Power Up Your Virtual Event, With Ryan Levesque: Top Tips For 2021.

We went very quickly from panic to holy smokes. This could totally change the paradigm for our business and our clients, businesses and businesses for like the ones that we're both part of forever. And it just opened up this whole world of opportunity, I think in a way that we would have been too afraid to test it had Covid had not happened.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to the show. This is the producer Darren Clark and we are happy to have Ryan Levesque as our guest today. He's the CEO of the Ask Method company, a number one national best selling author and co founder and Investor in Bukkit IO. Roland and Ryan discuss how 2020 impacted him and the surprising opportunities he unearthed. Plus, if you're hosting virtual events this year, Ryan breaks down how they've been tweaking their virtual events for maximum user satisfaction. So let's get stuck in but first be sure to hit the subscribe button.

Hey everybody, Roland Fraser here with Business Lunch and I'm very excited to have back for a second time. He was on one of our very early shows, Ryan Levesque from the Ask Method and Bucket IO. Ryan, welcome back to the the show.

Roland. It's great to be back man. And gosh, I can't believe how much time has flown by since that interview, which in some ways feels like it was like yesterday and then in other ways it feels like it was like a lifetime ago based on like how much the world has changed since then. So excited to be back and to be chatting again.

It is, yeah. We were talking about that kind of the changes that have happened and how people are adapting to them and things like that.

Tell me a little bit about like.

When everything got shut down initially. How did that affect your business and how did you respond to it?

I'll tell you, it was very scary right when it first happened because the timing of it was such that we had a very important multimillion dollar live in person event. And it was an event that was a relatively like a mid ticket or high ticket event. It's an event that people had paid thousands of dollars to, to be part of and all the thoughts were going through our mind. What are we, what are we doing? People were at that point a little upset that we were holding back on making any sort of because again the world's changed so much and we didn't want to announce too early that it was being canceled or going virtual. So we're like waiting till the last possible minute and fast Forward. And the net effect is we moved that event from an in person event here in Austin to a virtual event. And two things happened. Number one, it was our highest rated event that we'd ever done in history. So from an NPS score, we always ask for feedback at the events. It was the most well received. That's number one. And number two, it was also an enrollment event where we were enrolling people into another program on the back of that event. And it was our highest sales convert conversion or enrollment conversion rate on any event that we'd ever done. And it was like one of those things where we went very quickly from panic to holy smokes, this could totally change the paradigm for our business and our clients, businesses and businesses for like the ones that we're both part of forever. And it just opened up this whole world of opportunity, I think, in a way that we never, we would have been too afraid to test it had Covid had not happened.

Yeah, that is true. So what did you do differently? So let's look at a little process. So because there's a lot of people still trying to figure out what is the current normal, what's the next normal. So it might be helpful just to get an idea of what the process was. So we start with panic. What the heck is going on?

Right.

And then how did you start thinking about what to do?

So there's a couple things in this particular case, I'll just speak from our example and maybe you'll be able to extrapolate or pull from. Find parallels between. For anyone watching or listening to this right now. So this particular event was both an enrollment and a delivery event. So it's an event that a portion of the audience had spent thousands of dollars just for the event. And a second section of the audience had access to this event as part of a higher ticket program. So it was included in their tuition. And so we had these two different audiences that we needed to satisf. The first one, the scariest one, was the one who paid money. Like they paid $5,000 to come to an event that they were expecting to be in person, in a room, meeting with other people. We very quickly had to figure out, well, what are we going to do? And there were sort of a couple decisions we had. So one decision was we'll just credit them for a future event, which we did make available for someone who was in a whatever situation. Like if they were desperately affected by Covid and they couldn't make the event. We did that very thing. But then we also said it's one of these things that what we were teaching at the event, it was a webinar bootcamp and we teach a very specific way of doing webinars for selling online. Very successful, very effective. We were seeing better results with that technique than anything that we've done in as long as I can remember. And we said, well, we can't withhold that information from people. Like it's not right for us to say, let's just push this event back 6 months or 12 months. Like that just was. It would keep that information from getting in people's hands. So we didn't want to do that. So ultimately we made the call that we're going to do it, do it virtually. And then we opened up our minds to the possibility. We said, how could this event actually be better than the in person? So we started saying, what are the things, what are the constraints that we had when we were limited to an in person environment, that those constraints are no longer there? Right. And I'll give you a specific example. One of the things that we added to the event that was not part of the event initially is we did studio tours of about half a dozen people who run webinars who were part of the event. And we did it at different budgets. So we said, if you've got a. If you want to have a $100 webinar studio budget, what does that look like? And we had people do tours of their in studio setups at their homes at the time for pretty much everybody. And we did the $100 budget studio, the $500 webinar studio, the thousand, five thousand, ten thousand and beyond, so people could see all the different things. Now that's something that would have been very difficult had we been in a room together in person to do that. But now it unlocked that possibility. So that was. So we kept going with that paradigm of how can we make this even better than the in person? Not almost as good as, but how do we make this better? And I think it unlocked some creativity on our team to really think outside the box. So we did that there and then we had to think on the same side of how do we get a better result from a sales perspective, knowing that this was an enrollment event. So we looked at all the analogs that we could think of between we do an in person event, what happens? There's an in person event, we make an offer. There's some sort of time sensitive element, there's some sort of fast action element for the first people who move forward. We have an in person, on the ground enrollment team who are there to take people's enrollments and then answer questions and have those conversations. So how do we replicate that and do that online? And so one of the things that we did is we said, okay, well, we could probably create an analog using live chat. So when we make this offer, instead of having a quote unquote back of the room, we can have a live chat team that's available and they can figuratively be in the back of the room. And what's great about a live chat team is you can have a thousand people on that team or one person on that team. And it's not like a wall of people staring you in the face.

