Tag: Zach Hesterberg

Ep 572: Using Paid Virtual Events to Scale Your High Ticket Offer with Zach Hesterberg

AJV (00:34):
Everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. AJ Vaden here. Super excited to have this conversation today, one, because I know Zach and I believe this is going to be of immense value to everyone. But two, I’m also super excited ’cause I shared this with him before I hit record. I’m so selfishly invested in learning this information that this to me is like, I’m just over here with like, like a, you know, a girl on the first day of school with her pen and notebook ready to take notes. And so should you as I always do here’s who this podcast is for, and this is why you should stick around. If you would like to know how to test and offer before you invest time, money, energy and resources into it, this is the episode for you, right? If you wanna know how to sell high ticket offers could be coaching, consulting masterminds, communities without taking one-on-one sales calls or big, or building a huge sales team.
AJV (01:34):
This is the episode for you. If you wanna know if you should be hosting paid events versus free events, this is the episode for you. And if you wanna know what the biggest mistakes are with hosting live events today, then this is an episode you do not want to miss. So let’s get right into it. Let me introduce you to the one, to the only. Zach Hesterberg. He is the founder of paid events, helping high ticket coaches, consultants, and course creators scale through paid virtual events with nearly a decade in marketing, Zach has helped generate six and seven figure paydays while selling over 15,000 event tickets. Y’all, that’s awesome. Unlike traditional funnels that rely on unreliable sales teams, his paid event method attracts high net worth premium clients, increases conversions, and creates predictable revenue without burnout. Who doesn’t want that? Zach, welcome to the show,
KH (02:33):
Aj. I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me, by the way. Fantastic intro. You are a fantastic podcaster, .
AJV (02:40):
Well, you know, if all else fails, I could always go into MCing, you know,
KH (02:45):
That’s, that’s fair. That’s fair. I’ve always said, I’ve always said, if I had a, if I had a secondary life, I’d always wanna be like a radio DJ or an mc. So I’m, I’m right there with you.
AJV (02:53):
That’s never too late. Never too late. Yeah. All right, well, just to help our audience get to know you a little bit I’d love to just start with, how’d you get into this?
KH (03:04):
Yeah, so paid events specifically that came probably 2020 I was doing, so I already had a marketing agency. Been doing that since 2015. Started in college, just kinda working with some local businesses. And 2020 came around and I was working with a couple clients more so just optimizing their sales process. I was, people were coming into us for help with Facebook ads mm-hmm . And I was finding that Facebook ads, like you could send traffic into anyone’s website or into anyone’s sales process, but if the sales process is inefficient, they’re not gonna make money. And so, or they’re at least not gonna be happy with the profits. And so I had a client, his name is Jay Long, he’s from Australia. He coaches wedding photographers how to build up their wedding their, their wedding photography business. And he’d hired me because he was hosting a virtual event.
KH (03:50):
It was called the Wedding Photography Summit. And he reached out, he said, Hey, I know that you do a lot of stuff with sales processes. I’m selling $7 tickets for this upcoming summit having a hard time scaling up ads. And I also have some like order bumps and, and one click upsells that have a really low take rate on, could you help me out with that? I said, yeah, no problem. So for the next eight weeks, help them scale up ad spend. Got the, the cost per ticket sold like the, the CPA down pretty low got the order bumps swapped out, and it started working really well. We sold over 8,000 tickets. That was my first ever virtual event. Wow. And a week before the event, well, actually it was the week of the event, it was our last call of our consulting engagement. I said, so Jai, what are you gonna pitch during your event? And he said, I wasn’t planning on pitching anything. What do you mean? Like, I was just, I’m hosting a, a paid event. Like I don’t, I don’t wanna pitch anything like these people have paid to be here. I said, brother, do you hate money ?
