Steph Crowder (0:00)

Hey there. Are you ready to learn the only process that you need to fill up your group program or really any signature offer anytime you want year round? I've got an upcoming advanced sales training class called fill your group program in five weeks. This is a three part roadmap to consistently sell out your offer year round, anytime. In this training we are going to talk about my signature 5 week buzz blitz process. I'm going to show you the calendar for how to create a five or even six figure launch and also going to learn the three key ingredients for a step by step rinse and repeat sales cycle that brings you consistently full groups. You just have to go to stephcrowder.comworkshop to get all signed up again. It's on June 24th. That's a Tuesday at 12pm Eastern Time and I cannot wait to see you there. Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hey. Hey friends. Welcome to the podcast. Today we are talking about how to start, sell out and scale your group program. Okay. We are going to talk about my pathway for how you can go from step one, which is one on one. Whether you are a coach, a service provider, consultant, something along those lines, one on one. And we're going to walk all the way to the very coveted and popularized concept of one to many. There is a secret step in the middle that most people miss. Okay. It's not something that gets talked about very broadly. You hear a lot of people talking about one on one. You hear a lot of people online talking about one to many and how it's so amazing to make money while you sleep and help so many people. But we're missing a key step in the middle. And that is one of the concepts I'm going to introduce today. Because group programs absolutely help you walk yourself across that bridge from one on one, getting your first ever one on one client, getting booked up with one on One clients to helping more people. Okay. And if you want to hear more about this, I'm going to go into much more detail about it during my upcoming class. It's called fill your group program in five weeks. It's happening on June 24th at 12pm Eastern Time. You can go to stephcrowder.comworkshop to get signed up. Because I have more visuals. I want to be able to show you about exactly how this works. So we're gonna cover each step of the process, starting selling out and scaling. So maybe you have a group program already and maybe you don't. And either way, we're gonna cover every step of the process. So here's the problem. Most coaches, service providers, consultants jump. They try to jump straight to a course, right? They're like, maybe you have tried some one on one service providing or coaching and then you hear the experts tell you to go make a course. So you do that and then you stall out. You maybe get a handful of sales, not that many. It's certainly not enough to cobble together a living. And so you stall out, you quit. You feel like this doesn't work. How do people ever help? Lots and lots of people. We need to bridge the gap. And so I want to introduce that middle step which I call one to few. Okay, so we have one on one to one to few, to one to more or one to many and small group programs. We start with a small group program, we can scale it to a large group program, but you have to start with a small group program. And that really helps you get across this like sort of valley that people fall into this pit where you find yourself asking, how in the world am I going to go from helping a handful of people to impacting tons and tons of people on the level that I dream of? I know that was my fear and my question when I went off on my own, starting my coaching business years ago now probably 2017, 2018. I remember having three one on one clients and feeling like I was ready to help more people. And I dreamt of having hundreds, I dreamt of having hundreds of people in a program with me, but I couldn't figure out how. It just like felt like such a huge jump. Like how do you go from helping three people, five people, like one on one clients, to hundreds of people in something like your digital course didn't really make any sense to me. And the answer was small group programs. So what happened for me is I walked myself through this and this is how I ended up teaching it is I decided to Run my first small group program within eight people. I just opened up eight spots. I sold it for eight weeks. $800 is very easy for me to remember. And I found those clients using the community that I had built with this podcast. And I put put it out there. I told people what I was thinking of creating. I tapped them on the shoulder. These are all now kind of so interesting how everything ties together and everything builds on itself. Because now I have personal invitation templates of exactly what to say in this exact circumstance. But I used these sk to get my first eight people into a group program, and I helped them together. There was no curriculum ahead of time. There was no lessons, there was no handouts, there was no nothing. I just knew that I was going to be able to help them for eight weeks. And I did that. And I actually built a wait list for my next group. So I believe I went into the first group with the second group already halfway sold out. Okay. So then I did it again, the exact same process. Eight people, eight weeks, $800 and ran it again. And I learned so much. And I didn't make that much money, right? I mean, it wasn't nothing, if you do the math on that. But it wasn't like enough to retire and go to the beach. Like, it wasn't even enough to feed my family. Right. But I had this feeling that I was