Jason Fladlien: He’s perfected the “art of selling on a webinar” and if you just google Jason Fladlien webinars you’ll find an Entrepreneur magazine article about how he has sold over $100M with webinars.
He’s sold almost $10M in a 7 day period with record breaking affiliate promotion.
People pay him $25,000 plus 10% to do webinars for them!
He’s come a long way since being a monk, a $12 dollar an hour house painter, selling his first $4 product online in 2007 to now having all star clients such as Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins, Larry King, Zig Ziglar Corporation and teaching high level influencers in Joe Polish’s Genius Network on how to use webinars effectively to bring in massive results!
I’m honored to have Jason Fladlien as the FIRST ever guest on this podcast and LOVE LOVE his book “One to Many – Secrets to Webinar Success” he’s recently published and available on Amazon!
Check out his FREE webinar training at www.JasonBonus.com
Follow me on Instagram to see when next CHALLENGE is with myself and Jason Fladlien at:
https://www.instagram.com/maria.gudelis/
Love and light to you,
Maria Gudelis
Transcript
Maria: So, basically, Jason, and if you’re listening to this right now, he’s come a long way since being a monk, a 12-dollar-an-hour house painter, selling his first 4-dollar product online in 2007, to now having all-star clients like Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins, Larry King, Zig Ziglar Corporation, and teaching high-level influencers in Joe Polish’s genius network on how to use webinars effectively to boost their sales.
Maria: So, Jason, my long-time friend, welcome. I know, right? That’s a long-
Jason: Hard to believe, yeah. This very platform we’re using, Zoom, I did a training for them in February. They invited me on to teach how their people at Zoom, webinar clients, how to be more effective at webinars. Then they went public, and now they’re worth 16 billion dollars. It’s crazy.
Maria: Oh, my God, so can I call you the billion-dollar man instead of the hundred-million-dollar man?
Jason: I’m an influencer to the billion-dollar brands, but I’m still working my way up there.
Maria: Okay. Well, I love your book, and thank you for sending it to me. One to Many, it’s secrets to webinar success. For the ones listening to this right now, you can go grab this on amazon.com and anywhere else that they can grab this from, or is that the main place to tell people to go?
Jason: We want them all to go to Amazon, yep.
Maria: Got you, got you. The Amazon man.
Maria: All right, so, tell us first, Jason, before we deep-dive into juicy stuff, about how to make massive success with sales. I want somebody who’s listening right now to get to know who you are as well.
Maria: So some funky questions, but first of all, what made you smile today?
Jason: My two dogs. I have two German Shepherds, and they were kind of just being sweet to each other this morning, and that was cute.
Maria: Aww. That’s cute. What are their names?
Jason: Bryce and Kingston.
Maria: Bryce and Kingston. Love it, love it. Now, here’s another question. Describe the last five-star, as rated by you, meal you ate.
Jason: Yeah, I ate a cut in Beverly Hills with a really amazing group of people, like the former CEO of jump.com, a guy who had three bestsellers on the top-10 New York Times at the same time, and there was other really influential, amazing people there. So the meal was world-class, and the people were even more world-class.
Maria: Cool. What do you love most about doing what you do?
Jason: The money.
Maria: Show me the money. Okay.
Jason: You know, it’s a funny question, because every time somebody asks that, it’s like I forget that people … Because they usually, everybody gives other answers. I like the money. I mean, that’s why I got into this. And of course it’s not just the money, it’s what the money can do for you, but I like the fact that I can’t ever foreseeably see me worrying about anything money-related for the rest of my life, and that makes me feel real good.
Maria: Cool, cool. Who would you like to be stuck in an elevator with?
Jason: My wife.
Maria: Aww. That’s sweet.
Maria: All right. Now, let’s get to business. Thanks for that. Let’s talk first, I like to ask every guest this, and you’re the first, by the way, you’re the first inaugural guest on this new podcast, I’m Possible, so thank you for that. Let’s talk system and tools, like for brief minute. What’s your technology stack? What do you use in your personal life, and in Rapid Crush, that you love the most?
Jason: Yeah, it’s really funny, because I’ve always been a low-tech person even though we’ve been innovative on a lot of the technology throughout the years on the internet. I personally, I prefer a pad and a pen over almost any other type of note-taking device that exists.
Jason: Keynote is my favorite thing online to use, because that’s where I write my presentations on. It’s just Keynote or PowerPoint, either one. I’ll take either one. I’m good to go with that. Zoom is our platform of choice these days on webinars, primarily because of the integration and the training that we do for Zoom, and the way that we’re working with Zoom to help them out and grow their business and then helping us, and Zoom is a pretty excellent platform. They definitely have more room to grow on the webinar side, so we’re excited to explore that with them further.
Jason: In terms of building webpages and stuff, the team, we use ClickFunnels, and I don’t know if you can see it in the back, but I was one of the first eight-figure funnel club members.
Maria: Nice.
Jason: [crosstalk 00:05:11]. We like ClickFunnels, but really, ultimately is any page-builder that you can put it out there is good, and it’s good to sell, and I’m all about simplicity. So as I built the team, Slack seems to be the thing that I spend more time in that anything, business-wise, on a day-to-day business, and that’s just checking and interacting with people.
