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Hey there CNC fan. Quick heads up before we dive in, if these episodes are lighting a fire under you and you're ready to actually launch like a pro, not just talk about it, not just learn about it, I need you to get yourself on the wait list for sold out group programs. That's my mastermind. That is very high touch for experienced entrepreneurs who want repeatable sellout results without the burnout. And doors are going to open one more time in just a little while. If you want first dibs, you got to go to stephcrowder.com mastermind to raise your hand. Let's get into today's episode foreign 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. Hello. Hello CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. I am so excited that you're here with me today. I am excited to be here today. This topic is a really good one. I'm super pumped to take you behind the scenes into a project that I have been working on for my clients and sharing with my clients. It has been incredibly impactful for them for just a handful of days. We have a lot more time to go and this is an idea that I think a lot of you could take and run with as well and use it in your businesses for your clients to help them get more results faster and also to help you fill in any gaps that you might have in your own offers, in your own group programs. I am talking about doing a challenge within your program. Okay, so right now my clients are going through this 30 day sales challenge. It doesn't really have a fancy name, it's just this 30 day sort of fast track. And the idea behind this challenge? Well, first of all, it's not the first challenge that I've done for my clients inside of same day sales. I have run these 15 day challenges that I've called the Gotta Sale challenge and they've been really, really popular. The Idea, of course, has been how can I help my clients inside this program who already have access to all my curriculum and all my coaching and all the goodness that we do inside that program to help people learn how to get their first or next sale very quickly. But when we layer in an added challenge, it is often like this, kick in the pants that people in both of my programs, at least at this time, you have 12 months when you work with me. So they're year long programs. There's plenty of time to get the results that you came for. There's plenty of time for life to happen. I really designed it that way on purpose and at the very same time, a year is a long time. A year is enough time to, you know, come in with initial excitement. But then for whatever reason, maybe you get distracted or you just get unfocused. It's very normal. In fact, it's like the most normal thing. And what I have found is offering some kind of extra challenge, extra push, extra, just like life raft that I can throw people to get them back into the work that we do in my programs. It is always very welcome. And it also, like I already mentioned, it helps people speed up their results. And so you might want to consider, if you have a group program, you have a mastermind, even a course, I would say if you have a course with like lifetime access or some kind of extended access, it can be such a fun exercise and useful exercise to have a challenge. You know, back when I was doing my signature program, my first, you know, multi six figure course that I ever did is called Crickets to Customers. Some of you were there. We would do it started out as I would, I taught it live, right. I taught it live over six weeks and, and then we ended up extending that to these sort of like eight week guided tracks. I always called them guided tracks. Even after the curriculum was created, I would sort of go through it week by week with clients and we would spend a week together on week one and then a week together on week two. You get the idea. And even though people had, especially towards the tail end of that program's life, people had constant access to the curriculum. It just, I can't even describe it. And I'm sure you can relate. There is something about the live element and knowing that we're all doing it together and that the coach is going to be talking about the material in a really sort of like chronological order kind of way. There's something very motivating about that. And so, yeah, I think this can really be a fun and useful engagement strategy in your programs. That's one reason to do something like this. And I'm gonna break it all down. That's what we're doing in this episode. Exactly what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, how it's working, all, all of those things. So it can be a great engagement strategy. I also think it's a great way to get people getting results. If you are really wanting to, you know, see the sort of like fruits of not only your clients labor but also your own. It's like we take all this time to build all this curriculum and put all these lessons together. If you're having trouble, you know, having like getting your clients to actually follow through on the actions in your program, it may be that they need a bit more, I don't know if hand holding is the right way to say it, but they may need more of an incentive to do the things that you're asking them to do. The other thing I love about doing a challenge like this, and I'm again, I'm going to break down the anatomy is I'm really breaking