Interview With Webinar Conversion Expert Joel Erway

Key Takeaways

there we go alright so I think we're in record so hey Joel welcome to the modern marketing podcast super excited to have you here today awesome hey Adam thanks for having me you have my pleasure I mean I've been following you we got to chat a little bit beforehand before we hit the record button and as I'm always concerned about any time that we have a chat before we hit record there's so many good gems being tossed out there so much good information that you're sharing a third hey we got up we got to start recording this right away so we don't miss any of it that's why we're here that's it so why don't you you're known as the webinar guy right now but you're obviously you're so much more than that I mean just as we were talking before you've got a pretty good history of doing sales you moved into webinars I think you're probably the best one to tell your story though so why don't you give me and give the listeners a bit of a recap of sort of what got you to this point and what it is that you do yeah a hundred percent so yes so the last two years have been kind of a whirlwind in terms of the entrepreneurial world before I jump into that I guess I'll give it a little bit of background about where I came from and why I'm doing webinars why I decided to specialize in webinars so back in 2008 2009 I graduated from I've graduated from college as a mechanical engineer decided that I was going to be an engineer don't know why because my brain is not suited to be an engineer so when do I graduate bachelor's in in mechanical engineering and got my first engineering job right out of college quickly transitioned into sales engineering when I found out that I just couldn't sit behind a desk all day and and and draw CAD so I decided to start selling to those same consultants so I grabbed a gig doing sales doing sales calls selling that equipment open up a new territory for this company and we did I went from basically zero to two million dollars per year in sales in about four or five years and the majority of that growth happened within the last year and a half to two years we were kind of beating our heads against the wall trying to figure out why why we weren't really making the progress that we wanted and as I was traveling around going to all my different manufacturers we sold custom heating and cooling equipment for big construction projects hospitals you name it so what do you think made the biggest difference then when you're sort of getting to the last couple years there all of a sudden you see this massive intake in sales yes so as I was traveling to different manufacturers and learning about their equipment learning about their processes so I could sell it better and get educated we would also have them fly into our territory and give these sales canned sales presentations to engineers yeah and they were awful engineers are just you know they're not the greatest at putting together sales presentations surprise surprise right and I knew it all along like I'm like I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like these presentations are terrible yeah it's like they're the worst like I don't know how anybody thinks that we're going to get new customers by listening to these boring technical presentations yeah so as I'm flying around the country I'm going into em in these airports and I met my layover and whatnot I would go to the bookstores and I would start buying these sales presentation books because I saw that as the biggest opportunity gap because we weren't getting anything from these presentations we'd go we'd pay $200 to bring in lunch for these engineers and when they would they would sit in on these presentations and they would just basically pass out because they're you know they go coma comatose and they're not they're not interested in your big lunch and then yeah tune out the sales presentation right so I knew that that was the biggest opportunity gap so and I finally started to do my own presentations because we also had a lot of inefficiencies with flying these manufacturers and from all over the country all over the world to do a five-person presentation like well if I need to if I want to grow this I need to learn how to do presentations on haolam yeah so I started scale that's yeah so I started to test it out and as soon as I started changing the presentations and doing it with my style like sit we immediately saw an immediate impact in sales I mean I can't even express what the change was I mean we I I remember doing one presentation and immediately afterwards I landed a multiple six-figure contract from that presentation because it was just completely backwards yeah so when sales started exploding my Commission's started exploding I'm like oh well I can so two engineers I can run my own business right it was the natural next step as an opposite if I can do that I can do everything exactly I quit literally I quit and I'm like well I'm gonna do this on my own and and so I ventured into online business and I joined a couple masterminds and I wanted to teach engineers how to how to level up their career so I built a whole I recorded a whole career development course engineering career development course and my mentor at the time russell brunson said you need to do this via webinar yeah so I'm like well I okay I get that like I know webinars I know sales presentations like sure well the market that I was targeting ended up being a very broke market because my message was attracting people who were unemployed I'm like well I'm gonna show you how that but my whole message was hey how to land so my history was I'd never if I ever got a job interview I'd landed an an offer from 100% off my job interview so that was a really unique fact about me so Mike well I'm just gonna teach people how to do interviews because I found there's art to that well I'd naturally attracted unemployed brokenness oh you know I had a hard time selling selling to broke people yes yes bad I mean that's a huge I mean