Jason: But for the most part, I have very little technology that I use in my business. I got a Yeti microphone, it’s a couple of hundred bucks. I got a webcam which we’re not even using right now, we’re just using the display monitor. Otherwise, I have a super-high-resolution one that I barely use, and a laptop. I mean, what more could you need?
Maria: Yep. True. Okay, so thanks for that. Now, the whole thing I really want to talk to you about, because you and I go way back, I think 2008, 2009, and we did a lot of webinars together, you helped my company make a lot of money.
Jason: And you helped my company make a lot of money.
Maria: I know, I was like your first affiliate ever. I think that’s so cool.
Jason: For many years, you were our number one affiliate.
Maria: Yeah. Thanks.
Jason: Yeah, that’s significant.
Maria: Cool. Yeah. It was pretty exciting to reconnect with some of the folks at Rapid Crush in the last few days.
Maria: So, let’s talk about that, since we did a ton of challenges and webinars back in the day, 2009, ’10, ’11. Now it’s 2019, so the real question that probably some of the listeners may have on their minds is, do webinars really work, or are they passé, behind the times?
Jason: Yeah, so, webinars are no longer the new cool thing, right? But that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that they’re any less effective.
Jason: Bad webinars are now less likely to be successful than they were in the past. The marketplace has become less tolerant of these really bad, crappy webinars that we had seen, you and I had seen this because we’d been around the block a few times, really. How does that thing even make money? But when everybody’s dying of thirst, even the dirtiest water is looked upon and welcomed. Nowadays, there’s a lot more opportunity and choice that consumers can focus on, and information. Access to information is easier than ever with podcasts, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, so now you really have to be disciplined. A little bit of discipline, though, and you just rule the roost.
Jason: I have not found, for most businesses, with very rare exception, I’ve not found anything more effective for selling online than a webinar. The only things that are more effective are tremendously harder to scale, so like a phone one-on-one? Build a sales force, hire and train the sales force and then generate leads, and have them call into a call center, and manage that monstrosity? That will be more effective than a webinar, but it’s about a thousand times more challenging to set up, and has a lot more room for error and problems.
Jason: A one-to-one in person, or one-to-many on a stage offline are also, those are likely going to be more effective in terms of raw, pure persuasional power than a webinar will, but you got to get on planes and fly all over the world and live out of a suitcase.
Jason: And so usually, they end up making less money, even if they’re technically “more effective,” and so webinars lie in this special zone on the internet where it’s personable, so it’s not like a pre-recorded video or a static webpage, which the internet likes less and less these days, because we’re all built around social media and interconnectivity, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s also not granular in the sense of it’s just one-to-one one at a time. We can have a million people on a webinar these days almost just as easily as you can have five people on a webinar.
Jason: And so there’s something about it. it has still that event feeling, it has that importance to it that places it higher than a regular video, but it has that effectiveness of having some teeth to it, where it can turn people into buyers. Because, like, the most popular post on Instagram is an egg.
Maria: An egg?
Jason: Yes, an egg, and that was done for the memes, for the lolz, as the kids say these days, but the Instagram egg was the most popular post of all time, but it didn’t make anybody any money.
Maria: [inaudible 00:09:30].
Jason: Yeah.
Maria: What’s funny is I still remember, and this is probably more than seven years ago, the one email that always sticks in my mind of what you wrote to your list was about the egg, about how to crack an egg, or something? How you roll it? I still roll my eggs now when I make a boiled egg.
Jason: Well, that’s so funny, because I literally talked about how to … I can’t even remember now, but it was something completely unrelated to what I was talking about, but it was interesting. And that’s something that a lot of people can pay attention to, is if you learn how to communicate in a way that’s interesting, you could literally talk about anything, and then segue it into anything else, and that’s lacking these days. And so I love the webinar because the webinar really allows you to pull that up to the greatest power possible. But yeah, I mean, an egg on Instagram can get a lot of likes or a lot of followers, but it won’t convert people into buyers.
Jason: And a lot of the media you see online these days? We went head-to-head in affiliate competitions with people that have 10 million email lists, 10-million-person email lists, and we’ve ran circles around them. So quantity is a poor substitute for quality, but the webinar has a special ability to have both the quality and then reach the quantity, so that’s why it is really effective. Still to this day the most effective thing.
Jason: I wish there was something easier, honestly. I don’t want to have to work that hard. You know, life is easy when you live it the hard way, but life is hard when you live it the easy way.
Maria: Let’s … Continuing on that vein of webinars, I want to bring something up that I watched, actually, the replay of one of your webinar training, which was really phenomenal, about genius webinars. And you said in it specifically, I’m just going to read because I didn’t want to forget it, so I wrote these notes. You said, “Understand this. The goal of the webinar is to make a behavioral identity shift, transformational change in the audience. It’s not all about education.” Can you expand on that and why that’s the number one goal? Because I think so many people will learn from that. That’s pure gold.
Jason: If all it took was education, anybody with a library card could be a millionaire. Early on, I fostered and really honed in on this belief that true education doesn’t occur, in my definition, unless behavior changes.
Maria: Mm-hmm.
