: So today we're gonna talk you through how to help navigate it and plan for it so that you can stay grounded and intentional and not make emotional-based decisions, and still make the most amount of revenue that you can
• 5:23
  Jessica: in your launch.
• 5:23
  Jessica: So step number one, we would love for you to set good, better, and best goals.
• 5:28
  Jessica: I have a client who sets must, sweet, and God goals, but any kind of thing that you wanna call it.
• 5:33
  Jessica: Basically you wanna set a realistic goal based on numbers that are rooted in reality.
• 5:41
  Jessica: Good is your floor.
• 5:43
  Jessica: This is the number where it even makes the launch worth running or where you're not losing a ton of money.
• 5:50
  Jessica: It's covering your delivery cost, it's covering your ad spend, it's covering your team if you have it, and it leaves you with we learned something and we're gonna actually do this again.
• 6:00
  Jessica: Better or sweet is where you want to set your actual revenue goal and what profit you want to see coming in would really get you jazzed and excited for this launch.
• 6:10
  Jessica: And you would say, this launch is a win and it's worth definitely repeating the same play.
• 6:16
  Jessica: And then obviously best is your stretch goal or your God goal.
• 6:19
  Jessica: You gotta be careful here because you don't want it to set too high because I know in the back of your head you're like, "This God goal is gonna happen."
• 6:26
  Jessica: And if it doesn't, That can get you down in the dumps too, but you wanna make sure that it's still rooted in reality.
• 6:31
  Jessica: It's a number that if everything went well, you hit that highest conversion rate, you hit that max number of leads you wanted to bring in.
• 6:38
  Jessica: And if you stretched everything to the limit, you could still fulfill it, so that it's not a trap.
• 6:44
  Jessica: And then what you wanna do is engineer those revenue goals, those conversion goals backwards so you can see what should your registration goals be if you're running some sort of live event or challenge.
• 6:54
  Jessica: So you have, a clear goal and milestones to hit along the way.
• 6:59
  Jessica: If you're not running a live event, a live challenge, it could be how many leads do you wanna grow with a lead magnet before there.
• 7:05
  Jessica: But the key here is setting checkpoints so that you're not waiting all the way to cart open to realize the walls have fallen off.
• 7:11
  Jessica: If you're setting these little checkpoints, you can make Tweaks and pivots along the way to make sure that you're hitting the goals that you need to ultimately hit that revenue goal, and not just get to the end of
• 7:22
  Jessica: the thing and be like, "Oh, woulda, coulda, shoulda."
• 7:23
  Rachel: Yeah, and when you have these core benchmarks, these good, better, best, can live at the registration level because you have your enrollment level.
• 7:32
  Rachel: So you can reverse engineer it down.
• 7:34
  Rachel: You know that you have X% of conversion from registered to live attendee.
• 7:41
  Rachel: those are the things that you just wanna have visibility before launching.
• 7:46
  Rachel: You can give yourself a gut check, and ultimately set yourself in reality when it's time to actually operate and not sit there and being like, Ugh, 100 people are gonna register for this."
• 7:57
  Rachel: Well, your email list, that would have to be like a 50% conversion If your list is small in order for 100 people to register.
• 8:04
  Rachel: So it really just keeps you grounded in all of that.
• 8:07
  Rachel: The data will never lie to you.
• 8:09
  Rachel: That's where you wanna lean into.
• 8:11
  Rachel: Still, we have a lot of clients that are super-duper whimsy, super-duper in that woo woo space.
• 8:17
  Rachel: Do all the things you need to do in that space, but do this to keep you grounded and let the manifestation also take you away, but at least you have one foot on the ground.
• 8:26
  Rachel: And then step two after you establish your good, better, best, and this is in addition, I like to tell my clients to pre-decide their pivots.
• 8:37
  Rachel: But this is in that initial planning stage.
• 8:40
  Rachel: If you're new to the episodes that we're doing, which is the launch series, we broke down the launch timeline.
