How Making Power Offers Will Transform Your Expert Business with Joel Erway

All right, welcome back. This is Brad Costanzo and you're listening to Bacon Wrapped Business with obviously me, Brad Costanzo. And today I have invited a friend of mine on the show who has really impressed me by simplifying a business model for people who, especially for people who sell services such as coaching, consulting, but also information products and pretty much anything. A lot of what he does is stuff that I've somewhat subconsciously done in the past. But Joel Irwe, who you're about to meet, has done an incredible job of encapsulating this in a formula that is really easy for people to understand and create a sales system that is not only simple, but highly effective. In fact, it's very rare that I come across something that makes me stop and go like, son of a bitch. That's both innovative and simple as hell. And why didn't I think of that? And that's one of the reasons I invited Joel Irwe to come on the show. Met Joel several years ago. He is the founder of a company called the Webinar Agency. But he also helps experts semi retire with these million dollar course launches and course offerings. Since 2015, he's worked with and served thousands of paying customers, helping them launch their courses using this perfect expert model framework. We'll talk about that. He's been featured on a lot of podcasts, none of them quite as esteemed as this one, obviously especially that one he was just on with that Roland Frazier fella. But Joel recently started to reveal the framework of his model right now regarding how to create and sell high ticket courses by simplifying everything you're doing. And now is the time where I'm going to shut up and welcome Joel to Bacon Wrap business. Good to have you, brother.

How are you? What's up, Brad? Thanks for having me on.

Yes, it's, it's good to see you again. I mean, I think we first met. Was it, did we first meet at a dinner at Traffic Conversion summit something like 100 years ago?

That's when, that was the memory that I had when we, when we first met.

Yes, absolutely. And as I mentioned, you know, we kind of kept in touch a little bit here on the social medias. But recently, I don't know if it was like, I don't know, six months ago or whenever you, when I came across this. You started a Facebook group talking about, was it, what's it called? Million Dollar Course.

Yeah. Million Dollar Course Marketers.

Yep. And you started to just talk about a framework that you developed to help people cut through all the noise and simply launch offers, get them off the ground and do it in a much simpler way than what most people are familiar with. I want to dive exactly into this, this model here. And then I want to go deep and I want to ask a bunch of questions because I think when people listen to this, hopefully with a pen in their hand, because they're going to want to take a lot of notes, there's going to be some paradigm shifts and I want to talk about some of the nuances that maybe I haven't seen you cover, you know, when you're talking about it in your webinars and courses and etc. But let's go back a little bit to your experience in this industry of helping people sell, especially experts with the webinar agency and everything you've done. So give us a little bit of background on, you know, how you got started in this field.

About. Well, we're in 2020 now, almost coming up to 2021. I got started in this industry back in 2014 and I had the idea. So I left my corporate job. And I'm going to give you the down and dirty, very short version of this because it can go rather, rather lengthy. But 2014, I had committed to leaving my job and pursue entrepreneurship. I was a sales engineer selling commercial heating and cooling equipment. And that is what got me interested in the world of sales, marketing and ultimately entrepreneurship. I was, you know, educated as, as a mechanical engineer. So I decided my first venture was going to be to publish a book. So I wrote a strategy guide called how to. I'm sorry, called 30 Minute EIT, how to pass the fundamentals of engineering exam without beating your head. And you know, to this day I still make about $50 a month on Amazon with royalties, which is pretty cool. So totally passive income. And that is pretty much like that was all I needed to get hooked to this world of entrepreneurship. After I quickly realized I wasn't going to retire, I wasn't going to be able to make a whole lot of money selling a very, very, very niche book, I said, well, you know what? I'm going to launch a course. And went down that path, started to follow some marketers because I had no idea about marketing. And that was right when Russell Brunson was launching ClickFunnels. And as he launched ClickFunnels, there's actually a tie into this. But as he launched ClickFunnels, I'm not sure if he talks about this or not or what, but he launched a couple of coaching programs to help. I don't know if that was his goal was to help fund clickfunnels. But he sold high end coaching programs and everyone who joined the coaching program obviously got clickfunnels. And he taught us all how to use it, et cetera, et cetera. So I joined one of his coaching programs and he was teaching people about webinars. He's like, okay, Joel, you want to sell a course, you need to do a webinar. I'm like, all right, well, I've been doing sales presentations for the past five years. Makes sense to me. I can pick this up pretty, pretty quickly. And I did. So I was selling. I created a career development course for engineers. Selling that for I can't remember how much, 300, 500 bucks, 600 bucks, something like that. It was relatively low to mid ticket and honestly I was pretty close to break even. So I was selling some courses here or there. But that was my first venture into paid traffic. That was my first venture into doing anything business related. And if I had known what I know now, I would have stuck with that and kept working at it. But I ended up running out of cash for ads and I just kind of threw it away because I didn't think that it was going to work. So I ran out of cash, called up Russell. I'm like, dude, I need to hustle. I need to work for you. Let me, you know, let me run phone sales for you. Let me close. Let me sell this coaching program for you. Like, I'm a big believer in it. Like the stuff that you've given me is valuable. I just ran out of cash for ads. He said, sorry, I don't have any openings for salespeople right now. But connect with my buddy or with my other coaching client, Jason, who's looking for a salesperson and you know, maybe you guys can connect. So he introduced me to Jason, who was running a weekly live webinar and he was looking for a phone salesperson to follow up with all these leads on why they didn't buy and try and convince them to join the program. So we connected. I watched Jason's webinar and by the way, I had no experience in phone sales. I was just straight up hustling. But I watched his webinar. I'm like, dude, you know, how well is this webinar performing? It's not performing well at all. We're basically break even. We're doing about one sale a week of a thousand dollar program. I'm like, all right, well before I start calling all these people and I didn't tell him this, but like, I really didn't want to do phone sales. I said, what if I just rewrote your webinar? He's like, fine, go for it. I hate webinars. I just, you know, Russell is telling me to do it. That's the only reason why I'm doing it. I'm like, all right, cool. So I rewrote his webinar. I pitched it for him two weeks later and we ended up doing 14 sales that week. So we immediately boosted his sales by 1,400%. He went just bonkers, you know, because, you know, it's just a massive conversion rate boost. I mean, he sees life in the business. I'm happy because I just made, you know, 1400 bucks. I was getting paid 10% commission on all those sales. So I'm happy. He's happy. And that was the birth of the webinar agency. So started, you know, taking on more clients writing long form webinars. And in 2016, 2017, we started testing this thing called a mini webinar for high ticket offers. That did very well. We ended up helping my first client. We took him from zero to $400,000 a month in six months. Many people may know who he is. He's big in the gym space, the fitness space. He's basically the face of clickfunnels. So worked with him. He was my first client. We've helped other people go from zero to $10 million in five months. And all following what we're talking about here. The perfect expert model, power offers and mini webinars.

