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SHOW NOTES
This question comes from our IGNITE support call – but it’s one every entrepreneur I know has grappled with, at least once…
“What if I’m not selling to every lead on my list? Do I create a downsell/upsell offer?”
My advice is, not immediately. It’s a mistake to shift your focus before you’re ready (and I’ll explain how to know when you’re ready inside this episode!).
Look, I know it’s tempting to fill out your Value Ladder with another offer – especially one that specifically serves the flood of incoming leads unready for your Signature package… but in this episode, I’ll explain why that can actually be to your detriment.
Tune into this quick “lesson in marketing” to hear my thoughts about…
- This real-life example from one of my Ignite students
- How to know when you really SHOULD create something new
- And what to do now for the leads you’re not selling to (yet)
P.S. If you have a question of your own, slide into my Instagram DMs (@emilyhirsh) – and I’ll either answer directly OR maybe feature your Q on a future episode of the show!
NOTE – Check out episode 76, “The ONE THING everyone needs to constantly come back to in marketing + business,” and episode 26, “The importance of FOCUS in your marketing,” for more about why one-thing focus matters in creating your Value Ladder. And listen to episode 71, “Creating a strategic customer journey for your customers + products,” where I debunk common ideas for building out your Value Ladder.
Key Points:
[2:57] “It would be a mistake to shift your focus.”
[6:21] Here’s when you *should* create something new
[8:19] You’re not losing money, you’re saving money
[11:14] So, what should you do if you don’t have something to sell everyone on your list?
[12:17] Remember, creating something new is a full-time commitment…
CTA:
If you’re ready to explore working with Team Hirsh, we have two different options for you over at HelpMyStrategy.com – apply today!
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[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Emily Hirsh: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention innovators, influencers, creators, and game-changing entrepreneurs: your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launch multimillion dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind-the-scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success. Stay tuned for top-converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.
Hello everybody. Hope you are all having an amazing week. I am wrapping up an amazing week. It was a half travel week and a lot of, two days full of no calls and a lot of content creation, and just… my schedule and some of my own personal appointments during that time, so I go to acupuncture, I go to the float tank… So, super cool, super necessary as I’ve been growing and just really loving that kind of a schedule and routine, to have two days fully free to put in those appointments, not have to have them on the weekends, take away from my family time, but still make sure I have time for them. So today I’m talking about, and answering this question – but it’s not a question I got directly asked, it’s something that came up, actually, in our last IGNITE support call that I was on, that I help people… and it turned it into a little bit of coaching. It was really good, it was really good.
And multiple people felt this way, so then of course I thought, “Well we got to do a podcast on it!” because everybody, a lot of people probably feel this way. So that is, “What if I’m not selling every lead that is on my list?” I’m going to give you guys the background. Somebody on this [call], an IGNITE student has a successful funnel. She came on and was like, “I made $6,000 so far, haven’t really scaled the ads… it’s going to this higher ticket offer.” Then she said, “But I also know that a lot of people are coming onto my list, and they’re not ready for the higher ticket offer. So I need to create something for them, because I don’t have anything to offer them right now, and I need to create this course that I want to create.” I can definitely understand that train of thought, and I’ve been there. I mean, I spent two years only having a high level offer, and I didn’t have IGNITE or a “done” course, a digital product to sell people.
So I can absolutely understand that, but I want to talk about it, because I told her, “I think it would be a mistake to shift your personal focus as the CEO and your team’s focus in terms of marketing like, spread it across two different offers…” You could argue it’s the same funnel, so I don’t think she was doing it to say like, “Let me create multiple funnels.” You could argue it’s the same funnel, because what she does is, she’s got people coming in [through] a quiz, and then they go from, based on the answers to the quiz, they go to the higher level or they’re not ready and they are categorized as a lower level business owner in her niche. So she was feeling like, “Wow, well I’m getting this percentage of leads in that I don’t have something to sell to them yet, so I need to create something.” So there was some stress there, but the key piece is, she hadn’t fully scaled. She had made the $6,000, but she hadn’t fully maximized. She even said like, “I haven’t run a lot of ads to maximize [the] selling of the high ticket offer.”