that's a huge marketing takeaway right there right like you've got to pick the segment of your audience that is willing and that is able you've got to find the people with the money mm-hmm hundred percent so I struggle with that for about four or five months dumped multiple five figures into that and a lot of good learning experiences you know one of which just you just expressed which is a huge valuable takeaway is you need to make sure that you're not selling to broke people don't sell broke people you're gonna you're gonna go out of business what so anyway so I ran out of money and I called up I called up Russell and I'm like Russell and he did do phone sales for you and I had never done phone sales in my life but I knew that you know he had a high ticket program and he had tons leadsmen let me close some deals for you and he was like hey man so I don't have any opportunities right now but you should connect with this other guy you know I think he's looking for salesperson so we connected with him he was one of the other coaching students as well and he was doing a webinar and it wasn't performing well and so what he wanted to do is he was collecting phone numbers for all of his leads who had registered for the webinar because I want you to call all these people and you know follow up with them and see if you can get them to convert into sales and he goes well first watch the webinar and so you know what you're talking about and then call him I'm like okay so I watched the webinar and I'm like man like this reminded me of back in the engineering days like this is a really shitty or this is a really crappy woman yeah and so I'm like hey hey man can you uh like let me let me take a crack at this webinar like maybe I can like help get you more sales not even making phone calls he's like sure man whatever so I revised it and within two weeks we increased his sales performance by fourteen hundred percent from the weather excellent so it was $1,000 it was $1,000 offer he was doing the webinar and making like one maybe two sales each week basically breaking even and we we I revised that and we did fourteen thousand dollars in sales the first presentation that I revised for him and he just he lost his mind he's a holy crap yeah so thankfully I didn't have to do phone sales because I'm not trained in both sales yeah yeah that's oh that's excellent so with your now you mentioned a couple terms there that I wouldn't mind drilling into one of them we were kind of talking about before is that the high ticket item so that's kind of a big a big one here so for those that aren't familiar high ticket typically just means higher priced opposed to sort of lower priced is that do you think a major factor can this work with kind of lower ticket items as well as the system sort of you just Universal works across all industries and that so with his program I wouldn't consider that high ticket it was it was a thousand dollar offer but and we were selling it directly on the webinar okay gotcha yeah so I mean you could definitely sell higher ticket items from a webinar we've done that before but with him it was a direct to sale you know cold traffic to the webinar selling his thousand dollar course and then he would upsell them on the back end yeah from that yeah okay perfect perfect so that's yeah that interesting do you find that there's a cap because we've seem to have found at least statistically anything above like two grand starts to push into the high-ticket thing that's where we don't seem to have the good as as good a results with webinars it seems to work better with the sales calls that's sort of what you found as well or so when you start to cap the the limitation on a webinar when people say okay we can't sell anything more than two grand that's not the first time that I've heard it it becomes more it's it's less of a webinar sales presentation because you can sell anything at a price on a webinar I mean like within reason yeah I believe that you could sell $25,000 offers from a webinar what matters is what's going on to warm those people up before the webinar your weather R is just your conversion mechanism right so if you give them a warm up sequence of a couple of weeks I've purchased five thousand dollar programs from webinar before however it wasn't cold traffic to a webinar and then I hand over a credit card for five thousand dollars yes I got on this I got in this guy's list he sent emails and you know then we did the webinar he made the pitch and ultimately I bought so at that point the your limitation on price point has to be associated with how warm they are before they get on the webinar yeah excellent so that's actually a perfect lead-in then why don't we talk real quick just about the phases now obviously we don't have time to dive into the full meat and potatoes but what have you found a really good system of like a pre webinar warmup the webinar itself maybe we can work through kind of a rough outline of how to sort of structure that and then the post webinar so essentially sort of a trifecta there the pre the the actual webinar and then the post is there some good takeaways that people can take if they want to start implementing this in their businesses yeah so I'm going to assume that we're talking strictly cold traffic so people who have never heard of you before heard of us before yeah and we want to do a webinar and test the sale that way so I've spent a lot of time testing all different forms of webinars from the big gurus who say you got to segment it you know segment your list a thousand different ways you got to put them through three indoctrination videos and three warm-up videos and all this other stuff and yeah so I've tried that and I've tried just a simple registration to webinar to sale and the biggest thing that made the biggest impact was simplicity works the the strong majority of people do not watch the free warm-up videos segmenting my list and never found that to be any more effective than just giving everyone the same email with a cold traffic