getting somewhere. I was walking across the one to few bridge. All of a sudden I had helped 16 more people and I learned so much. I was like, oh my gosh, everybody gets stuck, stuck at this step. Everybody falls down into this trap. Everybody needs to know this about business and that about business. And now so many of the Steph Crowder courage and clarity concepts that you all love so much, they came from me working with those original 16 people in those groups. They became the beta and the testing ground and the foundation for all of my more advanced ideas. Right? So after I did those first two small group programs, I then decided, okay, I think I'm ready to try to do something longer term. I'm going to go for a six month program. And I wish I could remember what I was charging per. It was like a monthly payment plan. I want to say it was 300. It was not more than 500amonth for six months. And I got something like 16 people into that experience. And now I was starting to make some really serious money. Right? And then, so at that point, I had helped. You know, if you add all of those group programs together, I had helped. I don't know Something like getting close to 50 people. 40 or 50 people. And I took all of that learning and I created my first one to many offer which was a course called Crickets to Customers. And to be honest, that course, like I call it a course, but I really ran it more like a group program. There was so much support. I was teaching every single week in that program. There was curriculum, but I also was doing so much teaching. I got to know a lot of those clients. I helped hundreds of people in that course. Some of you listening even took that course. And then I took, you know, after a lot of people had gone through Crickets to customers, I had people asking me, Steph, like, how do we keep working with you? I didn't have a continuation offer. And that is how my mastermind was born. I again used all my same strategies of the one to few bridge. And I put it out there and I said, hey, I'm thinking of doing a sort of continuation mastermind group for crickets to customers students. And I got my first 11 people into what is now my mastermind. But back then it was like a, a fraction of the price and I didn't know what I was doing. And again, I had guys, I had absolutely no curriculum, I had no lessons. I just told people, we're going to build it together. I'm going to train you live, we're going to be building it as we go. And some of those trainings you can still find in my sold out group programs Mastermind today because they're so good and they still help so many clients. And this is years, years later. Okay, so that is really my story of how I walked myself from one on one to one to few, to one to many. And what you will find is here's how you know that you're starting to be ready to do a group program. If you're working with one on one clients, you will start to feel like you are having the same breakthrough with people like 10 times a week. Right? So when I had, when I came back to business in 2022, I got booked up with one on one clients. It was the easiest way for me to jump back into business. I still love one on one guys. You might be surprised to hear me say that. I know I talk a lot about groups on the podcast. I coach a lot of my clients to do one on one coaching first. Because you learned so much about your group and you're building demand for your group. And that's exactly what I did when I came back from having a job in 2020. 2. And what will happen when you do this right is you will work with, you know, 10 one on one coaching clients, 20, whatever your number is, and you will start to be like, okay, everybody's having the same breakthrough. I'm having the same conversation on like 10 different islands. I'm ready to consolidate this into a session where we can all be together and all experiencing the same breakthrough and magnifying and amplifying that breakthrough because we're doing it together. Okay? You can't skip this step. Mostly some, there's some exceptions, but it's really important. Like again, when I came back to business, I knew I had to go back to one on one because I had to remember and re engage with like, what is the core breakthrough that I help people with? You discovered that with your one on one coaching. Okay, so I'm not saying. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, shoot, but I want to do a group. I, I teach people how to get booked out with one on one inside of sold out group programs. That might be a little surprising because again, I know it's about group programs, but a lot of my clients, or at least some of my clients, are working towards the goal of let me work on one on one coaching. So I again get really intimate with the breakthrough with the one core breakthrough. And then I can go into let me help facilit that breakthrough in a group. So I help. If you're someone who's in a client dry spell or a client drought and you want more clients and you think maybe it's one on one, we help people sell out any offer. Group program is kind of the banner that I put it under. But my strategies all work for one on one offers as well. And I have multiple clients, plenty of clients who've gotten fully booked with one on one coaching using the same strategies. Okay, so let's just kind of walk through now that you kind of have my. I just wanted to share. I've shared the story before, but I always come back to it because the reason I'm so into group programs is it really is my path, it is my origin story. It's how I'm here. I've done it twice over. Once when I built my business the first