• 8:46
  Rachel: In that ops and marketing timeline where you're putting together all of the pieces, establishing your goals, really decide, okay, if things aren't going well, what is our plan A, plan B, plan C pivot that you feel comfortable with?
• 9:02
  Rachel: This is a life lesson that I've been taught over and over and over from my dad, where he says, "You do not make decisions when you're emotional."
• 9:10
  Rachel: And I think so many times when people are in launches, and they have so much on the line for trying to meet sales goals, and the excitement of like, "I just need to get this product out.
• 9:21
  Rachel: I built all of this time around it," there's a lot of emotion there.
• 9:26
  Rachel: And so what you don't want to do is make a decision when you're in that heightened state of emotion.
• 9:32
  Rachel: So put that in the pre-planning stage where you're saying, "I'm comfortable with adding five one-on-one calls as a mid-lull giveaway.
• 9:43
  Rachel: A lot of these different things that you can do, and it really just helps you say, "Okay, these are already set, and if I don't need to use them, even better.
• 9:53
  Rachel: But it gives you a menu to choose from versus panic mode you trying to decide, "How do I do this?
• 9:59
  Rachel: What do I need to do?"
• 10:00
  Rachel: All of those things.
• 10:01
  Jessica: for sure.
• 10:02
  Jessica: She already talked about thinking about additional bonuses that you can add during the lulls.
• 10:07
  Jessica: Thinking about if you're maybe gonna offer a more extended payment plan, if that's something that's feasible for you, if you wanted to do it.
• 10:15
  Jessica: And these are things you wanna think through before because you don't wanna make it in that emotional state and panic state and just do it and not think about repercussions down the line.
• 10:23
  Jessica: Like, "Oh, I'm gonna give, free one-on-one calls just so I can hit my launch number."
• 10:27
  Jessica: But me later has to do 20 free one-on-one calls.
• 10:30
  Jessica: So really making these decisions when you're in a grounded kind of area.
• 10:34
  Jessica: And then just thinking about different things that you can do that you can pre-plan and just have in your back pocket that you maybe don't necessarily want to execute 'cause a launch is exhausting, but you'd be willing to
• 10:45
  Jessica: do it.
• 10:46
  Jessica: That may be offering another Q&A call, or we like to do open house behind-the-scenes calls.
• 10:51
  Jessica: Or maybe you are gonna commit to being in your DMs and doing some personal outreach sprints or something like that.
• 10:57
  Jessica: But you just kinda wanna think about all the different ways that can accelerate your launch if it's not going the way that you are.
• 11:03
  Jessica: These aren't the most ideal things to do, but these are some things that sometimes we have to pull out of our pocket to make sure that, we stay on the profitable side of the launch.
• 11:13
  Rachel: So then that moves us to step three, which is get manual, get in the weeds, boots on the ground, high touch.
• 11:20
  Rachel: This is when the crickets are cricketing.
• 11:23
  Rachel: You really want to move into relationship building mode, like hand to hand.
• 11:30
  Rachel: And so this is the part where I have seen so much success in.
• 11:35
  Rachel: I've seen also a lot of people resist this part, but it works.
• 11:39
  Rachel: And this is where you're sitting there being like, "Okay, should I send another email?"
• 11:44
  Rachel: Would it take an hour of your time?
• 11:46
  Rachel: What I do for my clients, we pull their warm list, where we say, these specific people have clicked on the sales page more than once.
• 11:55
  Rachel: Do they exist in social?
• 11:57
  Rachel: Do they exist someplace that you are aware of?
• 11:59
  Rachel: Not just popping into them and being like, "Hey, I saw you on my sales page.
• 12:03
  Rachel: Do you wanna buy it?"
• 12:05
  Rachel: This is not a sales pitch.
• 12:07
  Rachel: It's a relationship building point.
• 12:11
  Rachel: And Jess, I don't know if you have more tips on this.