the core concepts that I teach into very, very digestible chunks. So every day there is, and this is really the core of what I'm doing every single day. This time I'm doing 30 days and I'm doing it across both my programs. So my same day sales clients are taking advantage of this. And then also I'm offering it as a fast track option in my mastermind and we'll talk about what the point of it is in just a second. But what I'm really offering every day for 30 days is this one sort of short, very actionable, tangible, one golden nugget concept in a video. I'm just using loom. It's really not fancy. Eventually what we'll do is we'll take these loom videos and we'll put them into my curriculum so that people can take advantage of this into the future. We'll come back to that as well. That's part of what motivated me to create this challenge in the first place. But that's how I'm delivering it. And then there's one key action every day. So I'm asking my clients to engage with me and tell me, you know, their takeaway, tell me something specific. And it's meant to really move them toward the key result of the challenge. And so what I'm doing in this particular 30 days that I've outlined is we have come up with the result that I'm Trying to get people to. And that's the first thing that you want to do if you're going to put something together like this, if you hear me talk about this and you're like, yeah, that would be really fun, I want to try that. But the first thing you want to do is ask yourself what, what are you aiming at? Like, what are you trying to help people do or get or become or change over the course of, like I said, I've done 15 days. This time I'm doing 30 days. But what's the point? What's the purpose? I have told my clients that the point of this particular challenge, this fast Track, is signing one to three new clients in the next 30 days. So for my clients, I've been telling them, if you, if it is your goal to get one, two or three clients over the next month, then this challenge is perfect for you. You know, inside of same day sales, which again is my, like that that's relevant to everybody inside of same day sales because that's really what those guys are working on is the, the individual sale is learning how to really get good at converting at the individual level. But then inside my mastermind, we are working with clients in a high touch, really immersive way. A lot of those clients are launching always say these skills that I teach are super fundamental and foundational. Whether you're a new entrepreneur or you're super experienced and you're making multiple six figures, even into seven figures. This is the foundational stuff that everybody in all of my programs needs to know how to do. And so I'm offering it separately in both places and we're having totally, totally separate conversations. So the way that we're doing it, like I said, is I'm just recording a daily loom video and then I'm dropping it into the platform that we use for our programs. Right now we're using Slack. And so it's literally, I just came up with a separate channel, it's like a pop up channel. And every day it's like day one, here's your little prompt. Watch your video and tell me, do your homework essentially. And the homework will again be just be that one key action. And we're doing that every single day for 30 days to help people get that result of signing a client, two clients or three clients. So I want you to notice right off the bat how specific that is. Sometimes I see I'm gonna talk a little bit about problems that I see when people do things like challenges. Now I've done a lot of Challenges in my business, these are client only challenges that I'm talking about right now. But if you've been following along with me for a while, you know, I've also done like big free challenges. And for no matter what kind of challenge you're doing, one of the things I see is we aren't putting together challenges or sprints with any particular result or transformation. So just like any of your offers, just like any of your programs or services, you need to have a result, you need to have a transformation. You need to have a place where you're taking people. You don't want to just have a challenge that's like, you know, exercise every day for 30 days. Right. We really would want to aim that more towards, you know, gain three pounds of muscle. And that's probably too much of my fitness. My really fitness people don't pick that one apart. Okay, but you get the point, right? Like making it really result based and then it becomes, it's not about like people failed if they didn't get that exact result. But things look different, Our actions are different when we know and we commit to what result we are aiming towards. So even if your, if your result is ambitious, which I think it should be, even if people don't get all the way there, think about how far they will come. So for example, if I'm trying to gain two pounds of muscle, muscle in 30 days and I end up doing your challenge and I end up gaining a pound and a half of muscle, I'm still going to be really happy with that, right? Versus, oh, let me just go and exercise every day. Now that wouldn't be a bad thing to exercise every day, but it's a little bit miss like there's no direction to it, right. It's just sort of like I could, I could do anything. I could just walk into a gym and kind of