time, and then when I built it again when I came back. So I know that this stuff works. And so I just want to spend a couple of minutes talking about each stage of your group program journey. Okay, so assuming that you've been working with some one on one Clients, the next place you're going to start or you're going to, you're going to start is starting. Right? So stage one is start starting your group program. What I teach my clients to do, and I walk them through every step is to run a small group. I don't love the word beta, but let's go ahead and use it as a placeholder holder. Okay. It's the reason I don't love the word beta is because sometimes people think that means you don't charge anything or you charge something like very, very minimal you're going to be charging for this. It's okay if it's founding member pricing. I mean, that's how I've always done it. Like I said, when I launched my group program, that became my mastermind, that's today is $8,000 for a year. It was eleven hundred dollars for six months. Right. So founding member pricing is totally fine. But you're going to run a small group first round, we can call it a beta. And you're going to look for anywhere between three to eight people for that group. Okay. You can go up to 10 or 12 if you really want to. But the sweet spot for most of my clients is three to eight. And that first run is all about beginning to build out the foundations of your program. You are going to collect transformation proof. You are going to feature your clients on your platforms. You are going to help them get the most amazing results. So you build your own belief, you build your credibility, you figure out what you're doing and then you're going to do it again. So I like people to do two rotations typically of the sort of start phase of their group program where you don't have to do a big flashy launch. We can do this with personal invitations. We can do it with, you know, like the platforms that you already have. Some of my clients do go ahead and do like a sales webinar for, for the start stage. I teach you exactly how to do a sales webinar, by the way. It's part of my process. But a lot of times people will go ahead and fill their first group without doing like a really big exhaustive launch. It's typically can be overkill. You don't necessarily need to have a big launch. It's much, much better if you just kind of go use your network. And some of the strategies that I teach that are really like low hanging fruit. You have low hanging fruit, people that will come be in your first group. You're going to collect that proof and then you're going to go to stage two. By the way, when you walk into stage one, notice there was no preparing of curriculum. Okay. There was no I need to build out my videos. There was no I have to get my worksheets ready. This terrifies people. I understand that can be really scary. But when you trust the process and you realize there's a huge. I'm going to get into this more in my next episode. But there's a huge danger in making all of that curriculum ahead of time and doing all of that work ahead of time because you're at serious risk of building the wrong stuff that your people don't even need. So I'm going to share more about that in the next episode. But for right now, I just want you to know you do not need to have anything prepared other than your skills and your brain and your background to help your first group. And again, I walk everybody through this inside of my Mastermind program. Okay? Stage two. Stage two is sell out. So you've done start now. We're going to go to sell out. Now that you've done your first three to eight person beta round, you can do one of two things. One, as I already said, you could just rinse and repeat and use your network again. That's what I did. I did two rounds with my network. Right. Or if you're ready to move on to a more sophisticated strategy, you can use a launch process to really do like a big public promotion. My favorite way of doing this is my Buzz blitz process. This is the heart and soul of my Mastermind. It's a five to six week process, depending on how you do it. I give you every email, every template, the calendar, step by step of how to execute this thing. I tell you exactly how to do a sales event. My favorite kind is a webinar. And I walk you through my CONVERTS framework that teaches you these steps. I think Converts is. What is that? Eight steps. It's an acronym. My eight step framework for high converting webinars. Okay. All of that is detailed in my Buzz Blitz process. But what you need to know for how you sell out a group program is you need to be thinking about pfr. We're going to be getting into into PFR in depth for free in my upcoming workshop, which is called fill your group program in five weeks. It's on June 24th. You can go to stephcrowder.comworkshop. but PFR stands for promote, fill, repeat. PFR, promote, fill, repeat. And so you want to be thinking about each step of that Process, what are you doing to fully promote and show up with a lot of visibility and a lot of clarity and a lot of confidence to really draw in like from your highest group program leadership identity to call in the right people. Then you want to be thinking about how do you fill the group? What's happening with, you know, what is your process for closing new prospects? Are you doing sales calls? Do you have applications? What is that process? If you had to detail from cold to enrolled, what are the steps that people are taking to actually join your group? And then you're going to repeat. So you need to be documenting what worked and what didn't. This