We tested 3 Workshop Funnels + Offers (here’s what works)

I recently got to catch up with a few friends and readers of the newsletter and it became clear that the most loved version has been insights from my own business, more so than automations.

I’m here to give the people what they want, so let’s go!

Online Workshops:

I mentioned in the very first newsletter our current funnel strategy was:

Step 1: Virtual Summits for lead gen

Step 2: Pre-recorded webinar to sell a live workshop (sometimes)

Step 3: 1 or 2-day live online workshops

We’ve tested a number variations of this model. We’ve tested a number of pricing strategies as well.

In this article I’ll break down each test, and the pros and cons of each. My hope is that it sparks ideas for you to consider for your own business.

Pro Tip: Avoid these failings…

What didn’t work for us was promoting other people’s offers. 

That was our initial idea; to work with each host and then promote their offers. However, none of them were marketers, so none of them had proven funnels.

We even helped them design better offers and funnels in the beginning, giving away way too much of our expertise for free.

A lesson I learned is control the environment that you’re an expert in. We crush it when we create our own offers and funnels, and once we owned each funnel we 10x’d the results.

Workshop Funnel + Offer #1:

As mentioned, we used every virtual summit launch as a way to generate leads. Each summit would range from breaking even, or generate up to $50k in profit.

Then we would use each workshop after the summit as a profit maximiser.

Our first attempt at creating a workshop was:

Promote a pre-recorded webinar done by our summit host.

The webinar was mostly written in a way that would help to build trust and solve a tiny pain point.

At the end of the webinar they would introduce a 4-week online program which consisted of 1 lesson per week, and 1 Q&A session per week. Plus lifetime access to the recordings. No price was mentioned.

Price point was $1,200 USD.

We sold this via application and Zoom call.

We capped this offer at 20-25 participants because genuine scarcity is a powerful motivator for purchases. It’s important that this scarcity is authentic.

Although we estimated a maximum reach of 30 participants with significant effort, we chose to promote the offer as exclusive to 20 people, highlighting it as a feature in our marketing.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make is they bleed their audience dry on the first launch, and lose all momentum. You’re better off capping the intake, and building more demand for the next.

You may be asking why did we decide to do a webinar first. Great question!

A future newsletter will go into more depth, but there are two key reasons:

It allows the host to have more time with the customer before buying. I’d encourage you to review The 7-11-4 rule by Google that I’ve mentioned previously.

One of the keys to success with email marketing is to email often. Most brands who do it well email their database daily.

However, if you’re promoting “hard” offers to them all of the time via email, they’ll stop engaging with you.

That’s why we have these “activation offers”. They are free pieces of content (webinars, ebooks, guides, templates, masterclasses etc) that are related to the main offer.

Once someone shows interest in that topic by signing up for the free offer, we drop them off the main list, and add them into an email automation that sells our offer much harder.

Each email automation has at least 5 emails, 1-day apart. If they purchase, they are removed from this automation as well.

If they don’t purchase they are added back to the main list once the email automation is complete.

This way, you’re only promoting hard to the people who are interested in that particular topic. This helps keep the larger part of your database happy by not receiving sales emails everyday, and hopefully, they’ll buy from you further down the road.

Ok, here’s my take on this workshop funnel:

Pros:

we filled almost all of them to the 20-25 person mark.

since selling was not the greatest strength of our hosts, we could take control of that hurdle.

selling 1 to 1 over the phone is way easier than selling one to many.

Cons:

not a very scalable option. We knew the price point was at it’s max, which meant hiring and scaling a sales team was not going to be a viable business decision.

4-week programs really dragged on for both the customers and the hosts. Unless they were great at leading the customers in a community (which they weren’t). The drop off rate was quite high.

Mistakes:

Early on we didn’t have any qualification questions around the affordability of the program. Too many people were getting on calls without having the money to afford it. Once we added in some extra questions to the application that was solved.

We gave 50% of the sales to the host. This was a big mistake on our end. We did 90% of the hard work. And once we set a precedent of 50% it was hard to negotiate to less.

Workshop Funnel + Offer #2:

Next we tried a sales webinar with a proper sales pitch. We were fortunate to work with the leading holistic veterinarian who was loved by many and great at what she does.

Her one-to-many sales was ok, definitely better than the others.

To enhance the appeal, we advertised the workshop as an exclusive group, limited to just 50 participants, at a premium price of $490 for a comprehensive 2-day event scheduled over a weekend.

This strategic positioning paid off, as we exceeded our target by selling 60 spots, accounting for potential no-shows during the live session.

This funnel worked basically the same. A pre-recorded webinar that people would sign up for. We had a hard selling email series that was sent to those people.

The big change was the call to action in the webinar featured the price point and a link to the salespage.

Pros:

no sales calls.

2-day workshop was way easier to manage.

The pre-recorded webinar meant we could edit it to be exactly how we wanted it.

Cons:

we realised this was heavily based on the talent of the host and the quality of her existing following. Which meant it wasn’t really scalable for other creators.

limiting it to 50 was also limiting our income.

Mistakes:

again, we were still paying 50% (stupidly) of the revenue to the host while doing all of the work.

Workshop Funnel + Offer #3:

As I’ve mentioned, the biggest hurdle we’ve had in our business was controlling the quality of each speaker.

While they were all great at producing the content for their niche, they were limited in their selling skills. And with our limited time with them, there was only so much we could help them with.

Knowing all of that, we finally settled on a variable funnel and price point that was somewhere in between.

Here’s where we’ve ended:

The ideal option is:

some sort of email opt-in (ebook/guide or webinar)

email series with a hard promotion of the offer

we create a detailed salespage with a short video from the host (3-7 minutes)

Sometimes, we don’t always get all the pieces we want, and we’re ok with that now.

The price point is also much lower than the $490 test. We’re doing anywhere between $99-$249 for each workshop depending on the length, topic and host.

While our email strategy is a little more aggressive, we don’t try and squeeze every little sale, every single time.

We focus on building long-term good-will with our audience. Knowing that some will buy now and some will buy in 2-years once they’re in a position to.

Each funnel then becomes an “asset”. We have a library of free ebooks and webinars that people can download at anytime. When they download it, they also get the email series to purchase the workshop recordings.

It’s my belief that this is the key to growing an educational business.

Whether you’re a coach, consultant, infopreneur or soloprenuer, there are going to be buyers who buy immediately. Or those who buy from you in 2-3 years time.

By creating these types of workshop funnels and offers, you’re giving your audience a chance to engage with you deeper, in an ethical way, that isn’t going to repel them.

All of a sudden, within a year or two, you now have these “activation assets” that run on autopilot, helping you generate more leads, and activate your audience into paying customers.

This is exactly what I’m about to begin helping with…

In March I’ll be launching a productised agency that helps small brands grow with events. From virtual summits, workshops, masterclasses or webinars, or live in-person events.

We’ll help build an automated lead generation machine, creating activation assets that will serve your business for years to come.

I’ll only be taking on 3 clients initially. And only a maximum of 15 in total. These spots will be filled up within 6 months.

For the first 3 clients, you’ll also get 6 months of consulting included for free. Why? The first few months might be a little clunky. It’s part of starting something new. So, of course, I want to alleviate teething-pains quickly.

I’ve designed this in a productised way, which means you’ll have to let go of some control of how things are done. It’s for people who can’t yet afford the $5-15k/m bespoke packages from agencies. (However I’m willing to bet they won’t outperform us anyway). 

Since it’s more productised, it means we can still deliver great results, at a more affordable price.

If you want to know more about what’s included, hit reply to this email and I’ll send you some more info!

Excited for this!
– Mitch

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