putz around and then maybe that counts. And in some cases I could see how that would be valuable. But for a lot of people, they want it to be grounded in something. They want to be aiming towards something. And so if you're going to do this, you really want to think about what kind of result is achievable in the timeframe that you're doing the challenge. And also what kind of result would really serve people in the broader context of your program. So for example, for me and for what I teach, if I can help people learn how to get a client in 30 days, that is going to translate to so many different things that's going to increase their Confidence, especially when they come into my mastermind and they're going to be launching and doing group programs. You want to be able to fall back. I talk about this all the time. You want to be able to fall back on the confidence of knowing that you have the skill, that no matter what happens, if you have a bad launch, if things don't go the right way, you're not sitting there being like, but I don't even know how to get clients. It's like, yes, you do. You've proven that to yourself. You know how we did that already. You've shown yourself that you can do that. So I think it's really important for people across all levels to have this fundamental skill. So that's why I built the entire challenge around it. Now, another reason that I've decided to do this in my programs is because, and this is where I think it can be a really. A really fun way to sort of feed two birds with one seed, so to speak, is if you have gaps in your program now, if you run a program for long enough with curriculum, you are going to realize that you have gaps. It doesn't mean that you've done anything wrong. It literally just means that you have been running your program for a little bit of time and you have exposed areas where people aren't getting it fast enough. People are asking the same question over and over again. We all need to be updating our curriculum over time. We are always evolving, Our clients are always evolving, and the market is always evolving. So you're never done. Okay, we're never done. You're. You really need to think of your curriculum and your teachings as like a living library. Right. And so for me, I have been having a lot of conversations with all of my clients about the fundamentals of sales. And even though I have same day sales, which all my clients get access to, you know, there are still things I've been running same day sales for. Gosh, I guess it's been about two years now. Like, over those two years, I've noticed, oh, you know what, we're kind of missing this piece. Or, oh, like this thing has been working across the industry or I want to add this thing. So instead of just adding it, which I could do and that would be great, I've decided to, like, sort of create this whole challenge and include the things that I want to add. Right. So I'm again, feeding the two birds with the one seed. One is actually probably more than two birds, really getting people engaged. Right. So sometimes we have a lapse in engagement, very normal. We have an incentive to kind of come back, come back to home base, get people excited. It's sort of that fresh day of fresh, fresh, like first day of school energy all over again. That's the first thing. The second thing is helping speed up people's results. And then the third thing is filling in any curriculum gaps that you have. Right. So it's just such a fun way to pour into my clients. I'm really enjoying, like, as I record this, we are literally on day five of 30, and I'm just seeing so much clarity. I feel like they're already learning so much about themselves and their businesses. I am seeing where their. This is important, their growth edges are. So I'm already getting some pushback. I'm getting some, oh, gosh, like, I'm uncomfortable with this part. I don't like this part. I don't want to do it. That's really good for me to know as the coach and the leader of the program. It's like, oh, we need to do more coaching around this. Right? There's, like, a lot of money mindset stuff that's coming up for people around certain things, like, for example, visibility and being highly visible, leveraging your personal network to get more sales, that can really bring up stuff for people. It can be scary to think about your friends and your family and your. And your colleagues and people that you know and how they might fit into your sales ecosystem. So we're pushing. It's called a challenge for a reason, right? We're pushing people past their limits, and it's really beneficial as the coach to know what those limits really are. So that's a big piece of this as well. And so the other thing I want to mention before I kind of get into the, like, more of the anatomy of how to design this if you'd like to do something like this in your own program. Or you could do a free challenge too. Like I said, I've done many of. Of those. The one of the number one mistakes that I see people make is it's so I already mentioned one of them, which is like, there was no key result, no transformation. It's just kind of like, you know, the drink water every day challenge, Great thing to do, to drink water. But, like, what's the. Like, that's not a transformation. That's not a result. There's not a clear before and after. So just like our offers, we want there to be a clear before and after