Right.

If you're at a live event, imagine if there's like an offer that's made and you look in the back of the room, you say, talk to one of our enrollment specialists and it's a thousand people back there. It's intimidating. Right? Right. Similarly, if it's just one person back there, it's like, how long am I have to wait to talk to Susie in the back of the room? So we were able to modulate that and keep it. People did not need to know how many agents, so to speak, we had behind the scenes. And we were able to get to people much more efficiently because we were able to know in real time how much interest we had. And we were able to quickly staff it up. And we had, again, as I mentioned, our highest enrollment conversion rate of any event that we've ever run. So I think there was something around that that was very interesting. So as far as, like, to answer your original question, we started with that paradigm of not how do we make this almost as good as, but what opportunities have unlocked that we can actually make it better, both from a delivery standpoint and also from a financial results standpoint on top of it.

And was that video chat or text chat?

It was just text chat. So we had a triage. So just to get one or two levels more in more detail, we made an offer. And instead of the offer being fill out a piece of paper and turn it in the back of the room, it was, let's go to this website together. So that in and of itself was an order of magnitude more efficient than having people fill out a piece of paper. Now, the concern I had was, someone doesn't have a piece of paper in their hand, are they actually going to do it? But we went through the process together. We screen shared, walked through the form, we filled it out together. And a Certain percentage of people just filled out the form and they were in. They didn't need to speak to anybody because they were ready to sign up. But then there's the group of people who weren't sure. For whatever reason, they had questions, they wanted to talk to someone. And so there we had a live chat beacon on the enrollment page. We use that to do tier one level one support. So some would say, hey, I have a question about this. Now, based on that query, we'd route people. And so if it was a level one query, I'm not sure what does this field here mean? Do I put my business name or I have a partner, my business. Do I put my partner's name, my name? Like that type of thing. Great. We can have a tier one customer support person answer that question. Great, done. Then if it was a little bit more of a sales oriented question, basically, I'm not sure if this is right for me. I need to talk to someone. Then they would get routed to an enrollment person. They would have a chat conversation. That enrollment specialist would have the latitude to just get on the phone with that person. Or a zoom call if it made more sense.

Right.

So if it was like a quick thing, let's just chat back and forth in live chat.

Awesome.

But you know what, you have 10 minutes right now. Let's just, let's just talk it through on the phone here. I'll give you my zoom link and we'll just hop on a quick zoom call. So they had that latitude to do that, have that conversation and then when they were finished, go back into the queue, so to speak, to answer another question. So we were able to do it. Maybe it's because we're a digital organization. I feel much more efficiently than is often the case when you're trying to navigate the in person logistics of a, like a physical event. Like we got to find a quiet space to talk. Like, oh, all the quiet spaces are busy. Let's go down the hall. It's, you know, there's. You don't have any of that. It's just all virtual space. There's no physical space. That's a constraint. So we did that and that was just. That was definitely a do again for future events.

That's pretty cool. And what was the tech stack looking like for that?

