23 Aug August 26, 2019 – Personal Brands Ramon Ray and Online Pricing Adam Smith
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Ramon Ray – Global Speaker, Founder of Smart Hustle Media and SmartBizTechnology.com, Keynote Speaker, Author of The Celebrity CEO: How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive by Building a Community and a Strong Personal Brand
The best personal brands, in my opinion, are those who have a
very small market. You can be a global speaker in Slovenia, but
only speak to those who care about chicken gizzards.
Ramon Ray is a sought-after event host and keynote speaker, bestselling author, and entrepreneur. He’s given presentations to Congress and the President’s staff, interviewed President Obama in his first live video chat, graduated from the FBI Citizens Academy, and worked at the UN. Ramon created four startups, and has sold two, giving him hands on experience with marketing, sales, personal branding, technology, and more. He has been featured in MSNBC, The New York Times, and FOX Business. He is passionate about sharing his wisdom and experience with other businessmen and young people planning their futures, so that they can achieve their financial goals.
Adam Smith – Digital Marketing and Funnel-Building Expert – Read interview highlights here
There is no other container or mechanism that can hold attention
better than a webinar. There’s no sales page or video sales letter.
No, no, no. People are engaged with webinars. And you do that
through your content.
Adam Smith started his first business at the age of 12, where he worked to outperform his pancake ticket selling peers. Intrigued by marketing and business, he read about the topics at a young age. His pursuit of opportunities initially led to him selling security systems door-to-door. After keeping track of slammed doors, rejections, and his sales, he eventually realized his sales were limited by his methods. In person, he could only reach one customer at a time. He thought he could solve the problem by going online and selling through webinars, but didn’t land his first client until after he reverse engineered a successful sales funnel and applied it to his site. His knack for marketing combined with his skill in building funnels and creating effective calls to action led to him being pursued to scale businesses, a task at which he excels.
Highlights from Adam’s Interview
It took a while for us to figure out who our perfect client was. But what we decided is that the person that we wanted to serve was that person who had some type of digital product, some type of online course and type of program, they’re a coach, they’re a consultant, they’re a trainer, they’re an expert, they’re an advisor of some sort. They’re the type of person who is not excited about the marketing, and all the tech, and putting everything together. They know that webinars are important, but they’re really, really concerned that they don’t have time for another mistake. They just want to do it right, get things off the ground, and get things moving. That’s the person who we serve. That’s primarily who we focused on, people usually selling anything over $1,000. That is the market that we’re serving. Not that products under $1,000 can’t, they’ll work on a webinar, but we’ve chosen to work typically with people who have products over $1,000, because it’s so much more profitable and so much easier. And that’s part of what we want to get into, is about being able to feel comfortable charging more. I’m excited to jump into that today.
$1,000 is the minimum. It really is not about the money, it’s about the results that you’re providing somebody. I think that’s where so many entrepreneurs get lost, is that they really don’t understand the value that they can provide. I feel like most people, 80% of people are undervaluing their pricing; they’re not charging enough for what they’re doing, especially those in the wealth industry. That’s primarily the people who we focus on, business coaches, and consultants. And so many people, they just don’t understand how to be able to charge more. When I was first getting started, I was terrified that my very, very first product I ever sold was $500. And I was like, “There’s no way on God’s green earth that someone’s going to pay me $500.” I just came from working this $12 an hour job. I was like, “There’s no way, I’m terrified.” And what it came down to was really helping people, or helping myself understand that I was actually worth it, that I was capable of charging more, and I had to start low. And that’s totally fine.
I feel like most people have to start there until they can get more comfortable charging more. So we charge $500 for the first couple, and then we started charging $1000. And then we started charging $1500. And then now, for that same product, we charge $3,000 for something that we had to start at $500, because that was something that I felt comfortable with. I needed to start in a place that I felt like I could be like, “Oh, I can actually do this, this is worth it,” and then start to incrementally charge more. I think where people should start, especially on a webinar, it’s just impossible to be profitable at anything less than a $997 product. I mean, your cost to acquire customers can be anywhere between $500 to $700, depending on how good you your pitches are, and how good your content is. And so anything less than that can be very, very difficult to be profitable out the gate.
The way that we usually do it is, we will typically start with running ads. So many people, they throw a couple hundred dollars at a webinar, and they’re like, “I don’t understand why this isn’t working.” Well, you have to first go and do your market research; you have to collect the data yourself. When I first started sending out a brand new product, a brand new offer that’s never been tested before, the way that I usually start is focusing in on collecting my market research. And when I spend my first thousand dollars, I’m not spending that to make money, which sounds super, super counterintuitive. But what I’m doing is, I’m using that to get my market research, to get my data, to get my numbers. I’m going to tell you benchmark, and I’m going to tell you what we’ve done. But it’s going to be different for you, because of market conditions, and so many other different things.