I love it, you know, and I've done in the past. Past is the key word here, is written webinars for clients. I hate it. I don't know how you have hair left because right, like so, for instance, like writing a perfectly scripted video sales letter or something is a little bit different. But I even don't like that if I'm writing for somebody else because oftentimes I know that like, if I'm writing for my, like if I'm writing it, I might be thinking my voice and I've given it to somebody else and then they read it and I'm like, oh my God, it's like terrible. And I vowed off writing full blown webinars for folks in the past. I don't know how you survived that and came out the other side, but you mentioned the concept of a mini webinar and I want to get to that because. But I know that kind of fits in the middle of your framework, and I'll preface this for my audience, is that when I came across what you were teaching, none of this is like the hyper advanced to where it's like, oh my God, that's so hard to understand. Like this is so new. But the way that you've created the structure you've created in the framework for taking your expertise and your offerings and understanding how to cut through the noise and get the attention of the market really impressed the hell out of me. And as I told you, offline, like this is the stuff I kind of did naturally in the back of my mind. But I never really had a, a roadmap or a framework to do this with. And when I saw what you were doing, it was one of those drop the mic moments. Like that's it. You just hit the nail on the head with this concept of catch all marketing, et cetera. Let's use this to go through kind of the framework of what you're now showing people how to do and why it's so effective.

Of course. So I'm an open book. So any questions you have?

Well, I got a handful of them, so yep.

So what we're talking about here is what I call the perfect expert model. So when I was doing webinars with clients, primarily I was working with coaches, consultants and course creators. People selling information and expertise. And for the first two and a half years, all we were doing was this thing called long form webinars. We were either selling a direct, direct to offer at the end of the webinar, like, hey, buy my $500 course, thousand dollars course, whatever it is, or we were doing push to an application. And Brad, you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Webinars are the, probably the single handedly most difficult thing that you can do in Internet marketing, in digital marketing. And so we felt it, you know, we, it's not like we have, yes, we are great at it, but you know, we still had to go through a very laborious process. Every time that we created a webinar. We didn't have some magic bullet that just spit out great webinars. It was a lot of, you know, a lot of work. And after a while, you know, I'm, I'm trying to figure out ways that we can optimize not only results for ourselves, but results for our clients and for, you know, full transparency. We took on some clients that we didn't get results for. And when you start doing that, number one, you have a brand to protect and you have to figure out why you're not getting results and you really start to fine tune your ideal client avatar so you don't, you know, you don't repeat that stuff. And you, you know, it really came down to the fact that like, okay, webinars are extremely difficult and they should, you know, our ideal climate client avatar was they should not be in startup mode. We took a few clients that were in startup mode and they thought that, you know, great, you're going to write a webinar for me and we're going to make millions of dollars. I'm going to be able to just, you know, be, you know, the best performer in my marketplace.

Well, they saw that on a Facebook ad, so obviously it's true.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, so they see that and you know, they have false expectations or unrealistic expectations. And so I had to figure out like, because I got a lot of these leads now. So once we really figured out who our ideal client avatar was, we were getting tons of leads. Russell wrote me, wrote about me an Expert Secrets. So he's mentioned me as the, you know, I'm the webinar guy. So we're getting lots of leads, which is great. But you know, we still had to make sure that we could get results for these clients. And so we'd get a lot of these leads and they were unqualified because they'd be coming to me like, Joel, I saw, I read about you in Expert Secrets here. You're the webinar guy. You know, I want to launch a course and let's do it. And there's not qualified because they don't have any revenue coming in the door. You know, launching a webinar, especially to cold paid traffic, is a big risk. And if it hits, then it's going to hit big, but it's not always going to hit. And so we had to turn down a lot of people. And so in my own business, we had a webinar that was running and it was profitable. We were selling, we were doing an application model, long form webinar to an application and it was probably like, I don't know, 2-3x return on ad spend, which isn't all that great. It was costing us about 400 to $450 per application, which for all the other webinars that we were running that were an application model to a high ticket program, it was the worst performing one. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? I just couldn't figure it out. So I hired I joined masterminds, I hired coaches, I hired people to look at my funnel and look at my copy. And nobody could solve it. Nobody could give me the right answer. People were telling me, oh, you got to hire an ads agency or you got to do this. It's like after I went through the whole gamut of all these different techniques to try and fix my funnel, I was laying in bed one night and we had just moved into a new house. It was our dream home where we live right now. Our dream. Our son was born. So this is fall of 2016. Our first child was born. So we have, you know, a new addition to the family. We're in a house that's three times as expensive that than it was than our previous home was. So expenses are much higher. And I'm still trying to figure out, you know, how to really get clients, like how to get clients consistently. And I was laying away awake in bed one night staring at the ceiling fan like, I remember it like it was yesterday, trying to figure out, like, what am I going to do to get clients? And I was reading this book by Bob Bly. It was how to create Irresistible offers. And on the first, within the first five or six pages, there was this chart that said that it explained cost per customer acquisition depending on the type of content that you have. And this was the big light bulb moment for me. This is what changed the game for me from here on out. So this chart showed that basically, as you create content, if it's primarily offer driven, your cost per customer acquisition will be the lowest. The lower amount of content you put in that piece, the lower amount of offer percentage that you put in that piece of content, the higher your cost per acquisition. So essentially what he was doing, what he was saying was, if you want more clients, make more offers, do less marketing. And I'm like, this is, this is so simple that it has to be true. It's one of those things, like, I couldn't not believe it because I couldn't poke any holes into it.

