#59 - How to troubleshoot a failed launch

When something doesn't work, it's actually a really great opportunity to learn.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit, too. Are you ready? Let's do it foreign.

Hey. Hey, guys. And welcome to episode number 59 of the Doing It Online podcast. My name is Kate from hello Funnels, and I am your host today. And today is going to be another juicy one. So I hope you have a pen and paper handy, or if not, if you're out on a walk, I hope you've got your phone in your hand and the notes feature open so you can, funnily enough, take lots of notes, because I think you're going to want to. Because today we're talking about failed launches and what to do about them. Now, one thing that I see a lot, both with myself, with, like friends and peers in the space, and also, of course, with clients, is that not every launch people do hits it out of the park. This, this may be news to you guys, but the thing is that when you do have a launch that doesn't go exactly to plan, that doesn't hit every sort of goal that you set for it or that, you know, actually underperforms, it's actually a really great opportunity for you and your business because there's two ways you can kind of handle this kind of launch. You can either let it completely defeat you, and I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't suck and that it does, you know, that there's not going to be a lot of sort of inner monologuing going on about how you're not good enough or, you know, the market's too crowded or all of those, you know, all those fears, all those stories, all those things that been trying to kind of keep at bay, they're all going to pop up again when things don't go as well as you'd hoped. Like I said, there's. There's two ways to handle this. You can let those fears kind of run riot and, you know, you can decide that things do suck and that you suck and you use it. You let it sort of defeat you or stop you or from going forward. Or you can, of course, given a reasonable amount of time to lick your wounds and to get your mojo back again, you can realize that when something doesn't work. It's actually a really great opportunity to learn. So there's a really fantastic saying that I love, and I don't know who said it originally, but I fully believe it. And that is there's no such thing as failure, only feedback. And that is exactly what a quote unquote, failed launch actually is for you and your business. It is feedback. It is information, data that you can use to make the next thing you do better again and again and again. And one thing that I wanted to remind anyone listening to, to this, who has had a failed launch before or who maybe has in the middle of one or has just had one, is that there are plenty of people out there who you admire, who you aspire to have businesses like, who have had sucky launches, and some of them right at the start and others more recently, because not, like I said, not every single launch will go to plan. So today's episode, I kind of want to break it down for you guys, for those of you who are ready to go. Yep, you know, I've. I've gone for a walk, I've blown off some stadium. I've kind of let that, you know, shook off that energy, and now I'm ready to look at. Okay, what can I learn from this? What. How can I use this, you know, sucky thing that happened to be something that's actually going to improve my business going forward. So today we're going to kind of run through like a mini audit that you can do on anything, any launch that you've had, any promotion that you've had to see. All right, where are the learnings here? What can we take away from this? And like I said, use it to actually improve your business going forward, to use it for a positive thing. So the main thing that we always kind of want to look at, like the reason that we put detective hats on and going to go and, and dive into the different stats and data is we want to figure out what went wrong or. And as well as what went right. And there's normally three different things. So there are normally three different components that we are trying to analyze when it comes to your launches. So first of all, is, was it your offer? Did you. Is there something in your offer that didn't hit the right note, that didn't quite work? And is that the reason that, you know, your launch and your sales didn't go how you wanted to? Or was it something in your marketing and messaging, again, that, you know, that didn't quite work how it needed to, that didn't do as much heavy lifting as it needed to, or was it perhaps even something completely outside of your control? And that happens as well. So I want to give you guys a quick little story before we dive into the stuff we're going to look at because I wanted to again highlight just how important it is to be able to put on, you know, to step out of that, you know, that guilt, that anger, that fear, whatever it is that you're feeling in this situation and be able to look at something really objectively. Or is it subjectively? I always get them the wrong way. And as I was talking to a friend of mine recently, now this is a friend who has a seven figure business who has been running it for years and who has been running like she has one of the most, I would say clockwork running businesses I've ever seen. She, she's been doing the same launch sequences, the same challenges, the same thing. Like she keeps wanting to do new stuff and every time she does something new, the old stuff proves to work better. So she's got everything down, rinse and repeat. She can tell you down to like a decimal point what things are going to convert at when she has a launch. Like she has that dialed in. Like I said, she's been running it for years and at this level of reliability. And her last launch, which was, you know, like literally a rerun of one that she's done before, a thousand, not a thousand, but many, many times before, it sucked, it tanked. It was less than 20% sales wise of what, you know, she had expected and she panicked. She had this thing, she says, oh my gosh, maybe this is finally it. Like it's been working so well for so long and maybe this is the moment where my business comes crashing down and I realize I'm not good enough and I have to know, do something different. And all of that worst case scenario disaster kind of thinking. And this is, you know, like I said, a woman who has a really, really solid business that has been proven again, again, has been running for years, seven figures, all this stuff. She still had these thoughts and she called me up because she needs someone to talk her down off the ledge. And I sort of, I talk through it, the stuff we're going to talk, you know, I'm going to break down with you guys here. And she realized there was probably two things that would have impacted her.

