#91 - BIG Lessons from creating our funnel certification program

But then you had like some amazing, amazing programs out there that were just had so much baked in support. And that became one of the things I realized is really probably just as crucial as the technical trainings.

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.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFunnels co. And welcome to episode number 91 of the Doing It Online podcast. Now today we are taking a little bit sneak peek behind the scenes of one of the really big projects that we just wrapped up. And I mean, this is a six month in the making kind of project. And I, over that time we learned a lot because this was a very new thing for us to do. And it's something that I'm sure a lot of people listening have potentially considered or, you know, might be something you want to think about down the track. I really wanted to, as we always do, share the nitty gritty, share with the what worked. The what didn't work. So today I want to take you behind the scenes of how we created our funnel certification program. Some of you listening to this might be thinking, what's the big deal? Isn't it just a course? And I think I probably sort of thought that going into it, I definitely wasn't expecting it to be as an involved process as it ended up being. But no, a certification is, is actually a very different beast. And like I said, there was a lot of lessons we learned along the way and that's what we're going to dive all of in today's episode. First up, I think the first question that we need to answer is why we decided to create a certification. Like why that was. That was something that I thought would be a great decision for our business and absolutely has been like, we think it's really, really an awesome type of program and an awesome thing to create and run. But there's a couple of reasons. And to be honest, I've had this on my to do list for probably two and a half years. But I knew that it was probably going to be a bigger undertaking and I was a bit burnt out from course creation. Being the chronic course creator that I am, I think I'm up to about 13, maybe more now. But really it didn't go Away. It was on that one day I'd love to do this one day I'd love to do this list. And the reason was we had so many people. Like, for those of you who don't know and aren't familiar with our programs, like, our sort of signature program is Ecourse Empire. That's a program for online business owners like coaches, course creators, things like that, to help them to create their own online programs and to then set up systems to sell them and scale them in as automated way as possible, obviously using funnels. Now, inside that program, we. We try to make it as easy as possible for people, even the most technophobic people, because we know that people coming to this program, they're. They're naturopaths, they're dance instructors, they're yoga instructors, they're. We have a Bible studies coach. Like, they're not necessarily someone who is as big of a nerd as we are. We try and make it as simple as possible. Like, we've got videos that literally step you through, like, click here, blah, blah, blah. We have templates for a lot of the major systems that you can click and they're in your system. But still, like, there's a lot of people that say, look, I just, it hurts my head. I don't want to do it. I don't. I don't trust myself to do it. I don't have the time to do it. I'd really just love someone else to build funnels for me to help me set this up. And we're getting asked more and more and more and more, and I just didn't really have a resource to point people to because obviously we build all our own. We. It's not something that we outsource. I've always done my own. And then I've sort of, you know, brought on team and taught the team how to do them, my way of doing funnels. And when we've tried to or had clients try to sort of outsource here and there, typically one of two things happened. Either they went that, okay, I'm just going to hit up upwork or fiverr and pay someone, you know, $30 an hour or something like that to set this up for me. And they may or may not do a good job of actually the tech side of things, of connecting it all together. But if that person didn't have the strategy side of things, like you could have someone who. And this, again, this is, this is an example of potential of a client who came to us afterwards, so they hadn't gone through our program. They had sort of benefited from us helping to advise them on what would or wouldn't work best for them anyway. They'd heard about a particular type of funnel on, from someone on Instagram and how it was like the be all and end all and they had to have it. They went and paid someone to set it up for them. They, that person did, they set it up. Technically it was all correct and then it didn't work. And they're like, I don't understand, why didn't it work? Then they came to us and they were like, well, because that strategy, it doesn't fit your business, it doesn't fit how you market, it doesn't fit your product. So, you know, the tech implementation side of things is all well and good, but if you go and build the wrong thing, it's, it's not going to work. And then you have, you know, the other side of things where people will go out and might invest tens of thousands of dollars. We had again, another client who spent I think just under $10,000 getting someone to help her to build, to create a webinar and a webinar funnel and everything. But the funnel, again, it didn't work. And the reason that it didn't work is because her offer wasn't set up to work for that type of funnel. There's, there's always been like this whole, there's like some people out there who are really good at maybe the strategy, but they don't offer the build side of things. And that strategy they'll, they'll charge you a lot for, right? And then there's lots and lots of people out there who can connect up a few emails and a few timers and that's you. And then call themselves a funnel builder. And obviously there's a lot more to it that you pick up over the, over the years and over having that experience. But how could we sort of bridge that gap? Like, how could we. I really, I just wanted a list of great people that I could refer clients to when they were going, look, I just don't have the time to do this myself. We've helped them create this amazing offer. They now want to automate it and they just want someone who can just step in and be that sort of advisor for them, who knows the strategy, knows what works, has their sort of finger on the pulse of what's, what's happening in the market right now because things are always sort of