Structuring Webinar Pricing & Selling High Ticket Software Via Online Seminars

Cindy: Yeah, so it’s really about engagement and interaction and getting a face for your brand and your company and the product that you’re

promoting. Walt: Yeah, definitely.

Cindy: I know that you’re right, internet really does give a whole lot of anonymity. You have products where you have support desks and

some of the stuff that people send into support desks, I know for sure that nobody would come and say some of this stuff to your face because they assume that the internet is out there and it’s something that … We’re not real people. When you put a face on it people want to buy and they want to connect.

Walt: From a purchasing point of view, it makes communicating the message of the product a lot easier. If you’re doing a demonstration of a product online, people can actually see it working in live time, they don’t have to guess does it do that, doesn’t it, and make assumptions about that product. The buying experience is a lot higher. There’s of course lots of different types of webinars, as you know. There’s training webinars, there’s coaching, there’s sales, there’s lots of different environments where webinars work.

Certainly from a sales perspective, if a customer can see and engage with a face, a person who is talking through the sale itself, the product, what it does and how it works, then they don’t have to make these assumptions of what they think the product does. They can see it, they can walk through it with the creator of the product, they can ask questions and they can make sure they feel comfortable about their purchase.

Cindy: Yeah, that’s really good. In this podcast, I want to really talk about price points. What have you found to be the best converting price point and how do you come to that decision?

Walt: The first thing that I’ve got there from an answer to that question is to make it a no-brainer. To make it a no-brainer. When you’re looking at a product, you’re seeing the value of it. If it gets to the point of the pricing and it causes either one of these two reactions, the first reaction being, “Oooohh,” then it’s too high. The second reaction being, “Really?” Then it’s too low. I’ve run webinars, and thanks very much for the very kind words in your introduction. One of the things you said was “getting stellar conversions every time.” That hasn’t happened by accident.

We’ve run a webinar, and to give you a real example, we’ve run a webinar with a product at $2,000, okay, which is quite a high-end product, and we converted off the clock. We did an incredible amount of sales of that particular product. I think we did over $160,000 in sales on the night of that webinar, right, so on a $2,000 product. The same product, repacked with a different pricing, what we were trying to do was get more people involved, we actually re- ran that webinar pricing was offered at a $1 trial for 30 days. People would not engage with it at all. Couldn’t you believe it? A $2,000 piece of software, people were falling over themselves to buy it, but when we even offered them a trial like, “Hey, it’s only going to cost you $1 and then if you like it in 30 days then you can pay.”

Nothing. It was like crickets, it was just so unbelievable and the reason was the value, Cindy. We realized the fact that people saw us in 90 minutes go through something amazing, they could see the value, they could feel it. They knew that what they were looking at was of incredible value. When you put a price tag in front that’s too low, it makes people go, “Oh. Maybe it’s not quite as good as I thought it would be.” The other note that I’ve got there on pricing, how do you set the price, is I actually wrote a blog post on this, what I term is “making sure that both sides are richer as a result.”

What do I mean by that? If I sell a product and happy to take the money, and then at the end of the experience of buying that product the people who have paid the money aren’t happy with the result, then I’m richer financially, but they are poorer. If you craft your product in such a way that no matter what it costs, the value far exceeds that cost … Let me give you an example. If I look at a new car, for example, and say this car is $30,000. If you buy the car and you love it so much, it’s so great, it gives you years of good service, it’s the most comfortable, it’s easy to drive, it’s the best car you ever had, then that $30,000 has been well worth it for the lifetime of that car. In the other side, if you bought the car and at $30,000 and it gives you no end of trouble and it’s always in at the shop, it has a weird judder when you’re driving and a bad smell and blah blah blah, then you don’t have that $30,000 worth of experience.

