← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
913: Fan Favorite- Generate $1k in the Next Two Weeks with my Pre-Sales Method
00:42:55
Tune in to find out what pre-sales are, how you can benefit from them, and learn some simple strategies to help you get started!
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Abigail Pumphrey
The irony of pre sales, which I just find so funny, is that most of the people that I see hesitating around doing pre sales actually already do them all the time and they just have never called them that. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee. Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee I am in the midst of my own pre sale launch right now in the middle of recording this which felt like the perfect time to talk about why I value pre sales and why I think they're such a valuable tool to people who want to sell more digital products and courses in their business. Now by the time this airs I will have wrapped the pre sales launch but I wanted to be in it while I was recording this to give you the true behind the scenes of what why this is such a valuable time in my business and how it can really benefit you. Now if we are just meeting for the very first time. Thank you for listening to the show. I am so glad you're here. I would love if you would hit subscribe. I am going to be sharing a lot more about growing your business and leveraging things like digital products and courses to diversify. So if that's something you're interested in, definitely hit subscribe. And if you haven't yet followed me, head on over to Boss Project on Instagram and my personal profile Abigail says is linked in the bio. I'd love if you go hit follow over there. I think you might be surprised. While I run a large podcast and I have a seven figure company, the amount of followers I have on social media is a lot less than you might think and the amount of followers do not correlate to sales. So I think Some of the statistics I'm about to share may come as a surprise to some of you, but I'm also excited about the picture that will paint for your future. I want to see you be successful. And I know that things like those sort of numbers and vanity metrics can really hold us back from making powerful decisions that help us move forward in our business. And I don't want that to be the thing that scares you. So make sure you go head over there and see just how realistic this is for you as well. Now, the irony of pre sales, which I just find so funny, is that most of the people that I see hesitating around doing pre sales actually already do them all the time and they just have never called them that. If you are the kind of person that has predominantly or ever found frankly offered services, you are in fact doing a form of pre sales. You are telling someone about what you will do for them, the problem you will solve for them. They say yes, and they often pay, sometimes even in full. And then you do the work, then you do the service. I don't know why when we switched to talking about digital products or courses that people get really hung up. They're like, I don't know, this feels like it's great for me, but I don't know about how it is for them. And there's all these hesitations that fly around. And I really want to get into why this is such a valuable tool. So much so that for nearly everything I do in my business, this is a requirement for me. So I guess first and foremost we should talk about what is pre sales. Pre sales is typically a time period in which you are selling a digital product or course prior to making it, you are going to market and saying, hey, I want to build this thing. I'm really excited about this thing. I know it'll help you in this way. Say yes now and then I'll do it again. This happens all the time in the product world. Entire companies have been built around this. Things like Kickstarter are literally pre sales for E commerce products. People use Kickstarter to fund building the thing. The same is true for digital products and courses. When we are in a pre sales period, what we are doing is validating the offer in the marketplace. We are ensuring that it is in fact something that people want, getting their insight and making tweaks along the way to make the product even better. It is the perfect opportunity to really test messaging and sales copy to make sure you are connecting with people in the right way. I think A lot of people assume that if they get to this point in their journey that everything needs to be perfect, that everything has to be buttoned up. Their thing already has to be developed, it has to be finalized. They have to have the entire plan, they have to have already built it. And that is often the thing holding you back from moving forward. Every other industry on the planet operates from preset. Even when you walk into a restaurant, you order the food and then they make it. They're not sitting around with burgers that are already done getting cold. When you buy a house, you go under contract with construction company and they make the plans before you build it. We do this in every other area of our life and I genuinely do not understand why people get so weird about it when it comes to doing it themselves. This is powerful. Like I mentioned, help you validate that offer, help you test that messaging, and also, and maybe most critically, it allows you to get paid before you build it. I have seen so many people go into a launch, regardless of how big or small it is, and they are so focused on building the thing behind the scenes that they don't give their launch the energy it deserves. And frankly, they may build an incredible product, but if it's not getting in front of the right people, because that's not where their time and energy was, the getting paid is typically less than they would have made if they focused first on