webinar funnel and so what we what I found works the best is cold traffic to the registration page I usually have a survey on my thank-you page like immediately you know it's all them hey this is what you're gonna be learning take this quick survey and tell me why you're interested in learning and watching this webinar I will send them one additional video which is more about it's just an about me video because they don't know who I am so that's the only thing that I want them to care about is figure out if you resonate with me because 80% of you are not gonna show up anyway so if you do resonate with me like great I just want to speak directly towards you so if I can connect with them on an about me video that's no more than two to three minutes long that's the only video I send them before the webinar yeah then they hit the webinar and afterwards I send them you know a bunch of follow-up emails but that the typical format is really just testimonials and what are their main objections if it's cost I'll talk about the cost if it's it will the system work for me that will answer those but I usually litter them with testimonials testimonials the most impactful like getting sales after the webinar and so this we're right now we're talking about the after the webinar process mm-hmm yeah excellent okay yeah test the most absolutely phenomenal right I mean people can't it's hard to visualize especially with a lot of these online things that we're buying it's there so intangible I so you're relying on a result that hasn't been experienced yet to any others there's almost nothing more powerful than those testimonials simply because it allows people to envision themselves as being that person or to yeah to sort of identify with them so yeah that's awesome so why don't we talk about then let's move into sort of your main specialty which is this webinar process and essentially the conversion that happens because I this is where you you stand head and shoulders above others is that you've not only got the webinar but you've got a way to take these people in like you mentioned a 1400 percent increase in in conversions there I mean this is huge so let's talk a bit about how do you convert these people on the webinar because yeah we've we've all been in those webinars that are just oh man they're just atrocious and then they kind of have this awkward pause into a horrible sales pitch and then you can just hear the crickets and you're like III know eventually I've put some on like that so so I can identify but why don't you give up maybe even just for me some tips here on how do you increase the conversions how do you better identify with the audience what can you do to improve the sales so the way that I had it broken down is is pretty simple so of the past of the webinars that I've helped build in the past year and a half I've learned a lot of things and we can almost always get sales right out of the gate based on crafting a compelling offer right if you don't have a compelling offer it doesn't matter what's gonna happen people aren't going to buy ya from a cold traffic webinar kind of contrary to that belief is if you warm people up so much you can put on the crappiest webinar in the world and those people who are really really hot are gonna buy no matter what what you sell alright so how do we marry the two together getting an awesome hot hot traffic system and build a compelling offer so basically there's three there's three there's three sections to your webinar you get the introduction your content and in your sales pitch so what has to happen within each of those three sections is pretty simple so I've dubbed it a very awkward acronym but it's I call it the AR e webinar a sales method it's not sexy which is kind of anti what I do because I try and sexify everything yeah but anyway so within the first part of your webinar you have to establish Authority attraction and awareness of a common problem that you're here to solve so as the authority you've already got that built because you're trying you're getting people to come listen to you so you've already established yourself on top of this pillar whether the presenter realizes it or not but in the eyes of your audience you are already at a place of where they want to be here they think that you're in a place of where they want to be so you have to recognize that and tell them that life is awesome here because ultimately what we want to what we're trying to get them is some sort of transformation when we do a sales pitch we're trying to transform their lives in one way or another whether it's helping them make more money online or helping them lose weight or helping them get a better find the partner of their dreams I had one client who's in the relationship niche and she was selling $7,500 relationship consulting deals so ultimately we want to help them with transformation so we have to acknowledge that where they are right now in the beginning and where we are is at the top of this you know on top of this platform and just acknowledge that gap and make that gap as big as possible there's an awesome video with kind of where I learned this concept from it was a TED talk by Nancy Duarte and I can send it a link yeah that's perfect yeah we'll definitely make sure to link that up in the show notes here so yeah so she talks and I kind of modeled a lot of that first part of the webinar with how she explained it because I thought it was I thought it was explained very very well but basically she talks about this gap that you have to establish yourself as the presenter in the authority and acknowledge yourself that and acknowledge yourself as that she gives Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King speeches as two really really good examples and she breaks it down into like super super detailed explanation so it's like it's like a 15 minute talk it's definitely worth the watch excellent yeah we'll definitely make sure to link that one in there so that's the authority the attraction awareness and then we've got R so R which is