What I talk about is make sure that both sides of the transaction are richer as a result. If I sell you this for $100, I really want to make sure that you are richer as a result of buying it; you’ve got more value, you’re able to do more things because you bought that particular product. Both sides need to be richer. The seller of the product richer from a financial perspective, certainly, that they’ve been able to sell their product and put money in the bank, but the buyers of the product to be richer as a result of buying. They’ve got more value than the cost that they’ve outlaid. Those two points, making it a no-brainer, so it’s an easy decision to make to buy that product. That doesn’t give you a price level because everything is going to be different, and then making sure that both sides of the transaction are richer.

If you follow those two steps, you will end up with a price point that is both easy to swallow from a consumer’s point of view, and gives incredible value. Then it’s an easy transaction. As we’ve sold products, I think the most expensive product I’ve sold on webinar where the webinar pricing has been $5,000, 4,997 as they do in marketing circles. The cheapest product we’ve sold on a webinar, specifically where webinar pricing has been that $1 trial, which went nowhere. As a direct sale, I would say at $100. The conversions pretty much stay the same depending on the value of the offer. It’s a matter of making sure that what you’ve got delivers that value, what is it worth to a consumer and is it an easy decision for them to make. It it’s a $100 product, don’t try and sell it for $500. Conversely, if it’s a $5,000 product don’t try and sell it for 100.

Cindy: Right, right. I see people doing single payments, multi-payments, as you mentioned, trial payments. What’s your opinion on whether to hit them up for a single payment or spread that out so if it’s a $1,000 product do it in instalments. What’s your experience there?

Walt: Again, it depends on the product and of course on the pricing of it. What I’ve seen is a great technique, and I’ve seen this done by some of the best people in the industry, is they’ll do the single payment on the webinar, so they’re talking about … Let’s pick a price point just for the sake of the argument, say that it’s at 997, that’s a $1,000 product. They’re talking about their $1,000 product, they’re building the value, they’ve show that actually if you buy this you’re getting this bonus and this bonus and you get this and you get that. You’re actually getting $10,000 worth of stuff, it’s going to cost you 1,000. Okay, great, it’s an easy decision, you get loads of value, it’s $1,000, $1,000, $1,000. You’re pitching that single price point on the webinar and then on the replay as well.

One of the most important things about a webinar, and especially in today, we’ve seen that the sequence, and I know that some of your 7 Figure Furnace guys are going to talk about the sequence of webinars later on in the series, so stay tuned you guys. We found in a sequence that of course we have a lead up: “there’s a webinar happening on this date, register now, it’s happening tomorrow, make sure you’re registered, it’s on in an hour.” Getting that build up towards the webinar. Then the webinar pitch, and then the most important or the biggest part of the sales come in the follow-up. Follow-up emails in terms of “did you miss the live webinar? Come and join on the replay” and then talking about the offer that was presented on the webinar.

What we’ve really found works well is you pitch the single price point on the webinar, it’s $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, it’s $10,000 worth of value, it’s $1,000, $1,000. You’re driving for as much of that big price set point as you can. Then towards the end of the replay sequence is when you start dropping in a payment plan option. Okay, so it’s $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, come and watch the replay, it’s $1,000. Come and watch the replay tomorrow, it’s $1,000. We’re closing the offer in 48 hours and because I know that a lot of you want to get involved but don’t have $1,000 with you, we’re going to offer you the opportunity to have three payments of 397.

That’s what I’ve found works really well is present the product as it’s priced at the time of the webinar, and then try and get as much as you can from a sales perspective, and then drop in the multi-pay option towards the end. That’s from my personal perspective what we’ve seen works really well.

Cindy: Yeah, well that totally makes sense. It helps people just to get rid of any of those last hanging on problems, issues, to stop them from actually buying.

Walt: For the people that have bought on the single price, you want to make sure that they feel special. There will be people that, they’re on the webinar, they had to scrape to get that money together, it wasn’t easy money for them, so they’ve outlaid the money. The last thing you want to do is make them feel like they should have waited. If it’s $1,000, make sure that the payment plan is higher, so in other words, if I pay the $1,000 I’ve actually got the best deal, but if I can’t quite get the money together, three payments of 397 actually works out to be an extra couple hundred dollars more to spread it over that time. If you’ve paid the money upfront you feel good that you’ve saved that money in the long term. You want to make sure that the payment plan costs a little bit more at the end.

