TJ Walker describes abandoning traditional webinar-to-sales-call funnels (long ads → free long-form webinars → sales calls) because they felt 'cheesy' and produced many no-shows and low-fit leads. Instead he created an "anti-sales" webinar: a 75-minute, high-value training where he openly teaches as if for a paid session, removes fear/pressure tactics, presents his full expertise, and links to various paid offerings for the small subset of attendees who want deeper, in-person or higher-touch services. He positions this as a response to scaling problems and misalignment with typical $5,000 blended coaching prospects.
Chapters
Little background. Tim. I went into one of these, I've been following all these gurus on how you use long, basically long YouTube ads to lead people to a long form free webinar on something which really is just disguised to get people to a funnel into taking a call with you where you talk to them for an hour and then sell them on a hybrid coaching plan. A lot of people do this very well and very successfully. And I spent a lot of time and money and effort and I got to, I felt a little cheesy and sleazy about it because it, you lead people in sort of the, the standard advice is promise them the solution to all these problems. Then when you get them there, you talk about all their pain points and you agitate, you agitate, talk about pain, you talk broadly about the solution and then you say, but your particular situation is so unique and different and special. I can't give you generic information for you call me and I'll talk to you about it. And then that gets people in. So I'm not condemning people who do it. I tried it and for us it generated a lot of calls. And I would say 90% of the people who booked calls, confirmed call, just never showed up. Those who did it just wasn't in alignment. They were looking for something that was, I don't know, $99. And our price was $5,000 for this blended coaching program. Yep. So. And we sold a few but. And the people we sold it to love the program but I couldn't figure out how to scale it, therefore just didn't seem to to work. So I came up with something completely. And Ben, I see you posted this, but now I forgot how I can click on it or capture it to then pull it up on another screen. Ben, if you actually, if you can just email it to me, that's going to be the easiest way for it. So I did a completely different webinar. I did an anti sales webinar. Sales webinar. So I created recently a video where I say, look, I know I'm supposed to hit all your pain points and do all these things to get you on a sales call and seem like I'm actually going to teach you communication skills, but I'm actually going to just give you all my expertise here and teach you and you don't have to buy anything. You're going to learn a lot. And the reason I'm going to do it is there's a certain percentage of you, maybe it's 1% are going to say okay, that's helpful, but I want something more in depth, in person training, a speech, a seminar, a webinar, a live session on zoom for training. And if you want it, it's all right here in the bottom, but you can just keep on listening. And so I didn't do all the fear. I really just gave them a training as if they had paid for a full day with me. Now it's 75 minutes long. So we did it maybe six weeks ago. We connecting it to pages that give content about basically all my services. Because like a lot of people, I package my expertise and sell it in different ways. And, you know, sometimes people want a day of me, and that's one price. Sometimes they may want a week, sometimes they may want Zoom session with one of my other trainers, or they don't have a certain budget and they want to come to a public workshop, which my company does. I don't personally do those. We have webinars, we have books. So we're violating some of the standard marketing rules, which is, you know, a confused customer never buys. Give them one option, or at most three. I was doing that and just didn't enjoy it. And what I found is even the people we did sell using the. What most of the gurus say you should do now, it took two separate zoom calls, which to me meant, if it's taking me, and I'm the Expert on this, two separate Zoom sales calls to close something for $5,000. There's no way I'm going to be able to scale that, hire other closers to do it, because they're not going to. It's going to take them two different calls. It's too unwieldy. It's got to be something they can actually sell. So just giving you a little bit of the history there of the mindset of why I came up with this particular strategies. Sam.