Typically, here’s what we can expect, we’re going to pay somewhere between $1.50 and $3 per click. That depends on different optimizations and different ad creative… Let’s just say $2, you spend $2 per click. So on average, you’ll get about those, you’ll send people to a webinar registration page, they’ll need a page to be able to register for the webinar. It’s also a great place to build your list, because people enjoy webinars. They love learning, they love being trained, and you have their attention. Now the thing I love about webinars, is that there’s no other container or mechanism that can hold attention better than a webinar. There’s no sales page, video sales letters, no, no, people are engaged with webinars. And you do that through your content.
We’re going to talk about that, about how people should structure their content, because this is where people screw it up. Let’s say you spend $2 per click, you’re going to get about 25% or 20%. If you’re just starting, it might be a little bit lower, but it’ll be somewhere between 20% and 25%. Let’s just say, conservatively, 20%. 20% of people will give you an email address, they will sign up for your webinar, which means that you’re spending $10 for an address, like $10 for an email address. And people freak out and they’re like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on.” This is why we need to charge $997. You’re going to get about 25% of those people to show up, and that’s if you’re decent. When we start adding in different things, we’ll add in text messaging, different retargeting ads, we’ve had clients get it up to a 40% show up rate. But that’s not typical. When you’re sitting, it’ll be about 25%. Now, just to get someone to show up, you’re looking at $40. Now, you will only get, if you’re good, about 5%. If it’s anything less than 5%, there’s probably something wrong with your content, your offer, but less than 5% of those people actually buy your stuff. This is conservatively, on the low end. You’re looking at somebody who actually saw your offer, you’re looking at about an $800 acquisition cost. Now that sucks, that totally sucks, because if you’re spending $800 to acquire a customer at a $997 product, you only make $200.
So what we do is we start working our ads, we start tweaking them, and let’s say we get our costs down to $1.50. And we start working on our conversion, on our landing page. And we it up to about 30%. Now it’s only costing us $5 for an email address. And then let’s say we start throwing in some text messages and retargeting ads, we’re getting more people to show up, and we get a 35% show up rate. Now it’s only costing us $14. And from there, let’s say that we have a great pitch, we have an awesome offer, and we close 10%. Now it’s only costing us $150 to acquire a customer, which is kind of insane. But for so many people, it’s kind of playing in that ballpark. That’s why I don’t like the $497 offer. It’s just too hard to be profitable.
For the webinar, we were just on Imagineering, so from there… Let me just do it real fast, the $1.50, and then we had 30% and divided by… we had 30 people in that webinar. It really depends on how much you spend. Our goal, what we want to do, is we want an easy number across the board. We want to convert 1% of all the registrants. So everybody who registers, let’s say we have 100 people register. Our goal is to shoot for 1%. We want to make one sale off of 100 registrants. If it costs us $5 to get someone to register, that’s $500. And we’re selling a $997 product, we have a 50% profit margin on that.
If you wanted to get 300 people on it just so you can sell 3? Or do you want to just have 300? So 300 show up. Okay. We’re there to get 300 people to show up. To get 300 people to show up, you’re looking at five grand in ads, which is like, Wow, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of money. But if you think about it, you get 300 people to show up, and you get 7%, which is pretty average. That’s 21 sales at $987. You just made 21 grand.
Okay, so this is where so many people screw up, because every single person thinks they need to teach. Because people are like, “If I can just get good content out there, and good value, and people like it, then they’re going to buy my stuff.” No, that is totally wrong. The only reason that people buy is because they have a belief shift. They have a belief shift. That’s all marketing is, marketing is simply changing beliefs. So many people messed up as they start to focus on the content. And I used to do this wrong, I used to do this, I used to think that if I provided good content, then people would just come. And what started to change for me, was when I started putting together these presentations and learning, and I went to an event. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a webinar, or if you’re at a live event. It’s all the same. It’s the same presentation.
I was at an event. I was there, and there were four other speakers. They had more credibility, they had more experience, and they were better qualified for what they were talking about than I was. And I wanted to be able to outsell them. And on average, all these speakers sold at about a 10% closing ratio. And they taught amazing content, incredible content. And I was like “Wow, this is a tough crowd, this is really going to be difficult.” So I went through and crafted what I call my belief based selling framework, belief based selling. And I crafted this framework, and I got up, and I went through the presentation. And people are writing notes. People are still learning, but you’re teaching them through story, and that’s the difference. If you teach them through story, and at the end, I pitched the product, which was the same price as everybody else’s. We sold four times as much. We closed 38% of the room. And it wasn’t because I had some great, awesome product, it was literally people’s beliefs are changing. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is what I needed.”
Let’s say that I’m selling a Facebook ad course. The very first thing that I’m going to do is, I’m going to think about what is the current belief about this product, and why people have not acted on this. A lot of people might think Facebook ads are too expensive. That might be a belief that somebody had. And when we talk about beliefs, they’re simply reasons or excuses that hold people back from buying. And so I go through and I think about what are all those objections? What are all those reasons? You know, a couple years back I used to do door to door sales. And I would knock on people’s doors, and he would come to the door and I’d say, “Hey, my name is Adam. I’ve got this awesome security system package.” And I would talk to them about it, if you will. A lot of people told me no; it was terrible. And I would get the same objections over and over again, “Oh, I don’t have time. I’m too busy. My spouse isn’t here” with the same objection. And so what I did is, I started bringing up those objections first.