Cindy: Yeah, exactly, and it’s going to stop people getting upset and getting refunds and feeling ripped off.

Walt: Exactly.

Cindy: When you’re putting together products or you’re finding products to sell on webinars, how do you find the ones that are going to sell? Do you have a gut feeling when you look at a product and you go, yeah, this is going to sell really well at this price. Or do you find some that are just … you know you need to sell it or you might feel like you need to sell it but you know that it’s going to be a tough sell. How do you separate which ones are awesome and which ones are going to be tough?

Walt: As you do it more and more, so for anybody that’s watching and listening to this, as you do this more and more you get to know

people in the industry. One of the ways of me answering then is with trust that the product creates. I’ve done a lot of work with Damien Zamora, for example, from GoMobile. When Damien hits me up and says, “Hey, Walt, XYZ product,” I know that Damien’s staff always delivers an amazing value, and so that’s an easy decision for me to make. It is a gut feel, really. You’ve got to know the person, for a start. Who are they, what are they, what are their business values, what do their customers say about them? It’s really quick to find that kind of stuff on Facebook, very quick search of them. See the comments on the wall and you get a pretty good understanding pretty quickly.

Also, see if you can find testimonials from previous products. Are the customers going to have a good experience? Make sure you get a copy of it yourself. If something is being sold and you’re representing that something by setting up a webinar for your people to come and listen, make sure you get a copy, see what it is and understand it. If you get the buzz when you look at the product, when you look at the product and go, “Wow, this is awesome,” then other people will feel the same way. If you look at a product and go, “Yeah, I’m just not that sure about it,” it’s not the right fit for you. You’re not going to be able to confidently stand up and talk to people about it.

I’ve done sales; before we started our own business, I was working in corporate sales at a high boardroom level, we’re talking billion dollar deals, that kind of stuff. If you couldn’t legitimately stand in front and say, “This is the best decision that you could possibly make as a company,” if you don’t feel it, there’s absolutely no way that the sale will be made. You have to do the introduction on a webinar, you have to stand behind the person that’s presenting, and if you don’t feel it, don’t do the webinar.

Cindy: Yeah. I know it can be tempting because once you start getting your reputation around and people start coming and pitching you ideas and that kind of thing, it can look like it’s something that you can just quickly, easily make a bit of money from, so there’s that temptation there to just go and jump on it. It’s really important to keep integrity and make sure that you’re promoting and what you’re sticking your name behind is going to be something that you can actually get excited about and lend your name to. Yeah, these are really good points.

Walt: It’s not an exact science either as well, Cindy. Sometimes you might look, you might think it’s great, you might have done your research, you’ve done everything right and then … it…

Cindy: It doesn’t … right.

Walt: It didn’t work or something wasn’t quite the way it should have been. If that happens, your best point of action is, again, to email

out to your people and say, “Hey guys, sorry, we understand there are problems, let’s work together to solve it.” Ninety percent of the time, if you follow what we just said, do research and make sure that you’re understanding what you’re putting in front of people, because it is your name behind it, then you should be fine, be doing okay. It’s easy to find products that fit, and again you can do something as simple as a Google search, whatever your market is.

For example, you mentioned RepWarn, which is our reputation management software, and Hydravid, which is our video marketing software. If I Google either one of the terms around that, so if I talk about reputation management, I put that into Google, there will be companies that pop up that have not competing software but maybe ancillary services, and that’s a perfect match. I can reach out to them and see if we can do some cross-selling between our two companies. The same with the video marketing. There’s an incredible industry that fringes on video marketing and as long as you have a product that’s noncompetitive but aligns with what you’re both trying to achieve, then that’s an excellent opportunity to do something together.