if we're gonna do a challenge. So that's the first mistake. The second mistake is making it way too complicated. So when you do a challenge, I have a lot of practice with this. You want each day of your challenge to be one very, very simple action. So a lot of. A lot of the days of my challenge, in the challenge that I'm doing right now, it's like, make a list of three people. Like, that's one day of the challenge, right? Or it's like, write this one sentence or fix this one thing about your social media bio, or, you know, do this one thing on your booking page. So a lot of times I'll review people's challenges because sometimes we do that as part of a launch strategy, and they're just trying to do so much, and that's because they really want to teach and they want to help and they want to be super valuable. But that will have the inverse effect. You start fire hosing people, they fall behind. It reinforces all of their crummy beliefs that they have about themselves. And. And they're thinking, gosh, I knew I couldn't do this. I can't even get through the free stuff. I can't even get through this challenge. Like, of course, like, I'm not cut out for this. I shouldn't hire this person. Like, I can't even do the free. And talking about free challenges specifically, I can't even do the free stuff. How am I ever gonna, like, keep up with their paid stuff? Right? So it can be very counterintuitive. But the best challenges, the most transformational challenges, are very, very unburdened and very, very simple. It's my goal that my clients should be spending no more. And this is in a paid environment. Okay. Even less for free. But in a paid environment, I want them spending no more than 15 minutes, maybe 20 tops, on a heavier day. But that even includes watching the training video. So my Training videos are 10 minutes or less for each day, and then I want the action to be five minutes or less. Okay? I don't want people to fall behind. I don't want, like, a lot of my clients. And this is just true of high achievers. My clients are very good at beating themselves up and being critical of themselves. I don't want them to use my challenge and my curriculum. I don't want them to use that against themselves. Right? Be like, I'm terrible at this. Like, I signed up for this thing, and I can never. I can never complete anything. You want to make it impactful, but you also really want to make it completable. So that is Something really, really important to think about. Okay, so here's how I'm laying out this challenge. I've already talked about having a key result, locking in on that, making it super simple. The anatomy of the daily format is the video and, like, a prompt with one key action, and we're driving towards something specific. Like I said, my. My specific result is signing one to three clients in a month. Right. And so the other thing that I think about when I lay this out, I know it could be really. It can feel really hard to be like, how do I start to like, what am I gonna do for 30 days? Okay, you. What I like to do is I'll just start brainstorming. If I literally. If I. Steph Crowder, we're gonna go sign one, two, or three clients this month, what are all the things that I would do? Okay. And I just start, like, bullet. Bullet pointing those things here, all the things that I would do, and then I just kind of start organizing it, right? It's like, okay, how does this break down? What are all of the steps that I would take? Like, if you followed me around for 30 days, what would you see me doing? And so that really starts to shape the challenge. Now, this is also where in our modernized world, this is where tools like Chat GPT can start to become really useful. Important caveat. Y' all already know. I'm not a fan of going to ChatGPT and being like, Design me a 30 day sales challenge. No, it needs to come from your brain, or it's just gonna be generic and boring and. And. And forgettable and not that useful. Notice that I did a full brain dump on. Here's everything that I would do. I like using. I've said this before. I like using ChatGPT as a intern, as, like, a research assistant, and as an organizer of information. I don't go to ChatGPT and be like, tell me the information that I need. The information comes from my brain. The strategy comes from my brain. And then I often use tools like ChatGPT to help me organize it and simplify it. In my opinion, that is all you should really be turning to ChatGPT for when it comes to your craft. Okay? You have the knowledge in your brain. You need to use your brain. You're. I could go on a whole separate tangent. Okay? Your business depends on you using the genius inside of your brain. It's better than any computer. Okay? So you take what you know, and then you can go to chat GPT and be like, help me lay this out over 30 days really help me simplify it, help me organize it, make it achievable, make it oriented around a key result. Okay. That can really. And I've had to do a lot of shaping that's just going to give you a rough draft, but it can help you start to put some rails on the road. Okay. And then the next step after that is, as I'm looking, that'll give you like a rough draft of your 30 days or 21 days, 15, like whatever you want to do. What I really like to do from there is to try to organize. If you're, especially if you're doing a 30 day challenge, I like to organize it into