There’s a movie called Eight Mile that came out a long time ago with the rapper Eminem. And this is where I learned he was actually the guy. In these rap battles, you have to know a lot of bad things about the other person. That’s how you win. But instead Eminem took a different approach; he started bagging on himself. He started saying all these bad things about himself. When it came time for the other person to rap against him, he didn’t have anything to say, and Eminem won.
I did the same thing on the doors, I would bring up the objection first. I would say, “I know you don’t have enough time. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to make this quick.” So when they come back, and they say, oh, well now I can’t say that, because you already brought it up, and now I look like an idiot. Now, in a presentation, in a webinar, we do the same thing. We bring up, what are those objections? Are those reasons that people are not purchasing, or why they won’t purchase your product? And this changes everything. If I were to do this for Facebook ads, I would think, what is the current belief? And then, what is the story that they are telling themselves? What is it, what happened? What caused them to think this?
“Oh, Facebook ads are too expensive.” Here’s the story, “I spent a lot of money on Facebook ads, and it didn’t work. I didn’t make any sales, and Facebook ads are expensive, and they don’t work.” That’s the belief. So I’m going to come in and say, “Okay, what is the new belief? What is the new story that they need to understand? For them to actually take action on it?” And so I’m going to think, I’m going to come to them and say, “Facebook ads, a lot of people think that they’re really expensive.” I’m going to tell them their story. “A lot of people think they’re really expensive. But in reality, when you start adding in different things like retargeting, where you can actually target somebody who’s already shown interest in your ad, the ads become pretty inexpensive, and you can acquire more customers out of profit. It completely changes the game. So now people are like, “Oh my gosh, maybe if I just did that, that would change everything.” What we’re doing is, we’re breaking down those objections, we’re breaking down those beliefs, and changing the belief; this is what we call belief based selling. And it completely changed the game for everything that we do. That’s the framework that we take people through, and our conversion rates, we outperform just about every single other person, because they’re still stuck in this old way of teaching really, really good content, which is good. But it’s not the best thing you could be doing, if they were transitioning out of that into belief based selling.
The reason some webinars are too long is because it’s just not interesting enough. That’s why you believe you have better things to do. My priorities have shifted from giving my attention to this webinar to something else. When we use this belief based selling model, where we start to hook people into the big result that they’re actually going to get from implementing the training in what you’re talking about. And the other thing, the reason from the presenter side is you need time to be able to tell the stories and then break down the different false beliefs. And so we see consistently that people, they typically drop off around an hour in. I don’t know what it is, but people have this mental block in their head. We dropped the price at the offer, before 60 minutes, and we spend the last 30 minutes answering questions, which is really just like closing; we have tons of different closes that we use. Because the longer that people stay on, more likely they are to buy. And so I’m going to stay on there as long as long as I can. We’ve been on webinars as much as two hours before, just answering questions and closing, if people are still on, and they’re still listening. We always drop the price before an hour, 57 minutes, that’s where we want to be. So instead of starting with like, “Oh, hey, Sally, thanks for being on here.” No, no, we spend about like 60 seconds or so making sure all the tech is done, and then we get straight into the hook. And we have this big hook, like, “Hey, this is what you’re going to learn, this is what is going to be presented on this training.” Because that is where most people drop off, about that seven minute mark. If this is not interesting, not engaging, people are going to leave. And so we have a big headline hook, how do we know if the headline hook is going to work? Because in our heads, we’re saying, Wait, what? When we say Wait, what? That’s like if I read a headline, and I say, Wait, what? And it kind of makes me turn like, stop. It’s like, what’s this guy talking about over here? Like, that’s a good hook. That’s a really good hook.
There are tons of different ways to be able to do this. My favorite is how to do whatever they want to do, the big results, the big desire, without whatever big pain that they have. And that’s the way that we usually do our hooks. And we jumped straight into a… think of a movie, things like a Mission Impossible or like a James Bond or one of those movies where they don’t drive the plot; you are in the action, right? When we’re doing our presentations, we should be in the action, starting at, “Hey, here is what’s happening.” And we start at a point of high drama, because this is what hooks people in and what causes people to stay on these webinars. So yes, they may be long, 45 minutes, sure. But if you can do it the right way, people are going to stay on, you’re going to increase your show, and that’s going to make you more money.
You guys can find me at https://www.thex2entrepreneur.com, get a free case study that shows one of our clients, and that actually walks everyone through the process of this belief based selling model. And so there’s a video there that you can watch if you want to learn more about our entire process. We are only just scratching the surface of this thing, which is amazing. You can connect with me there. I also have a podcast called the X2entrepreneur podcast where I go deeper into this belief based selling framework and model. And you guys can find me there.