The Step Everyone Skips Before They Launch

  Sam Vander Wielen: You’ve been watching other people’s launches from the outside. Those big revenue numbers, the sold out offers, the We Hit Our Goal in 24 hours Instagram stories, and you want that too. You want a launch that actually works, that brings in real money for your business, and that justifies all the work you’ve been putting in.

But every time you try something is off. Maybe the sales trickle in slower than you hoped. Maybe you’re doing all the right launch things and it’s just still crickets, and you’re starting to wonder if it’s your emails, your offer, your timing, or honestly, if it’s just you. Here’s what I wanna tell you today.

It’s probably none of those things. The real issue is happening way before launch week ever starts, and today I’m gonna show you exactly what that is and what to build instead, so that your next launch has actual chompers waiting for it.

And don’t worry, by the end of this episode, you’ll know what chompers means.

So I have to welcome you or welcome you back to On Your Terms®. On Your Terms®, is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses. And I can’t think of a better way to be profitable in your business than having a good launch or a good sale. Like in today’s episode, I’m using the term launch. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a live launch or a big thing, but we’re gonna talk about making sales in your business.

Before we do. I have much, much, much more important business to get to. I have to say hello to Luke and Emily because I have to tell you, Luke and Emily are my neighbors and they’re adorable. I love them and both of them listen to the podcast with their mom, Jen and I gave Jen a shout out weeks ago, and I have not heard the end of it since then from Luke and Emily about why were we not featured on the podcast. And they are right. So hello to Luke and Emily. This is not even enough of an intro, but hello, Luke and Emily. I’ll see you guys later.

I also wanna remind you to, if you have not gotten a copy of my book yet, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy. We’ll be talking about it a lot today because in the book I really lay out my launch and sales strategy and all of that kinda stuff, everything that we’re talking about today, building an audience is all outlined in the book, but if you haven’t yet purchase a copy of my book anywhere books are sold by April 29th because that way you’ll actually get an invite to my live book club call at the end of this month. So all you have to do is purchase my book anywhere books are sold. Head to samvanderwielen.com/book you fill out the form on that page, and you’ll automatically get an invite to my live book club call, where we’ll be implementing it all together.

So the idea for this episode actually started because people like, especially my friends, are always surprised by what my week of launches looks like. Like whenever I’m in the middle of a launch, I’m always getting texts from people being like, are you okay? Like, how’s everything going? How are you managing the chaos?

And I’m fine. I’m walking? Like I’m out to lunch. I’m at the gym, like I’m not doing anything. So that’s not because I don’t do anything or because it’s like lazy or whatever, things are that automated, we work really hard. But I think that people assume that launches themselves always have to be insane and chaotic and crazy and stressful, and I decided a really long time ago that, that just wasn’t gonna be a thing for me, and I wasn’t going to navigate it that way first and foremost.

I take a very, I don’t know, holistic kind of mindset to launches where I’m like I’m not gonna strangle this thing to be something that it’s not. I’m gonna do my best. And then we see what happens. And from there, it’s data, it’s feedback, it’s learning, it’s okay. It’s experimentation.

By the way, I wanna like caveat everything I’m saying today because I, I feel defensive about this and maybe I don’t need to feel defensive about this, but I feel very defensive about being like, it was like this before because I’m, I’m kind of reaching this point in my business now. Where every single time I say anything about anything, I get the whole, yeah. But yeah, but yeah, but yeah, buts, right? The must be nice, the like, but you have a team, but you do ads, but you have this, but you don’t care about money anymore. Well, that’s news to me. Every single thing that I’m saying to you are things, attitudes, whatever that I took when I had little mini launches on my own. No team, no Facebook ads, no anything else, right? So I, I just like this stuff did not pop up because I have big launches. I think if you’re gonna listen to me about anything I say today, I actually think this is a really like crucial point.

I had to be able to do all those things myself in order to hand it off to other people. So like I was able to get a team and have such incredible, I have three people who work for me, by the way. I think sometimes people treat me like I’ve 600 people, like working behind the scenes.

So we have one full-time, one part-time, and another even more part-time. And so we are not a, we are a very small but mighty team. We all work really hard and we’re all like really good at at our little lanes, right? And like what we do. But the thing is that like I had to have done certain things in a certain way to then hand those off to people who then, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that all three people who work for me have worked for me for a really long time.