So this first one, we've got another one coming up that we're doing on the topic of quiz funnels, this past one was webinars. We got another one coming up on quiz funnels. And so this one was right as Covid hit. So we were like in total self quarantine. So much so that like Gary, our video tech is in the studio with me right now. I actually did it all myself. So the tech stack was we used a Zoom account. One Zoom account. We ran it as a Zoom meeting. We had someone on our team virtually sort of serving as the admin of Zoom. And she was like hosting the meeting on her, her system on her end. And I was here in the studio basically all by myself, no help at all. And I was jockeying between. I basically used. It's not the camera I'm looking at right now because I had to keep it simple. I just used my laptop. So I had my, the laptop that you see right here on the, on the, on the screen I had my webcam. Nothing any fancier than that, just the laptop. That was it. I logged into a secondary computer in case I had issues or got booted out. So I had a secondary LAPT that you can see right here. And I use my iPad. And I basically logged into the Zoom meeting three times. And when I needed to switch between things, it was like Ryan iPad, Ryan computer 1, Ryan computer 2. And that was it. And I would literally just hang on one second, let me unshare my screen. It was a little clunky, it was a little bit messy. But I think, and I don't know if it was again because of. It was new and so people were very forgiving and no one had gone through this before. So everyone was totally okay with the, with the changes. But I also, I also wonder, and this is the suspicion I've had depending on the market that we're in. And this would affect you and your business too is I think sometimes when things are a little overproduced, it creates too much distance between you and the person on the other side of that experience. Like for example, mutual friends of ours helped produce a Tony Robbins event that I think had 27,000 people in attendance virtually. Which is incredible, right? So Blue Melnick and his partner Barry Baumgartner run a company called Sage Productions. And they were a big part of that. And it's incredible what they were able to do with that technique, technology. At the same time, someone at home watching that in my mind is thinking, well, you're Tony Robbins, of course you've got this million dollar plus studio. Could I do what you do? No, you're Tony Robbins. But when guys like us can show, hey, here's what you do with just a laptop, like the same laptop that you have sitting on your desk right now. That's what I used. I used to run this event. If I could do it like, you totally could do it too. So I think there's something about that real appeal that opens up that doesn't exist. Roland, in a live event environment, when someone is even seeing you on a physical stage and your celebrity has been elevated in that environment where they can't relate as much, because just by nature, the fact that you're on a stage, like you've been elevated to a level of celebrity versus just you and me on our laptops, on a zoom call, there's something to them that I think opens up opportunities for us.

Yeah, I think so, too. And how about on the chat side? How did you manage that?

What do we use? We use. I think we use live chat. So we use the. Live chats is the name of the software. So we do that beacon, and we use that elsewhere in our business as well. So I think it wasn't. I wouldn't get too hung up on that particular software because there's other live chat software out there. We just. That's the one that we were using. So we ran with it going forward. Yeah, I don't think that was like, the linchpin to making it succeed.

What else did you do differently?

Okay, so here's something we did differently. We were very cognizant of the fact that we were. You're gonna be in front of a computer for, in our case, three days, roughly eight hours a day each day. Like, they're long days. Right. So you can imagine you do work at your computer, and when you're not mixing it up with, like, phone calls and taking breaks during the day, like, if you've ever spent recently, like, eight hours just in front of a computer, that's exhausting.

Like, it's.

It's a lot. So we were very cognizant and very intentional about doing a lot of physical breaks along the way. So we brought in members of the community that were in businesses that had some health or holistic element to it, and they brought something to the table that was, like, fun and novel and also physical at the same time. So just to give you, like, the diversity of experience, we have someone in our community who teaches qigong, so the ancient sort of art of qigong, and he taught us different qigong moves to help with our energy and kind of get things moving, which is really cool. We also have someone in our community who's a professional saxophonist. Saxophonist. Saxophonist. I've learned how to pronounce it correctly. So she taught us breathing techniques. If you're going to be like blowing out a bari sax or a tenor sax, that kind of like really helped. And it was totally different perspective, but it was cool to do that. And then what we also did, this is the ninja thing behind it, is we use those as opportunities to highlight and showcase members of our community who are having success with what it is that we teach. So, like in Donna's case, Donna's the saxophonist. She taught us this breathing technique before she gets on stage. And she was also able to, by the way, say through the program, like, I've had my best month ever teaching saxophone because I used what I learned in the program and blah, blah, blah, just did a launch and we made all this money. It was very successful. Now let me teach you a breathing technique. So it's just a great way to reinforce success in the community. Killing two birds with one stone and then also bringing that on. So it was new and novel. It wasn't, you know, just one person coming on every single time to rah, rah, rah, whose home am I gonna get to inside of next? So I think that was really effective. Keeping people moving periodically throughout the event. That was. That was very successful. The other thing that we did, I think was a good learning is we had no idea, Roland, how it was going to go. So on day one, we did a whole bunch of different experiments for different modalities of engagement. So, like, for example, we weren't sure what was going to work well. Is it going to be office hours where we do a zoom breakout, put a coach in that breakout and have people be able to go and ask questions that other people can hear? So you're kind of like learning from other people. Is it going to be more effective to do small group masterminds on a, like, a specific topic or give people a prompt? Is it going to be more effective to do breakouts on different topics? What's going to be the most sort of effective modality? Because we didn't have any experience, we said, let's do five or six experiments on day one. We'll get feedback at the end of the day, which we do every day. Whenever we do any events, we always ask for feedback at the end of the day. What did you like? What could we do different? Whatever. We powwow as a team. And then on days two and three, we doubled down on the stuff that people liked and we just scrapped the stuff that people didn't like. And we let people know ahead of time and they Loved that. And what was great is that the proof was in our NPS score. Our daily NPS score went up every single day. So day one was very good, but day two was better, and day three was even better. And I think it was just. It's something that we can all do, which is literally at the end of the day, just ask that question. What did you like? What should we keep for tomorrow? What should we get rid of? And how well did we do?

Were you surprised at the response? Were you surprised at what worked versus what you expected?