AJV (04:44):
I was like, you’ve got 8,000
KH (04:46):
Of your best customers coming to you to learn how to build up their business. You have a coaching program for 2K, you should at least offer that. Like, because an event is only a catalyst to get someone transformation after the event’s over. Like, there’s so many people that will go to a live event, whether it’s in person or virtual. They get all hyped up, they’re excited, and two days, five days, few weeks after the event’s over. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. You’ve not taken action on anything. And typically that’s because there was not a real transformation that occurred during the event. You got excited, you got into a great emotional state, but there was no action that was taken to hold you accountable to seeing that transformation through after the event was over. So that’s what I pretty much told him. And he was like, all right, well, cool. I’ll give a quick pitch. And he made another quarter million dollars in the last second. And yeah, that’s, that’s how I got started with it. And so I’ve, I’ve taken on quite a
AJV (05:37):
Bit more. Well, that’s a good entry into the business, Zach. Yeah, Good, good. First go at it. Yeah. I love that it’s like you’ve been in the marketing world for a really long time and then really kind of like honed it into this paid event space in the last, you know, six years. And so you mentioned something to me before we started that I, I kind of find most fascinating. One because it’s, it’s our current sales model. And so we have asked ourself the question of how do we continue to scale without constantly having to add more humans to our team? And it’s not like we don’t love our team. Sure. We love our team so much that we want to give them all of our love. We don’t want to add anymore. Yep. And I, you said like, you know, I believe that there’s a new path to selling how ticket offers without a one-on-one sales call, right? The sales call funnel. Yep. Tell us more about that
KH (06:34):
. Yeah, absolutely. So real quick this, this actually can be supported with what I’m about to say from the Bible. And the, I I’m not gonna push Christianity down anyone’s throat today or anything. Lord willing, you’re, you’re a believer, but if not, no big deal. You’re still gonna give value from this analogy. I was looking in the Bible not too long ago and was analyzing, like, how did Jesus start his ministry? Was he meeting with people one-on-one? Was he going door to door and having one-on-one appointments with every single potential follower of Christianity? No, not at all. He had a limited time. He understood the, the essence of time and how important it was, and he had to be really efficient. Mm-Hmm . And so if you look at like the, you know, the feeding of the 5,000 the Bible says there are 5,000 men there that he, he spoke to that day, not including women and children.
KH (07:23):
Most theologians would say there were probably 11 to 12,000 people in that crowd that day. And if you do the math and you say, well, if he was working eight hours a day and he had one hour appointments with people, eight, eight, yeah. Eight appointments per day nonstop back to back to back a hundred percent show rate. And you know, not taking any breaks, it would take him about five years and three months to have met with that many people. But he just did it in one afternoon. And it’s not, it’s not that like, it, it, it’s actually not impersonal to do that. It’s actually almost better because he, he’s doing a disservice if he has to have people meeting with him one-on-one. People want to hear from him. They don’t have to have a one-on-one with him. And so anyway, I was like, man, yeah, he used events to be able to start his ministry and even his disciples.
KH (08:16):
‘Cause Some people would say, well, you know, he had a disciple. So that’s his sales team. No, no, no. Most of his disciples were also doing sermons. It’s a far more efficient way to spread a message. And of course, you’re not gonna have a hundred percent conversion, but you could still have somewhere between a 10 to a 20% conversion pretty consistently when you’re speaking to a group of people at the same time, it’s kind of pitching in a one to many fashion. So that’s my, my inspiration behind some of this. I love that. But yeah I mean, happy to dive more into it. Like obviously there’s sales strategies that you have to deploy and you have to make sure that you’re pre handling objections and, and pre-framing people for the right reasons. But yeah, you could absolutely scale. Like I, we’ve seen the, the virtual events that we’ve hosted, we’ve seen them successfully sell anything from as low as a thousand dollars offers as high as $30,000 offers directly from virtual events where people are paying seven bucks for $9 for like really cheap. So it’s a loss leader model. You don’t, you don’t make money on the front end, typically you’ll lose money after the cost of acquisition, but you make all of your money in that backend sale.
AJV (09:17):
So this is so fascinating. So I would curious to hear from you, like, why do you think that these sales call funnels, like the call booking funnels, why do you think they’re becoming a little less effective as time goes on? Yeah.
KH (09:32):
I think it’s twofold what maybe threefold. In general, the, the reason I said twofold is because people are more sophisticated than ever before, and they’re also more skeptical than ever before. So sophistication is like they you’re, you’re probably not the only person telling this person that you can help them. There are plenty of other people that are making the exact same claims and they can go do whatever research they want. There’s more information than we need online . And so they don’t need to have these like one-on-one sales conversations that like, they ultimately know they’re just gonna get pitched to in some way, shape, or form. Like they, they know it’s typically not gonna be a super high value sales call. And so there’s that. And then also the skepticism. It’s like a lot of people have been burnt in, especially in the high ticket space.
KH (10:18):
People have made some investments that really weren’t the best fit for them, or maybe they didn’t get taken well or taken well care of. And so yeah, the, the skepticism and the, the sophistication, it’s like, it’s just really hard to sell to. And in the past you can, when those were both lower, you can easily have a quick 62nd ad that someone watches on Instagram, they watch it, they’re like, oh yeah, this is interesting. Then they click it, they opt in, they watch a quick 20 minute VSL or maybe a 90 minute webinar. They’re like, cool, yeah, I’m sold. I wanna book a call. They book a quick, a quick hour long sales call and they’re gonna buy no problem. But it’s just not happening at the rate that people would like to see at this point. And so, I, I, I always say that lead generation is easy. It’s really easy to get a lead or someone interested in working with you, but the conversion part is much harder. And that’s because most people skip the in-between step, which is the lead nurture. And so I’m finding that, and this is just my kind of hypothesis a virtual event or in-person event doesn’t really matter, is one of the most efficient ways to nurture a prospect and truly gain that know, like, and trust factor that they truly need before they’re ready to invest with you at a higher rate.