So let me put a pin right there just for explanation, kind of for my audiences, the nuance on this. So let's talk briefly about what is offer based content and what do you mean by the more offer driven? I think you said something about the more offer driven content you do, the less marketing. Driven, driven content. So what's, you know, what's the difference there for folks who are kind of like, not familiar.

Yes, thank you for stopping me because it sounded like that came out unclear and I'm glad and it did. So what that essentially was saying was you have a piece of content that you put out and it's going to. There are two types of content that Bob describes and he goes, you have your offer and then you have brand driven content. And so brand driven content is basically anything that does not promote a call to action. Right? Anything that does not promote, you know, hey, do this next. Yeah, right.

Education marketing.

Yep, education based marketing, exactly right.

Which is good. It's good to have. But yes, like you just in the.

Preference to all of this, like where, where I'm going with all this is that I want it to be known. I am not trying to rewrite the rulebooks of the rulebook of marketing. Like, I'm not trying to disprove marketing. I'm just trying to put it in the right order, particularly for bootstrapped startups and people who really care about finances and their money. Because this is what I found to be the most effective way to generate revenue with the least amount of risk. So offer driven, the two types of content he's talking about is offer driven content and brand driven content. So if you have a piece of content that is say 95% offer driven and 5% brand driven, meaning it's primarily an offer, your cost per acquisition will be the lowest. Because there's no, there's no way to read between the lines, like, hey, I've got an offer for you, do you want it or not? And he said, as you start to increase the amount of brand content that you have in a piece, in a piece of content and decrease the amount of offer, your cost per acquisition is going to go up. Right, because it's more education and less offer driven. And so I looked at that and in simplistic terms, that's when I said like, okay, what are you saying is if you want to make sales, make more offers, do less marketing. And I was reflecting back on my funnel. Cause that was the only thing that was top. My top of my mind, like, was why was my funnel not working? And the reason why it wasn't working was because I had tons of education. Even though it was a funnel, it was a webinar funnel. And webinar funnels do work. But I had tons of education in my funnel and, and my offer was at the very end. And so what that was really telling me was that number one, I was over educating my market because we had plenty of other webinar funnels that were converting at a much lower cost per acquisition. But what that told me was I had a Huge market already that wanted this topic and wasn't willing to sit through a presentation because they probably already knew it. My topic was, hey, let me show you why webinars are so awesome. Sit through my webinar to learn about why webinars are great. And at the end I'm going to make you an offer to hop on a call with us to help you with your webinar. So what that was telling me was that I already had a huge market that was pre educated on webinars. They wanted a webinar but they just didn't, you know, they didn't have the time to go do it themselves. So after I read that book, that's when I ran downstairs and I just typed up what I now call a power offer ad. I launched it and that very next day I landed a 25k client and I had another one on my waiting list. So two 25k clients like immediately. And I haven't looked back since.

So you're going to give an example of that?

Yes.

Cool. And the power offer is really kind of the first step of this entire thing. Right. Know what you're offering and then make it powerful.

Yep. So if we look at, so we talked about education based marketing. Right. First, and that's, that's like the perfect example is the webinar educate, educate, educate and then at the end make an offer. And there's a time and place for that. Right. But when we do offer driven based sales, because it's not marketing when you're leading with an offer and there's a difference there. So when you do offer based sales, you're validating your offer because you're putting it front and center. It's the first thing that somebody sees. Right. I'm not necessarily talking about your price, I'm more referring to your promise inside of your offer. Right. So when you see offer, you know, I'm referring to high ticket offers and high end offers where you, there's a time and place for when you reveal it and you likely don't want to reveal that if it's cold traffic ad on the first thing that they see. So I'm really referring to the promise. You want to validate your promise. That's your offer. So the power offer that I came up with was when I ran downstairs and I typed it up, I said, hey, listen, attention coaches, experts and consultants. If I offered to create a high converting webinar for you in the next seven days without you needing to worry about what to say or how to say it Would you take me up on that offer? I might be butchering it a little bit, the details, but that's essentially it. It's if I offered you X, Y and Z without any sort of hurdle that you know that you have, would you take me up on that offer? Right. It's. I'm really gauging the responsiveness for it. I want them to say yes or no right away.

And you're not telling them the price that's also important right there.

Correct? Correct. I'm not telling them the price on this, on the, on the power offer ad. Correct.

Okay.

So I'm validating my promise because what so many people. And this is where a lot of people get tripped up. And this is, this is where it becomes really difficult to get high converting web, like to get webinars to convert unless you have a lot of experience creating offers. But to get webinars to convert like on the first or second go around, it's really difficult because you really have to know what they want and that offer has to convert so you can have all the great content in the world on the front end. But if you put an offer in front of them that they don't want or doesn't resonate, it's not going to convert. And so I said, you know what, I'm going to flip it on its head because I knew from creating all these long form webinars that the most important element was the offer. So I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to put it right out, right out in front and see if anyone will respond. And so after I launched that first power offer, my cost per application went from 450 bucks to 30 to $40 literally overnight.

Wow. So let's talk about. And this was my big epiphany moment. And you mentioned catch all marketing.

Right.

This is where I was like son of a bitch, that Irwe is smart. I'll let you describe it. But I had this epiphany where, which I'll explain after you explain what catch all marketing is and why this works so well.

