Realistic Webinar Scenarios!

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I want to take you through a realistic webinar scenario. This means you are thinking about a webinar, you haven't bit the bullet yet. You don't want to hear about the million-dollar, you know, winners. You want to know what is a realistic scenario for launching a live webinar look like. And I have a lot of data to back this up because I have a lot of people that are in my world doing webinars. I am watching webinars every week. I'm analyzing, optimizing, and this is across multiple niches, not just the make money online niche, but personal development niche, crafting niches, Etc., etc. When you launch a webinar, there's a lot of expectations tied to it, and of course the biggest one is money. We want this webinar funnel to make money, but what is realistic in terms of how much you spend, how much you invest, how long it takes, and the average? And I want to talk about the average today because I talk a lot about the, like, winners, and there are a fair amount of winners, but there's also a lot of average. And I feel like for some people, if they can understand what that path looks like, they might just have the courage enough to take action because they're like, okay, I see the road before me. And a lot of what scares us is the unknown. So when you are about to embark on building a webinar and a webinar funnel, I'm gonna talk about the realistic scenario that it would be like if you were working with me. The very first thing we do is evaluate the offer and we create a one-page offer brief that goes into what that offer is. A lot of people get stuck here if they have something already created because it's got a lot of existing students, existing pricing, payment plans, container, and it can be a little tricky to, to say, okay, is this a good offer for cold traffic in a weekly live webinar funnel? If you don't have an offer yet, you're kind of at an advantage because you can build something from scratch. At the same time, you now have more work and you don't have a validated offer and you don't have testimonials yet, right? So there's pros and cons to both, but either way, regardless, we create an offer brief and this is where we really talk about the problem. We talk about the solution. We talk about your unique point of view. We talk about the price. We talk about the container, all of that. Once that's done, we then build an offer stack and an offer stack is basically an offer outline, but with a marketing spin on it. And I want to look at the offer stack and think, okay, How is a cold buyer going to respond to this? Is it going to feel good? Is it going to feel like a great deal? Is it going to feel like, oh, that's kind of expensive? This is also where we start to decide what type of webinar you're running. Are you running an application webinar? Are you running a buy now webinar? Are you running a hybrid? There are people who do hybrid as well. We sort all of that out. The next step is we actually build the presentation and you would be amazed at how long it takes to build a presentation. It's actually quite shorter. It's much shorter now than it was back in the olden days when we didn't have ChatGPT and all these extra templates and stuff. But it's just hard to think of content that is going to satisfy the, the teacher in you, but also satisfy the marketing belief that needs to happen in order for people to be ready to buy. And that is not always the easiest thing to do. And that's one of the reasons why I actually suggest a coach specifically for the webinar deck. And as far as the timeline goes, you know, where we're at here with the offer brief, the offer stack, and the webinar deck, there are some people who can get the whole thing done in a week. And there are other people who get stuck right at that offer brief because they're really trying to plan an offer that's going to carry them financially for the next 5 or 10 years. And so we take a month to figure out that offer brief, and that is not uncommon. It just depends on who you are and how you work. That webinar presentation, the offer stack doesn't really take very long. The, uh, the webinar presentation, however, that can take anywhere from 1 to about 4 weeks to actually script it out, to get the overarching view, to start collecting, you know, pictures, testimonials, things like that. Again, there are some people, it takes them 3 months to build a webinar, and that's because they're really starting from the ground up and they haven't even figured out what their unique point of view is. And so the webinar is actually functioning as a tool to help them develop what their business is all about. And that's why it takes longer. But the average person takes about 3 weeks to build a webinar. If I were to sit down and build a webinar, I'd want 3 weeks of lead time to build it. And the layers are, you know, you sort of— I call it chunking it out where you're just kind of putting it in like black and white, and then you start to add elements, visual elements, and then you need design. And one of the biggest things that people underestimate is the power of design. Your webinar presentation is like building a children's storybook, and if you were like, ah, the illustrations don't matter in a children's storybook, people would look at you like you're crazy. But visually, when you're trying to keep attention, the actual visuals on a webinar presentation matter a ton, even more than web pages, I dare even say. Okay, so you're about 3 weeks out, and then at that point you want to build the actual funnel itself. This is getting so fast now when you work with me because we've got it all built out and it's just kind of a one-click install. And you know, you've got to do some tech, or maybe you hire someone to do a little bit of tech, but