Jason: So we educate not to inform, we educate to transform, and that’s the key distinction because the reality is, is education is actually really easy. You can go to Wikipedia, do a bunch of research and then recite some facts. But if you can give somebody the best information in the world, and they’re still scared out of their mind to act upon that? You haven’t helped that person at all. If you teach somebody 127 different ways to do something, now they have 127 new ways to feel confused and weird about the thing that they’re trying to do. You’ve actually harmed them, arguably, in that instance instead of helped them. So the idea here is the right information at the right time, with the right context, and the right amount of it is going to be effective.
Jason: And so I always look at this, this is the question I ask myself when I write a webinar is: at the end of this webinar, what can a person now do that they couldn’t do before? And that really hits at the heart of transformation. I want to take somebody who had a problem and was afraid of their problem, and by the end of the webinar have their problem afraid of them.
Maria: Have their problem afraid of them. Wait that’s-
Jason: Yeah! Yeah. So you’re not getting, I’ll give you an example. This is one I use very often, and there’s a lot of derivatives to this one. But somebody says to me, “Jason, how can I be successful and make 10 thousand dollars a month?” And I said, “How can you be a failure and still make 10 thousand dollars a month?” That’s what I’m more interested in, knowing the answer to that. Because that changes the relationship with how they feel about the information. If they feel like, “I have to be successful in order to make 10 thousand dollars,” that’s a certain amount of pressure and there’s a certain ego associated and attached to that, right? And when I reframe that to, “How can you fail, and still make 10 thousand,” it opens up a whole new set of possibilities, a whole new perspective, a whole new set of feelings, which gives me leverage. So when I do inform, it has the ability to be transformative.
Jason: When somebody … It’s amazing when people have problems? All the bad limitations they place upon them, which are all artificial, so our job basically is to remove those and to get rid of those. And so oftentimes, people will put these weird things like, 10 thousand dollars is successful, so therefore if I don’t, you know. I’m like, “How can we fail our way to 10 thousand dollars?” seems like a more interesting question to ask-
Maria: I love it.
Jason: … than how do we be successful.
Jason: Now here’s another one with this too. If somebody says, “Jason, I’d like to solve this problem, so what do I have to learn?” I say, “How can you stay exactly the same and still solve the problem?” That’s a great question to think about. How could you not acquire any new skills, learn anything new, or do anything different, yet somehow magically get a better result? And that’s a fascinating question to examine, and that really hits at the heart of education for transformation. Because the example I’ll give when I’m speaking is, if I want to be a better poker player in terms of better meaning, winning more money when I play poker, I have two options: option number one is the option everybody thinks about immediately which is, study the game more; learn probabilities; learn how to read people, et cetera, et cetera. That’s very hard, and it takes a lifetime to master, right?
Maria: Yeah.
Jason: Or there’s option number two, which I’m far more interested in, is finding the tables with the big, dumb, rich, eager to bet, don’t care if they lose and really bad poker players. Because I will make more money simply because I’m sitting at the right tables, not because I’m a better poker player. If I want to win races, I want to race against toddlers with really short legs to become a better sprinter, right?
Maria: Right.
Jason: That’s strategic problem-solving. That’s strategic thinking. So education should be strategic towards outcome and transformation.
Jason: And what’s interesting is, it’s just as easy to give a solution that’s strategic as it is to give education. So the effort isn’t necessarily harder, it’s just that the [inaudible] is better. So you really have to think of, if I want to be different from the other 172 things they’ve heard on this topic in the last seven weeks, I’ve got to educate to change an identity. I’ve got to educate to change behavior, not educate just to increase intellectual capacity.
Jason: And that’s the difference. That’s the difference, because you and I are very familiar with this line of thought, which is, you don’t want to teach anybody anything on a webinar if you want to sell to them. You can teach to them, or you can sell to them, but you can’t do both. That’s a very common sentiment in this industry, and that is so preposterously, erroneously incorrect, wrong. It’s bad. It’s terrible. It’s such a simplistic viewpoint of the world.
Jason: The idea here is we can educate and sell, but how we educate is different. We can’t just educate the same way we do when we write articles. We can’t just educate the same way that we do when we create video content or do audio podcasts, like what I’m doing right now, right? We can’t educate them the same normal standard way that we do in every other way, but we should use the leverage and power of education, but aim it at a specific outcome. And now we can use education to sell, but it requires a little bit of a refinement from the traditional approach of, let me just give you a hundred different ways to do something and then magically you’re going to give me money in return for that. It doesn’t work that way.
Maria: Yeah. No, good point you know. And it’s sort of like, I’ve been dealing in the last probably eight months with a lot of influencers that have webinars in place, but they’re coming to me saying, “You know what? It stopped working,” right?
Jason: Yep.
Maria: That was kind of leading to my next question. What do you suggest for them to do now? Is it finding, maybe, a different tiny hinge that moves a big door, like maybe another strategic output for them? Because, like, how do you explain it, right? They’ve all of a sudden been crushing it with their webinar the last three months and then bam. The last month, no sales or crappy sales in comparison. What would you-
Jason: Yeah. I mean there’s three issues with that usually. Issue number one is the limitation of one. So anytime somebody “crushes something,” quote, unquote, it’s usually they have one traffic source with one webinar with one offer, right?