Yep. So now if we start to take this whole idea and put it into a model, this is what I call the perfect expert model. So once you get the concept of like, okay, great, I have to make an offer first. Like, okay Joel, I'm understanding this. Like, you know, it's sales first and then marketing. Right. So make them an offer first and then give them a little bit of information, the need to know information first them to make a proper yes or no decision as we start to expand this and how we develop a real business model for course creators. What I do is when I go out with an offer, I want to make sure that I have two or sometimes three versions of that offer that I can, that they can buy, right? And so when I think about that as course creators and coaches and consultants from a very basic level, let's take my agency for an example or if you're an agency owner, right, My top level is going to be done for you. And all this ties to one core promise, right? So if the promise is, let's use the webinar, for example, like, hey, I want to help you build a webinar, okay, in the next seven days or whatever it is. Seven to 10 days, right? So I want to get them captured on, get their interest captured from that big promise. Hey, let us do it first for you, okay? They're going to go through my application funnel, they're going to go through my process and they're going to book a call and we'll hop on the call. I'll do some discovery, but at the end I'll say, okay, great, based on your situation, like we can even either do done for you or we can put you through an accelerator coaching program or you can buy my templates and my trainings for do it yourself, right? So I always have three, two to three versions of that promise of that offer that I can give them. So it's one core promise. That's our, that's our power offer, right. And I can give them two to three versions for how they can achieve that promise. So that's what we call the perfect expert model. And where this really starts to make a lot of sense. Brad, as you already, as you already mentioned, I call it catch all marketing. Because what a lot of people try to do when they're selling a course, they try to, they will try to follow the Ascension model. So they'll try and sell a low ticket course first. Then they're going to try and upsell them into, into coaching and consulting and then maybe down the road they'll sell them into a mastermind or whatever, right? And they think that this Ascension model is the way to go. Let me be very clear. I do not want to, I'm not trying to say the Ascension model does not work. We have our own Ascension model. But my brand has been around for five or six years. Like it's like I've built it in stages. I built it using the descension sequence. So I started at the Top and then built all of my core elements down the value ladder later on. And so when we're able to do this, we do this with the power offer and the mini webinar funnel using the perfect expert model. And we do this by leading with that top tier offer. Right. So when I lead with done for you, who's going to respond to that? Right. Is it going to attract my players with money? Yes, it's absolutely going to attract them, but it's also going to attract people who necessarily can't afford it, which is the entire rest of my market. And if I do that properly. Right. When you do that, you attract the entire market because you're giving them that best offer that you possibly can. And when you get them on the phone, you're able to identify really what the best level is for them and you can make the appropriate offer. Because not everybody, the vast majority of people are going to, are not going to be able to afford your top tier offer. And so it's your job to say, listen, this doesn't really seem like the best fit for you, but we have something that's equally as valuable for your situation. I'd like to present it to you and then, you know, give them the done with you offer or the do it yourself offer.

Absolutely. And that, that was the, this catch all concept of, you know, what are the, what, what are the highest ticket potential, like, potential payers, what will they pay for? What will they pay tens of thousands of dollars for? And it's usually like you said, done for you. They want, I don't wanna learn it, I just want somebody to do it. And then that's when it hit me. I was like, yeah, you know what, who else wants that? Freaking everybody. Everybody wants the easy button, right? Not everybody can afford it. Everybody wants it. It's almost like if you said like, you know, if I offered to, you know, who wants a Lamborghini? Everybody wants one. You know, millionaires want it, but so do broke asses. Like everybody wants that. And it's like, all right, well cool, so maybe like now I've got your attention. And this fits so perfectly into the most classic marketing formula, Aida. Get attention, generate interest, build desire, and then go for action. If you don't get their attention, you don't even have a chance to do the other things. And you know, in marketing, especially in copywriting and webinars and VSLs, we hear about pattern interrupts. And you know, this is a goldfish, like John Benson's favorite VSL in the day. But Pattern interrupts are great. Doing something outrageous or saying something is a great way to get somebody's attention. But you know what else is a great way is just like, hey, I've got this. You're hungry for a piece of steak. I've got steak. Who wants steak? Like, maybe they get filet mignon or maybe they get hamburger. It just depends. It's, hey, it's cow meat. But, you know, that kind of thing where I realized, yeah, you got to get everybody's attention. And now once you've got that, you kind of get to filter them out based upon where they're at, what they can afford, what they really need. This actually dovetails into a concept that I teach some of my clients. And I did an episode on my podcast about it recently, about. And it has to do with offers, but it's like, you know, why Led Zeppelin's mistake? You know, I was like, led Zeppelin was wrong. She's not buying a stairway to heaven, she's buying heaven. That's the offer, right? Like, she wants to be in heaven. You may have a stairway, a rope ladder, an escalator, a rocket ship or whatever. Like she. But she doesn't care about that. She just wants to get to heaven. And that's like, you know, advertising your stairway as opposed to advertising, you know, the heaven. So when you advertise it, that. Right, yeah, everybody wants to get there. It's like, all right, can you afford the stairway or do you need to take the rope ladder?

Well, it's, you know, it's the easy way that I, the best way that I can use an example is, let's say we're promoting a free webinar, right? So going back to that same funnel that the education based funnel, right? This is perfect for people who are just launching, right? And this is the reason why I did this, because we want to get cash flow coming in the door. So we start with our high ticket offer first and then we, and then we, we, we scale down. But when I'm promoting a free webinar, right? It's somewhere in my copy. It's going to be, hey, sign up for this free training to learn X, Y and Z. And you know who's not going to sign up for that free training? Most of the people who have deep pockets, right? Because the number one thing that they value more than that they value at this stage in their career is they value time over money. So I had to design a sales funnel that was short and to the point because they weren't going to stick around very long to solve that problem. And so that's really where this whole idea came up, came from is you know, catch all marketing, grab everybody so you can get those, you know, get those high value clients and then also talk to people that you can downsell into your lower level programs.

Bingo. Bingo. By the way, I also call my nuance, I call them high ticket. This is when it comes to high ticket, this is a nuance. Not exactly what you're talking about but high ticket payers versus high ticket players, both are good, both people will pay money. But like to me a high ticket payer is somebody I really need the foundation like I want to. I don't know anything about, let's say building a business like an online business. So I need to know how to do customer research and avatar research and build this and build a sales page. I need the whole, I need all 800 videos in your, in your home study program. That's a high ticket and that's going to be $10,000 or whatever. A high ticket player is somebody who's already got momentum. They're already doing stuff they typically want the done for you but. But they value their time over their money, right? It's exactly like that. So it's like if you don't have an offer for your high ticket players, the people who want to just write a check and make their problems go away, you've got a problem. But like we said, everybody wants to just write a check and make their problems go away. Can they do that? I want to dovetail into the other couple parts of the system so. Because we could talk about this for days. Um, so the next part, after somebody responds to your power offer, which you said as the example, if I offered to create a webinar for you without all the headaches, handle all this other stuff in seven days, you know, would you take me up on that offer? By the way, is there an like would you take me up on that offer? Is that the phrase? Like if you tested would you be interested versus would you take me up on that offer? Do you play around with that or. I was always curious.