it's really not too, too much work. I would say the hardest part and the thing that stops people in the tech is they don't like tech, but they don't want to hire for tech. And it's like, you want your cake and eat it too, right? If you don't like tech, just hire it. If you do like tech, then learn it. If you don't like tech and you don't want to hire, then you got to learn it. But if you don't like tech and you don't want to learn it, I don't know what to tell you. And that can kind of throw people off. Also, A2P registration, and this is the ability to send text regis— uh, reminders, text reminders. If you don't have a phone number and all of that, that sometimes takes about a week to get up because you got to wait and get approved for it. But the actual webinar funnel itself can be customized in one day. If you know what you're doing, not really hard at all. At that point, now you've got your offer brief, you've got your offer stack, you've got your webinar deck, and you've got the webinar funnel. At this point, uh, things diverge. If you are doing a buy now, you are creating an order form and a membership area. If you are doing an apply now, you're creating an application pipeline with invoicing and that tech. Differ, you know, differs depending on what you're choosing. And that's kind of part of building the webinar funnel, but that's like more like the backend delivery that takes a little bit more work because you wanna think about a welcome letter. You wanna think about onboarding, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And if you're thinking to yourself, well, I don't even have the program, that's okay. We still do onboarding. We still give them expectations of what to expect on what date and things like that. So there is some onboarding, whether you're doing a buy now or an apply now to a call. At this point, depending on whether or not your offer is created, you do a live launch of your webinar or you just start on the weekly webinar cadence. And again, that really depends on whether or not the offer is created. If the offer's not created, we launch it. And that means 2 weeks of ads, emailing your list, um, all that good stuff, doing the webinar once or twice or even 3 times if you want to, during that launch, and then taking that batch of students that, or clients that you get, and then actually building the program with them, and then turning on the weekly webinar cadence once it's built. If you already have the offer built, you can go right to the weekly webinar cadence. It's about 2 weeks of ads, and then you begin that weekly webinar. This is where most people start to lose momentum, because I noticed that like in the actual planning and building, people are fine, sorta. It depends on what's coming up for them. But once they're out there doing it, that's where your need for a coach actually doubles or triples because you can lose your footing if you don't get sales right away, or you're not sure if the offer's validated, or you're not sure of those KPIs and what's the ad spend and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I want to give you some realistic scenarios now of what happens or what has happened with my clients who have been on this trajectory. The first person, I'm just going to change everybody's name. The first person is Jane. Now, Jane did not have an offer, so she went through that whole process, offer brief, offer stack, webinar deck, webinar funnel. She decided to live launch it and she had a small audience. She also used ads. She got 13 people in her pilot program, and that was definitely the webinar plus her, like, grit and hustle together because it was to warm traffic. She built the product and then she turned on her weekly live webinar. She had a lot of issues with her weekly live webinar from a tech perspective. There were a couple of things that went wrong. Number one, there were no text reminders, so her show-up rate was very low. Number two, her ads and her registration page were attracting people who were not business owners and she needed business owners. It took us probably, I don't know, 5 webinars or so to work out all of that tech and all of that mistargeting. And this can be really stressful if you're spending money on ads, whether it's $50 a day, $100 a day, because it feels like a waste, but you're like trying to get all those things optimized and done. And certain personalities will be like, well, I'm not going to turn ads on until I have it all done. And that's fine. Other personalities are like, "Done is better than perfect. Let me just run it even without text reminders and see what happens." Once we got that all sorted out and we started getting the right people in the room, then it was probably another 5 to 6 weeks of trying to get the presentation to convert. She had some issues with the content. It wasn't quite hitting. She was teaching too much. And then we had some issues with the way she was presenting, the kind of language, the kind of filler words that she was using, and there was just some parts about her presentation style. So that was another 5 weeks where we were evaluating, okay, what's going on? And then we started getting sales. Okay, that is a perfect example. Another person, the average, uh, I'm just trying to think of averages. Let's call her Susie. Susie had the same exact kind of flow, and she launched and she got her, I think, 15 or so students. She built the program. And then she started the weekly live webinar, and for her, she had the tech all sorted out, and the weekly live webinar converted right away, and she was getting 1 to 2 sales a week, and then she was getting 4 to 5 sales a week, and then she was getting 8 to 9 sales a week. And I have maybe 3 or 4 people who are in that bucket where they had an offer, or they built an offer, and then they had the tech all