phases. So obviously with 30 days, that breaks down into 10, 10, 10. And so, for example, in this challenge, I am seeing these 30, these 10, 10 and 10. As the first 10 days are about clarifying. The second 10 days are about connecting and converting. And then the final 10 days are about troubleshooting and creating momentum and moving forward. So that also helps me kind of break it into milestones. Right. So that for the first 10 days, I'm really helping people get super clear on what their offer is going to be, on what problem they're solving, on how to describe what they're doing, on, like making their game plan and starting to get things in action. Clarifying. Right. Second 10 days, we're, we're connecting and converting. This is where we're actually getting into how do we talk to people, how do we speak in a sales environment, how do we do sales calls, how do we do coffee chats, how do we do personal invitations? Right. What are all of the actual mechanics of how we connect? And same thing with conversion. So once we are actually in a conversation with somebody, how are we moving them through the sales process, where are we falling down? How are we getting them to actually be a client that's covered in the second 10 days? And then the final 10 days, like I said, are all about problems, troubleshooting habits, momentum. So this will be like, at this point in the challenge, people are going to be coming up against issues. There's going to be objections in their sales conversations. There's going to be, you know, parts where it's not working for them. They're going to have questions like, should I be discounting what do I do when, you know, somebody tells me that they're in, but then they ghost me? This is where we're really going to start to deal with the things that are coming up in the actual, like on the ground. Right. Because I have them out there in the world. Implementing in these final 10 days will be troubleshooting. Like I said, we'll be fixing, tweaking, and helping train them to get better and better. And then we're ending with a final celebration. And also, I forgot to mention, I like to do prizes. I like to do special prizes. So there's going to be prizes for this challenge as well. So I don't really want to give it away for my clients who are listening to this in real time right now. But in the past, I like to think about incentivizing people for full participation. So if they do every single day of the challenge, I've done things like giving away a ticket to my year on the wall training. Every year I do this big planning training. It's $47. And so I often if somebody completes a full challenge with me, they get comped a ticket for that. Or sometimes we give away an extra bonus coaching session. Right. They get some kind of incentive or some kind of mean. I like a meaningful prize. I wouldn't do like an Amazon gift card or something like that. I want it to be relevant to my program and to my transformation and I want it to be something that they get to unlock. Like that's another idea is like maybe there's a special like tier in your program where it's like this insider club that you unlock once you do the fast track. Right. Because that's the other thing about me creating this challenge for my clients is after it's complete, it's going to go into my programs. It's going to be something that's always available for people. So and that's one of the, to be honest, that's one of the big reasons I decided to do it, is as I was getting people into the last round of my mastermind, I realized that there were some clients that really needed like a fast track start. They wanted to be able to make their investment back very quickly. And I love that for them. I actually encourage that. Because my mastermind costs $8,000, I want people to make their $8,000 back. It's fast as humanly possible. And so that was part of my motivation was like, what if I put together a 30 day fast track that could help people break even on their investment with me in the first month so that the remaining 11 months are all profitable learning. Right. So this is not going to just be a one time challenge. This is going to be an onboarding ramp. This is going to be a fast track or a boot camp that our clients can go through to get results faster. So you're if you're doing something like this, you're building it for the moment. And it's like I said, it's been super fun. I'm love, I'm loving doing it with people live, but I'm also integrating it into my programs for the future and it's going to make my programs better over time. So it's working not just once for right now, but it's also building better clients and building a better client experience in the future. So that's what I wanted to share with you today about how you can incorporate something like a fast track or a bootcamp or a challenge into your group program into your offer. I love doing one of these at least once a year. Sometimes I get to it twice a year, but I hope you'll give it a try and let me know how it goes. You can always reach out to me on Instagram. I'm at hey Steph Crowder. Tell me if you're going to try this. Or you can respond to any of the emails that I've sent you and let me know what your ideas are. I would love to hear. That's what I have for you today. I can't wait to see you in the next episode. And until then, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.