Yeah, you know, I wish I could say that I've tested a lot of those different calls to action, but that worked so well that I like that. I really have, by the way, I really interested.

Interested is like Aida. Action is like would you take me up on that offer? That's asking for an action? Like yeah, I would take you up on that. I was just curious if you tested it because I liked the Way you phrased it compared to what you could have done?

Yeah. When I wrote it, I wanted to be as direct as possible. And the reason why I didn't say, would you be interested versus would you take me up on the offer is because I wanted to attract buyer leads. I didn't want to attract people who were just dipping their toe in the water.

Bingo. Okay.

So they say, yeah, full transparency. I have not tested it.

I don't think you need to. Okay. So they say, yes, I'd be interested. Maybe that's on an email. Maybe that's in a Facebook ad or a social post. Right. Like, that's the. You get it out there. Next step. You mentioned the mini webinar. What's the difference between a mini webinar and a maxi webinar?

Besides mini and maxi? Yeah. So our mini webinar is going to. If you take away one thing from this entire podcast, you have to understand my methodology and my framework in this launch stage, because this is what we're doing. This is, you know, the launch stage for launching new offers is sales first and then marketing. Okay? So I lead with the offer. I lead with the promise first at every step in the process. So we call them mini webinars because we are still doing some educating inside of this presentation. And so the first thing that we do is we are presenting them with the promise, with the offer. So it's like, hey, you know, we're looking for clients who are. Who have a program they're looking to sell and know they want a webinar, but just hate the thought of sitting down and writing it all out. If that's you pay attention. Right? So in the first, like, 15 seconds, we're just. We're repeating that promise because we want them in the back of their mind, not even at the back of mine. In the forefront of their mind. Like, okay, I want to be in consideration stage for whether or not I want to do this. Okay. And so we make that promise up front. We make that promise in the middle of the presentation, and we repeat that promise at the end, right? So we do it two to three times throughout the presentation. So we go through the presentation, and we are still going to give them some education in the middle, right? So I go sales and then marketing. So make the offer first and then give them a little bit of marketing to educate them on what the opportunity really is. What. What makes you different, what is your process? What is your methodology? So we explain all that in usually two or three steps in the presentation. Just like you'll have two or three teaching points. In a long form webinar, we just cut out all the extra crap. Like, we really don't talk about you, the authority. We will spend maybe 30 seconds talking about you, the authority. We're not going to tell your backstory, we're not going to talk about. We're not going to do an offer stack. Right. The only thing we're talking about in the offer is that power offer. That's it. If you want a webinar, book a call. Right. But it's basically every important element that we use from a long form webinar. We include in the mini webinar, we cut out all the fluff. So we've seen some as short as four minutes and we've seen some that take a little bit longer. Like 20 to 25 minutes.

Yeah, well, it just depends on. Yeah. What you're, what you're doing.

For some.

The simpler the offer is, the less you need to do it. Like I've heard it said, you know, like, a lot of people make marketing so complicated. Like, especially, you know, if you've got a customer, like, let's say you've got a horse to sell and you find somebody who needs a horse. You don't need a webinar, you just need a sign that says horse for sale. Right. It can be that simple. If you're talking to the right people, like, that's the, that sometimes that's the way to do it. One of the other things that, and I also noticed, I don't know if you just hit on this or not, but I thought it was important is throughout this mini webinar, you're still just talking to the ideal, highest ticket buyer, typically.

Right.

Like, that's who you're, you're speaking towards. And once more, you're still going to get everybody listening because everybody wants to be in that situation. But you're not teaching them that. Okay, the first thing you have to do is go do this. You're not educating them on what to do, you're educating them on what you will do. Right. Like, so step one will help you develop your power offer. Step two will write your mini webinar. Step three, three will take you to the application, to a call, which I think is step three. Is that not cool?

Yep.

So, yeah, you're telling them, you're still educating them on what will happen, but throughout this, you're not educating them on how to do it themselves yet.

Yep.

Cool.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah, it's really just educating them on the opportunity Exactly.

So that brings to step three. And so step three, you said, is kind of the application. What do you call step three?

Power assessment form. Application. Yep.

So, and I have a question on this. Is there anything different? Because I mean, assessment forms for an application, for a call, Nothing new about that. They've been around for a while. Is there anything that you do slightly differently on these than traditional or that you've changed the way you do it?

So we had tested a couple different assessment forms and every, you know, for the most part the assessment form has to be custom to the offer. Right. There are some questions that you can, that can be cookie cutter, but like for the most part you really need to understand the situation of your prospect and ask, ask the right questions, the assessment. So all of this dovetails in the fact that this is a pre selling process. This is a sales process. You know, when I first got started in this industry, I took some trainings on, you know, how to be a high ticket closer and you know, how to follow these scripts to close big, big money deals. And I never liked them because it always made me nervous. A lot of them really focus on like making, you know, for lack of, lack of better words, like making your prospect cry, which is like. Exactly, exactly. It's no way that I like to do sales. And so as I developed this, I said, you know what, like I'm just going to be real with people. Um, I'm, I'm not the best salesperson, but I close enough to where it's a very profitable rate if I'm doing the sales. So I'm not, I don't run my own sales anymore. But when I did, it was a very simple process and it all started with the assessment form. And so, you know, I asked that, you know, I ask them very standard, very basic questions so I understand what their background is and what their situation is. But then I make sure that they're in a position right now to make a yes or no decision. And I'll just let them know, like, listen, you know, clearly we are looking for clients. Like we're in, we're in a spot that we're looking for, for business. If you're not in a position to make a yes or no decision right now, like that's totally cool, like enjoy, like hang out on my list, like, you know, stick around for a while. But like that makes no sense for us to get on a call. And I, what I will do is after they submit an assessment form, I will usually ask them a few questions and a follow up communication, whether this is via email, whether this is via text message. It's really going to depend on the audience, on what they prefer. But I'll ask them, like, hey, number one, did you watch the video? Did you watch the presentation? Like, making sure that they. They actually watched it. So they understand my methodology, so they understand my branded language so I don't have to repeat myself. Because if they're coming onto the call and they don't understand my methodology, they're unqualified. And they're not. They're very likely not going to make a yes or no. They're not gonna make a yes decision because they still have to consume it. They have to conceptualize and believe in it first. Yeah.