So like, then everything just, it’s like, I don’t know, like Lego pieces kind of like falling into place, right? Like everything. But that foundation was already set and so I’m just caveating this conversation because. I wanna invite you to see how many stories you might interject in your own mind as you’re listening to me today, and you’re like yeah, but that’s because she can do this. That’s because she does that. That’s because she has a team now, everything I’m saying to you can be implemented on a varying scale, varying degree, right?

And it can be done where you are right now. In fact, I would argue it has to be done where you are right now in order for you to get to where you want to go, right? So I’ll step off my extremely high soapbox, but it’s just something that I’ve been dealing with a lot lately where I’m hearing, like every time I say something, everybody has all these like qualifiers as to like, why everything’s so easy for me now. And I’m like, I don’t think you understand what it takes to get here. Um, and that I was doing all those things that you think you can’t do ’cause you don’t have a team. I was doing it all myself and so like, it didn’t all just happen when I had a team, right?

So I think a lot of this comes from this place of like people thinking that launches are insane and that can be decided.

You can set that mindset when you are doing it yourself. For one, because you can decide that. You’re just one person and you can only run a launch how you can run a launch, like there’s only one, one person 24 hours in a day and so many working hours.

But for me, I decided that launches were going to be this experimentation phase and they were going to be what they were going to be. And I also decided very early on that I decided how I showed up. I didn’t let the launch and how it was going or not going sometimes, um, dictate how I continued to show up in it.

So I really like stayed locked in so if you’re doing a five day sale or a 10 day sale, like I stayed committed the entire time because if you don’t you will hardwire how your launch will go, right?

And so I had launches that I felt like were going terribly or like down the tubes, and I stayed committed and at the end things picked up and actually ended up doing a lot better than I thought I would. So I, I really do think that that like mindset and that strategy pays off.

But there’s a reason that now my weeks of launches especially are, are so chill. Honestly. Sometimes I look around on the week of a launch and I’m like, is there something I’m supposed to be doing? Because it almost like feels like this is supposed to be harder. Right?

But the idea here is that it’s kind of like a wedding. I really think launches are very similar. You do all this work like way in advance. So it is a lot of work and it’s, and then maybe some of that work in like spread out over time, like a long period of time where you’re just like chipping away, you’re chipping away and you don’t really feel it because it’s done over such a long period of time in advance.

And so my launches are so chill because for one, I’m more seasoned at it now, right? And so now I’m just kind of like, it is what it is. We’ll do like fine. There’s a certain level of confidence that also comes after time of being like, I kind of have a feeling of like how, at least like a foundational of how well we’ll do.

Honestly, a lot of it is just a numbers game. And so I see like how many people sign up for a webinar. I roughly know what our conversion rate is, and so I can, I can kind of predict right, within a, a reasonable degree of certainty as like to how it will go, right?

Going back to how I used to do launches, uh, you know, when I was doing this more on my own, because I fully recognize that this is probably the situation that you’re in and that you’re probably planning your own launches yourself right now. Pre big launches, I did pretty much everything the way that I did it now, except that I did it myself, right, and probably made a lot more mistakes and like messed stuff up, and was probably a much more open to experimentation because I was still finding my way of doing my own launches and like still finding my way of marketing my own products, right?

But I do think it’s important to tell you that I had my first six figure and multi six figure launch before anyone worked for me at all. And I had less than 10,000 people on my email list, which 10,000 people is a lot of people, but a lot less than what we have now, right? So people say, I have big launches now because I have the team.

I run, a lot of ads, or I do this thing or that thing. And I do think that there is a, a way you can incrementally build this up yourself now and implement a lot of these things along the way, like the pre-planning for a launch, um, and because a launch does well, set aside a little bit of that money to invest in bringing in maybe your first step is a VA so that you don’t have to manage all the emails or the customer support of like, somebody’s credit card’s not working, or they can’t access the course, or something like that, right? So that’s, that’s how you start chipping away at like maximizing your time, money, and your effort.

And so I could sit here and teach you, actually, my initial idea was to talk more about like the structure of my launches, like in terms of timing and how I kind of reverse engineer, like I pick my date and then I reverse engineer. But that is literally what I break out. I have like a little calendar section in my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy all about this.

So it literally walks you through how to, like, if you’re gonna do a live webinar or some sort of live date, like live event of some sort, how you pick the date, and then how you back out and exactly the step-by-step plan that I, I encourage you to take.