My advice was, “Don’t make the course right now. Let those leads sit there, let them build. Nurture them with your podcast, nurture them with your content that you’re putting out. Let them build on your list. And put 100% of your attention into what you know is, one, working, and two, you already have it. You already have the offer, you already have the systems to deliver it, you know your team is delivering it”… She said she’s not super involved in the delivery, it’s pretty streamlined… “So scale that to its maximum and get it basically running without you as the CEO fully, and then you can work on something else. Then you can build that other product as that down-sell,” or that upsell if you did it the other way around. I think that it’s a very common feeling and thought to be really stressed about, “I have these leads coming in, and I don’t have something to sell them.” I think people stress about that, so then they go create something, and then… it’s not like you just create something and that’s guaranteed you’re going to sell it.
So that’s what I said to her. I said, “Let’s be real. You’re getting this percentage of leads. It’s not a huge volume, because you haven’t scaled yet. Yes, they would probably buy something. Maybe a couple of them would buy something, but it’s not like you’re going to create something that’s just going to sell. You’re going to have to create something, nail the messaging on it, fix the marketing around it, make sure you’re selling it strategically to them. Figure out the price point, test it, get the data. It’s a lot of work! It’s not a matter of just create it and they’re going to buy it. It’s a matter of create it, and then we have to do all the work that we have done for this other offer to get us to where we need to be.” And she was like, “Oh my gosh. Yeah, I needed to hear that.” It was almost like a relief for her to hear that she didn’t have to go create that offer. That’s where I’m going with this.
Don’t stress yourself out about having to create an offer because you have people that you can’t sell on your list… because they’re either too high up or not high enough, they’re the wrong level. That’s okay, and everybody’s going to have that. It’s not bad marketing if you have people coming in who aren’t at the exact level that you’re targeting. You have to be, one, clear who you’re targeting and the level that they should be at. Then you have to make sure that you maximize the offering to those people. And the deciding factor of, “When can I create something else?” honestly, in my opinion, should be, one, the marketing’s fully scaled. We can turn the dial up or down to get leads in the door, to sell this offer… and it’s very consistent, 7+ figures. Like, it’s working, it’s converting. Then two, the delivery is fully running without you as the CEO. Because the problem is, if the delivery is not fully running without you as a CEO, what you’re going to do is, you’re going to take your focus, and you’re going to go put it on building this new course.
Then the delivery of the product that is working, that is selling, that is making you money is going to suffer, and your volume is going to go down, of how much you can bring in. So those should be your two metrics: it’s fully scaled, we can turn the dial up or down if we want, have leads coming in and selling, it’s proven and it’s working… and then two, “the delivery is fully done by my team and not me as the CEO.” Then you can go add something else in, and you can build that out. Just knowing that just because you have the leads in there doesn’t mean it’s going to be an easy thing to just sell, pop up and go. It’s going to be easier than the first time around probably, because you’ve been working to build this warm audience. Like when I launched IGNITE, it was definitely easier, because I had years of people following me who were never quite ready or at the level where they could afford or it made sense for them to work with us as a done-for-you. But I had fully automated the delivery and scaled it.
And then it wasn’t like it was easy, like I just put IGNITE up and it was like sales came flooding in! I mean, we had to do a lot of work. We fully launched it. We did the marketing plan for it, we had do the branding, the name, the messaging… It was a ton of work. What a huge distraction it would have been for me if I was trying to put part of my time into delivering for the agency! So it’s super important that you don’t get caught in that trap of, “Oh my gosh, I have leads coming in that I paid for, and they’re not all 100% going to go for the main core offer I have, and so I have to make something else, because I have to capitalize on that, and I’m losing money if I don’t do it.” You’re not losing money if you don’t do it! It’s going to cost you money at first to get that offer working.