And that happens. You would think that most people would not apply until they watched it. But, you know, having worked with clients and done this on my own as well, like, I'm really blown away. Like, did you even watch. Did you even know what you're signing up for? That happens.

Yep. So I'll ask them, did you watch the presentation? And they'll say, yes. And I'll go, okay, great. And then I'll challenge them in a polite way, but I'll say, so what about the presentation makes you feel this is a good fit for your situation? Right. So I asked them that question because I want them. It's a bait question. I want them to start feeding me back my branded language because I know after they watch my own mini webinar that I have running right now, when they answer that question, they're gonna say, joel, I love the perfect expert model. I love the Tesla method. I love the, you know, I love the idea of a power offer or a mini webinar. Like, there's three or four core buzzwords that are branded to me that if they say that, then I know they've watched it and they've. They believe in the methodology. Right. So once they answer that, then I'll say, okay, great. So. And I will also let them know that I looked at their application, said based on your application, like, I think that there's. There's a great possibility that we could have success with your project or that we could, you know, we could. We could do some damage together. And then I basically say, I want to be upfront and transparent and honest with you because I don't want to waste your time and frame all in the mind and the benefit of the customer. Say, I don't want to waste your time. But, you know, our services or our programs start at X and range all the way up to Y, right? Does your budget allow for this type of investment to solve your problem? And if they say no, not at this time, then okay, great, then we'll part ways, right? Then I'll give them some free content, say, go, you know, keep following me. But it doesn't make sense to, to hop on a call. But if they say yes, I'm like, okay, sweet. Then I'll say, well, we'll hop on a call and we'll talk soon, right? Really a three question pre qualification makes all the world of difference. So by the time they get on that call, it's really just a Q and a call and say, you know, if you think it's a great fit, then great, let's, let's rock and roll. But you know, I don't want to surprise you with a price tag. I don't want to surprise you with something that you don't think that you're expecting. But man, I'm all about pre selling and if I can pre sell then my, you know, I really don't need to do any selling on the phone. My whole job is to make, is make sales for my team as easy as possible. And so our sales team right now does the same process. They do a pre selling qualification and we're closing it like 60 or 70% on a 25k offer.

That's beautiful. Okay, so I'm going to recap. You tell me if I missed anything. I'm going to recap for my own edification and that of my audience. It's really a three part framework or maybe four part, which is know what your offer is and in essence, you know, the offer is really what they get regardless of. It's not how they get it, it's not how you do it, it's what they get after working with you. And it should be as appealing as possible to everybody. That's your power offer. If I offer to do this for you or show you, etcetera, the highest end, you know, would you take me up on that offer? If they say yes, there's no price, send them to a mini webinar which still talks to the highest level avatar and still repeat. It's about the promise. It's the promise of what they'll get from working with you. You're not there to educate them, you're there to enlighten them about how the process works and what they'll get. But you're not here to, you know, you know, convert the unconverted. Like, okay, this makes sense. I Want this, right? Like that's what you want, then you send them to. You still on the mini webinar are not mentioning the price. You're getting them to an application or assessment and the assessment is going to find out if they're a good fit for you based upon their information. At this point you can or you don't have to reveal the price where you said, look, I want to be upfront with you. Like our, our products or slash service range starts here or we offer multiple levels of service offerings from like 20,000 or like done for you, done with you, do it yourself, none of the above, etc. Like, so sometimes you will tell them the price on the assessment, sometimes you won't. Is there ever, like, what's the nuance where you might tell them the price and you might not?

Most of the time, I would say it depends on the type of traffic that you have coming, coming through. If you reveal a price range on your assessment form, you will likely get a lower application rate just because it will scare some people off, which is not necessarily a bad thing. My default now is to not have the price and to reveal it on the, on the pre text qualification. Like the pre call qualification, that text message sequence, that email sequence that I just talked about. Yeah. So I am still going to reveal it before the call, but I'm going to do it after. I have some sort of communication with them first so I can gauge if they're a good fit. And that's, that's basically it. So I just move that down a step.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so you said. And that was the thing I think I just missed over where it's like, okay, they went through that and then you're going to text them or message them or you know, however, and then you're going to just allude to it. I don't want to waste your time. Like, are we in the ballpark, like. Or is this like a hells to the no. Right?

Yep.

Cool. By the way, I got a tool for you if you have not tried using this yet. Have you ever heard of Video Ask?

You know, we are in the process of setting that up for testimonials. So I actually just messaged my head of Client Success today. I said, go ahead and let's get signed up for it and let's get it set up. So yes, I have heard of it.

It's so cool. Like I've used that in Bonjoro. You're familiar with Bonjoro?

I have, yep, I am familiar with it. Yep.

Cool. So like for instance, for, for Bonjoro, sometimes it'll, you know that this, this is all via email, not text, right? Like if, if somebody applies for something, you know, you can just pull out your, wet your phone, it'll give you a task and say hey, I just noticed you signed up for this, blah blah, blah. And it'll send them a video. Like it's, it's personal, it doesn't scale. You're not doing this to a thousand people a day. But if you're getting 5, 10 applications, right, you could ask them there. But with Video Ask, which you've probably seen. But for my audience who doesn't know, I love this, my friend Carrie Wan told me about it. So you can do a personalized one and then they have those. But have you seen those buttons? Like you can have it as a question, like, hey, Joel, just saw you signed up for this. I think it's really cool. Hey, just so we're on the same page, like is this in your, is this in your wheelhouse? And they go yes or no? Like yeah, they have, there's a button on there that they say yes. And then you can take them to a prerecorded video, for instance. Hey, great, that's awesome. Like et cetera. But I think Video Ask would do really well for your follow up sequence.

I'm a big fan of could for sure.