AJV (11:29):
So I have a question for you. You mentioned like seven to $9. Why so cheap? Like why not $20? Why not $50? Yeah,
KH (11:38):
Great question. Great question. I haven’t seen a whole lot of data on the 20 to $50 range. I’ve tested all out a, a good few on like the 97 to 2 97 offers, and people still use those. And so I’m, I’m not gonna sit here and say like, one is better than the other. The only reason we’ve done seven to $9, and, and actually here in about three weeks, we’ll be hosting our own event. We’re actually gonna we have the hypothesis that we think a dollar will still work, so we’re gonna do a dollar ticket because I think there’s just something powerful in the 16 digits being exchanged of, of the credit card number. But yeah, the seven to $9 came up from, honestly, that first client, Ja, he was already selling it for seven. And then the very next week I had a client, her name was Christian Boss, and she said, Hey I I, I’m curious about hosting this upcoming three day virtual event.
KH (12:26):
I was gonna make it free. What are your thoughts? I’m like, I have another client we just sold 8,000 tickets for, for $7. Like, do you wanna do that? And she did it. And a month later she had 3,500 tickets sold at a $7 price range, and she made a quarter million dollars from that as well. And I was like, huh, yeah, maybe there’s something to it. And so my hypothesis, like I’ve, I’ve tested out once again, other price ranges, but my hypothesis is that the lower the price range or the, the, the lower the, the price for the ticket, the easier it is to make that quick impulse purchase. And we’re not in it for profit on the front end. We’re in it for buy-in. And there’s a significant difference from a free event versus a paid event of any sort on the show rate as well as the backend conversion rate, because these people
AJV (13:07):
Are sure you better have some skin in the game, right? Yeah. Something.
KH (13:09):
Yeah. So, yeah, I, I don’t know, the seven to nine I, I’m open to being proven wrong. Like, our motto is, we don’t care to be right. We just wanna make money. So that’s why we’re gonna try the dollar tickets. And then we’ve tried some $27 and $47 events, but they just, the sales page conversion rate quite literally just has not been as desirable as we’d prefer. And at the end of the day, we want that cost of acquisition as low as possible.
AJV (13:32):
So that leads me to another question then. So clearly you’re not doing it for profit. Are you trying to do it for break even? Or are you fully prepared to take a loss? Oh,
KH (13:40):
Yeah, yeah. Fully prepared to take a loss. So I’ve , I’ve got a client that they spent, like, literally right now, they’re spending about $30,000 per day leading up to their upcoming event. We will do, they’ll, they’ll usually spend about $300,000 over the course of about 10 days. And they will, I mean, yeah, they’re selling $7 tickets, but their cost of acquisition can be as high as 140 bucks, which is now lovely on the, on the, on a $7 ticket. They’re losing a lot of money, they’re losing almost all of that money. But they know with predictability that they obviously started off with a smaller budget, but they know with predictability that every single time they do these events, they do them about once a month. They will make at least three x in cash collected on the, on the backend? On the spot?
KH (14:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Literally on the spot. So it’s, they’re like, okay, well we can, we can float that cash. So yeah, you can absolutely try to break even. You can add in some order bumps, some one click up sales. But most of the clients that we work with, they’re busy. Like, they’re usually multiple seven figures, oftentimes in the eight figure range. They don’t want to have to come up with new products to sell just for a funnel. Like they’re, like, at the end of the day, they, they only care about the backend profit. So as long as you have the cash to float, great do that. But if you’re really cash strapped, you could of course add in some extra one click up sales and you could try to increase the average order value.
AJV (14:57):
So then it’s Okay. So walking through this process, for anyone who’s listening to who, okay, if I had a little money to put some, you know, money into some ads, had this low ticket offering, what are you seeing is the most successful formula for the event itself? Is it a full day? You mentioned three days. Yeah. Is it a half day? Yeah.
KH (15:15):
Great question. So it does depend on your market a little bit. For example, myself, if aj, I would imagine you personally, there’s no way I’m going to get you to commit to a five day virtual event for a couple dollars. You’re not attending that because you’re too sophisticated and way too busy. Your value of time is too high. So the max that I can maybe get your attention for if it’s a sweet enough offer, is maybe two days, one hour, like, like one hour per day. That’s, that’s about the max of your attention. I, I could potentially earn as long as the offer was. Right. But if you’re selling maybe a $30,000 offer to your average nine to five consumer, you’re probably gonna need a few more than two total hours over the course of two days. mm-hmm . So in those cases, yeah, we’ll, we’ll stretch it out to about five days, but in general, we usually opt in for a multiple day event.