really our content right so after we do that the introduction is the a aspect Authority awareness and attraction yeah so now we need to get to the content part which is all about you know relationship and rapport building so that's what the R stands for relationship and rapport so I like to build webinars that are broken up I like to build the content part of the water now that's broken up into three sections now each section talks about an existing belief that they have about a topic and how I crushed that belief and get them to think about what I want them to believe so a good example is I helped somebody build a business or build a webinar that sold an info product on how to build a business with Amazon so the first piece of content that I tell them would be the system of what they do to sell products on Amazon second two pieces of content are all about why your why their prospect didn't believe that that system would work for them so it's almost your content does all of the selling for you right if you do this properly your clothes is very very simple because you're already obsessing all of their objections inside of the content and crushing their existing beliefs of why they it won't work for them so the first piece of content is usually talking about the system and then the next two pieces of content are all about addressing their biggest objections and why it won't work for them and so I do that by telling them stories of either testimonials or stories about why I thought that way and how I viewed myself in the same position is where they are you know not that long ago so I need them to see themselves in my shoes and walking through the transformation and walking through the steps as it was when I experienced it when presenter experienced it so that's all about relationship and rapport building perfect and that leads us nicely into E which is e which is the exchange right so so rather than trying to like shove it down their throat so you need to buy now buy now buy now which is how I actually first learned how to do webinars and it was very sleazy very high P and yes you can get a lot of sales doing that but most people are not comfortable doing that so I spent a lot of time studying other people who were doing awesome with webinars and and kind of did a little bit of a meld between both of those styles like the Heike style and not hypostyle right yeah so if you frame your cont this all goes back to your content right if you frame your content you know good enough there they aren't gonna have any objections any major objections to your offer so you basically just say here's what I've got for you and I always pre frame I offer in the beginning of the webinar too so I say hey listen do we stay until the end you know I've got it I've got an offer for you it's special only for people who are on this webinar so you know that's that's my hook to the end if you see me I'll give you a special special deal or whatever yeah so I acknowledge that and say hey listen did I keep my promise I told you I'd show you how to transform your life with building a business on Amazon right so I just want to go through my offer real quick if it's right for you I want you to get it if it's not right for you I don't want you get it plain and simple no snow no skin off my back and so I basically just go through a very very very top-level overview of the transformation of the result they're gonna get when they go through my course or when they go through my product or service or whatever I'm offering I do not go into details that's the number one rule in sales you do not go into details most people get so caught up in how many PDFs are my giving these people how many videos am I giving these people if somebody told me that they wanted to sell me a two thousand dollar product and there's gonna be 45 hours of video I would not buy it right right so when you start going into details you immediately raise objections about why they wouldn't want to buy it so we stay very top-level only talk about the results how it happens you'll find out when you get inside the training or maybe I'll I'll go through some of that with basic QA mm-hmm but you know if you tell them what you want them to achieve by the end of the program as long as they put in the work it'll happen so excellent oh that's awesome no I think that's fantastic that's a really cool point about only talking about the results cuz again it's kind of that preaching the benefits not the features don't bog people down with details not to mention I mean they're not going to have that intrinsic understanding of the product that you do right so if you're gonna start listing off all these things yeah you're just gonna you're gonna confuse them and then yeah you're gonna lose so so here if you remember one thing about the offer it's every time that you introduce a new component or a new feature it's another opportunity for them to raise an internal objection in their mind of why they shouldn't buy it so if I tell you that I'm I've got 25 pre-recorded videos in 75 hours of content and I kid you not people think that when they say 75 hours of video content they think that's a benefit and that is an anti like that's a major objection like there's no way in hell I'm going to go through 75 hours video yeah so every time that you address one that you raise one of those you're going to be triggering an objection into somebody's mind now the challenge with that when webinar is that you don't you can't see their face so you can't conquer that objection if they were to bring it raise it up with you right so you have to make sure that you stay very top level and just say listen when you finish module one you're gonna have this result when a finished module two you're gonna have this result when you finish the whole program by the end of the program you're going to have this machine that is going to give you five dollars out for every dollar you put in or whatever like right that's top level right that's top level benefits and not features how it happens that's what