In order to properly warm up, nurture and then convert your audience to purchase your thing. I even talk about what your sales emails should look like, the sales sequence, email, like all of that stuff it’s all in the book.

The thing is that since I had my really big launch in, uh, February. We have had like a blowup of inbox and dms and texts, and I’ve gotten voice notes, voxer, Marco Polo, literally every app you can think of, it’s been like, ding, ding, ding.

I have had people asking me how did you do it? How’d you do it? How’d you do it? Right? And it’s really interesting to me from a mindset perspective, when I see, uh, some people have sent me take it upon themselves to send me a bullet point list, like no joke, bullet point list. Long, long ones, um, full of various, specific questions that are all very good questions.

Like, what time did you send out your emails? How many emails did you send? What time was your webinar? How many webinars did you do? Right? Good questions. I get it.

But it’s really interesting to me because when I hear those questions I’m like, oh, they’re actually really missing the point. It’s really not about what time I held my webinar.

In fact, I used to do three webinars when I would do a live launch, which like, I don’t even know, God Bless, past me because I don’t have the capacity or energy. I would fall asleep by the midpoint to the second one now, but I, I would need a snack break for sure, but I, um, I stopped doing three.

And I also used to freak the heck out about what time my webinar was at because I was like, well, are the most people signing up from the East coast or the West coast? What’s the perfect time that meets people in the middle? What about people who work? How am I going to accommodate them? I would drive myself crazy, right?

Do you know when my webinar really took up? When I went down to one, I picked the best time for me and I just went with it. And then I learned how to promote the heck out of a replay, right? So the answer, this is just like one example amongst a million, but the the answer is not what time you hold your webinar.

There’s no secret to how many emails you send. What might have worked for your audience, you know, wouldn’t work for mine and vice versa. I’ve sent fewer emails and made less money. I’ve sent more emails and made more money, but pissed more people off, right? There’s like, there’s, this is a such a nuanced conversation.

But really the point that I think all of these things are missing, and the reason that I just don’t think it’s helpful for me to sit here today and tell you, like, do these five things in this order, and therefore you will have a $500,000 launch. Besides the fact that I just know in my bones that that’s not true and that’s not how it works, and I’m not like that, and I won’t ever sell you something that’s like, do these five things and you’ll do that.

It’s, it’s not true and it won’t happen. So I’m not gonna pretend like it will. I think that in order to have big launches, in order to make more sales, in order to have a big hit of your sales, sell out, blah, blah, blah. You have to have big chompers. Okay? Now this is where you’re gonna have to hear me out.

You’d be like, what the heck are you talking about? I was joking with my friend Michelle beforehand that my grandfather, Moishe, he used to call his his dentures, chompers. So chompers. So that’s what makes me laugh when I think about it. But that’s not what I mean, I do not mean that you need to go out and buy big dentures.

What I mean is that you need to work on getting people in your community around you who are listening to you, who want something from you and who are waiting for you to solve their problems and baked into everything that I just said, you have to know what their problems are. You have to know what the solution is that they’re looking for, and you know you need to know how to speak their language.

In other words, you need to build a community of people who are ready to chomp, right? They’re ready to go. When you say, I’ve got this thing, boom, they’re ready. Right? So everybody wants to copy my launch strategy. They wanna, they, you know, I can’t tell you how many people have asked me for my webinar slides to watch my webinar, blah, blah, blah. It’s not that. Because you can take my webinar slides and if you don’t have anybody to show it to, it’s not gonna help.

You can take my webinar slides. But if you have not created a product speaks to the people’s pain that actually provides ’em a solution because you understand what the solution is that they really want and you know how to do it in their language, it’s not gonna help. Right?

And so what people don’t understand about my slides, my webinar, what time my webinar is, how many emails I sent, what time I sent the emails is that I have spent the last 10 years. Understanding well, and many years before that, you know, being in law school, becoming a lawyer, practicing as a lawyer, so understanding the legal system and working with hundreds of business clients there too, right?

But last 10 years in online business. Really understanding what it is that you are confused about, what you’re concerned about, that you just wanna start an online business the right way. You don’t know how to do it. The legal stuff’s confusing, it’s overwhelming. You frankly don’t wanna deal with it. You just wanna get it over with.

And all you know is that you wanna get back to doing what you do best, which is producing content, taking care of clients, living your life, right? So I understand that. I’ve taken a lot of time and, and energy and effort to understand how you speak about all of that. Everything that I just mentioned, because it’s not frankly, the same language that I speak.