Maria: Yep.
Jason: That is a recipe for failure sooner or later, probably sooner. And so the reality is, we solve that problem by not being overdependent because easy come, easy go.
Maria: Gotcha.
Jason: So that’s the first thing, is to look at, okay how are we … Changing the traffic source that was, for a webinar that’s successful in one media, and then all of a sudden isn’t? Just getting a different traffic source could probably rescue that thing and then bring it back to its former glory without even changing a single thing on the webinar, right?
Maria: When you say “traffic source,” would that be from Facebook ads to YouTube or to LinkedIn, or do you mean like, maybe just an audience on Facebook?
Jason: It doesn’t really matter. Just any new audience. Here’s the line of thought that you would say … Well clearly some people are buying it for some reason, or have demonstrated that they’ve bought it in the past, right? How can we find more people like them in areas that other people aren’t going and finding those people. So I want to fish in a different pond. If I fish in a pond and everybody’s fishing in the same pond, that bait that worked last week might not work this week and it doesn’t make me a worse fisherman. It just means that the pond dynamics have changed.
Jason: Now if I go and drop that pole and that bait into a new pond that nobody’s fishing in, and it has the same fish? All of a sudden I’ll start catching fish like I used to again. So that’s the first area that I would look at and take a consideration of.
Jason: The second one is sometimes it’s okay to put the horse to bed if it had a great run. I mean, I’ve had webinars that have made millions of dollars that I just one day said, “Okay, you had a good run, I’m going to put you in the Hall of Fame, retire you, and you’re not allowed to come out anymore.”
Maria: I love that. Okay.
Jason: Because it’s easier at that point to create a new offer and a new pitch, than it is to somehow try to hold onto the relic of the past and hope that magically, one day, something will flip back over and that it will be good again.
Jason: But the third reason, too, is the marketplace the same as it was four months ago when you wrote that webinar, or six months ago or nine months ago, and the answer is no. The marketplace is changing consistently and constantly. It would be more shocking to me if the marketplace stayed the same in three months than if it changed, that would be a shock to me.
Jason: And so usually, ultimately alls we have to do is go back in and say, “What do I know now that I didn’t know before? What do I understand about my customers that I didn’t know before? Who am I competing against now that maybe I wasn’t competing against? For what internal and external factors are influencing something? And let’s go back to the drawing board and try it again.”
Jason: The biggest advantage we have online that businesses for most of the whole existence of humanity have is, we have agility and flexibility. So if I were to run a newspaper ad or a magazine ad, I would have to make sure everything was perfect, because I would get one shot and then it’d have to be a long time before I’d cycle back and get a second shot, right? I could be running ads in the morning to a webinar registration page where the headline could be changed 15 times before I went to bed at night until I figured it out and got it right. And so we would prefer to make adjustments and be agile and fluid, as opposed to hoping for this thing that doesn’t actually exist, which is this unicorn of a webinar that magically can stay the same forever even though the marketplace changes all the time, right?
Maria: Yeah. No I love that.
Jason: That’s not a popular answer. A popular answer would be just get it right once and then you never have to do it again. Well, that’s like saying, “Hey, if I shower once really good I’ll never have to shower again, I’ll be clean for the rest of my life.”
Maria: Well yeah-
Jason: It doesn’t work that way.
Maria: Yeah and that’s why my clients get frustrated, how often they’ve got to change up their webinar or the messaging.
Jason: Well they don’t have to change it, they can go broke. That’s okay too.
Maria: Let’s talk about this book for a second, because Zig Ziglar Corporation was your [inaudible] where you changed up a lot of stuff, so maybe that relates to what we’re talking about. So what did you do for them? Was that the case, where it was stale and they needed magic touch and strategy?
Jason: It was a tough webinar, and it’s a really interesting case study because I let emotion get the best of me. Because Zig Ziglar to me is one of the greatest influences I’ve ever had in my life, and I learned a lot of selling from him and I adopted a lot of what he would do one-to-one and to the webinars that we pioneered and is now commonplace to the whole industry, and the whole internet community. But here’s the idea, it’s a really challenging sell to take somebody who hasn’t been alive since 2012: the marketplace believes that new is better, and therefore not new is worse.
Jason: And so it was a challenge. Nobody wants to invest in the personality business and somebody who there’s no way that they can create any new content. The Zig stuff is timeless and it’s probably the most valuable stuff ever, but trying to sell that to a public who has moved on and past that? It’s too hard of a sell.
Jason: I was actually more proud of the webinar that we created for that company than most of the webinars I’ve ever done, even though the conversion rate was just okay. Because creating an okay conversion rate with those dynamics in place, to me, was harder than writing the webinar that made 9.7 million dollars in seven days. It is crazy, but you have to remember that sometimes the best pitch with the best offer with the best price with the best audience still can only go so far.
Jason: But what was great about that is you always work backwards. You always say, where is the market at right now and what do they need to hear in order to help them understand that not having this thing is going to be more costly than having this thing? And that’s what we work for. So for that particular situation they brought me in because they were looking at a way of really … I mean, their goal was a way of having people remember Zig and not have Zig fall to the wayside, right?