The. Okay. And then yeah, obviously I guess the fourth part we're not going to get into this is the sales call. So obviously you've. What I like by now is that they've taken several micro commitments and anybody who studies cialdini and persuasion, et cetera, understands the power of just people taking these little tiny commitments saying yes, yes, yes. They've answered the power offer, they've watched the webinar, they filled out the assessment. I mean that's three pretty good signs that somebody is interested in buying. So I think hopefully my audience can see why this is really so simple. One of the things you and I talked about offline, we didn't really talk about here is, and I like this, like if you're, if you don't have a course yet but you understand the value of pre selling it and getting, finding people are interested, you could do one that says look, if I offered to, let's just say if I offered to, if I offered to build an online business for you, Soup the Nuts, did all this other stuff and basically handed you the reins, would you be interested? Would you take me up on that offer? They say yes, you talk about it, you come through and you go, okay, well look, this is going to be, I mean, I mean that would be very expensive. That could be a $50,000 offer. Or then the next level could be a coaching program or the next level could be a do it, you know, done, you know, do it yourself. Like a, like a, what do you call it? A, like an info, an info course, right? A product based course. You could always on that call say, well, okay, I'm going to be releasing, I'm going to be doing this as a class I'm going to every single week. I'm going to be releasing new content. Would you like to enroll in that? And it's only thousand bucks or whatever, right? Like so you could literally launch your class and your course doing this. You never even actually have to do the highest end service. You can offer it if somebody's willing to pay, but you can launch a course. And I love this because it validates, starting with the offer. Are people interested or not? Because I think we both have probably done this where you create a course and you put your blood, sweat and tears into it. You throw a bunch of traffic at it and then it's like crickets. And that will destroy you if you're not. If you don't have the persistence to move on post launch, like after you've done this. And you know, okay, this is good. Like I've got an info product, like I've got a great course about this and I've got coaching, etc. Do you still use this when you're scaling up like after you've proven it? Or is there any a time where you just change that and switch it out? Like what's the.

Yeah, so there's what I, what. This is a great question. And you have to understand, okay, so once you build, once you valid. This is all about validating your offer. Now we have had clients go to astronomical proportions like just ridiculous success with the mini webinar itself with this system. Right. I mean we're talking tens of millions of dollars in their own business just doing the mini webinar. Nice. It may work for. And it's going to be very market specific. Now their market was very responsive to that. They could scale it. They ended up scaling their phone sales team and you know, et cetera, et cetera. That became their primary funnel for other markets that may not be, that may not allow for that level of scale. What you're going to want to do is just take that mini webinar funnel. Now that becomes your back End funnel. And so now what you do is you develop your marketing assets, right? So sales first before marketing. So now what you want to do, because the mini webinar is really geared towards the top 10% of your, of your market, right. So Chet Holmes has the buyer's pyramid. There's 2 to 3% of the people who are ready to buy right now. Then there's like another 10 to 15% of the people who are like interested or considering. 20% of people will buy later, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And then it starts to, it starts to grow. So that's why I keep saying I'm not trying to rewrite the rulebooks of marketing, but I'm going to go after the top 2 to 3% because that's still probably enough to feed my family and usually more so if I design a great offer. But as I'm starting to scale, right. And build my audience and build my brand right now I start to put marketing elements in piece, right. Other other marketing elements in place. So maybe I develop a long form webinar, maybe I develop a lead magnet. Maybe I develop like all of your standard marketing stuff. Maybe I'll develop a Facebook group, maybe I'll do some podcasting. Right now this is where I want to start to build some list building activities and or low ticket offers. But I want to make sure that my, my back end high ticket offer converts, I want to make sure that people who I get into my world when they are ready to see my high ticket offer, I want to make sure that that's going to convert. And that's why I drive cold traffic to, that's why I test the power offer to the high end offer first. Because I want to make sure that that's actually, people are going, that's actually something that people want to buy. Yeah.

So I love that because it keeps you from developing all of the education based marketing that you think people want because it's a lot easier to come up with the thing, you know, that they want. Right. Like what do they want? They will, they want X, what do they want to learn, what do they need to learn, et cetera. That takes a whole lot more trial and error, et cetera. So I love the fact that like you said, you get the highest people off the top. That funds the development of the rest of your business. Much like the Tesla model, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know where people make the mistake is they start with list building activities. And you know, this is very real. You know, you could create the wrong lead A lead magnet that attracts the wrong type of person into your business. And you could be, you know, driving tons of traffic to it and getting low cost per leads, but they're, they're never gonna buy anything from you. It happens, it happens a lot. I have had lots of people come to me with 30,000 person lists and they're making less than $1,000 a month from it because they are just not, their audience is just not conditioned to buy or they don't have the right offer. Usually it's the former of what I just talked about. If you condition your audience not to buy from you, they're not gonna buy from you no matter what you do. And so you have to have this delicate balance of balancing education along with offers. And when you start with an offer, your audience knows you've got something to sell them whether or not they want it or not. That's fine, but you know, people will come back later, you know, when it's time for them, right?

So with a business related offer, like, you know, talk about webinars, right? Like if you already have a done for you, service able, or you could do one fairly simple, like I'll build this for you, I'll do this for you, etc. Even if that's kind of a decoy, let you price it so much that it's like, well, I don't really want to do this, so I'm going to price it high. When you're working with people who don't have a done for you component nor do they ever want to create one, what's kind of that like next step down because you know, you mentioned do it yourself done with you, done for you. Like let's say, you know, there's people in health, like I'll show you how to get fit, right? There's people who relationships, I'll show you how to have a better relationship with your spouse or how to meet women or, you know, whatever, or improve this or, you know, I'll teach you how to do this where it's still an education based offer. It could be like a suite of info products or a coaching slash mastermind or something of that nature. But it's not quite done for you. Where's the sweet spot on the power offer on that? Is it like you want me to show how to do this or.