selling it and then building it and then coming back to sell it again and again. But I got some pushback from someone in my community and they're like, I get why it makes sense for the business owner. I can wrap my head around why it's good for me, but why is it good for them? Like, if it's such a low price thing, why would someone want to wait? People want instant gratification. I was like, I hear you, but what you're talking about is because of the world we've immersed ourselves in. Amazon being a great example of this. We are used to being able to search something, find something, and have it be at our door very quickly. And in the case of Amazon, sometimes even the same day. But that's not how the world operated until a handful of years ago. For years prior to this new technology that existed, we had to wait. We had to be patient. We had to wait for things to be manufactured or shipped or come across the globe on a boat. And we have been manipulated to think that waiting is a bad thing. It is not a bad thing. And in fact, I think so many people crave this Interaction with community and with a small business owner that they would actually prefer to wait because they know the intentionality that's going into the thing. It doesn't feel mass manufactured, it feels like it's for them. And when I say it's for them, it's because it genuinely is. When I go into pre sales for sure I have an idea of what I will create. Like it is a very concrete idea, likely with a pretty thorough plan behind it. And while it's completely planned, it has not been created in the slightest. Generally there's not slides made, I haven't pre recorded anything. Like this is simply an idea on paper. In fact, I probably spent more time building the sales page than I have even thinking about how the product will be put together. And some of you are like, literally what? Like, I know this sounds crazy, but when you go out with an idea and say, I know I can help people, I know I can solve this problem and help them solve it in this way, and I can see it. And then you get the opportunity to interact with this audience and genuinely hear from them, you will change how you deliver. Period, end of story. It may be a small tweak, it may be an additional question that you answer. It may be something you hadn't even considered at all. But you will make adjustments because they are one of the first few buyers in the world of pre sales. I see so many people create a digital product or a course and then they get questions from their community or people aren't getting the results that they had hoped for and it's because they are not adjusting to the needs of that community. But if you had gone through a pre sales process, you would much better understand the needs that community has, the specific questions they came in, the specific hopes and dreams of this audience and what they are assuming about what you will provide. You'll be able to better understand those needs and incorporate the answers to those questions in whatever you're delivering. Ultimately, this is likely going to be a steal for anyone who comes in early because coming in on beta for anything. Sure it may not be the most polished in game version, but you best believe the intentionality you put in with those people. They are going to get a higher touch experience that will likely feel much more like a service than it will when you've sold it a dozen times to thousands of people. But I realize a lot of this pent up energy is coming from anxiety. You have this presale anxiety and I want to talk about that. I'm an anxious person too. Like Genuinely an anxious, like literally medicated for anxiety. Okay, I get it. You may be an overthinker, you may be worst case scenarioing your entire business to death. Like I understand what's going through your brain, but you do have to step back and give yourself perspective. I'm not sure what worst case scenario you're coming up with, but genuinely, genuinely. Like the actual worst case scenario in a pre sale is that nothing happens, no one buys and you didn't build it. I would so much rather you have nothing happen and no one buy it when you didn't build it than when you did. Because when you already did build it and then there's no reaction, people will get so hung up on it they're going to do one of two things. Either they're going to give up and never want to sell in this way again or they are going to be so persistent that they are going to consistently change the messaging, adjust the sales page, try to make all these tweaks to force the market to want it. And you know there is the off chance that it was simply because it didn't get in front of enough people. That's definitely a potential. But generally speaking, if there's not sales during a pre sale period, it's because you're not solving a real problem or people don't understand the problem that you're solving. And that is generally more a case of messaging issues than it is the offer itself. But you're not going to know that until you go out and sell it. And so you could change messaging, you could change the offer. It's just going to depend on how things shake out. But if the worst case scenario is nothing happens and no one buys and you didn't build it, are you any further behind than you are right now? Other than some lost time? No. The alternative is you do nothing and you never know and you're still in the same place. What if it does work? What if it does perform? What if it does give you real results? Genuinely, I don't know why I'm stuck on this. Genuinely and generally, I'm so sorry. It's wild. Anyway, I want you to commit. I want you to consider the direction you could go. You likely already have something on the brain. You already have an idea and you've been hesitant to put it out into the world for whatever reason. Maybe you think it's the wrong time or you don't have enough