Maria: Right.
Jason: Their goal was to extend his legacy and his impact even further. And so they brought me in to help them do that, and unfortunately sometimes we let our emotions get the best of us, which is a lesson in entrepreneurism all the time, is, it would be better for us to sell something else and then ship that product as a bonus for free than to try to sell that product, because people want recent, new, exciting et cetera, et cetera.
Jason: So we have to walk this fine line, and because my children want to eat candy all day long, right? If I give them candy all day long, they’re going to be diabetic and dead by 25, right? I want them to eat vegetables all day long. If I try to make that work, they won’t love me anymore and they’ll probably die of starvation, right? So the balance is figuring out when to give them the sweets and when to give them the vegetables and then you eat everything in between.
Jason: And that’s what you have to do for your customers and clients. You have to know about what you’ll be willing to play in their mind share with, and what you’re going to get them to adopt your mind share of, and that’s the eternal balance; the dance that we play with clients. And that’s why I love it, that’s what makes this game so exciting to me, because the better we get at that, the more we can help people, and the more we can help people, the more profit we can make.
Maria: No, absolutely. So you know what? I’m going to segue, because you just brought that up. I’m going to segue to my last question but I’m going to come back to the affiliate launch you did.
Maria: I strongly believe, we’ve heard undeniable proof just even from this and what we see on the marketplace, webinars work. So I was super intrigued with your product, Genius Webinars, that one of your bonuses is called … I’m just going to read it out, so I don’t forget exactly word-for-word what it is on your sales page. “Webinar Integrator: don’t have an audience or product of your own? In this bonus you can discover how to leverage someone else’s existing audience, products, or other assets by enhancing what they already have using webinars. I will show you how to craft integration deals that can build your reputation, give you an audience, and potentially make a lot of money.”
Maria: So what do you mean by an integration-
Jason: One of my favorite strategies of all time.
Jason: So one time, this woman that I knew who I worked with, she would run thee little launches on this forum called The Warrior Forum, and she was able to be able to generate whole bunches of buyers in short periods of times. And then on the back of that, we would come in, and we would do webinars to sell and help close that audience because it was fundamentally believed back then that a seven-dollar buyer wouldn’t buy a $300 item. That they were only low-ticket buyers and instead of trying to educate people to the difference, we just did it and profited from that.
Jason: And that’s an example of an integration deal. So that woman of course was you, and we integrated our packages into your offer on the front end, so it was hand in glove, right? It was perfectly situated. You drove the audience, and we took care of the conversion.
Jason: Now that’s a more complex approach than even what I teach in the integration bonus, which is essentially this: most people, here is where they land. They believe one of three things. Thing number one, that webinars don’t work anymore. Great. Good. Good for you, because if you understand that webinars actually work, and they’re so incredible, that’s more opportunity for you to use webinars at the expense of other people. They’re leaving the ocean wide open, it’s blue. It’s not red anymore. That’s great.
Jason: Or option number two is they tried webinars once back in 1977, and it didn’t work then. So therefore, webinars for their audience never worked, will never work, and is no longer worth doing, right? Just like Facebook ads don’t work, yet Facebook is a multi-billion dollar corporation, right? Somebody’s making them work. So that’s the second issue.
Jason: Or the third issue is they’re so scared to even think about the idea of doing a webinar. It scares them so much that they would rather not do it and remain losing out on millions of dollars than to do it and maybe claim some of that unclaimed money. The integration is essentially where you come in and say, “Listen, I’m going to do all the work, and we’re going to split the profits, 50-50. Is that something you’re interested in?” They say, “Well what does ‘all the work’ mean?” You say, “I’m going to sell your product, to your audience, and I’m going to do it using a media, or a vehicle, that you’re currently not using or underutilizing, and I’m willing to do this. You’re going to look like a star when it’s all said and done, and your audience is going to be treated well and how do I know that? Because we’re going to see them your very product. And we’ll just split the profits, even though I’m going to do 99.9% of the work. How does that land with you?”
Jason: And what’s great about that is somebody’s going to say yes sooner or later. There’s a lot of idiots out there, by the way, who will say no to that? But it’s like-
Maria: I love that. Catch the wave.
Jason: I mean, there’s seven billion people on this earth, Maria. So that means 3.5 billion of them are of below-average intelligence, right? There’s going to be a lot of stupid people that you’re going to put this deal in front of that won’t realize. They’ll step over a million dollars just to pick up a penny on the ground, right? You can’t fix that, nor should you try.
Jason: But yeah, it’s five or ten. Somebody’s going to say, “Okay. What have I got to lose? I’ll try you out. What do you need?” And you say, “I’m going to do a webinar. It’s going to look like this. Oh, by the way, I’ve already written the webinar.” That’s the best way of doing this, show up with a webinar in hand, and when they say yes, you say, “Oh, surprise! I didn’t go write it, I already wrote it.”
Jason: And now here’s my initial knee-jerk reaction that people give me: I don’t want to write a webinar if somebody’s not going to use it. Here’s a little hint for you: if you fish in the same pond where you’re going to contact five or 10 or 15 or 20 different influencers that all have similar products, 80% of your webinar is going to be exactly the same. But you’ve got to slightly customize it based on the individual personality and offer it specifically to that individual. So your work’s going to be your work no matter who you do the deal with, just be a little strategic with it.