Yeah, I mean, there. So one of the things that we totally missed the boat on, and this is like a good learning. I'll pass, so you don't have to learn on my dime, is that we spent too much time in the morning of day one giving people a primer and tutorial on how to use all the different facets of Zoom and how we were using a Facebook group for the engagement. So we turned up like, Zoom has a million different dials and knobs that you can turn on and off, right? Q and A live Q and A, not live chat. On, off. Breakout sessions, not breakout sessions. Raise hand, not raise hand. Like all the different things that you can do. And when you really get into it, you can really fine tune how you want to run it. And so our thinking, our line of thinking was, well, if someone knows Zoom inside and out, they're going to be fine. But what happens if we have even 10 or 20% of our audience who is just totally lost? And again, this is the beginning of COVID 19. This is not now. And this is a world where a lot of people, this, for many people, is sort of like a new thing. I know for my kids school, for example, our kids school teachers tried to teach through Zoom last semester, and it was a disaster because they didn't know how to do anything. Like, they couldn't even figure out how to mute people on and off, right? So we spent far too much time in the morning, like, walk. So here's how we do this thing, and here's how you're gonna use the Facebook group and your comment here. And people were kind of like, get on with the program. Like, we get. We're a little more hip than you realize we are. And so it was one of those where I was like, dang, if we could have. What we would have done differently. And what we will do differently is instead of making it part of the main event, about a week or so before the event, we're gonna host an optional sort of if you're like a technophobe, we're gonna show you how to get the most out of the event. So you know how to log into your account and your Zoom account is updated all the way. Like all the little things that can like really derail a person's experience, get that out of the way and not make it part of the main event. So that was like a big learning there and we missed the boat on that one.

So diving into your content just for a little bit in the context of everything that's going on right now, what are you finding is working really well on the webinar front?

Yeah, so great question. So on the webinar front, so one of the things that we teach and we've been experimenting a lot with this is, is what we call it an instant webinar. And an instant webinar is as opposed to a live webinar where. Hey, Ryan and Roland are going to be hosting this thing on Thursday. Come join us. Register, register, register. It's basically people go through a funnel. Most typically in our world, it's some form of a quiz funnel. So people are going through a quiz, like, what type of business is right for you? Should you sell your business? Take the quiz to find out. Now, thinking about buying a business, like, there are five paths to buy a business. Which path is right for you? I'm just thinking of ideas for your business. Take this assessment to find out. Now you take people to and out step where you're giving them some value and that immediately segues into something like click the button below and I'll see you on the other side. With the training I have on this very topic, and that's effectively an instant webinar. Now that for us is working incredibly well. It's working better than anything else. And I think the reason for that, if I were to just put my finger on it, like all things, right, like this, the market is always a pendulum, right? It's like fashion stuff. What was out of fashion 20 years ago is suddenly back in fashion. When I was a kid, what we called mom jeans, like, what we made fun of, like, they're in fashion. They're the thing. You see these Instagram influencers that are far more fashionable than I will ever be, they're wearing the jeans that I like. Me and my friends would make fun of our moms for wearing. So, like, whatever goes out of fashion comes back into fashion. And I think for a while, this idea of driving people to a sign up for the webinar, you can watch it at three times. You can watch it in 30 minutes, 90 minutes tomorrow. People are hip to that. Like, people are hip to like, dude, it's pre recorded. Let me just watch the dang thing right now, right? I think there's something to that and it's. And I think there's a time and place for that where that may have made sense. I think now the more authentic thing to do is to say, hey, listen, you're busy, I'm busy. Let me just get this in front of you right now. Now, the challenge, of course, is to do it in a way that's effective because when someone registers for something, the reason why that kind of just in time webinar works so well for so long is because I think it changes the frame of mind someone's in where they know, okay, there's an event that's happening. I'm carving time out of my life to be here and be present for this event. That's different than when they're just scrolling on social media or on YouTube and watching videos that are prerecorded right then and there. Just a different frame of mind. So we've been experimenting with the formats and frameworks that work well driving people to an instant webinar. And there's a few things that we found to be true. So number one, it is shorter. Now, typically what we find for a live webinar, we'll aim for between 60 and 90 minutes is our sweet spot. And we like to get to the offer at the 45 minute mark before the top of the hour. So it gives you 45 minutes to lead people to an offer, 15 minutes to get through the close, and then the ideal time I'm aiming for is 75 minutes. 15 minutes of Q and A past the top of the hour. That's like textbook live webinar in our world. Now, that doesn't work when you're driving people to an instant webinar because people aren't planning on sitting down for 75 minutes.

Right?

