- Background.
A UK-based training company was offering high-ticket property investment mentoring courses costing £5,000 to £10,000.
- Historically, they would hold free two-hour “taster sessions” across the UK and Spain to introduce potential clients to their business opportunity, with a view to upselling them to their high-ticket offer on the day.
- They used mainly Facebook & Google ads to generate approximately 1000 to 1500 new leads each month.
- This yielded average monthly sales of £45,000-£65,000 and it was barely profitable after overheads were accounted for.
Taster events were time consuming and expensive to host.
- Attendance was based on travelling distance to the venue: in general, people would not travel more than 25 miles to an event.
- Poor attendance rates – often less than 50 percent of event subscribers actually attended.
- The perception of “taster sessions” had become jaded.
- Attendees were often poorly qualified and not necessarily the target market.
- The company was spending £15,000 to 20,000 a month on paid advertising, creating an initial negative cash flow in the first three months as the sales cycle was around 90 days or more.
- It was difficult to get hold of, and follow up with, potential leads from the event: this meant that leads went cold fast.
Problem.- Solution.
After consultation with the company, they implemented the following recommendations:
- Set up an ‘evergreen’ webinar.
- Push ALL new leads through the webinar initially.
- At the end of the webinar, invite anyone who was interested in finding out more to apply for an appointment with a sales consultant.
- As part of the application process, request all leads to complete a fact-find questionnaire.
- ONLY allow qualified prospects to schedule a call.
- Offer lower-ticket training courses to ALL other prospects.
Within 60 days of implementing the new system, the client reported:
- Dramatically reduced costs.
- Over 337 percent improvement in conversions, resulting in first-month sales of £205,000 (7 x £10,000 + 27 x £5,000).
- Sample cost savings included:
- £1000/week venue, travel and accommodation costs.
£1000/week staffing costs. - This equates to over £100,000 a year in direct cost savings.
The increased sales were due to:
- Greater reach: Via the webinar, the company was able to make its presentation to over three times more people in the first month alone (674 people compared with 200 monthly attendants with the previous system).
- A higher volume of better-qualified prospects: The sales team quickly reported that the leads passing through the automated webinar funnel were better qualified. With the previous system, 3-5 percent of attendees at a free taster session would convert to a £5,000 to £10,000 mastermind course. In the first 30 days after the webinar, over five percent of attendees converted (34 sales).
Other major benefits of the solution included:
- Time saving: With the previous system, the company was spending a huge amount of time trying to contact leads. On average it took 3.7 call attempts to reach a new lead, by which time they’d often gone cold or gone to a competitor.
- Significant staffing reductions: Instead of having to make 3000-6000 outbound calls each month to prospects, it became less than 200 outbound calls. This halved the number of salespeople required from an initial team of four to two (saving £1500 a week in salaries).
- Happier employees: Importantly, the sales team felt more motivated as they were only speaking to qualified prospects, who had pre-booked an appointment to speak to them.
Because of the success of the webinars so far, we’ve been retained to consult and build out further webinars for their business.
- These have included webinars based on specific investment opportunities within the business and for areas of new product development.
Summary & Next Steps.