Cindy: On most of your webinars you are selling software; I don’t think I’ve seen you selling training or coaching or that kind of thing on webinars, it’s mostly software, am I right?

Walt: [inaudible 00:17:36] I have in the past, I have done webinars where we’ve been talking about a particular training program and I suggest you get involved with the training program because it’s amazing, and the training program is a 12 week session with our presenter at such and such. I have done it, from my personal experience, and everybody is going to be different, it’s easier for me to show software because that’s my space. It’s easier for me to say, “Look what this can do for you,” click the button and wow, rather than talk about “I believe that you’re here in your evolution and by going through this training course you’re going to be there at the end.”

It’s easy for me, but again if I look at some of our colleagues and well known people online, they equally talk about software as well as training or as well as training programs or courses or seminars. I’ve seen webinars pitching live events. You come to a webinar, 90 minutes or an hour, meeting someone specific, and at the end what they’re talking about is an event somewhere in the world and a special offer on tickets. There’s so many different products that are available for sale on webinar. Personally I stay in software because I understand it and it’s easy to see a result. Again, if somebody came to me with the right training program, I would for sure talk to my people about it.

Cindy: Yeah. When you’re demonstrating software in a webinar, do you have any tricks that you can share with our listeners on how to

really make sure that that demonstration comes across slick, how to actually present it so that it’s going to sell?

Walt: Yeah, sure. The first way to answer that is by not launching into a demonstration from the first moment that you’re on camera, or the first moment that the webinar is on. Why? Because the people that are there, they want to answer the first question of why are we here for a start. There needs to be an explanation about a problem, so we’re here to talk about this is a problem, this is a problem in this particular marketplace or in this sector of the community, or yourself. This is a problem that we have all seen. Can we agree that this is a problem? Yes, okay. Now I can acknowledge that my audience sees that this is a problem for themselves or for a section of the world. Now that I know that that’s a problem, this is a known solution. Our solution is we follow these steps, we do this, this and this, and this solves that solution. Okay, now let me show you some software that takes all of that middle part and makes it into a five minute exercise instead of a five month exercise.

You need to be able to set the ground before you fire up the software. Once you’ve done that, so that comes in … Again, I know that your 7 Figure Furnace guys have got how to structure a webinar as one that they’re going to [inaudible 00:20:34], so again, guys, make sure you listen, it’s hugely valuable. Once you’ve got the structure and you’ve walked through the problem and the identification and you’re actually demonstrating, how do you make sure that goes smoothly? First of all, practice. That goes without saying. Make sure you know what you’re showing better than anybody else in the world. Make sure you’re the best at it, so that’s number one.

Number two, there’s often things in software that take time to run. It might be I’ve clicked on this button, and in effect what happens is the software goes off and does all of this amazing stuff, and what I’m going to do is come back tomorrow and get the results. It’s really hard to show that on webinar. If your software has components that take time to run, that need to go and do a lot of research or whatever, do that before the webinar. You will demonstrate setting it up, and then you will quite simply say, “While that’s working, here’s the one I ran yesterday, and here’s the results from the one I ran yesterday.”

Make sure that you’ve got the results easily demonstrable as well, easily visible for the people that are on the webinar so they don’t have to sit there with ten minutes worth of pained silence while the software does its automated tricks; because even if it only takes ten minutes, actually, let’s be even more clear. Even if it takes only five minutes, okay, it’s a pained silence.

Cindy: That’s a long time.

Walt: If you think about five minutes to set up. There’s a lot of software that’s instant, of course. Click this and bang, it’s done. Do this, it takes you to the next step. If there’s any steps of your software program specifically that take time to run, then make sure that that’s well-prepared in advance.

Cindy: Yeah, absolutely, and you don’t have to go digging around for links. Make sure that you have everything ready and that it’s good to go.

Walt: Definitely, exactly right.