Jason: But the idea here is, and this is what I used to say to clients all the time. I call it the Statue of Liberty close, right?
Maria: Yep.
Jason: I would say-
Maria: I actually have it written down, Jason, because I do write down closes.
Jason: Oh, nice. Yeah, give me your cold, give me your sick, give me your poor, give me your huddled masses-
Maria: Masses. Yeah.
Jason: … and I will sell them.
Maria: Give them to me!
Jason: Because like, give me the audiences you wrote off, let me try to sell them. Because if we can email them the cost is almost zero dollars.
Maria: Yeah, you already paid. They’re already paid for.
Jason: If we can use a value first. Yeah, we’re using a value first vehicle here. We’re not using, like a time-share pitch where I’m going to beat you up and then you either buy just to get out of the room, or you throw me out of the room, right? We’re not doing that. It’s value-based, which is why I like the webinar so much. We lead with value, so it’s going to make the brand look good no matter what, and then we make an offer selling them the very thing that they’ve seen before.
Jason: Now, here’s what a lot of people don’t understand psychologically, is that the more times you ask somebody to buy something, the more likely they are to buy it. So if somebody said no 25 times, that doesn’t mean that they won’t say yes to the 26th time. In fact, give me somebody who said no 25 times but still shows up to the 26th webinar, and I’d rather sell to that person than somebody who’s never seen the offer.
Maria: Right.
Jason: In my mind it says I just need to know the right combinations of things to say to get them to buy, because they keep coming back. I mean, if they quit then yeah, I can’t sell to them. But they keep showing up again. And there’s hundreds of them, thousands of them, so I’m always in the “yes, maybe” kind of mood. You’re either going to say yes to me today, or you’re going to say maybe to me today, but you never say no to me. And so is it their time to say yes?
Jason: Now, some of this is outside of our influence. So here’s what I mean by this: let’s say I was teaching how to do Evergreen Webinars, right? Just how to do automated Evergreen webinars so you can set it and forget it, and I’ve been trying to sell that to you now for 18 months. And every single time you’re like, “No, I’m not interested.” And then one day you wake up, because your best friend tells you, “Hey listen, I’ll pay you 50 thousand dollars if you can set up an Evergreen webinar for me,” right? And then five seconds after that, you check your phone and an email lands in your inbox from me, Evergreen Webinar Training. And you say, “The gods themselves must’ve divined this to make this occur. This is fate. I have to buy this.” And this is you, who said no 25 times previous to me before seeing this offer the 26th time. Nothing changed except for your circumstances, we call that a trigger event, but that changes everything.
Jason: So most people simply write off their audiences, they take it too personal. They say, “Well they said no so they don’t like me, they don’t like my offer, they don’t like anything I’m doing, they’ll never buy from me.” But guess what? It costs pennies, if that, to contact these people and try again. We bring them onto a webinar, and so we don’t try to convince these influencers or these people who control these audiences that they’re screwing up. We just come with a vehicle to help them unlock the profit potential, and then we should get rewarded for that.
Jason: And then what’s really great about that is it doesn’t take too many of those in order for you to stack up your own brand, because you do that for enough times and you’re the one presenting the webinar, so you will get a lot of that spillover loyalty and value. And then you can choose to start using that as a launch pad for your own successes.
Jason: But yeah, I mean everybody does this, and this is the limitation that keeps people poor, is that they say, “Gee, I would do a webinar if only I had an audience.” But how are you going to get an audience without a webinar? It’s like, you can’t sell out an arena and then go book the talent to perform at that arena, right? You have to actually have the act before you can invite people to the arena, so the webinar is the act.
Jason: So it’s like, yes, today you might have a webinar and traffic problem. But here’s what’s great about this: the webinar, and now you only have a traffic problem.
Maria: It’s a great analogy, the whole thing about have the act first before the arena’s full, because you’re right. Everyone thinks, I can’t do a webinar because I don’t have money even to go spend on Facebook ads to go-
Jason: Don’t need money.
Maria: … build a thousand-person list. Yeah.
Jason: Yeah, money’s easy to acquire. A done webinar, that’s a little harder to acquire. That’s what makes it more valuable. And so the idea here is we’re just really creative. If we write the webinar, how can we use the webinar?
Jason: The webinar’s a great asset. The webinar is an asset, and how can we leverage that asset? Can we do it for free? Well yeah, we can. We can approach people with audiences. How can we get them to say yes? Well, if we’re unproven and they’ve never heard of us, and we’re trying to get them to promote our product, probably not going to say yes. But if we show them their product and we make them look better than even they can make themselves look better, and we’re going to their audience? They are stupid if they say so. And again, we can’t fix stupid, but there’s enough people out there that eventually somebody’s not going to be stupid, and they’re going to say yes to that.
Jason: And that’s a springboard, because small victories can lead to larger victories. But we can’t do that without a webinar first.
Maria: Yeah, and I love it too because even if that influence is already doing webinars? It might just be that those people that haven’t said yes yet just need to hear a different voice, right?