So we found that it's closer to 35 to 45 minutes of time is the sweet spot that we found is sort of optimal. You need enough time to make your sales argument, deliver value, explain in the framework that we teach, demonstrate your empathy and understanding for the challenges that people are running into and echo back the natural consumer language and make people feel like, oh gosh, this guy rolling, he gets me. He understands what's going on. To establish your expertise, deliver a little bit of content. Usually it's in the form of challenges and mistakes. That people are running into, shift the paradigm in people's mind and then make an offer. Like, you need enough time to be able to do that. So 35 to 45 minutes is the sweet spot. The other thing that we found that makes all the difference in the world is switching visual modalities very often. So I've become very adept at using my iPad to teach and crap I don't have. Gary literally asked me the question before we went on. We use Apple TV to show this. I might be able to show something on my screen here, but I will switch between three modalities over and over again. And the three modalities are slides me on camera and then writing notes in real time. And so I'll write notes that you can see this here, this is notes on the iPad that I'll switch to and I'll write notes like this. I'll draw notes and I'll use frameworks and I'll take people through something like this. And it's, I think right now very visually captivating and almost hypnotic and in some ways mesmerizing to watch someone, especially if they have a little bit of artistic skill, drawing on a digital whiteboard in the form of sketching on a tablet, especially when you're switching back and forth between modalities. So we found that. That switching is important. And what you can do if you use a tool like wistia or even YouTube and you're tracking engagement on your videos is just identify where the drops start to happen when you're teaching a concept, and those are the opportunities to insert a new modality. I like using the app Notability on the iPad because I don't know if you use Notability for yourself at all. Yeah, yeah. So you know, it has that great full screen view where it goes in full screen and you can do. I feel like it's much better than the native Notes app that the iPad comes with. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of Notability. Makes a big difference.

How are you doing that? So what I've been doing is basically take my keynote PowerPoint and save it as a PDF and then email it to myself, open it in Notability and then I'll draw on the slides as I'm talking and go back and forth between sharing that and not sharing that. Are you doing something? How are you handling that?

Yeah, it's a great idea. You've given me some ideas. Just as you were saying that right now on ways that we might be able to do it. I find that when I use Slides, I do a fair amount with builds. I do a fair amount where the static end slide, it's doable because you could have instead of one slide with a build in it, you could have 10 slides. Can I tell you what I do? What do you do?

So on notability, if you draw a rectangle, then it makes a box. Right?

Right, right.

So I basically, Brendon Burchard used to take post its and put over the things.

And I remember.

Yeah, so I'd been doing that. So for like the challenges I do, I go through my slides that are builds and draw boxes so that it looks like basically the post its on there. I do them different colors and then I'll write question marks or 1, 2, 3 or 4 and then I hit the erase button and then just touch them with the pencil as I'm going. So it basically is a reveal as you go. And it's cool because it's there like promoting curiosity. And then of course I also have drawn the question mark on it because that is a challenge and I didn't want to have 4,000 slides. So that's something you can try just that alone.

Those little segues, I feel like captivate people and maintain interest in a way that when you're just one dimensional, it's a little bit more challenging. So that's kind of how we're doing things. And I mean it's worked, I mean it's worked well, much better than just for the instant webinar for sure. Let's go to slides. And then it's just 90 minutes of just slides.

So you're going quiz funnel webinar.

We do quiz funnel to instant webinar. That is our, like, that's our secret sauce. To sum it up in two words, Quiz funnel to instant webinar. Quiz funnel more effective for getting cheap qualified leads that you can segment to different buckets than anything that I found. And then the instant webinar is better for converting those leads than anything that we, that we found as well.

So what's different in quiz funnels from when you first started? What's been the evolution of those?

Yeah, it's interesting, right? So when you're involved in something long enough, it's cool to see like stuff that continues to work over a decade later, almost 15 years later. That's how long I've been in this game is almost 15 years. And to be able to see how much the world has changed and yet see certain things continue to perform, in some cases perform better than they did back in the day. And at the same time see other things that maybe don't work in the same way. They don't work as well. So a few things that I'll say. So number one, and this is no surprise, but traffic has moved more mobile than any time in history and it's just continuing to move in that direction. So it's never been more important than to have a mobile first design for your entire experience. And as you're thinking about someone taking your quiz, I always like to think about or any, anything online. But let's just talk about quiz for a moment. You want to think about like imagine who they are, what they're doing, where they're sitting, where they're at. What else are they multitasking with as they're going through this process? And I think that's changed a lot. I think if we were to close our eyes and imagine that experience even four or five years ago, we might have one view in our mind. Nowadays, I think it's rare that someone has a single screen in front of them at any one time. Yeah, like I think about my life. I mean, I'm just embarrassed to admit this. I find it difficult to watch something on Netflix without having my phone in my hand. Also, like keeping the unengaged neurons in my brain engaged to look at like the second thing over there. And sometimes it might even have like my computer like next to me as well. That's the world that we live in. So when you think about that, you've got to design whatever you're creating with that in mind. So the hook needs to be compelling. It really needs to speak to where people are at. You truly do need to deliver value. So again, I think it's along the same lines. It's a good maybe meta lesson that we'll pull from this at the end. Same thing with the Just in Time webinar is a little bit shady. It's a little bit kind of like it's not, I'm going to admit it's like not the most above board thing to do. Those quizzes that you may have seen people do that are just BS quizzes that actually don't deliver value or everyone gets the same result. Like people are hip to that. Like you can't do that. You really do need to like authentically take people down a path where you're asking good, thoughtful questions and then based on the answers people give, you give a good solid piece of value added information that they're going to walk away and feel, hey, I got something from this. Even if they don't become your paying customer, client. They got some value from the experience. And I think that's never been more important. And I know not everybody teaches that or really implements that. That is something that we like harp on a lot is you got to actually deliver value in your quiz. You can't just ask people three questions and put everyone in the same thing. Like that's just a trick, it's not real. So we've seen that there's so many different best practices. We just launched our second generation platform for our technology. Yeah, bucket 2.0. And so just to give you some numbers, We've had over 12,000 quiz funnels built on our technology in the last almost five years since we launched our 1.0. We have over 200 million data points in the quizzes that we built. And we have over 30 million people annually who take a quiz through our platform. 30 million unique human beings. So we have a tremendous amount of data now to know what works, what doesn't work. Everything around number of answer options, character, length of questions, how to position, like all that sort of nitty gritty piece that we have our AI built off of, which is what we've learned through this massive data warehouse that we've accumulated over the last five years. So there's so many little best practices like that around. Progress bar, what percentage you should start it at? How many questions are optimal? Question 3, what is the best number of options you should have and the worst number of options that you could have, statistically speaking, based on all of these quizzes. So there's so much nuance with that. And what we're finding now is that it's more than a human being can remember, it's more than we can teach in a course. So we've just built all of those best practices into the second generation technology where you don't need to remember what kind of constraints or restraints you should have. You just build on one of these pre built templates, make a few tweaks and you're going to be using best practices.