Her launch quite significantly. One, she doubled the price. So again, you know, that's always going to have an impact on your sales when you increase the price, even if it's only a small one. Often, you know, it's. The impact is still ends up being. And this is again, where you get to play with these things in your business to find where that right sweet spot is for you. But often if you increase the price, yes, you'll get less sales, but hopefully the profit and the revenue coming through is still not always, sometimes increasing your price actually increases your conversion. So again, your business, your product, you go test these things. So she'd done that. And the second thing was she had this launch right at the. So it was a few months ago from recording this episode. So it was right when a lot of places around the world were kind of opening up again and people were. They'd been locked down for so long and they just wanted to be outside. And, you know, I'd heard across the board people saying their launches weren't doing as well, that their, you know, the attendance rates on webinars that are normally X percent would, you know, like half. And the fact that, you know, one of the beauty I think of being, you know, working with the number of people that I work with and having the community that we have is I get to see lots of people saying this stuff. So we kind of get to see this trend. So this is one of the great things, like inside our ecosysempire program, you know, we've got, you know, over a hundred amazing people in this program going through launching throughout the year. You're running Evergreen throughout the year and reporting back. And these are in different countries, different niches. And so you kind of are able to see these trends, right? It's like, okay, well, all of a sudden everyone is having things go a little bit softer at the same time, you know, regardless of nations, I'm like going, well, what could that be down to? So again with. I said we went through kind of troubleshoot and it came back to, well, maybe it's. It's one of these two things or maybe it's both, you know, what she's going to do and having that information, having that sort of, that sort of line of inquiry, because again, it's not a hard fact yet. You'd probably want to test it again. But she's now got that information ready for her next launch and she's going to be able to use that to make some informed decisions to possibly change some things and then see how that impacts her conversions next time. And, you know, and that's going to help her. As I said, going forward. Let's dive into what the questions were. The Things that I asked her that you can now ask yourself if you have had a launch that didn't go to plan. So the first question that I asked was, what did you change? What was different? And did you change anything? Or was it exactly a complete rerun? So again, some of you, this will be your first launch of something, so everything will be new. And again, this is one of the reasons why, you know, one reason I'm such a big believer in trying to reuse things that have worked in the past. Because it means when you are trying to troubleshoot a launch, you get to go, okay, well, break down each of the components individually and say, okay, well that webinar that I did, I've done that webinar before, or I've done a similar webinar before and it converted it this last time. And so you get to look at it how it converted this timing and compare like for like or even say, well, look, I've launched this offer before and I've used this discount and I've had these bonuses, so they're the same. And I know last time it meant it converted at this. So if you did make a change to that offer and it changed what it converted at, that's information. If you didn't make any changes to your offer, then you're probably like, well, it's probably not going to be that because the offer was worked before and we kind of put that in the proven, you know, the tick. But you know, that is something that's proven that's worked. So then when you're having a look at your launch, you go, okay, what are all the things that are new? So obviously if it's a brand new product, brand new launch, it can be hard to then go, well, how do like it's all new. How do I know which bits are which? So then the next thing that I think is really crucial is, okay, do you know what your stats are and how the individual components of your launch stack up against the industry benchmarks? So again, this is something a lot of people love about our program equals Empire, is that every part of a launch, every part of a funnel, we have benchmarks for it. We have, you know, just brackets of this should be converting in here for it to be like, it's like that health check, that tick of, okay, that's working well enough. Anything above that is working really well. But if it's working in the well enough category, you know, it's probably not that. That's not the thing that, you know, you need to change next Time or that you need to experiment with. So you need to know your stats and you need to really have a good understanding of what those stats should be because then you can kind of look at it and go, you know, and by stats, I mean things like your email open rates, your email click through rates. If you did a webinar, it's like your sign up rates, your attendance rates, your sales on the webinar. If it was a challenge, same thing again, sign up rates, number of people who actually joined your group, sales from the challenge, all of these things. There are benchmarks for these guys and they obviously they do vary slightly compared for every business and every niche. And over time, one of the most valuable things you can do is actually start to compare your launches side by side. So we have a spreadsheet, just a Google Doc or sorry, Google Sheet, and we put each of our launches into it when it's finished so we can see them literally next to each other. Like how you know, and we compare everything you can possibly think of, stats wise. But you know, whether it's webinars, if we did ads like what were the cost per click, what were the cpm, what was it cost to get a new registration, all that stuff, we have it all side by side so that when we can sort of start to not just compare our stats to the industry standards, that's always where you start with. But then actually as you go forward, as you're wanting to improve, be able to compare it to your own standards and your own benchmarks and knowing what those numbers are. And that's the friend I was talking about before, that's what she did. Like, that's what she kind of went back and looked at because she has such a long history of doing these launches. Like I said, rinse and repeat again and again. She knows what those numbers should be. So when she had a second to calm down from her initial panic, she could go back and have a look and found a few key points that were lower than they should be. And that's when you start to go hypothesize what could have caused those.