My launch, it cost money and we profited for sure, but I’m putting that profit back into the next launch, almost all of it, because I want to grow up big, and because that’s what you do when you launch something new. It’s not like you’re just sitting on all this money that you are not making if you don’t do this. It’s so much more powerful to fully maximize the offer that’s working and get it to that scalable and automated place before you add something new. The other thing with this is, I’ve talked about debunking the value ladder… I think I had an episode called that [episode 71, actually called “Creating a Strategic Customer Journey”], so if you want to find that, you can Google that… People stress, they think they have to have every level, because of this idea of the value ladder. They think they have to have like a $47, and $97, and a $500, and $1,000, and a $5,000. In theory, it’s great to have all those offers. It might take you 10 years to have all those offers. It’s not an out the gate.
What drives me crazy is people just go fill their value ladder, because they think they have to have it, and then they don’t create the best products that they could possibly create. That’s what drives me crazy, because it’s so much more powerful to put all of your effort, all of your marketing effort, all of your delivery effort, your team’s effort (if you have one) into one deliverable until that is fully scaled and fully automated [away] from you as the CEO, and fully functioning. And that could take like, two years, like me. It took me, well four years since I started, but two years of growing my team and automating it before I even focused on another offering. And I didn’t lose a bunch of money doing that. I made a bunch of money doing that, because I was highly focused and intentional with my time and my goals and my resources in my company, and was able to scale it.
Now my second offering… first of all it costs. It’s an investment of time and money to get it up and going, it’s not just like put this out here and you make millions. It will never, ever, ever be like that, because as we know, that’s not how marketing works. But now this next offer is helping my bigger offer. It feeds people in, and that’s why I created it. The key with any offer you create, if you’re creating multiples, [is] that they solve the same problem but on different levels. So it’s not like you’ve got one offer that solves ‘this’ problem and one offer that solves ‘this other’ problem. My offers all are going to solve people’s marketing problems and Facebook ad problems, it’s just going to be at different levels. So I’m still going to be attracting the same person, but at different levels. You don’t have to rush to have something to offer everybody who’s joining your list, just keep nurturing those people.
So on this call she was like, “Well what should I do? If I don’t have something to sell to them, are they going to sit there for months? What should I do?” Well you keep nurturing them. You talk about what you do have to offer so they know the problem that you solve and what you do for people and supporting them, and then you nurture them. You get them listening to your podcast and building that brand, so that when you do decide if it’s in six, or 12, or 18 months to launch something new, you have these loyal followers, and it will pay off – but i’s the long game, because marketing is always the long game. Business is always the long game. I want you guys to think about this, I want you to think about if you’re getting caught in that trap. I know my IGNITE students listen to this podcast, because they had just commented…
“We heard the episode about ‘stop changing your strategy,’” so this isn’t considered changing your strategy, which is why I think she didn’t recognize it as that either, though. It’s not changing your strategy, you’re adding to your strategy, but it’s also not always the best idea to do that and feel that pressure. Creating a course, or a new product, or a service, or a new offering is a massive undertaking. It’s a full-time thing for the CEO’s brain capacity. It’s a lot, and you usually need even team members to do it. So just saying, “Oh, I’ll create a course,” is not accurate, because we all know it’s way more work than that, and you have to be realistic with that or you’re going to take away from what’s working and really almost sabotage it or hold it back from having the potential it could have.
All right you guys, if you would like to work with Team Hirsh and you want to explore having your ads done for you, right now we have two offers: We’ve got our premier and we have our performance package. So, people who are in the testing phase, they want to really optimize their funnel and get data and people through it, are in the performance [package]. People who have a proven product, proven funnel, are in the premier [package], and they’re ready to more scale and have all the retargeting ads and all of that covered. You can go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with us. We only take on people we know we can help. We take pride in that. We really have a very great application process that you’ll probably learn something out [of, for] your business, about your business and your marketing, just through our application process, because we make you answer some questions and think about your business and your marketing. So check that out, HelpMyStrategy.com, and I will see you all next time.
Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind-the-scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com. If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.