And it's bucket IO is still the place to find the 2.0 version.

Bucket IO is still the, is still the place to find it. It's just our 2.0. It's our second generation platform that we just released earlier this year.

Yeah, nice, nice. So it's more incorporative of all those.

Data points, it's more incorporate of all those data points. There's a full page builder now that's built into it so you can build all your pre quiz and post quiz pages. You don't need to necessarily connect the quiz with anything else. You could, of course, but you can just build it all in the platform. The analytics are pretty cool. Be able to see down to every individual question, what your conversion rate is every single step along the way. Integrated with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, so you can tag people based on their answers to their questions. Same thing with Facebook Pixel Manager, so you can pixel people based on how they answer your quiz and every combination you can think of. So you can build custom audiences across platforms based on quiz answer combination. So for example, if you wanted to create an assessment what business acquisition path is right for you, for example, you're building up these custom audiences, these sub audiences that you can then market to on YouTube, on Instagram, on Google and Facebook based on these answer combinations in a way that you simply cannot do in the native platforms. What most people don't know is that Facebook is becoming increasingly restrictive on the level of targeting that they're letting you have access to. And instead they're just saying, trust us, use our algorithm and we'll show it to the best people at the right time. So it's more and more opaque, which is good for Facebook, not good for us, because then we don't know like how to reach those people on other platforms and find them outside of Facebook. But a quiz allows you to overcome that because you can accumulate all these data points along the way and market with that.

That's awesome. So I'm going to ask one more thing. You've played around with lots of different versions of challenges lately, I know, and had good success with them. What are you finding is working the best right now in that world? Paid vs unpaid x days, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So zooming up one level, big learning that I've personally had this year is it's a great learning because I think it makes a lot of things accessible for people in our space, is that we're having a lot more success with live engagement opportunities as opposed to pre recorded, pre done, pre produced across the board. Not just with challenges, not just with quizzes, not just with webinars, but with everything. And so what that means is two things. Number one, it means that in order to get the best results, you've got to be there. Like you can't prerecord something. And the kind of evergreen I did it once three years ago and just play it over and over again is less of a successful paradigm. But the good news is is the production expectations are Also a lot lower. So in other words, we can get on a zoom call like this, deliver a ton of value, like hopefully we're doing here on this interview, and do it in a sort of live environment. People in our world are responding better to that than some of the stuff that we would pre produce. Scripted B roll, multiple takes, multiple cuts, cinematic, like all of that stuff that takes a ton of time, money and effort and energy to produce. The live stuff is working better. And it's again, it's taken me at least Covid to really embrace that into and to dive into that. So I think the challenge piece of that is just a. Is taking advantage of that specific idea, that live engagement today, this is what people want. People are at home, they're not having the same level of human interaction even months into the post Covid world. And I don't see that changing anytime in the immediate future. So I think the live engagement is in the thing to focus on now with challenges. We've done a whole bunch of different things. We've done paid challenges. We've done challenges where we contributed all the proceeds to charity. So we made it paid, but we didn't take any of the money. We just passed it to charity. So there was a social component to it. We've done some free challenges as well. So we've done a lot of experimentation with this. And what I'll say is this, like everything, I think there's definitely. You and I had this conversation weeks ago when we were chatting about both of our challenges. I think there's gonna be a level of fatigue that sets up it right. Everyone kind of thought challenge was the next panacea, the next thing that's going to solve everything. Just do a challenge. Like, my business is falling apart. Do a challenge, we're about to go bankrupt. Do a challenge, you'll save it. Whereas a video sales. Everyone's. Everything's had its heyday. Video sales, letter, webinar, whatever, it's all had its heyday. So I think there's a little bit of that happening with challenge right now. But what I will say is what we found is a framework that I mentioned to you when you and I spoke. And it's a framework that any, anyone can use. And it's using your daily theming as a question, question of the day. And it's a very universal framework that we've been able to use in a lot of different contexts. And basically every single day you're asking a new question. So you might start with who next day is what next Day is where, next day is when, why and then how. Now the thing that works really well is when you use a challenge as an on ramp into an offer. Your how day, so to speak, is the day where you make your offer. Because that's the question everybody's asking. Well, so this is great information, but how do I put it into practice? Well, let me explain how to work with us more closely. So then as you think about that, it creates a little bit of sort of a framework that you can use for doing a five or even six or seven day challenge by making everyday answer questions. So day one, we're going to focus on who. In other words, who are you focusing on? If you're looking to buy a business, who is your ideal target? Okay, great. Next question might be where. Where are they located? Where are they spending time? Where are they focusing? Right. So that could be where. The next question might be why? What's their motivation? Why are they doing this? Why are you doing this? Right. What's your big reason why behind this? Get clear on your why. So you build a future for yourself that's in line with what you're looking to achieve. And then how, how do you actually make this happen? It's a perfect segue, which is almost.