Like I said, looking at what did you change? What is the first thing getting your stats out, knowing what they should be for you, for your industry and seeing where there's any sort of big holes. And a little tip here guys, is don't try and focus on the things that are like 1% off. Like for example, a webinar registration page, we normally recommend it should be at least 35% of people who see that page are registering. If it's 32%, don't stress. That's not the thing. Okay? You're looking for things that are meant to be 35% and they're 10%. Like, you're looking for those big holes first. That's going to be the biggest clues. Don't go chasing the little one to three percents here. They're not going to really make that much of a difference unless you're having tens of thousand people of people go through a certain thing. The next thing that I always get people to stop and check and this, particularly guys, if it's a new launch or a new offer, is, were your expectations too high? Because again, I see this a lot. People go, I launched it, I got 10 sales. That sucks. I wanted 50. And, and you know, therefore my product's no good, my launch is no good, I'm going to throw it out and I'm never going to use that again. And then when we sit down, like, code a few people, they'll jump on one of our calls and equals empire or something like that. And we get to break down all their stats and go through it. I'm like, okay, well, how many people are on your email list? And they're like, well, 500. Like, well then if you look at the stats, actually that's an amazing conversion rate. That's actually really, really great. And you shouldn't change anything. You all you want to now focus on is getting more people onto your email list. But I think because a lot of people have, like I said, they might have unrealistic expectations, often due to people, you know, sharing crazy, you know, unicorn kind of success stories on Instagram. So that's why again, I always, like, I'm a nerd, I love a spreadsheet, I love stats. And I think it is so important for you guys to know your numbers and have realistic expectations around what a launch looks like if you have 500 people, what a launch looks like if you have 5,000 people. And again, being able to see. So another example, I was helping one of my clients to troubleshoot her launch just recently, and she was determined that her webinar sucked. Her webinar was no good. She should get rid of the webinar. And the goal of her launch was actually this was just a little mini launch she was doing to test a webinar. And so again, I got said, go away, break it down, stick it into the troubleshooting sheets that we give you and see what that comes back with. And it turned out her webinar was amazing. The problem was the title of her webinar. It just wasn't attracting enough people. Everyone who did get onto her webinar loved it. The attendance rate was great. They stayed all the way through. You know, she had a really high conversion rate of people on the webinar, but the title wasn't quite compelling enough. Her conversion rate on her opt in page was really low and she wasn't getting the numbers that she needed when she went into it goes, oh, my webinar sucked. She wanted to throw away this amazing webinar. And actually, webinar was amazing. The thing that sucked was her opt in page. And that's a much easier fix to change and test an opt in page or a title of a webinar than to go and rewrite your entire webinar having those accurate expectations, knowing, you know, and again, this is why this is what I do with every one of my launches. We have like calculators where we sit down and go, okay, we're going to be doing this. We're going to be running one webinar or two webinars, or we'll be doing a challenge or we're doing this. So we kind of reverse engineer our goals based on what we know and what we know these metrics should be. And that's again, what we get all of our clients at ecosysempire to do as well is go, okay, you're planning a launch. Let's work backwards. Let's set goals that are realistic and we know exactly what needs to be done to be able to achieve those goals. And it also kind of sets you little milestones as you're kind of building up to your launch so that you know that you're on track rather than just going, I want to launch, I'm going to pull a number out of the air, I'm going to just go and, you know, post a lot on Instagram, send a bunch of emails and hope that it happens. That's rarely. That's usually when people get really, really disappointed because you don't have the right data, your expectations aren't realistic. And so that's. That'd be my next point. Make sure, sorry, a long winded one. But make sure you know your stats and you know where they should be and you spend that time to do that. Really simple. Well, really simple if you have our spreadsheet. But I'm sure you guys can scribble down his paper. But you know, to do that reverse engineering of your goals when you set them to make sure that there's something that what is going to be needed for them to be achieved. Last point guys, when you are trying to troubleshoot a launch is don't hide, don't be ashamed of something that hasn't gone to plan and don't tell anybody about Again, I see this a lot. I think people have so much ego involved in launching. Like I remember once hearing this story and it still horrifies me to this day. Big super celebrity entrepreneur. I'm not going to say who it was but they said that, you know, they didn't care if they made zero profit on their launch. They were happy to spend every single dollar that came in from their launch on their launch because they just wanted to be able