Automated Webinar Sales System With Omar Zenhom

I'm not selling modules, I'm not selling videos, I'm not selling coaching, I'm not selling a community. I'm not selling software. Right. I'm selling an outcome. Right. And the reason why I'm doing that is because outcomes are a whole lot more valuable than a bunch of digital products.

Welcome. And today our guest is Omar Zenho. He's the co founder of Webinar Ninja, host of $100 MBA podcast.

He's got a pretty cool story.

Started out as a high school teacher, transitioned to an entrepreneur, was creating courses and selling those via webinars and then realized he pretty much bolted together a whole bunch of different services. It was clunky and he ended up just going, you know what? I'm going to build my own solution now. Back in 2018, his company, Webinar Ninja, was named one of the fastest growing SaaS companies. And that was before the pandemic. So he's been growing in leaps and bounds since then. Obviously everybody moving online and running webinars is, yeah, been great for the business. That's not to mention his podcast, one of the best business podcasts going around with over 190 million downloads. Very much an in the trenches guy. Knows his stuff inside and out. I got to know him really well as we were sailing around Tasmania together in a mastermind. And then I bumped into him and his partner again at an airport in Cebu on the Philippines. And I kept him awake talking his ear off for a few hours as we flew to Singapore. Long story short, he's most definitely one of the good guys. And today he's going to be sharing his automated sales system, which is right in our sweet spot. We love talking about systems. We want to prove that those systems work and then we want to automate and scale those. So without further ado, welcome aboard, Omar.

Thanks, David, for being here and thanks for that intro. But my favorite part was one of the good guys. Because one of the things I remember the most when I was coming up as an entrepreneur, people that I looked up to, the people that actually were kind to me and, and gave me the time. And I always remember that whenever I get the chance to kind of speak to somebody or have the honor be on stage or something like that, is, you know, the Chris Brogren's of the world and Michael Ports. These people were so nice to me. I was coming up and there was such a big deal to me and I'll never forget that. And that's one of the things that I really loved about that intro.

And it's on point, like, yeah, most definitely. I. I get that vibe from you, and you're always so sharing and always accommodating. So I'm super keen to peel back the curtain on your automated selling system, because I think there's some real key insights there that, that we'll be able to take from that.

Yeah, definitely. If you don't mind, I can just jump right in.

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's.

I kind of do those intros, and then I do the intro, so that way we can jump straight to the good stuff.

Well, you mentioned I was a teacher for 13 years, and that was my first career. I was a high school university teacher for 13 years. A lot of what I use today in business, in sales and automation, all that kind of stuff comes from my days of teaching. And I have a master's of education. But more importantly, five times a day, five days a week, I had to convince 30 bodies to do what I say. That's what my job was as the teacher. I had to kind of convince them that this is important. You got to learn this so that you can pass a test, so that I don't lose my job. Right. So people don't really understand that really teaching is a sales job. Right. You have to sell them on the concept that you're teaching. And in order to sell anybody on anything, you have to build trust, you have to build a relationship. And you'll notice that it's really weird and awkward in the first few days in. In school, teachers don't know the students. Students don't know the teachers. But over time, they build this bond, they build this trust. And. And if you look back when you were in school, you did best in the classes that you really like the teacher. Right. That you've built a relationship with. I used to use all kinds of things, guilt and bribery and all kinds of things at my disposal to get them to do their homework and to study and, you know, and say, hey, you know, I thought you. You know, I thought we had something going here. I don't know why you didn't study for this exam. You know, I was expecting more from you. Oh, I'm really sorry. And that only works if you have a relationship. Right? Right. So what does this have to do with business? What does it have to do with sales? Does that have to do with anything in businesses? Well, we don't buy anything from anybody unless we build some sort of trust with that company, with that person, with that brand. And a lot of us, we. We think if we just create the best product possible, if it's good enough, if it's different enough, if it's unique enough, then we're golden. And the fact of the matter is that that's just not true. Like, you just can't have a great product and just let it happen and all of a sudden you're going to be a billionaire. No, what happens is, in any business, big or small, you have to create opportunities to build trust. You have to create opportunities so you can build a relationship with that audience, with that customer, with that potential student in your course, with that potential coaching client, with that potential user for your software. So you can't just put up a sales page and just expect them to watch a video and be like, okay, that's, that's how you have to have a sales process. And basically what I learned in my experience in teaching, but also from my dad who was in sales, the reason why I went into teaching, because I had this, you know, like, I don't want to get into business or sales because I saw the up and down nature of business. You know, one summer holiday we're going to Disney World, the next it's the backyard. So I really learned a lot though, because I used to go to work with my dad, he was a car salesman, and I used to learn a lot about what. Why does he do things like this? And I asked some questions and I didn't really understand him, but some of the stuff seeped in throughout the days. And one of the things I learned from him is he used to tell me, listen, if you want to get somebody to buy something, you have to understand what they value, what they actually want, right? So for example, somebody would come into the dealership and instead of showing them, oh, this is the latest model, and this is in cherry red and look at the, you know, the beautiful carpeting and the leather. He's like, I don't really know if they care about that. So the first thing as I do is I ask questions. I say, hey, what brought you here? Why don't you like your car right now, that looks like a nice car that you drove into, right? They might say things like, oh, you know, I really hate the fact that it doesn't have enough horsepower, or I really don't like the sound system, or it does horrible gas mileage, whatever. These are the pain points they have. This is why they're in the market. So there's no real reason for me to even talk about any other feature in this car that I'm about to Sell them if I'm going to show them the car with the best sound system and the best guest mileage. Right. So I learned that from him in a way and I kind of cobbled that together. My teaching experience and what I wanted to do in my own business is I wanted to have some sort of sales process where slowly, slowly I can prove myself to the customer so they can say, you know what, these guys are not bad. And it starts with education, it starts with some free things. It starts with a little bit of entry level product where they're parting with their money a little bit. And it goes on and on and on and on. And that's kind of how I kind of frame it. It's like, how do I build this relationship so that, yes, my end goal is that we're going to get married and we're going to live a happy ever after and we're going to retire when we're 50 and together on a beach or whatever it is. That's the long term view. But right now I first just got to ask this person out, right? First I gotta go through the steps of building that relationship with them. So yeah, that's, that's kind of the theory of it.