Jason: Sure, absolutely.
Maria: If someone’s a female influencer, maybe they need to hear a male voice and vice versa, right?
Jason: There’s so many factors that can make sales happen. The most important one is this: asking for the order. That’s the most important thing. Most people don’t ask often enough for the order, and they don’t ask directly enough, and they don’t … You know, “new information, new decision” is something that I’m a very big proponent of that I came up with as a quote that I have lived by: “new information, new decision.” No just means no as in, “I don’t know enough to say yes.”
Maria: Yeah, exactly.
Jason: So yes, we can give them new options. But eventually somebody says, “Listen, if this person hasn’t given up on me after 25 times? I’m going to say yes just because of the person, not because of the offer or the webinar.” It’s a demonstration that I’m not going to quit on you, are you going to quit on me? People don’t want to work with people that will quit on them, but they love working with people who refuse to allow them to continue to make bad decisions. And for most people that you can reach, not buying your product is probably a worse decision than buying your product.
Maria: Yeah, agreed, agreed.
Maria: So this has been pure gold, and there’s one final question that I wanted to come back to was, the 9.7 million-dollar launch in what was it, seven days?
Jason: Yep.
Maria: I vaguely remember the ending of it, and if I recall you had a real ballsy guarantee that you’ll buy their business back, if they actually implement every step of the program, for 10 thousand dollars. Is that right?
Jason: Something like that, yeah. I mean-
Maria: That scare you?
Jason: We call it the million dollar guarantee, and it very well might be the greatest guarantee ever constructed, if I could so humbly say so myself, right?
Maria: I remembered it, so yeah, it’s fricking awesome.
Jason: Oh yeah. It was insane.
Jason: So the idea here becomes this, and this is always fundamentally where these strategies come up with, because people think that this happens magically or that somehow or another I’m very creative. But the question is always, and if the person hasn’t said yes yet, why?
Jason: When we sell something because it’s great. There’s so many things you could sell out there. You can just pick something that’s amazing, even if it’s not your product. This wasn’t our product; we sold 9.7 million of somebody else’s product. We got 50% of the profits, so we did pretty well on that, right? But we say, this product’s the best of class. There’s not a single thing that we could find better than this product right now that we could put in front of this audience; so that’s easy. There’s always the best product out there in any category, you can find it very easily then you can sell it, because everybody will pay somebody at a profit to sell it for them. That’s the most risk-free, most beautiful thing in all of business, right?
Jason: And so we said, why isn’t somebody saying yes? We think you’re insane if you don’t say yes to this because it’s so good if you’re the right person, and we know you’re the right person because we’re targeting you, right? So our question was this: is it because they’re afraid, not that they’ll not make money on the course, but that they’ll lose money because they’ll buy inventory, because this was an Amazon offer, right? Shows you how to start your own Amazon business. They’ll lose money on inventory, they’ll lose money because they’ll hire people to design their private label, they’ll lose money because, and we started filling in the blanks. In what ways could they lose money independent of the course?
Jason: So that’s the scary part.
Maria: Gotcha. Okay.
Jason: What’s brilliant is this. So there’s two factors to this guarantee that made it work, that a lot of people aren’t aware of. Factor number one is what makes it brilliant, is this: that we’re reversing the risk here not on the guarantee that they’re making, which is, we’ll give you your money back. We are taking our own additional guarantee as an affiliate on top of that, which is saying, “If you do all these things and you don’t make 10 thousand dollars, we’ll buy your business from you at 10 thousand dollars.”
Jason: So, 60 days from now I guarantee one of three things will happen. Number one, you’ll do really well, and you’ll be very happy. Thing number two is, you’ll do horrible, we’ll buy your business, and you’ll be 10 thousand dollars richer, right? Or thing number three, you won’t do any damn thing and you’ll be in exactly the position that you are today, right?
Maria: And that’s a powerful close.
Jason: But here’s the challenge with constructing these guarantees, is they have to be believable. And that’s the trick, because otherwise it can be gimmicky. If people don’t think that they can qualify, then they think it’s just manipulative, so you have to make it qualifiable. You have to also protect your own downside, but you have to make it qualifiable. Take a little bit of risk, and there’s a lot of reward. So we slightly increase the downside for us? Which dramatically will increase the upside for us. So that’s the kind of thinking that you put into it.
Jason: And then we go out there and this is how I made it believable. We went down to our bank, and we took a million dollars out. Put it in a brand new account, and then we had our banker draft up a letter that says, “We verify that there’s a million dollars in this account ending in these four digits,” and that if you would like to know the exact balance as of today or any day, call me and I’ve been authorized to disclose this amount to anybody who calls. And so we sold the guarantee.
Maria: Who does that? I haven’t heard of anyone in this industry doing something like that. That’s amazing.
Jason: You know, there’s two reasons we did that, and this is really important to understand. Because a lot of people think that this business is all like, unicorns and rainbows and whistles and Goldilocks kind of beautiful thing. There’s a lot of money at stake here, and there’s a lot of bad actors, and there’s a lot of people that play dirty. There’s a lot of people that fight and try to position you and reposition you, and put people down because there’s two ways you can be the best. You can rise to the occasion, or you can lower everybody else, right?