to say they'd have a set, they'd had a seven figure launch so they were happy to spend a million dollars to make a million dollars in sales just so they could then say that they had a million dollar launch. Which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. If you ask me. Like why go through all that effort? And it's such BS and it's lies and anyway it makes me mad. But you know, you do see these people. There's so much ego attached to the law. You know, you go out there and you share your launch and you're sharing it and you don't want to go out there and tell people it didn't go to plan. Particularly if you've had ones that have done really well before. And again I've seen this with some entrepreneurs and it's always kind of a little bit subtle where maybe previously like they'd had these big massive launches and they're like sharing like this number of sales, this number of sales, woohoo. And they're celebrating it and then you notice on their next launch they're not mentioning the number of sales they're still going like so many people. But all of a sudden it's become very vague, it's totally fine. But you know, I think there is a lot of shame around when something doesn't go to plan and you don't want people to think that you're a failure and you're a fraud and all that stuff. So people keep it to themselves, they don't share. But like I said like one of the things that I think is so powerful about the community we've got in ecourse Empire and having your own sort of pool of people in a similar space who your own business BFFs that you can call on is sometimes there are Things going on in the world. Some things. There are things that are just timing and it's not just you. And I've had this happen a few times, particularly with the pandemic, particularly with everything that happened last year where, you know, there was one point where our ads just like 10x in price and. And part of me was like, is it the creative? Is that the person doing our ads? Did they suck? Is it my offer? Is it terrible? And then I spoke to a few people and they're like, oh, our ads have done that as well. And it was just this little blip. It was this moment in time and they settled back down afterwards. But we would have if we hadn't gone out and embraced that power of like sharing collectively and embraced that being open and allowing other people to support us and to be vulnerable and things like that. Like if we hadn't just asked the question or if we hadn't had the community sort of built in. Like, I'm really lucky. I've got two communities, I've got our ecosystem empire community of my clients and I also have my community of business BFFs. But if I didn't have access to that, I would have made all kinds of incorrect assumptions. And actually it was, you know, it was something that was. It was a timing thing, it was something, a seasonal thing that was completely out of our control. But it was so good to know that. So that would be the final thing is don't hide, don't be embarrassed or ashamed of a launch that hasn't gone to plan. Like I said, there is no failure, there's only feedback. And sometimes it wasn't. It's not even you. It's not even something you've done. It's actually a timing thing. It's a thing completely out of your control. And it is so good to know that. So you don't go and throw a bunch of stuff that actually works really well in the bin just because of a simple timing thing. And also it's really good to know for next time. So you can see similar things happening in the market or around the world and you can make those informed decisions about maybe you push a launch back, or maybe you don't spend face money on Facebook for this one because you know it's going to be crazy expensive. You adjust your expectations, you go in and adjust your numbers that you've worked backwards from and you go out and you have that launch with the right expectations and without wasting a bunch of money. And it can from that can be one of Your best launches ever. So anyway, guys, I hope that has been useful. Like I said, just a quick recap. If you've had a launch and it hasn't gone to plan, it's going to be down to one of three things. Your offer. And by offer, I mean pricing, bonuses, any discounts, the actual product itself. If it's brand new, it could be down to your marketing and messaging. So by marketing, I mean what were the marketing elements that you did? And individually as individual components, how well did they work? So did you do webinars, did you do a challenge, did you do have a free opt in beforehand? All that kind of stuff breaking down and looking at the numbers for each of those or was it something else? Was something completely out of your control? And the best way to know that is to be part of a community, to have some people that you can call on that you feel safe to talk to about these things, to get that reinsurance, to get that extra information because it's so super valuable and to be able to figure out which one it is. You've got to get your stats, you got to look at timings, you've got to ask yourself, what did we change? And what was the same? So again, you can be looking at the numbers as like for like. And you have to make sure that your expectations were in line with where they should be. So you need to know your benchmarks, you need to know what those numbers actually should be. So I hope that has been super useful guys. If it has, let me know. Hit me up over on Instagram ellofunnels. Let me know any aha moments you've had. Always love to hear them. And until next time guys, keep doing what you do and I'll see you all online. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.