Exactly what we do. A little bit different, but yeah, it's.

But you can do it anything. Even if you're teaching people how to make sourdough bread, if that's your challenge. Or lose weight. Right. What's your why? Why are you looking to lose weight? Because I've got grandkids and I want to make sure I'm around to be with them for the next 20 years so they can grow up with me. Okay, great. That's your why, your who. So who's your who? It's my grandkids. So there's a way that you can use this framework no matter what it is that you actually teach. And so we just keep using that over and over again. And people love it because every day you're posing a question, answering a question, giving people good completion, and it segues beautifully into the how question, which is where you make the offer.

How do you balance the desire to have quality time with the insatiable appetite for live.

Yeah, it's a great question. So we're just wrapping up as we record this right now. A six week online digital virtual live quiz funnel masterclass. So we literally went live every single week for the last six weeks. And it's been a teaching day. So my schedule has been Tuesdays, teaching and Then Fridays answering questions. And originally, Roland, our plan was I was just going to go live for 90 minutes on teaching, one hour on Q and A, call it a day. But we found that with what we wanted to teach and the questions people are having, that kind of expanded a Fair bit beyond 90 minutes and 60 minutes more than doubled. And so it's been a fair amount of content, fair amount of commitment. And so coming out of it, what I can say is that I think I'm a big fan of things that have a beginning and an end. That's just the way that my brain works. I love having a great six weeks. This is great. It's not an open ended thing forever. So I know I'm committing for six weeks and now I'm going to be in a little bit of a rest period with my family and they know that. So they know that I'm going to have a month or so where we're going to take it easy. I'm not going to have as much live stuff, but then we're going to be good. Similarly, we've got a three day thing that we're gearing up to plan that's going to be like that webinar one that I mentioned, which is a three day intense boot camp. This one's not about webinars. Three day intense boot camp. And so again, it's like knowing that I'm going to be on for eight or nine or 10 hours a day, like a live event for three days. But then afterward there's an end and then there's sort of a bit of a rest period. And I think it mirrors in many ways the way that our biology works. Like we're not, you know, meant to be on. If you look at nature like trees are not growing 365 days a year. They're seasons, right? There's seasons of growth and expansion and seasons of rest and recovery. And I think that lends itself really well to the way our natural biology is. Have these periods of expansion and growth and being out there and then periods where you can just chill and rest and recover. So that's what I found. That works for me personally and well for us. And I think it's a good business model as well where you're not on all the time. You have time to step back and be strategic and think about the next.

Absolutely. Does the software that you've got bucket, does that also handle the webinar stuff or are you using something different to do the webinars?

So for the webinar Stuff what we found is simple is better, surprisingly. Right. So simple is better. So we teach an instant webinar. We also do some live webinar as well. We use Zoom.

I'm speaking about the one you were.

Talking, the instant webinar. The best platform to use, frankly is YouTube. And the reason for that, we've done a lot of testing on this. I've done some very high volume testing on this. I'm talking like hundreds of thousands dollars a day ad spend on this is. Listen, if there's anyone who has cross platform, cross browser configuration figured out, it is YouTube, like full stop. And number two, as you start increasing in scale and volume in your business, video hosting and video bandwidth becomes very expensive. Like on, when we're doing a launch, we might spend 20, 30, 40, $50,000 in a month in video bandwidth. It gets very expensive. Here's a cool thing. YouTube's free. So when you're calculating your return on ad spend and you're looking at, well, we made this amount of money, we spent this amount of money, you just wipe that bill right off your plate and it gives you a lot of great stats. So we find YouTube is the way to go. We do a fair bit with Wistia as well, because Wistia has a bit more robust analytics. But those are our go tos. Wistia to get some initial analytics and get data. And then we often migrate over to YouTube to have the optimal cross platform, cross browser compatibility. And no matter where someone is in the world and what their Internet bandwidth is and what version of Internet Explorer they might be on, that's 10 years old or whatever, I love it.