And so I’ve learned about what your concerns are. I’ve worked really hard to put my ego aside, at least like forward facing in terms of knowing what, what you are concerned about and how what I’m concerned about doesn’t really matter right now. And really speaking to what you are going through and what your goals are and what you are concerned about.

Yeah, so that is why my webinar slides work. That’s why my pitch at the end of a webinar works because it is painstakingly, I hate to use the word strategic, but it’s like, it’s intentional I guess I would say, right? As to like knowing how to weave in throughout my webinar, for example, little touches of speaking to people’s pain, showing them examples of people who used to be in pain like them, but now aren’t in pain, right?

Speaking to the solution, speaking to how this, my product is essentially the gap between those two things, and it’s going to resolve that for them. I know how to do it. I know how to do it through a lot of practice. It’s not gonna help you if you just steal my slides or my time or the whatever else. My, my subject lines.

Somebody asked me for all my subject lines, it’s not gonna work. That’s kind of my point, right? It’s like, it’s so funny to think like. Oh, give me your subject line. What was your top subject line? I’m like, who the hell cares what my top subject line was? Right? I mean, the only person that matters to was me because the point is that my subject line is very intentionally written to speak to my ideal person who’s in a specific kind of pain, who I specifically provide a solution to.

So unless you have like some weird ways, like it’s some weird alternate universe where like even if you were my competitor, you don’t have the same person. Right? And like you would literally have to be me.

Okay. Okay. So if we know now that we need chompers, right? We need those people who are ready to chomp at what you’ve got to offer, let’s like break down a little bit more what chompers are and how do we get them.

So chompers are people who have a problem, a problem that you ideally solve, and who are as aware of their problem and perhaps the solution to their problem as you want them to be.

Now, I’m gonna pause here because this is a really important thing that a lot of people don’t think about. There’s not a right or wrong answer here. It’s just that you need to know the answer for you and your business and your marketing.

You need to know how far along they are on the problem and and solution awareness scale, right? Which I talk a lot about in my book as well. But are you selling to people who know they have a problem, but they just don’t know what to do about it? Are you selling to people who have a problem? They know what the solution would be to that problem, but they haven’t found the solution yet.

Are you selling to people who are problem aware, solution aware, are maybe looking at a lot of solutions, but you’re trying to pitch yours as the best solution? A lot of times what I see, probably one of the biggest mistakes I see is people pitching a lot to a clientele without even kind of knowing it or thinking about it.

People who aren’t even problem aware. Then you spend a lot of your time trying to convince them that this problem is really important. This would be like, I don’t know, pitching to people to get them like a, a smoking cessation program, right? Like pitching to people to get them to stop smoking. To only people who aren’t interested in stopping smoking.

That’s kind of like what I’m talking about. It’s like, D.A.R.E commercials. Right? Like you, you’d be like screaming at them like it kills you and it’s so bad for you and look at all the things it does for you. And they’re like, yeah, I, no, I don’t see any issue with it. You’re not gonna convince them. Right? So I personally am not trying to like market to people who are like I wanna start a business, but like, I’m not, I didn’t even know that there’s legal stuff. I don’t really care. I’m not somebody who follows the rules. I’m not here to try to convince them that following the rules is important, that there’s a real way to do this. That, you know, they can’t just, they’re not above the law.

Like that’s not really my person. My person is the person who is like, like I know that there’s something I’m supposed to be doing here.

I know this is a problem, I just don’t know what to do about it.

That’s literally, literally what my ideal customer says. So then I’m coming in and I’m like, hello, problem. I have the solution. Like I’m good to go. So this is why I use a lot of language, like, dunno what to do, dunno what you don’t know about legal. Like here’s the solution. Literally that is what I say. Right?

So all that to say that you, you need to decide. Where is your person at on that scale? Does your marketing match up with that? Right? Are you marketing to a bunch of people who aren’t even problem aware, trying to convince them it’s a problem, but yet you want clients who are ready to go? And are looking for a solution.

So we’re talking to the wrong people, right? So these chomper people are people who have a problem that you solve, who are wherever they’re at on the problem and solution scale, and who are ready to take action or would be if they knew about a solution, right? So that’s where I like to kind of play that problem, problem ish aware, kind of ready for a solution, maybe don’t even know what the solution is, that’s totally fine, but then you hit yourself as the solution or your product.