you're gonna learn inside the program but don't get bogged down because you're only gonna counter sell your audience right yeah excellent actually that was gonna be a question that I had is how do you walk that fine line between them and I think you hit the nail on the head there is yeah you take that top level overview you show the end results and then how is the program and I've heard that so so that's a fantastic yeah fantastic Jim Joel all right we've covered a ton of material here a lot of really good stuff what's the what's the one thing that I haven't asked you that people should know what's the one sort of key takeaway point here that we haven't covered that woods that's gonna make all the difference yeah so great question and this is where I'm transitioning over the next 12 months with where I want to help this this audience in this crowd so webinars have been the most effective tool for people in for my clients and for my students to really scale their businesses because the core concept of a webinar and and people get bogged down for really one primary reason they get stuck because they think building a webinar takes a lot of time and so we're I'm moving forward in the next in the next 12 months I'm actually launching a membership program I'm coming up in the next week and a half I'm just about to finish up my pre-launch but it's called convert pro and I've built a piece of software called slide sell that helps people craft presentations in 45 minutes or less right so I think webinars are great because what they do cold traffic webinars are great because what they do is they even though you're going to get a natural drop off from your live audience you know on average right now we're seeing about a 20% attendance rate from people who register to people who show up so people think that's a big natural objection for why they shouldn't do a webinar and I want to challenge them to really think about who that 20% is that's showing up right so we're we're pushing people now and we're I'm helping to educate people is yes there's a lot of opportunity with that 80% of the people who aren't showing up to your webinar however what that 20% represents is your hot audience and you haven't done anything with warm up if they're registering for webinar and they're committing time out of their calendar to show up to an appointment that's a hot fire so you now have 20% of those people who are screaming red hot potential buyers and so we use webinars to test our offers to the hot audience right if they buy at the end of the webinar and depending on whatever the conversion rate and the ROI is we now can identify if we have a winning offer or not if they're not buying then we just do that we repeat that process for the next week and we say okay we're gonna run traffic again and we're gonna change our offer and we're gonna rapid-fire test our offers until we have a winning one and it doesn't take long to come up with a winning offer so I guess the one thing to get back to your question the one thing that we hadn't talked about was this opportunity to rapid-fire test your offers because your offer is the ultimate these single most important part of any funnel it's not your traffic it's not your warmup sequence it's not your how pretty your content is it is your offer because if people don't believe you and your offer isn't compelling you'll never monetize your list and so we're using webinars as a way to rapid-fire test our offers week after week after week by grabbing those screaming red-hot weed by by grabbing those screaming red-hot buyers and those hot prospects right out of thin air without doing any sort of warm-up so that make sense it makes perfect sense no and I couldn't agree more that really is key and so often we get caught up in the tactics and the tools and some of the new software that's available and we forget about the core foundational marketing strategies right and that's really what the podcast is all about here sticking with some of those those core marketing strategies like the offer that that quintessential piece of oh yeah making sure that it's gonna it's gonna connect with your audience because yeah otherwise what's what's the point if you've got something that nobody wants or you're giving it to the wrong people or you phrased it terribly yeah it doesn't matter how pretty you make it it's it's still an ugly offer so yeah that's a gem I just wear can people get a hold of you where can they learn more where can they sign up for your list maybe attend see a little bit more about your offers and about your webinars yeah so I have just a very very basic basic website you can go to the webinar agency.com so right now the home page is just an opt-in to grab my four hundred and sixty-six thousand dollar case study which is actually the story that I told in beginning that fourteen hundred percent sales increase is actually that story but I go through six months of numbers because I I stayed on with him to see this through a major major scaling effort so there's it's like ten or fifteen pages and we go through advertising numbers we go through what did I change with the presentation why did I change it what were the results so I highly encourage people to grab that perfect and I just hop on the list you know they can connect with me on Facebook or LinkedIn I don't really have a website built yet so they can't really learn about me unless they connect with me personally so perfect that sounds good we'll make sure to put a links in the show notes to the webinar agency I will throw in your Facebook profile there as well and also LinkedIn so anybody who wants to get a hold of you can reach out that way awesome Joel it's been an absolute pleasure thanks for sharing so much good information here on webinars and on offers and on how to get these conversions with the audience hugely appreciated massive pleasure having you here today yeah thanks Adam I appreciate it awesome in well we'll stay in touch and we'll talk to you soon sounds good okay bye bye now I gotta move the mouse