I love it. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come in and share all this cool stuff. Today we mentioned Bucket IO so that's the best place to get the software that handles all the quiz funnels and that sort of stuff, correct?

Yep. Yes, totally. And when you get there, you'll see that they're, depending on where you're watching this right now, might say something about a wait list or to get in, just reach out to us, let us know that you heard Roland and I talk on this interview. Reach out to our support desk. We might be able to get you in through a back door, so don't go shouting that from the rooftops. But if you do get there and you see it says a wait list or you need to wait for something, don't be dismayed. Reach out. If you're a friend of Roland's, you're A friend of mine and we'll hook you up.

That's awesome. And then would how to reach out be there or is it supportucket IO?

Supportucket IO is the, is the email address if you want to mention it. Or you can just click a link on the website and it'll take you there as well. Great.

And then you also have the Ask method. Tell us what's the best way to understand that.

Yes, it's a flip side of our business. We have a technology company and then a training company and they really work very closely together. And on the training side, gosh, what do we got going on right now? If you just go to askmethod.com, it's a great way to get in on what we might be doing. Depending on when you're watching this right now. Also, if you're interested in, if you're saying, hey, I'd like to have a quiz funnel in my business and maybe I'd like a little help from you and your team to get that done and get that created again, reach out to us there as well. That's just contactskmethod.com and if you want to know what's coming up around the corner and we can get you all the details on that as well.

New books coming out.

This has been a busy year, man. We like launched a brand new training, launched a brand new piece of software. We had some major pivots in our business. We have a new version of Apple is coming out within the next 12 months. So my first book, Ask, we have an Ask 2.0 that's coming out in the next 12 months at some point in 2021. And that's really going to answer the question of what's changed. It's been, it will have been about a little over five years since the 1.0, my first book was published and it's published, it's been bestseller in a bunch of different countries and hundreds of thousands of copies sold. But like five or six years in Internet years, I mean it's like a lifetime. So people buy the book and they say, wait, like this isn't even a thing anymore. So we're excited to release that new version. It'll be a great thing to get out there. So that's sometime in the next 12 months. I can't commit to a date because when you write a book, man, it's a lot of hours, a lot of time. So that's where we are with that.

So you had Ask, which was asking to figure out what the people wanted. And then you have Choose.

What is Choose? So choose is. I think I have a. Yeah. So choose is sort of was written as a prequel to Ask. So we have a lot of people come into our world. They use what we call the Ask method to really understand your audience at a deep emotional level. And there are questions that you want to be asking, questions you don't want to be asking. There's a way to analyze the data where you're looking at natural consumer language patterns and echoing that language and your marketing, using it to identify the buckets that exist in your market, the hyper responsive and hyper invested segments of your market. Like where you should really focus on the hot buttons in your market to. To really focus on in the areas of the market to just avoid. Because there's not as much untapped opportunity. So that's what Ask is all about. It's all about understanding your audience and how to figure out what anybody wants to buy in any market, really, full stop. Bottom story, bottom of the line. Then choose is the prequel, which is if you're not quite there yet and you're not sure like what market to go into in the first place, how do you choose that market? And we really talk about the story that we use to build businesses in 23 different weird niche markets. And it's an analytical process to analyze keyword volume and analyze sort of level of competition, market size. We've identified based on all the businesses that we've been part of that there's sort of a sweet spot that you want to be aiming for where you don't want to be in a market that's too big or too small. And we show people how to analyze what that is. So choose is all about how to make what I call the single most important decision before starting your business, which is not what you're going to create. But who are you going to serve? Going to those questions again. So who are you going to serve? Who's your audience? Who's your avatar? Who's your focus? And so it's a book all about that specific topic.

That's awesome. And is there a third one or is that not good enough?

There is a third one. And I can't announce what that title is. I can say we will stick with the one word title. So we'll complete the trilogy. Choose Ask Blank is the third one it's really gonna focus on. Once you've figured out exactly what people want to buy in your market, what do you do next? And leave that open loop there. That One's coming around the corner as well.

Awesome, dude.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you having the time. And there isn't a podcast that you've got as well, Sir.

There isn't a podcast that we have. That, my friend, is one of your time.

Like you don't do anything.

I mean, exactly. I'll tell you, man, that's one of those things that's been on the list for about three years now and always bubbles in December, always bubbles to the top of the list. And we say I'll just revisit it next year. So not now, but once we do have it, I'll tell you, you'd be the first person that I call to invite you to be part of that and hopefully you'll say yes.

Always.

Always.

Awesome.

Well, thanks again.

I really appreciate you taking the time today and thanks everybody for tuning in.

Awesome. Thanks so much.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information, go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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