Our goal is to have these chompers follow you on social media if you’re on it, um, or whatever platform. If you have a podcast, YouTube, whatever we, ideally, my goal would be to get them onto your email list. You have a nice consistent way to reach them. And then these chompers are also over time engaged followers because you are speaking to them directly.

You’re working on using calls to action that actually get people to reply and engage and they feel like they know you. You’ve shared little bits of yourself so that they have some sort of connection point with you and they’re responding and there you go. There’s your chompers, right?

So this actually came up the other day because one of my friends had asked for help because she right now needs to generate revenue in her business and she wants to have, she told me that her goal was to have a big influx of clients and she wanted to create a digital product that sold on its own, that brought in a lot of consistent revenue, right? Probably very relatable for you.

So she had come to me because she wanted me to just kind of give her this step-by-step plan, right? So like, how do I run a launch that will just get me a bunch of clients? How do I create a digital product and then launch it so that I get a bunch of sales, right? A natural question, very similar to the ones I’ve been getting since my launch.

But I paused and I thought about it and I’m like, of course I could rattle off 9 million strategies and steps and ideas of things you can do to sell to your clients and sell a digital product.

But I asked her, where are these buyers right now? Where are they coming from? Right? And our conversation pretty much in that moment went from like a how to plan a launch like yours kind of conversation to like, oh, I don’t have anyone to sell this to so like there’s not really, if I go through all these steps of like building out a live webinar and then having a million emails and having all the things, like all the pieces, she was originally asking me about who are we getting to come to this thing, right?

How, where are they coming from now? This was the biggest difference. Between kind of where I am now in my business and where I was, uh, eight years ago. And when I was doing this by myself, right, that I referred to earlier. I didn’t have any ads, right? I wasn’t running any meta ads. I didn’t start meta ads until the end of 2019, right before COVID, actually, and very lucky accident.

And so I was just running this to my organic social media, which again, was much smaller at the time. And then my organic email list, which was much smaller at the time, and so I kind of had this little baby pool of people. And so when I did my first, very, very first webinar that I held live, I had 66 people sign up for it. And I was so excited. I was so excited. And I remember thinking, and people always say this, so like I, you’ll have to forgive me if this is just like a tired analogy, but if you imagine speaking to a room full of 66 people, you’d probably be scared shitless. And so like, you know, you, we downplay it and we think it has to be a lot.

But like, I still would get nervous speaking to a room full of 66 people. I just gave a webinar for 11,500 people, so it doesn’t really change. You’re always nervous if you imagine it in person, right? So we all start somewhere. So I did this webinar and got the people to sign up who were in my community.

The issue is when you go to run it again, it’s like, um, it’s like a refillable pool. Like you need to have enough new people. Because now if I go to run this webinar, let’s say six months later. How much has my audience, my chomper pool changed, right? To get all these new people to sign up. So then maybe the second time I got like 150 people to sign up.

Right? And then, but it’s like you have to get enough new people in. So you have to have this constant kind of lead generation, right? This building of your audience in order to get enough people in to continue to grow this thing over time, even when you’re doing it by yourself. So this is essentially what I was talking to my friend about.

Like we have to build up the audience of the people that we’re going to invite to this webinar, right? And then yes, and then we’re going to convert some of those people and that’s great. But to sell a digital product, for example, to get the numbers for the amount of money that you want to do, like that you want to generate, you probably have to have a lot of people. So let’s like back up and look at this more realistically.

And so we talked about this idea of building the audience, but we also talked about a very, very important distinction that I need you to know about because what I’m not saying is that you have to wait until you build an audience in order to start running sales or to run a launch. We do both of these things simultaneously, but I do think that setting expectations is very, very important because it’s really about the size of the pool of the people that we’re talking to, and also the value of the thing that you’re selling that will dictate how much you’re really able to do. So a realistic conversion rate in any given launch, for example, like a sale to your email list is 1 to 2%, right? 1 to 2%. If you have a hundred people on your email list, do the math, right?

It’s, it takes a lot. So in order to. Get these like high volume, like if you’re trying to build a business that’s like, oh, I, I wanna sell this digital product that just sells in my sleep and that’s gonna make all of my money. It’s like, okay, then where’s the pool of people? Where are the chompers? How are we building this thing? Right? And we can do the, simultaneously, we can build the pool, we can build the audience while selling it, but you need to have realistic expectations along the way. Now my friend Tarzan Kay, uh, is copywriter, she has very rifle points. She always talks about this, about how like. People forget that if they’re in the online coaching space, for example, like if you’re selling kind of a high ticket coaching package.