ebbing and flowing and can build the whole end to end package. So that's what, you know, that's what I wanted to create. Like that was a problem we wanted to solve and I thought the certification is the best way I can think to do it. Because you know, it's not just getting people to do a DIY style program and come out the end of it and they've maybe paid attention to some modules or they maybe skipped through some or whatever. Like I wanted people who are going to come out the other and they were going to have such in depth knowledge of the best marketing strategies as well as know all of the insights of actually building a funnel that works. And it's not just lining up a few emails and putting times in between. Like as soon as you start to scratch the surface, it can get complicated fast and then that's when problems can happen. That's when things can be broken. And we, I wanted to teach our sort of system of doing things to try and eliminate as many tech issues as possible, possible. And that's what, you know, that's what Funnel Pro was so long, very long winded answer. But this is why we want to cause like there is a, there is this need for this and there aren't these people. There's some people who can do one, there's some people who can do the other. But I wanted to create like this army of nerds who can come in and just happily and confidently do both. And that's what we do inside the certification. So lessons wise, let's dive into that because as I said and kind of touched on already it, I kind of knew this going in that this was going to be more involved than a course, but it was so much more involved than the course. Like I will be like a hundred percent honesty. It took myself and my team and there was like five of us working on it. Obviously not working out 24 7, but working on it as like the majority of our work for each week. It took us four months to create the content and the setup and everything for this. Like that's to me is banana. I don't think I've ever stuck to a single project for that long. Plus there's a couple months of planning at the, at the front of it. And now that we've had our first run of people go through it and we're getting their feedback and everything, there's a few things we wanted to tweak and to add in and to make it even better. It's not done yet. I feel like there's actually gonna probably be like a 12 month program project for us to be like, yep, this is done. It's, it's. I'm happy with it, we can leave it alone now. And for me that was so against type because normally, and what I normally teach is when you're creating a new program before you put it out into the world, before you spend too much time on it, you want to test it, right? You want to make sure people are going to purchase it and you also want to make. Because that first launch and everything that's involved with it, it's. There's so much that goes on around launching anything new. Like you're coming up with everything from scratch. It takes a lot of time, energy and effort. We want to try and minimize where we can. And I always recommend that people for their very first run of an online program is that they do it the quick and dirty way. Like you still want your content to be high quality, like what you're teaching is the best, but the how it looks, you can do them live, you can have them. You don't, you don't have to have everything looking pretty and amazing and beautiful and branded like you can do. Cut some corners on the your perfectionist sort of side here and get it so it's out the door and you generally. I recommend that people have maybe the first one to two modules and the pre work done as a maximum before they sell something. So just enough to get people to be able to purchase it, get in there and that you have a little bit of a buffer ahead of you so that you're not sort of creating it as the day before it's due. And then you create each week as you go. And that's normally the, the best way to do it and still kind of manage your energy in a reasonable way. But obviously this was the opposite to that. This we created, we spent months and months creating before we even opened the doors. And it was, you know, one of the most nerve wracking things when we did sort of finally share it with the world. And that first sale like I still get so exc. A new offer, first sale of a new offer. It feels like the first sale ever. It still has that. You're still sitting there staring at your phone waiting for the notification and it finally comes through and you're just overjoyed. So that was, you know, that was the same but the setup part was, was definitely not the same. The other thing that I found and for people who are thinking about potentially doing a certification, you know, one of the things that I spent like a good month or doing Was like just going deep. And like I went and purchased a bunch of other certifications in completely different niches, like random things just because I wanted to see, okay, well, how are the lessons set up, how is homework set up, how is assessments done? Like, I want to see as many different examples as I could to see what I liked, what I thought would work for this. And I found that there was definitely two different sort of types of certifications out there. There was the ones, and I'm going to call them the BRO Marketing certifications because they seem to be not really certifications. They were just something someone had whipped up quickly, generally shoved a whole bunch of their existing trainings into one bundle and then chucked a quiz at the end. And they usually DIY style, no support, no community, no feedback, no practical assessments of any kind. And they usually had a pretty low price point as well and generally were like an entry level. I think people just like to. I wouldn't even call those real certifications. Cause I know that if I'd gone through and done one of those programs and just because I got a green tick off a quiz, I wouldn't feel confident coming out the other end going, oh yeah, my skills are now higher. I now feel confident to go and use these skills in my business and to put these into place. And I feel, I now feel like I'm going to be supported as I'm creating my first funnels and getting have a place to get feedback for that. That was definitely the first type and they were usually as a lower price thing. And to be honest, I kind of wanted to email them all say this is not a certification. But then you had like some amazing, amazing programs out there that were just had baked in support. And that became one of the things I realized is really probably just as crucial as the technical trainings because obviously ours is very. We're teaching funnel building. Like there's a