time to deliver it, or a time tends to come up a lot for people regardless of what it is. What if Two weeks from now, your entire world was different because you just decided to put yourself out there. You have so much opportunity at your fingertips. And if nothing else, consider how much more present you could be during a launch if you aren't concerned about simultaneously building the product. How would you act like you are going to be so much more there and people need that from you. You are going to perform better. You are going to get more sales, because that's your only intent, your only focus is to put it out into the world. And I'm the kind of person that will happily, happily ensure that anything I promise to anyone else will always get done. But the moment I promise it to myself and only myself, there is way more risk that that will never happen. And so if nothing else, incorporating pre sales into my business process makes it so that I have something I gotta do. It's no longer I want to build this and put out there someday. It's oops, I already launched it. I guess I do have to actually build the thing because it's selling like wildfire. Oops. Okay, so now that I've won you over and you're like, okay, girl, I get it, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get out of my own way, I'm going to put this offer out there. What's the strategy? How are we going to do it? What is this going to look like? First of all, make it simple. Make it simple. You know, we could go out and we could launch anything in the next two weeks, truly, especially if we're talking about pre sales. You could launch anything on pre sales at pretty much any price point. I want to narrow that down a little bit for you so that we can make this a little more approachable. It's usually going to be easier to approach this if we start with a low price digital product or a mini course. Okay. When we start with a product like that, it gives us an opportunity to explore what pre sales looks like. But we're going to remove a lot of the pressure around the price point and also the sales objections. Because if we build the right digital product, this will be such a no brainer that price isn't even a question. It will literally just be people fighting with themselves of, oh, I, I haven't checked out yet. Okay. We want to make this easy for people to say yes. And if we need some validation going on in our business, I'd much rather you get some easy yeses than you feeling like you have to convince someone they need it. We don't need to convince anybody. We need to solve a real problem, put it in front of right fit people and then we do go. Oh my God. Yes. This is amazing. It is exactly what I need at exactly the right time. Thank you. I know you know the feeling. Fear that keeps you from admitting what you really want. Self doubt, whispering who are you to really claim this? The overthinking that turns every decision into a time suck spiral. I've been there and I know how suffocating it feels. But here's what I've learned. The biggest thing holding you back isn't a strategy you haven't figured out or a resource you don't have access to. It's how you think, how you decide and how you take action. That's why I created Mindset Reboot. This workshop series is my way of helping you break through those mental barriers once and for all. But don't wait. You won't be able to grab this for just $11 for long. Visit creative templateshop.com mindset to find out more. Now, we're not going to dupe anyone. We're not out here saying this thing exists. Now here's the mistake I think people make is when they do this pre sales marketing on all of their marketing channels, they're like, I haven't built it yet. It's launching this day. Like they're really focusing on the fact that it doesn't exist and that's not helpful. Like you want to sell it like it's here. We're still gonna make it very clear that it's not ready yet. I promise you that's coming. But on the actual like forward facing marketing, whether you're doing this on social media or sending to an email list, you don't need to like really focus too heavily on the fact that it doesn't exist yet. Like please don't like it is just going to get people saying, oh, I'll wait until it exists. You don't want that to be a factor. Now when they get to your actual sales page, this is where we want to be up front. And so including things like saying that this product is currently in beta or available for pre presale at pre sale pricing or beta pricing, it is going to signal to someone that this is new and they have an opportunity to be the first ones involved. I also include a detail section that talks about what they immediately get access to versus what's coming and when. And this isn't super detailed. It's pretty high level. It's like you immediately get Access to our community. Sometimes there's like a bonus that's preloaded, that's relevant and maybe something I was already planning to include that exists. But it doesn't necessarily have to be. It could be other free content that you load. Like it could be a workshop you've done. It could be a PDF that already exists. It could be a link to podcasts that you've been on or a podcast you produce. You don't have to have those things, but if you want value to exist in there, you can give it to them. But you don't need to build those things. They need to already exist. And then I say program launch date or like program start date or digital product available date or whatever. And then I would put the exact date that it's coming, when it will start dripping out. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be all at once. Okay. It can be in phases. I typically will do a two week pre sales period. But my launch date for whenever they get access to the beta digital product or mini course is seven to 10 days following the end of the pre sale launch. That's going to give me time to develop either the whole thing, because we're talking mini, or develop the first piece of the puzzle if we're talking more like a mini course. Now, what's really going to help this sell and sell quickly is if we add real urgency in. Since it doesn't exist yet, people don't know how amazing it is, which means you don't yet have testimonials. And while you may have testimonials from other things you've done, if this product hasn't existed previously, you're mostly talking about your own experience now. Not to say that your own experience isn't valuable, but I do love adding a genuine real sense of urgency by making it very clear that you do intend to raise the price. So I absolutely have a pre sales like beta price and beta pricing goes away at the end of my pre sale period. And it doesn't necessarily have to go up all of the way. I think that's the thing that also people kind of hesitate on. Like maybe your normal Everyday price is $197 during beta. It may be $77 after beta goes away. It doesn't mean you have to take it all the way back up. You, you totally can. But if you're like nervous about it changing, you can go from 77 to 97 and that's still a change. It's not you lying or deceiving people. It's still adding real urgency. But you don't need to tell them what the new price is going to be like. You can have value 1 97, you're selling it at beta for 77. You don't have to say in two days it's going up $20. You know, if you're doing like a more significant change, like I've seen programs go from 3,500 to 5,000, then absolutely talking about how much it's going up will make a big difference. If we're talking about a small change, I would just focus on the fact that it's changing at all. And this is the last chance to get it at this price point. But let's talk about price point. I think that's really critical. Let's say your goal is to make $1000 in the next two weeks. If you wanted to make $1000 in the next 2 weeks, we could price it at $100 and sell 10. Or we could price it at something like $50 and sell 20. Now anything under that $100 price point is typically in what I would call like the no brainer range. Obviously the lower, the easier it is. However, there's really only a couple of psychological breaking points. Anything between zero and $20 people are going to consider at the same rate. I mean, maybe zero to ten, but generally no. Like we're so used to even going out to fast food and dropping 20 bucks that anything under 20 feels the same to someone under 50 is going to have a similar psychological impact. And then under a hundred after that, the scale changes a little bit. It's like 100, 250, 500, a thousand, 1500, 2000. I could keep going, but like the scale gets wider the further up in price you go before there's like an actual change in psychology to when you're going to make a different decision. You can do round numbers. Like round numbers tend to be something that's more common in luxury brands. But if you want something to feel like a deal, usually you're going to do something that is an odd number. So I love when I'm selling something under a hundred and I want it to be a no brainer. My favorite price points are $11, 29, 47 and $97. I've done a lot of testing. Those are the numbers I like. I'm not saying you have to stick to those at all, but they have been ones that are good for me. And 22 is my favorite number. So if you were to just ask me out of the blue, I need to make a thousand dollars in two weeks on pre sales. I'm like $47. Let's sell 22 of them. That's gonna be my instant gut reaction. But I have definitely seen a lot of success at the $97 price point as well. Now if we really want to make this easy on ourselves, I. E. We want the least friction possible to get people to say yes. I want you to consider how you're approaching the actual offer itself. I'm not sure what you're thinking about selling right now. However, if we want the least friction and the most results and the quickest time period on pre sales, you don't have to build the thing yet. You are going to want to be in a situation where we are not getting people to second guess. And if we've already made it at a no brainer price point, then the next thing we really want to be paying attention to is people's personal objections. And the number one personal objection that is the most likely to come up is that they have to commit. And if you sell an offer where they have to commit, you are putting friction. You are making it so that someone has to consider they might have total buy in that it's going to work, that it's helpful, that it's worth it. But because they have to do it, because they have to implement it. Now all of a sudden, the only reason they're saying no is because they're not ready to make a commitment. And so I like to remove commitment from my low price digital products, meaning I am not doing things like challenges where I'm selling them doing something for 30 days or 21 days or even seven days. There's no commitment to implementing. There is no commitment to them having to take the next step. Because I think a lot of like, for sure, everyone wants to see their people be successful. So it's not that you don't have the intent on wanting them to be successful, but I want my offer to essentially do it for them without doing it for them. So like I'm not coming into their business and performing a service and literally doing it for them. But I'm doing everything in my power to make it as simple and as easy and as frictionless as possible so that they can do the thing. Let me explain, give you a couple examples. So one of my most popular digital products ever has been Trello for Business. It has sold over 10,603 times last I checked and grossed over $287,000. It's priced $29 and has been the same price for many years. Okay, so 29 bucks. What this program mini course