Your 1 to 2% conversion could be fine, right? Or like, let’s say if you sold four coaching packages and you charge a decent amount, you don’t need to sell what I need to sell, or you don’t need to sell like the, uh, compared to the person who’s trying to build a $97 membership, right? Like, so it’s, it’s different.

And so we have to adjust based on what you are doing. But I think it’s really important to keep in mind, like industry standard, that there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s a numbers problem. It’s just a numbers problem. If you have 500 people, a thousand people on your email list, do the math of a 1 to 2% conversion for what you’re selling, how much is that right?

And if somebody signs up to sign up for your coaching, you’re not gonna necessarily get an equal amount of people signing up the very next month if we haven’t refilled the pool enough to have like new, you know, fresh meat, for lack of a better of a better term. But we’re not gonna have enough fresh meat in the pool in order to convert more people.

My friends in the online business industry make fun of me because like literally on Saturday, my, my launch is always end on Friday. On Saturday, I always turn to Instagram stories and I create a really, you know, kind of well thought out Instagram story about getting people onto my email list.

And for some reason it’s always like a good one. It always works really well, I think, ’cause Saturdays work well too. But anyway, I, I always turn to it literally the, the following day after my launches. And for me it’s just kind of like a little mindset thing. Like I always do it on Saturday. I might not do it again for like a week, but I do it that way because it’s a reminder and a signal to myself that the moment that a launch is over, I am boom back in building mode. I am back in getting enough new people, new fresh meat back in the pool and get, and building the list back up, getting new people in who are problem aware. Who I’m now positioning myself as the solution, my product, as a solution.

So I, I do that just as my, like to myself to kind of like shift into that mode. And it also helps me because it allows me to not be in both modes at once and like when I’m in launch mode and I’m leading up to launch for probably a a solid month, month and a half before I can’t be building at the same time, right. And that’s really not the focus. It allows me just to kind of drop it and be like, right now the focus is to get as many people as possible to sign up for my webinar, come to that webinar, like it need what I have and become a new customer.

And then the moment that’s over, I have to start building. And it’s like time to plan. It must be like how wedding planners feel, right? Like the moment that the wedding is done, they’re just like. Up tomorrow to plan the next one that’s, that’s coming up. That’s kind of how we all operate.

So in order to do all of this, everything I’m talking about and like, I don’t wanna leave you hanging, and my point is just like, Hey, this all takes a lot of time and you know, the conversion rates are really low. I’m not trying to leave you hanging. So if I were you, these are the three things that I would focus on in order to build your audience, build uh, an audience full of chompers who are ready to go because most people only focus on one of the things that I’m about to mention, but you actually need all three.

The first is lead generation, so that’s where are we finding people and how are we nurturing them. So where are these people actually coming in? Like what is the portal essentially? What’s the entry point? Where are they coming from? If you’re not doing ads, then it’s organic marketing, right? It’s being on social media, it’s blogging on your website, creating a YouTube channel, publishing your podcast, writing on substack. It’s some kind of thing, like a net that’s going out every week or whoever trying to capture new people. So where are these people coming from and then where are we nurturing them? Is it that same platform? Are we asking ’em to go to somewhere else? Like once they follow you on YouTube, are you asking them to subscribe to your email list?

Like where are we kind of capturing people and then where are we nurturing them? Yeah, obviously this is where you have to think about what you’re posting, right? So like on that platform itself, are you posting content that is capturing the right people? Are you talking consistently about what you do and sort of on the DL like talking about your product where you know, I will give an example and be like, oh, that’s something that comes up in the Ultimate Bundle®, which by the way, is my signature program that gives you a pack of 10 legal templates and all of the trainings you need to have to start an online business the right way, like you can work in it.

It doesn’t literally have to be sale. You just start to learn how to talk about it in your content more consistently so that people are very warmed up and kind of ready to go by the time you actually are launching or putting something on sale.

The second thing you need to do is work on product perfection. So, so often people wanna focus on how do you make a lot of sales, but we don’t often talk about how do you make a product itself that’s actually going to make a lot of sales because the product itself is so good. If you’ve read my book, which hopefully by now, you either have or you’re gonna go buy, so you can come to the live book club call at the end of this month.