lot of technical stuff. But I think above and beyond that, when people are actually implementing and wanting feedback, like it really having that feedback loop for them, having that access to support. And one of the things I thought was really interesting was in our first, the first time we asked for feedback, like early on in the program, one of the things people, a couple of people suggested was like, hey, we'd really like to hang out as a group more. You know, we'd love to do some like mixer events and things like that online and some masterminding. I thought, well, amazing. That's a great. I'd love to add that. And we, and we did and we have and it's now kind of a baked in part of the program. But I think that the real certification experience where you do come out the other side feeling like you have up leveled needs to have that support, you know, as well. And it needs to be like really strong and really, you know, and obviously to make sense for the program. But as on all above and beyond just your, the trainings as you go through, the other thing that I thought was it took a lot of time figuring out was the assessment side of things if you're going to do a certification, like I said, there's, there's the two different types of ones out there. The, the dirty nasty bro marketing ones and nothing against bro marketers, you guys do you, do you. But that's not how I like to market. And then the ones which were truly designed to help people to actually come out the other end with a higher level of skill and those ones. And that's what I wanted ours to be. I thought like I really, really had. I wanted people, if they came out and said that they were a certified funnel pro, like they, that was our brand, like our name. And I wanted to make sure that anyone who was wandering around saying hey I'm. Hello funnels has said I was good. I'm good enough at this. I'm, I'm like I've got that, you know, golden tick, I've got that little badge icon on my site that kind of gives people that sense of trust. I know to make sure that they actually were good, not just that they had could complete a multiple choice question 15 times until they got all the answers. The assessment, figuring out how to assess this really, you know, we did a lot of back and forth, came up, played with a lot of different types because you know, the quiz just would not have cut it for this type of program because it's so practical. Like we need to know that in real world examples that they're going to be able to actually physically build something and they're going to actually be able to find, have a look critically at something that's maybe existing and see what's working and what's not working, that they're going to be able to apply that level of strategy and make really good recommendations. What we decided to do and the everyone who's gone through really loved this was we decided to get them to, to practically be building funnels. And again that had a whole bunch of other things that come like well whose funnels are they going to be building? Do we get volunteers that's really hard to manage because obviously one of them, I think, as anyone knows, when you're working with other people and you know, you create building services or doing any services for other business owners is making sure they're getting all their assets in on time and stuff like that is like, it's can become a bit of a nightmare. It can blow things out massively. And when you've got people going through a program and they've got assessment deadlines, we just couldn't have that hanging over their heads. What we decided to do is to get them to build their own funnels. And it's one of those things, it's that you always see, particularly with service providers, is that so often the service that they specialize in, whether it's websites or whatever, is something that they never get around to fully doing as well as they could do for clients, for themselves. And if you are someone out there saying, hey, I'm really great at funnels, I'm really great at doing building things for online marketing and all that strategy and you don't have your own online marketing system set up, you know, it's kind of like your calling card, right? Like it's. If people come into your website and they're like, oh, but you don't have a funnel, you don't have a legion. You don't have a way for me to book a call with you. You're not. There's no nurture sequence here. If they can't kind of experience that for themselves, then that kind of makes it look like you're not as good as what you say when usually it's just that you're too busy. I'm like, okay, let's give people a reason that they can't get away from that they have to get this done. They have to finally build themselves a funnel. And every single one of them, they did not have a funnel yet. And they were all so stoked to finally have this set up. And we laid type of funnel that works best for these type of services. We got them to, you know, guided them through creating an amazing opt in, gave them copy feedback, got them to assess each other's design, everything from start to end. We even had like email templates for those who weren't like natural writers and who just needed some extra help to make sure they were saying the right things at the right time. And then at the end of it, like we said, we were able to assess all the skills we need to assess as far as their technical knowledge. We were able to get them to audit and give great feedback. We could see that they were really, really understanding what they learned and how they put it into place. And the best of all, they then had a funnel that worked for their own business. When it got to the end of the program and they were certified and we went out and shared them all with our list and on social media and added them into our directory and they started getting more leads. Then they had this funnel to help them to convert more to help them to be that, you know, be that funnel pro if you are, you know, again, sorry I rambled, but if you are thinking about doing some kind of certification, I would highly recommend that that's one of probably the areas you spend the most time considering is those two things. It's like this, what support makes sense, what will they need? Like above and beyond just understanding. But also when they're actually implementing and putting things in practice in the real world and also what, you know, what assessments do they really need to do to show that they, they do have the skills that they do, they have learned, they ha. They can apply this again in real world settings and if there's something you can do that's practical, that again that helps them, then that's going to be an absolute win win for