Good question. So you do not need to have done for you. It's a very, very common question that I get when they, when they see my model, like, oh, well, Joel, you have an agency done for you. I don't want to do done for you. I'm like, that's totally fine. You do not need to do done for you. Because working with somebody one on one is just as like sexy or appealing as, as done for you, right? I can't say it's as appealing, but there are certain elements where you can't do done for you like you talked about. So that's why you always just frame it as, you know, I want to work with you one on one because that's really what the top people want. They want to have direct access to the, to the resource, direct access to the expert, right? So if you just frame your top tier offer as one on one and that's all it is, is one on one coaching or consulting, then that's great. When I first launched um, this program and it's been rebranded a couple of times, we first launched it as the mini webinar program when I first started marketing it and I was driving traffic, right? I didn't sell done for you services at the time. I was only selling consulting. I didn't have the course built, I had the elements outlined. I had some results to show for it. We had results in my own business, results in Alex's business. And so I was working with consulting clients and I said listen, I have this new idea that's, that's working. We've got some results. Like I would love to work with you for a month or two months, whatever it is, and we'll just set up, you know, a month to month contract. And that's how I got like my first five or six case studies. Was just working with them on a month to month basis. And they didn't go through a course, we just hopped on a call, we got, got our hands dirty and we got it live. Um, so that's how I, because that.

Makes me think like I've got a client, for instance, who's, who has a, they have an ascension funnel right now, right. Like without telling who it is, I'll tell the basics of it. So their model is they have, they have a couple front end offers, but one of them like is a low dollar course on how to use their real estate investors, right? So, and they teach real estate investor, you know, success, right. So the first one is, let me show you how to, how we use Facebook ads to generate motivated sellers, right? So there's a $47 course and then there's an upsell to how to negotiate and then there is an application. If I get this right, there's an Application on joining their. I don't know if it's their mastermind or their coaching. I think it's probably their mentoring program at that point and then a mastermind. Right. So there is no done for you aspect. But they've been doing the Ascension model. It's not converting like they want to because. And I've actually been thinking about this like okay, well what. And it may just be want us to work with you. Do you want us to work directly with you to show you how to build a profitable sustainable real estate business? It doesn't quite feel like a powerful, a power offer though. Right. Because it doesn't feel tangible and I like the tangibility of some of the other stuff. So I've kind of been thinking about that in that nature.

Yeah. I mean so you. This is what I call demand triggers. Right. So you have to kind of like extract some part of your offer that is tangible. Right. And it's like, okay, what is it that they really want and what's the promise that you can deliver them? Like can you promise them five leads working with them one on one or like that's what they want? Right. So you had to figure out what they really want and because what you want is one on one, like that's what you want to offer. It's much different than what they want. Right. What they want is the result. And then they want to figure out how you're going to, how it's going to happen. Right. Promise them five whatever seller or buyer leads that will and what does that produce for them. Right. That's really what they care about. Yeah.

And you mentioned this as well. But it's like it's done for you. But it's also just access. Like people want access to somebody. I've noticed like the high ticket players, the people who have the ability to write big checks and they've got. More importantly, that's not what makes a player a high ticket player. A player is somebody who has the ability to get results quickly with your information. Right. If you've got a hundred thousand person list or you got this, it's like, oh, give me that one thing, let me try that. And boom. Like ROI is awesome. A lot of times those people just want access. They want to be able to call somebody up when they need it. When they have a problem and have somebody in their corner, they want speed.

And they want access. 100%. Yep.

I love that. The. What are some of the. Are you able to divulge any of like not the craziest but the most esoteric or things like, wow, this worked in this field. Like holy crap, if this worked in this field, this would work in yours. Is there any off the top of your head?

Yeah man, you know what? Like give me the most obscure niches any day of the week. Like what? Believe me, I love all my Internet marketing friends. I love all my, you know, people who help coaches get client friends. But like we're playing in bloody waters, man. Like you know there's even with power offers, like there's, there's only so like it's, it gets so competitive at some point that like okay, like there's only so much juice we can squeeze out of this market. You give me like the blue ocean markets, this thing will just freaking explode like a nuclear bomb. I just had a, I just had a client on my podcast a few weeks ago, Carwana Dyson. She's awesome. Karwana D is how she likes to be called. And she helps clients in get government contracts, like six figure government contracts. She's acquiring customers for her. I take a program for like a hundred bucks. Acquiring customers. Her application cost is like $5 per application. We had another guy in the business, niche business startup niche. He helped people start a seven figure, six or seven figure cabinet painting company, right? The very first lead that came through his pipeline, he sold for $10,000. He had no testimonials aside from his own results. And it's just a non competitive market. It's like so give me the non competitive markets any day of the week. And it's like man, it's, you can't screw this up like as long as you get a good, good offer. But it's like when we get, you know, we have some clients in our agency that are in, you know, the coaching space and so like I'm not knocking them but you know, it's, it's just difficult, right? I mean it gets more, you have to really start to get an experienced marketer who can extract the unique mechanism and you know, really figure out what your unique selling proposition is, what makes you different than everybody else. But you know, there's a lot of people playing in the coaches training coaches and get clients niche and so the niches that are not popular, like give that to me any day of the week and like we can throw up the most basic power offer and you'll get results.

That's beautiful. Well Joel, I know you got to go here in just a couple minutes but hopefully some of the folks have been listening to this and said alright, I want even more in depth training and access and maybe even because I know you guys do some done for you and you've got some amazing training. Your webinars alone are like super valuable. If people want to find out more about power offers and courses like this, where do they go? What's the best places to reach you?

So you can go to my personal brand site, which is joelurway.com that will kind of like send them to, that'll help them to any anywhere they want to go. Or you can go to highticketcourses.com and that'll be like the core, core central focus of all things high ticket courses and mini webinars and power offers. If they want to check out my podcast, they can check out my podcast at sold with webinars. And I also have another podcast called Experts Unleashed. So if you're listening right now, you probably love podcasts so you can check out all my free content there. We have almost 200 episodes published combined with those two podcasts. So beautiful.

Well, I'll make sure I include all of those in the show notes, guys. Go check that out. Joel, thank you so much for stopping by and being a guest on Bacon Wrap B. Business really did appreciate it and I really think you've done an amazing job at just really simplifying one of the hardest things to do, which is sell expertise into something that not rocket science. It just takes a little bit of thought, care and effort. And thanks for sharing some of the nuances of the strategy with me today.

Dude, thanks for having me. It was a blast.

My pleasure. Talk to you guys on the next episizzle. Talk to you soon.