But if you’ve read my book, you know, I talk about this at nauseum because I talk about how if you build a product that actually works, so it like offers some sort of benefit or solution or transformation depending on what you sell. And it actually does that people by their very nature will be happy with that.

And when people are happy with that, they tend to tell other people about it or they tell you about it. And then you’re able to use that fodder, you know, to further promote that product on social media or whatever else.

The product itself has to actually work. Otherwise they’re not only not gonna tell other people about it, they might even ask for refunds and things like that. Also, when the product itself is really good and like positioned in a way that is really like demonstrating that it’s the solution to the problem that this person is now aware of and that you’ve either brought further awareness of, or you’ve just like really spoken to them and they feel seen about it. Then the product is gonna be like the natural seatbelt click moment of like, that’s exactly what I need because I’ve recognized the problem. She’s told me what the solution is, and then there’s this product. Like it just, it’s a no brainer.

And the third thing you have to have in place is a sales system. So what system do you have in place to bring them from being a follower to a buyer? So we talked about lead generations. You’re creating content that’s hopefully catching the right people, right? And you’ve created this product. It’s kind of like I see those two things as like two ends of a pole, right? Because you’re catching the right people and then you’ve got this product on the end, but what’s the like, I don’t know, like the train that’s essentially like shooting them through from that first part of like capturing them all the way through to actually needing the product.

So one of those systems could be that you do something similar to what I do where you have a webinar and then people sign up for that webinar, and then there’s a series of emails. It could be something else. It could just be that you spend two weeks, what I like to call a dedicated sprint.

Like you spend two weeks emailing your list in a very methodical way, but emailing your list maybe a little more than normal. About your product and pitching them to buy it. Right? They’re putting it on sale. Create some urgency, get do something that gets them to just move and take some action. Right now, you like solve the problem of like, why buy now and I could buy six months from now and do that through some sort of sale or bonus or extra like live situation with you or something like that, right?

So it could just be that once a quarter you do that, right? Or something like this. But there has to be something in place that methodically moves them along.

So I’m hoping that in today’s episode you realize that for one, you need to give yourself a lot of grace and compassion of, like, that this stuff takes a lot of time. And I know that it’s, I, I was in the position when I just like wanted it. I wanted to be there already and I wasn’t there already. And that’s a very frustrating place to be.

So I see that and I recognize that. I guess I also hope by talking about this though, you see that like sometimes what we see other people doing online, if, if it’s even true, like what some people are even saying, but the, the ones that we trust and believe, you know, we all know who those are. If you believe these people, then you, you, so I’m hoping by sharing this story today, that you just see like, maybe I’m not quite appreciating how many steps there were in the journey and how this is a much bigger answer than just what time we send the emails or, you know, those kinds of things.

As much as we all wanna jump to the kind of like copy and paste strategy. I think it’s really important to slow down, answer some of the questions that we’ve talked about today and step back and do this, right? Right. Build the audience. Build the audience of the people who are chomping at the bit to get whatever it is that you’re going to sell.

And you might listen to me today and realize you have a lead problem, right? Maybe you have a great product and you have a sales system in place already, but you’re just not capturing the right people. And so maybe you’re in your to-do after today is listening to this episode and be like, I’m just gonna focus on my lead generation, getting the right people in, because now I have a great product to send them to and I have a way to send them through the sales system.

I’m just not capturing the right people. Or maybe you have a killer social media strategy and you’re doing great with lead generation, but you have nowhere to send them. Like, it’s almost like you have like half of a lead gen. Right? So you’re like capturing people on social, but you’re not really sending them anywhere, which is where maybe a sales system breaks down.

So I’ll invite you to reach out to me, send me a dm, respond to my email, and let me know after listening to this episode, what have you kind of identified as the gap in your process?

Are you just realizing that you just maybe need some more time? You were jumping ahead, or is it that you’ve identified one of these three things? Do you have a lead gen problem? Maybe you’ve got to work on your product and making sure it actually matches up to what people want from you, or do you feel like you just don’t have the sales system to move these very good chompers that you got sitting around in order to actually become buyers?

So I’d love to hear from you what’s coming up for you after this episode. And with that, thank you. So much for listening. Go grab a copy of my book anywhere books are sold. Head to samvanderwielen.com/book so that you can join us for the book club at the end of the month. I can’t wait for it. I’m so excited to see you there. Thanks for listening. I’ll chat with you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.