Yeah, I love that. Give some good insight into where it's come from and probably why you've made certain decisions that we'll see present themselves in the system as well. So this is something then. I, I mean it could really work for any business. Like, I'm assuming this is just a trust building exercise introducing into the business owner's world what it is that they do and the products and services that they offer. So I could see this universally applicable.

So it's definitely universally applicable and it's actually advantageous for anybody who teaches for a living. Like if you are a coach or a course creator or you, you create content or you're a consultant, like you have a huge advantage because by you performing and adding value to that person's life, you are proving to them quickly that you can be of value with them if they pay you. But it works with any business. One of the examples I give often is this is usually like the entry level product for Apple. Like I have AirPods, two pairs of AirPods. I have a phone, iPhone, I have, I'm on a MacBook, I got another MacBook over there. I got an iPad, right? I'm wearing an. I didn't have my accident, right? I started out with, you know, one product. I built trust with them. I was like, it's pretty good, you know, I need a new laptop. I just want to try this Mac thing. You know, this is like over a decade ago. And then, okay, I got the Mac now, all right? My phone died. Let me look at this iPhone that just came out. This is how it happens. We don't. We sometimes forget that we are consumers ourselves, but when we start selling things, we just forget about how people buy. You know, this is how people buy. People buy in steps, in increments, and it took a lot of touch points. Saw an ad, you saw a friend at a cafe. What is that? Was that the new iPhone? Okay, what does that look like? You know, and it just takes a while to build that trust. And this is the thing. You have to build a system now because time is on your side in the system. Meaning that the longer you do this for the more trust you're going to build, the more people are going to go through the system, the more customers, and it becomes kind of a snowball effect, because the more people that you go through the system, the more you get better at the system, but also the more those people recommend you to others.

Yeah, yeah, I love this. And what I like about the work that you do, like, I've always remembered, you know, back in my classic direct mail, you know, learning early days when I got started, they talk about this idea of it's salesmanship in print. And the good thing about, like, classic direct mail is you. You capture your selling method into some written form, and then that can be mailed many thousands and hundreds of thousands of times, and there's great time leverage there. And then for the work that you do with webinars, it's kind of like that next level up, it's kind of like salesmanship in video format, which makes it even easier to. To connect. So just to kind of connect those final couple of dots, what we're talking about, how do you deliver these outcomes through webinars? Like, yeah, how does that fit into the picture?

So I love the idea of inverse thinking, which is a concept that Charlie Munger talks about where, like, if you want to accomplish something, think about the opposite. So here's an example. Like when I want to sell my software, Webinar Ninja, right? Instead of me asking myself, like, oh, what are all the reasons why they should buy my product? Which most people say, like, I'm gonna talk about my features, my benefits, all that kind of stuff. It's actually more helpful for you to ask yourself the question, what are the reasons why they wouldn't buy? Right. And the reason why you ask this question is because you start coming up with a laundry list of answers of like, they wouldn't want buy because maybe they're intimidated. Maybe they think it's hard. Maybe they think they it's too expensive. Maybe they think the learning curve.