• 12:14
  Rachel: But I think that this is the part people feel icky about, but it does not have to be icky at all.
• 12:19
  Jessica: So one of my clients, we are actually in the middle of implementing this now, where his program's about $4,000.
• 12:25
  Jessica: One thing we've started implementing is we've brought on one person, this is obviously a bigger client, but we could do it on a small scale as well, as an enrollment advisor.
• 12:33
  Jessica: It's a past person that has gone through this certification program before that had a positive experience, and she is available for people that are on the fence and wanna talk to somebody that may have went through the program
• 12:47
  Jessica: and get a real deal idea.
• 12:48
  Jessica: So we do add an optional phone number field on here so that we can text, call, reach out to them with their permission.
• 12:56
  Jessica: They're obviously consenting on the form that we can do this to them.
• 13:00
  Jessica: We actually have on our sales page too a secondary CTA, if you wanna speak to someone, if you have questions about this.
• 13:06
  Jessica: And most of the time when the people get on the phone, they really just want confirmation that this is the right spot for them from a real human being talking to them, and on a one-on-one capacity.
• 13:17
  Jessica: So she's not even having to kind of sell.
• 13:20
  Jessica: Sometimes she's just showing the people how to check out or- explaining some logistics of things like that.
• 13:25
  Jessica: It's just been amazing to see as we implement this, how many additional conversions, that we will get, 'cause we're running a weekly webinar right now.
• 13:32
  Jessica: I would say probably, we're getting, a good 20 people a week, and eight people are converting on the call, two people from the follow-up email, and then the other 10 are from them either booking a call with her
• 13:42
  Jessica: or her doing some outreach after the event to follow up and see if they have any questions.
• 13:47
  Jessica: So I think like Rachel said, setting up that pre-tagging system of these warm people.
• 13:52
  Jessica: They have clicked on the sales page but haven't enrolled.
• 13:55
  Jessica: I love to arm clients with other intel- this is why we love quizzes.
• 13:58
  Jessica: They've opted into a quiz and we know they may have a specific pain point, so we can make that outreach a little more personal to them.
• 14:05
  Jessica: I think my clients have it in their head, like, "Oh, but this should all be automated, I shouldn't have to do any work."
• 14:10
  Jessica: Yeah, that's not how a launch work If you're, like, Tony Robbins, Amy Porterfield, and James Warren, Boren, everybody knows your name.
• 14:14
  Jessica: You've got that big brand built on trust.
• 14:17
  Jessica: But if you're just a random person on the internet, And you don't have that big, huge brand that they've spent years building around them that automatically give them trust and authority, and you want somebody to give you thousands
• 14:28
  Jessica: of dollars, then they're probably gonna wanna talk to a real person face-to-face.
• 14:33
  Jessica: And you can do this either one-on-one, but I've also seen group calls that are smaller and intimate with personal conversations, where they're just chatting with you back and forth.
• 14:41
  Jessica: You're not just doing your pitch that you would do on a webinar.
• 14:44
  Jessica: This is definitely something that you should plan to implement, and you could do it if your launch isn't doing that great.
• 14:51
  Jessica: You could do it if you really wanna hit that sweet girl, but I've seen it work and help convert a lot better
• 14:56
  Rachel: Yeah, and this is also phenomenal market research, direct from people's mouths.
• 15:02
  Rachel: Even if people don't convert, you wanna be documenting these conversations so you know what are consistent objections, what are things that people are hesitant on, and you can build that into messaging going forward so that you're covering these
• 15:18
  Rachel: bases proactively in the next launch.
• 15:21
  Rachel: But this is amazing.
• 15:22
  Rachel: Any data you can get directly from the mouths of your prospects and leads is something you want to be documenting and just having outside of your brain.
• 15:32
  Jessica: Love it.
• 15:32
  Jessica: Love it, love it, love it.