is doing is teaching someone about project management. But the way that that course was initially set up, which P.S. it's dated. Please do not go buy it. Technically you could probably find it on the Internet, but I'm just saying don't go buy it. See an example. I would much rather send you a different direction. Okay, back to center. The reason it was so successful is I taught the concept of project management, but I gave them all the templates they could need. Here's exactly what to essentially install. Okay, go install this in your business. Operate it in this way. Boom, you have a project management system. People freaking loved it. People were implementing and building this out in two hours a weekend. And then literally the next week they were so flipping excited about it. I had people writing blog posts about it, people talking about it on podcasts, people promoting it on their own social channels, not because they were an affiliate, but because it was so, so genuinely helpful. The product right now that has like the most virility, I suppose is my. Your digital va. It's my chat GPT prom fault this. It was really hard. Like I really wanted to step in and teach people about AI and all the ways they could include it in their business, but that would add friction to the product. I can't tell you how many times I've had to hold myself back from doing that. I may end up adding a couple videos here and there, but I very, very, very specifically gave people access to prompts. All they have to do, literally copy, paste, copy my prompt, put it into ChatGPT, and it's like Mad Lib style. So they like insert their own details into whatever they're trying to accomplish and then literally a result pops out in under 30 seconds. So to make a digital product a no brainer, I'm as close to doing it for them as I possibly can. And I'm making it as frictionless as possible. So I'm delivering in whatever way is going to resonate the most with them and make the deepest impact. And I'm allowing them to come into my world and get results in seconds, minutes, hours. Like we're not talking weeks, months, years. Okay, maybe days, maybe days, maybe a couple of days. Definitely less than a week. But I really want the time frame for change to be really tiny. Now, all that to say, I don't want you to overthink this, okay? Because like we said in the very beginning, the worst case scenario is nothing happens, no one buys, and you don't build the thing. Don't get caught up in having the right idea, the perfect idea. Instead, you need to move forward with an idea that you resonate with and you feel really good about and you want to put it out into the world. And I genuinely want to see you make $1,000 in two weeks. What would it look like to sell 22 at $47 or 11 at $97? That feels so doable. That's less than your kid might sell in Girl Scout cookies in a week. You can do this now. My favorite place to host digital products and mini courses is teachable. I've been a long time user. I've been with them since they've been in beta, which has been longer than I care to say because I'm getting up there. My business just turned nine. Oh my gosh. Check them out. If you haven't checked out Teachable before, definitely recommend it. I do have a deal for you guys. You can go to bossproject.com Teachable check it out, set yourself up. It's going to allow you to host whatever your digital product or mini course is and collect payment. That's maybe the most important piece. And once someone checks out, you can have something on the inside that makes it very clear what's happening next. You can have a little note that says thanks so much, I'm so excited. You can even post a little video of how excited you are. You can use a software like Loom to record that and put a little video up. Say thank you, let them know what next steps are. If you are giving them access to anything immediately, you can deliver that inside teachable. And then when you are ready to roll it out, they will already be in one place. So you'll be able to have everyone there load whatever it is that you're going to load and they're going to have access to it automatically. And even if you don't have an email service provider yet, you can email all of the students or purchasers of a certain product and send out a quick message. So even if you don't have an email provider, Teachable can be an option so that when it is loaded you have a way to contact these people all at the same time. Now, if you'd like a little more handholding through this process and you want me to guide you on building your first digital product or mini course, then head on over to bossproject.com jumpstart I'm not only walking you through building the right offer that aligns with your ideal client to really set you up for for long term success. We wanna align it for your existing offers so that you're getting paid to bring in qualified leads. I'm gonna walk you through that process but if nothing else, if you just wanna like Jumpstart hence the name inside I've included a two week pre sale launch boxed and ready for you to go. It's literally called launch in a box and you can go right now and get access. I'm including everything from what to say, the exact posts I would do and if you have an existing email list emails I would also send alongside of this locked and loaded. It's ready. Heck I even have a no brainer sales page for you. So simple so I can't wait for you to go. Check that out. The two links I mentioned if you want a host bossproject.com teachable I do make an affiliate commission when you sign up and then if you would like me to walk you through this process and have your first or next pre sale, you can head to bossproject.com jumpstart I can't wait to see you inside. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from bossproject. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.