Maria: Yeah.
Jason: And so to pretend otherwise is naïve, if you think people don’t play that way, especially when there’s millions and millions of dollars on stake. So we have thousands of affiliates competing over the same customers we’re trying to serve.
Jason: And one thing I knew about this guarantee was, not only did I have to prove that this guarantee was legit and believable, you have to sell it. You have to make it exciting. You just can’t think that people are going to buy logically, there’s got to be emotion involved. And there’s the other thing: I knew no other affiliate could copy it, because if it works really well? People will want to copy it, and if it’s easy to copy, people will copy it and that’s inevitable. And then guess what happens when somebody copies something? You’re not bringing unique value to the audience above and beyond them, so therefore there’s no compelling reason to go with you as opposed to somebody else, right?
Jason: And customers are selfish, and that’s why I love them. They’re going to go where they get the best deal.
Maria: That’s right.
Jason: And where they feel like they’re going to be taken care of the best. And so I knew the coup de grace kill shot, the repositioning because a lot of business is about positioning yourself, vis-a-vis how the customer sees you, but also vis-a-vis how you’re compared to other options in the marketplace. And then, there’s nobody else who can put a million dollars in a bank account and make that claim. And if they could it would be so obvious that they stole it from us, and nobody wants to take a replication of the Mona Lisa. They want the real thing. There’s a lot of strategy involved in that.
Jason: So you know, this works on any campaign and any promotion at the strategic level, but what I like about the webinars is the webinar is like a microcosm of all the strategy. It’s like a full market campaign cycle wrapped into one single vehicle, one single presentation. Because at the end of your webinar presentation, your audience should feel phenomenal. They should say, “Wow, I’ve heard everybody before you talk on this subject, but nobody’s made me feel this good about it as you have on my future related to this subject.”
Jason: And now you stand out twice in their mind. You stand out related to them specifically, like you’ve helped them individually; but you also stand out compared to everybody else. That relative positioning is everything. It’s you versus whoever else they could go with, and if you consider how they’re looking at everybody else and how you look in comparison to everybody else, that’s the real value in the customer’s mind, is not allowing you to be compared to everybody else.
Jason: So nobody who’s using a webinar, and you’re the only one using a webinar, you win. Every single damn time. And then what’s to speak of everybody’s doing these do-or-die type of webinars and you’re ones that are doing value-first, educate-to-transform type of webinars? You flat out win. If you’re doing the webinars where you say, “Listen, the guarantee is not good enough. I’m going to create a new guarantee, because what I care about is your outcome.” You win, because no one else is doing that.
Jason: When we take a pitch position and we say go look at everybody else’s bonuses. My goal is to give you the best deal, whether it’s with me or with somebody else, I don’t care. I just want the best deal for you. So I think I’ve got it but go ahead and look and compare to other people. But when you’re looking and comparing, make sure to notice that they do these things, or not. And if they don’t, then you have to question why. And nobody else is willing to take that position, because their position is this: I hope they don’t find out about Rapid Crush.
Maria: That’s funny.
Jason: I mean, our goal is to out-value every other option that’s available to them, and the more we do that, the more we should sell to people. Because our goal is to sell a dollar for a dime. Who gets the better deal there?
Maria: Yeah. Absolutely.
Maria: So Jason, listen. This is chock full of value, this what you’ve shared right now on the I’m Possible radio show. Speaking of just giving a dollar of value for a dime, I think everyone should head over to see the replay of your webinar about Genius Webinars. You have a product out there that I think is affordable for anybody out there. I did make a special domain that if people buy through that link, yeah, full disclosure, it is my affiliate link. But also that I will give a bonus of a strategy call with me, which I now charge $2000-
Jason: Oh, nice.
Maria: … for someone to have. So anyone who buys from that link, it’s actually called, just simple: jasonbonus.com.
Jason: That’s a great domain.
Maria: Yeah, just go to jasonbonus.com, and you can watch … If anyone got value out of this right now, which I know everyone did, then imagine when you spend another hour, 75 minutes with you on how you deconstructed the whole framework of a successful webinar. That’s so powerful. People can go make money with that right away, even just watching that, which is-
Jason: And they have. Yeah, we’ve made a lot of people a lot of money just watching the sales pitch for the course, which is how a webinar should be done, right? The webinar should be done very simply to, regardless of whether you buy at the end or not, you’re a better person than you were before you watched the webinar. But usually, most people will then self-select. They’ll say, “Huh, if I did it on my own, it will cost me a lot more than to invest and have part of it done for me or simplified or made more effective.” And that’s when something is at its purest form, where you make it so valuable to somebody to buy from you? That it costs them more to not buy from you.
Jason: And that’s on you, that’s not on me. You go there, you look for free we lead with value first, and then you can make that determination.
Maria: Yeah. Love it. That’s a wonderful way to end this podcast. Any other last words of wisdom, or how can they find out more about you? Just go to your Rapid Crush website, or Jason-
Jason: Buy that product. I mean, you want to see me in action? See me in action. Everything else is just foreplay.
Maria: I love that. Okay.
Maria: On that note, thank you so much Jason for joining us on the I’m Possible radio show.
Jason: You’re welcome.
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