• 15:33
  Jessica: We just wanna leave you with this quick mindset shift that, if your launch goes sideways, if it doesn't perform as great as you expected it to, launching is experiment, business is a science.
• 15:45
  Jessica: There is always a way to look at the data and improve upon the data the next go around.
• 15:50
  Jessica: We will tell you over and over again, your first launch probably isn't gonna be a banger right out the gate.
• 15:56
  Jessica: Even if you see these people, like jessie.
• 15:58
  Jessica: Yap Challenge girl.
• 15:59
  Jessica: She had a really big launch.
• 16:01
  Jessica: Looks like it was right out the gate.
• 16:02
  Jessica: She's been in online business for over 20 years and have built up skills to be able to do this.
• 16:07
  Jessica: This is not her first rodeo, so if this is your first rodeo, just understand it's gonna take time.
• 16:12
  Jessica: You've gotta learn your customer.
• 16:14
  Jessica: You've gotta learn your way of selling.
• 16:16
  Jessica: But there is a way to get better and better and better.
• 16:18
  Jessica: Just don't throw everything out and don't feel like a failure.
• 16:21
  Jessica: You did the dang thing that most people haven't done.
• 16:24
  Jessica: And launches are going to be a learning and teaching experiment every single time you go through.
• 16:29
  Jessica: Whether you make $20,000 or $3 million, there'll always be places that you can learn, to improve in your launch.
• 16:36
  Rachel: Awesome.
• 16:36
  Rachel: So let's tie this all together because we definitely went deeper.
• 16:41
  Rachel: Layers on layers on layers here.
• 16:43
  Rachel: So first, when it comes to a launch, understand the structure of a launch.
• 16:48
  Rachel: That is typically the open cart has a higher spike, it's more quiet in the middle, and then the last minute kind of surge typically happens.
• 16:57
  Rachel: It is very standard buyer behavior.
• 17:00
  Rachel: This is not a sign to blow up your launch in any case.
• 17:03
  Rachel: Step one, set your good, better, best goals before the doors then open, and then reverse engineer all of your various components like registration goal and all of that backwards from that and monitor it.
• 17:17
  Rachel: This will keep you from going crazy halfway during the launch being like, "Oh no, I didn't do that."
• 17:23
  Rachel: Step two is pre-decide your pivots to take the emotion out of it.
• 17:27
  Rachel: In your planning stage, decide what you are comfortable with and what future you would appreciate to show up and do versus making that panic decision to sell 20 one-on-ones and then future you has to actually execute that.
• 17:42
  Rachel: Step three is that when the crickets are really making some noise there, get manual.
• 17:47
  Rachel: Get hands-on.
• 17:49
  Rachel: Be relationship and human first, and understand that this is not reaching out and being icky to your entire list.
• 17:57
  Rachel: These are the qualified people that are raising their hands that probably just need to talk to a human, just need to hear from you and understand that.
• 18:06
  Rachel: And then layer into that is that's all market research.
• 18:10
  Rachel: So understand that all of this is just data.
• 18:13
  Rachel: Your numbers are giving you the right map, and it's not necessarily a report card.
• 18:19
  Rachel: It is literally just a kind of guide to where you can look and what holes you can fill.
• 18:25
  Rachel: So enjoy.
• 18:27
  Jessica: All right, we hope you found this episode helpful.
• 18:29
  Jessica: Make sure you send this to your business bestie, you know, the one that's planning her launch in October or November.
• 18:35
  Jessica: We would love for her to hear.
• 18:37
  Jessica: If you are launching, let us know.
• 18:39
  Jessica: We wanna follow along, cheer you on from the sidelines.
• 18:42
  Jessica: Make sure you come back, we'll be giving you one final episode for our launch series.
• 18:47
  Jessica: If you haven't listened to the episodes before this, we highly suggest that.
• 18:50
  Jessica: We're really walking you through step by step the whole launch experience.
• 18:54
  Jessica: And until next week, we are
• 18:56
  Rachel: rooting for you.