is what I call a repeatable sales process. If you are starting from scratch every time you go to sell a group, it's no wonder that you feel scared and you feel like, I don't know if I know what I'm doing. Because you're restarting and reinventing the wheel every time you go to fill your group. When I go to fill a new group, all I do is pull up my document. That is my total. I actually give this to my clients. It's my buzz blitz planning document. I just open it up and I start to plug and play. My process that I know works, that brings me a six figure launch whenever I do it. So once we have yours, you install that into your business. You rinse, you repeat, you tweak it, you make it better, you're always improving it. I don't teach like stale, recycled. All of my launches are always going to be different, but the skeleton of it, the heart and soul of it intact and then I can just kind of like play with it and put new angles on it and make it fresh. But I'm never restarting and I'm never reinventing the wheel. So that's how you sell out your groups. And then from there we go to stage three, which is scale scaling is when it really starts to get fun because we really start to stretch you. It doesn't really sound very appealing, does it? It actually really is. This is where you are going to truly begin to embody that CEO, that dream CEO identity, running the business that you always wondered whether it was for you. We will talk about sustainability. You need to be thinking about how do I go from sort of that cohort model of like, you know, we start on this date, we end on that date, we now will start to shift into an evergreen model, meaning you have different people at different points in the process at different times, and everybody's getting what they need and it feels amazing for everybody. And then we also start talking about what does it look like to hire support. So you will continue. I am not somebody who believes in like, okay, great, I built it and now I disappear. Like, I'm gonna sell you on me and then you're going to see me again. I am deeply entrenched in my program, in my mastermind. I am coaching my clients for our calls, which are two times a week. I'm coaching 80 to 90% of those by myself. And then I have my support, my amazing support coach, Haley, who is there to, you know, trained in my methodologies, trained in how we do things to help me, you know, double the brain power to help me give. She has her own perspective and has helped, you know, run huge communities in multiple different businesses. So she brings her own expertise to the table. So you now need to be thinking about how do you bring in more talent to increase the value of your program? Not to replace you, but to increase the value of your program. My support coach is a value add. It's not a replacement for me. I'm not training somebody to try to be me. I'm bringing in someone with a skill set that really complements my program and makes it so that my clients are so excited to be receiving a different perspective. Okay, so that's what we start to do in the scale step. We also start to think about what are the systems in place that will help people receive all of the support that they need? Right. How do we make it run smoothly so that people aren't waiting too long for your feedback and so that you're also not burning yourself out Again, thinking about sustainability, how do you go the distance with your group program and feel like you can accept more clients, you can expand your capacity to be able to have more clients. Now we're talking about having 20, 30, 40 active clients at one time and never, ever sacrificing the level of service that you are proud of and that you promise. That's what we do in the scaling stage. And so this is really the framework that I teach every single day. Inside of sold out group programs, we start sell out and scale, and we learn how to have that repeatable sales process that you can rely on anytime you want and keep your program full with as many clients as you'd like and that you're prepared for over the course of a year at any given time. The group program bridge is what unlocks the whole system. Okay? From one on one to one, to many. If you're getting stuck there, you're like I don't know how I'm ever going to help as many people as I want to help. You are very very likely overlooking that one to few bridge. I want to show you a lot more about this. I want I have visuals for you including that five week promo calendar. My Buzz blitz process. If you want to come see it in action, you want to learn about it, you want to see what it's about and how it works, you gotta come to my upcoming training class. It is an advanced class and it is happening on June 24th. You can go to stephcrowder.comworkshop to get all signed up. It's going to be an amazing class and I cannot wait to see you there. The live experience is definitely going to be the best experience. And of course I will also be inviting you to come into the next round of the sold out group Programs Mastermind. You'll learn all the details about how you and I can have a deep dive conversation about if it could be a fit for you. So you will get all the details that you need to consider applying and we can kind of go from there together. My friends, I'm so excited to talk to you in the next episode of the Group Program series where we are going to talk about why group programs fail. Okay. And how to bulletproof your group program. The most common mistakes that I see and how you can avoid them. So I will see you there and until then I am wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.