sorted, and then it was really just focusing on that presentation because everything else was already working. I had another person, we're going to call her Abby. No, because I actually have an Abby. We're going to call her— I can't even think of a name now. What's wrong? Bertha. We'll call her Bertha. My word. And she actually had an offer already, so she turned on the weekly webinar right away and it did not convert. She didn't have to do the launch and the pilot and it did not convert. And she actually did two different webinars at the same time to see which one did better. Originally, the lower priced offer did a little bit better and the first one didn't do as well, but Bertha was unbelievably persistent and she actually got that first one to convert after probably 3 or 4 months changing the offer around, changing the price around, and now she is consistently getting sales week after week after week, and that was really positive. I have another client, we will call her Poppins. I'm just looking at my dog right now. And this was an apply now. Situation. She was using Apply Now and her offer was already validated. She had tons of testimonials, okay? And we did the webinar and I would say she was one of those people that were like, done is better than perfect. So she got it out there, but it wasn't converting. And she really worked hard on her presentation vibe, like how she presents. and after 3 or 4 tries, she had great applications. And that was, um, yeah, that was about 3 or 4 weeks after the webinar launched. I'm just trying to think. I have another client. His name is Eric. We'll call him Eric. He had an existing offer and an apply now, and in— he— it took him a long time to write the webinar, so he was really procrastinating there, and it was like almost months, I think. But once he finally got it out the door, he got something ridiculous like 40 or 50 applications in that first webinar. He did it to warm traffic, and now he's been doing it every week, and now it's, you know, colder, colder, colder traffic. So the number of applications have gone down because colder traffic is harder. But he is, he is convinced that doing this once a week is very, very valid. And, and All of these people who are doing this webinar, they are learning from repetition and it is so valuable. There's nothing that replaces it. Oh, I know there was another client. I'm going to call her Nala because I clearly can't think of names when I'm under pressure. She worked with me and she got her webinar built in the timeframe that we worked together, and then she stopped working with me because she thought, okay, I've got my webinar built. And she went off to do her webinar and she came back a month later. She's like, okay, I need to work with you again. I was like, okay, what's going on? She's like, I've done my webinar 3 times. I've gotten this many sales, you know, but this isn't working and blah, blah, blah. So we've been working together and she is getting live sales every week, but she's also having people who are maybe not saying nice things in the comments or on the ads. And she's been really rattled by that. And I've been able to help her, like, okay, let me watch your webinar. Let me see, is this legit what they're saying? Is it not legit? What maybe can we tweak? How can we optimize? I just got a message from her yesterday. She's like, oh my gosh, this is so helpful for someone to actually watch and say, okay, on this slide, let's, you know, maybe say this differently, or let's reorganize this. And I have probably 10 more examples. This is all very average. I'm specifically not using the people that are like my my supersonic case studies, you know, my Trishas and my Lindseys who are like, you know, on track to make a million or half a million or whatever it is, because I want to just explain the average. Most people are starting at $50 a day and then they're ramping up to about $300 a day. And we're keeping the room small. The ideal room for a webinar funnel is about 50 people. I find that if you're at 50 people, inside like a Zoom, you can kind of still manage it. The chat doesn't get too much run away, you know, doesn't run away too much with you. It's a good number to be like, okay, if you get a sale, right, or you get a couple of sales, then you know, if you don't get sales and you can definitely tell something's wrong. It's not so many people that you're spending a bajillion dollars on ads. It's like a really good number. So to get 50 people in a room, you need to probably— it depends on your niche, but you need to spend somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 a week. And that usually means you're getting like 300 people added to your list each week, and then you're getting, you know, 40 to 50 people in the room. And that is a really good place to be, and it gives you those, um, those sales every single week. If you have less than that, you can still absolutely make sales. The thing is, if you have less than that and you don't make sales, you can't necessarily say that the offer isn't valid or the webinar is not working. Because it's too small of a sample size. And that's sort of where people get stuck. And then they're like, well, I only had 3 people in the room and nobody bought. And I'm so depressed. I'm like, you had 3 people in the room. There's no way you can actually prove whether or not that worked or not. Anyway, I hope this has been helpful. I really wanted to just kind of paint a scenario. If you need support or help working on your weekly webinar, or even if it's an on-demand webinar or a webinar that you might use for a launch, please reach out to me in DM on Instagram, or you can email me. Julie@JulieChenell.com. Thanks.

And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward.

You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.