Cindy: Yeah. I know we do, as you’ve alluded to, in 7 Figure Furnace coming up we’re going to be interviewing quite a few people who

are going to drill down into other topics for your listeners. Specifically this month we’re just covering webinars, so we just want to make sure that you’ve got everything equipped for webinars and to make sure that you’re doing them the best that you can. Before we head out, Walt, do you have any last-minute tips, action points, or anything that people who are really wanting to just dive into webinars can take and implement today?

Walt: Yeah, definitely. Webinars are an incredible way of making money. They really are, they work so fantastically well. Even if you’ve never

done one before, you’d really like to because obviously we’re talking about money. Who doesn’t want some more, right? If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself I’d really like to but I’ve never done before and I’m super scared. What the great news is is that if you are beginning by bringing an expert to your audience, okay, they are doing the presentation, all right. First of all let me say that the expert, the person who’s doing the presenting, loves that opportunity. If you’ve got the audience, they have the product and you can put them together, that’s a really welcome introduction from that product creator’s point of view.

Cindy: That’s quite easy. If you don’t mind, I’ll just jump in here; because a lot of people, like you’re alluding to here, a lot of people have

products that they’ve put in all the works, like you for example. If you can get 300 people, if you have a mailing list or you have subscribers or somewhere to connect or drive traffic and get people into a webinar room, there are tons of people like Walt that will want to just come in and sell your stuff for you. Often you guys are paid 50%, is usually …

Walt: Absolutely, absolutely. If you’ve got the audience, and there’s a billion training courses on building audiences and there’s lots of

things that you can do to drive traffic towards any webinar sign-up page, you just need to define the audience and run some ads to it. If you can bring the audience, I guess my point being, don’t feel scared about setting up a webinar because if the person you’re bringing, they’re going to do all of the hard work. If you’ve never done it before, switch on your webcam and just, as Cindy did at the beginning of this podcast, “Hi, my name is Cindy,” or of course whoever is listening you would probably use your own name, that would be smarter.

“Hi, this is me. Today we’re going to be talking about blah blah blah, and I’d like to introduce you to somebody who has been an expert in that area, and this is the person that I’m introducing. They’re going to talk to you for the next 30, 40, 50 minutes about A, B and C, and by the end of it you’re going to have this in your toolkit. Now I’d like to hand over to that person.” If you can do a professional introduction, your job is done and yeah, you can earn up to 50% of every single sale. Imagine if you’re selling a 500 or 1,000 or even $2,000 product, you’re earning 50% of the commission by doing two things: A, bringing the audience, and B, doing a professional introduction. Everything else is taken care of for you.

Don’t be scared of webinars, in fact, go out and speak to some people. I’ve always used a bit of a mantra that action [Q 00:25:56] is for you. If you go out and you’re dead set scared and the first thing that you do is speak to someone and say, “Hey, would you like to run a webinar to my audience for your product?” I’m pretty sure you’re going to get some positive responses, so you don’t have to have that fear of rejection. If you’ve got the audience then people are going to be happy to speak to you. If you don’t have the audience, make that your first goal. Go and build an audience about a specific topic. Once you have the audience then you’ll be easily able to find a webinar to suit.

Cindy: You know the funny thing, even if you totally goof, this “professional” introduction, it won’t really matter because people are going to forget. You’re on camera for maybe 30 seconds to a

minute doing the introduction, and then you hand over to someone that’s very confident and great with the audience, they do this a lot of times. Even if you totally screw up the introduction, it’s not the end of the world either, is it.

Walt: What we’ve just done is take away every reason why you shouldn’t be buying.

Cindy: There you go.

Walt: You can rough up the introduction and still do extremely well in a webinar, which I’ve done and which we know works, then you’re in good company, you’ll be fine. Cindy: Absolutely.

Walt: Just get it done. Yeah, my tip would be just get it done. Cindy: Just go for it.

Cindy: All right. Thank you so much, Walt, for coming in here and sharing so many gems. I hope our listeners have had a lot of great notes to take and will be able to move on in webinars. Thanks heaps for joining us.

Walt: My pleasure, great to see you. Cindy: All right, bye.