everybody. The final challenge I think we came across with creating this new offer, and this is one we're still kind of juggling, is that now we have two offers for two different target markets. Whereas previously all our offers were for a very similar sort of ideal client. They just might have been at slightly different stages of their journey. They were similar still, they still fit under the same main umbrella. We now have two target markets. We have DIYers, the people who are wanting to build funnels for themselves, for their own businesses. And now we have people whose business is going to be building funnels for other people. And suddenly with our weekly emails, with the content that we're sharing on social media, with the our homepage, all of a sudden the messaging almost had like a line drawn down the middle of it and you're having to jump between two brains. And I know Keely, who's amazing, has we sort of had to sit down and come up with ways that we go, all right, this is this hat and it's talking to this person and this is this hat talking to that person and trying to find a way that we could be making sure that if it wasn't relevant to you, where possible, you weren't necessarily seeing it. And also the thing I was most worried about that we didn't end up just going, trying to speak to both groups all at once and just being totally vague and not connecting with anybody anymore. Again, whenever we're trying to find a new, we're coming up with a new problem like this. We always go and do our research and we found some amazing, amazing people online who have very similar setups to us. They have like basically a B2B and a B2C kind of side of their business. And 10 seem to be the trend of what people do is that there's always going to be some overlap. We probably have like 70% of your content falls into that overlap. And that overlap is they're still business owners, they're still women, they still have the same values, they still have the same goals, they're still wanting to do the same things. They still like to nerd out and know about tech and all that kind of stuff. So great. What's that overlap? And then when you do have content that's more specific to one target market versus another, then obviously when it's something like on social media, you would just make sure it was clear, like either in the image or at the start of the copy, you would literally call out who you were speaking to. People would know, oh, this is or isn't for them. And then with your emails, we started now segmenting. So we'll have one email which goes to one email list and another. And it might be, in some cases it's totally different emails. Other times it's like, okay, well let's. We just need to change it slightly. That's relevant for each one. But that's how we've been doing it with our emails and our social media. And then that's again, something we're playing with and perfecting over time. And if anyone has any hints and tips who does this, please let us know. But those probably been the main things I think with the, with the certification is that, like I said, it's just to recap, it's. First of all, it is a much bigger job than just creating an online course. Coming up with the right support and assessment is super, super crucial. And figuring out if you are now creating like a separate segment in your audience, how you're going to start to segment them, how you're going to. Your ongoing content is going to work for those two groups is definitely something that needs to be considered. But coming out the other side of that, I feel like the. We've loved creating the certification. We love watching people go through it and seeing like we've said we just finished our first cohort that was so lovely. There are amazing betas. They hung with us while we sort of fig ironed out a few wrinkles and a few bugs and things and, and now it's, you know, it should all be running super smoothly for our cohort, which next cohort starts in May. But it's been so great to see them come to the end of it and be exactly where we really hope for them to be and say like their confidence has grown so much that most of them doubled, if not more, their prices and are already booking clients at those higher prices. And one of them said, she, she, like she massively increased her prices, booked a new client, the client still came back to her and said, I would have paid twice more again for this. The impact that's going to then have on these businesses is so immediate, so amazing. And the fact that we can now share them all and we'll include a link below this so you can go and check them out. If you are looking for someone amazing to come and build your funnels, we have an awesome group of ladies who would absolutely love to help you out. The link will be below in the notes. You can go and check them out. Find yourself a killer funnel pro or if you'd like to become a funnel pro yourself. Like I said, our next cohort starts in May. Links again are below. You can come join us. Save your spot. It's actually already filling up because there's quite a big gap between the first one and this one, so there's not a huge number of spots left. We're really excited to kick off that amazing next cohort which is going to be bigger and better again and create even more funnel pros to come out and to be building the funnels that I know everybody freaking. Thank you so much guys for listening this week. If this has helped you. If you've been thinking about creating a certification, I hope this has been really useful or if you've even just been thinking like what is a certification? How is it different to a course? I hope this has sort of helped to put your mind at ease that it is a very, very different process and even as a learner it's a very different thing to go through. And it is, I feel like such a valuable thing to do for your business and I'm so grateful that we were able to create one. And also there's so many other amazing ones out there for different niches and different topics. I think this self education market is just seems to be getting better and better, which is just a win for everybody. But I'm going to stop gushing now. I'm going to go let you get on with the rest of your day and finishing commute or your run or your vacuuming or whatever it is you're doing. Thank you as always for hanging out with me, listening to me ramble. I hope it has been useful. If it has, let us know over on Instagram. Otherwise I will see all your lovely faces. You'll hear my voice. I won't say your face, but you get what I mean. Same time next week with another episode of Doing It Online. Until then guys, keep doing what you do and I'll see you then. 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.