KH (16:08):
The reason why is, is honestly just because if you can deliver a really powerful shift on perspective in their mindset on, on day one, they’re sitting in that for another 24 hours before they get to hear from you again. And then they’re now eagerly waiting for day two, because as long as you kind of create some nice open loops that don’t totally get closed on day one, now they’re super excited for day two and you’re taking up their brain space and their mental bandwidth over the next 24 hours, and that’s only a two day event. If you wanna do a three day event, great. Now you’re, you’re kind of taking up mental bandwidth for about 72 hours of time, and they’re getting to spend in their mind, they’re getting to spend multiple days with you, but really it’s might only be an hour or two per day. So really it’s not much different than a quick little two hour session or a three hour session. But if you could break that up into multiple days, there’s a, in my opinion, a pretty strong correlation on the, just, just the experience that the customer’s having.
AJV (17:02):
So That’s so interesting. So you find that it’s better to have shorter sessions over multiple days than having all together on like a half day full day. Yep.
KH (17:11):
Yeah. By it. I guess my, my rationale behind this, and once again, I like, I could be wrong on this, but my rationale is that the bite size information is easier to digest for sure, as compared to making someone absolutely just drink through the fire hose.
AJV (17:26):
Yeah. And then their brain is so full they can’t think. Yeah.
KH (17:29):
Because if, if their brain is twofold, they can’t think, and they feel like they’ve just drank from the fire hose for four hours straight, the last thing they want to do is now go buy a multiple thousand dollar offer that you’re pitching them because they feel like they just got so much information they need to take action on that before they invest in your offer, because that would almost be poor stewardship of the information they just got. So give them bite-sized, digestible information and still, like, I would say more so radically change the way they look at whatever the area of life is that you’re helping them, whether it’s business or marketing or health or finance, whatever, like help them out with some mindset shifts. Don’t teach too, too much of the how’s. And it’s not manipulative. It’s just like if you teach too much of the how’s, they will then feel like they have to go implement all of that.
KH (18:13):
Yeah. And we all know, going back to what I just said earlier, if they are so focused on the how, and they’re focused on implementing all of that now, they’re not going to actually buy. And if they don’t buy now, they’re, they’re not actually gonna get that transformation and the accountability mm-hmm . After the event’s over. And that’s, that’s what it’s there for. Like, going back to Jesus , it’s like he wasn’t expecting your entire life to be changed over the course of that sermon. The sermon was there to change how you thought It’s the catalyst. Yeah. Yeah. It’s the catalyst. And then the true transformation is after the event’s over.
AJV (18:44):
Fascinating. And so next question I’d have is for the person listening you know, I think this is a really, you know, a big deal because first of all, you gotta have, you know, if you’re listening, you gotta have some money, right? To put into paid traffic. So is that if they don’t have any money. Yep. So this model still work, what’s just trying Absolutely. Trying to drive it organically. Have you seen that work?
KH (19:05):
Absolutely. Yeah. There’s, we have kind of four core ways that we’ll drive traffic to any event, whether you have a big budget or not. Obviously yes, ads are probably the most scalable. However, you can also leverage your email list or SMS list if you have those. If not, no big deal. I’m sure you have a few emails you could still send send invites to. But then you can also leverage your organic traffic, obviously go post on some social media. Go let your, your word of mouth network know. And then lastly, any JVs or affiliates mm-hmm . And I say JVs or affiliates, because I do look at those as two separate relationships. Jvs would be someone that you’re expecting, they’re more so going to go you know, do a full on promotion to their email list. And there’s going to be a more probably a backend rev share involved.
KH (19:52):
And so they, they’re financially incentivized for a different reason. We have seen a fun little hack I guess you could call it on the thank you page. There’s some, there’s some extra real estate you could use after someone buys a ticket on the thank you page. Instead of just saying, cool, here’s a receipt. See you there. Check your emails for more information. You could put a video on that thank you page, and you can now actually leverage that as a way to get some new traffic immediately. We’ve seen this done in two ways. Number one, we’ve seen it done where that that video is actually inviting them there. You could have a form directly below that to sign up to be an affiliate. Yeah. And you could get an affiliate code and immediately you could actually start making money. You could maybe give them a hundred percent of ticket sales a hundred percent of the proceeds of the ticket sales that they generate before the event starts.
KH (20:39):
They can potentially even have a little bit of an ROI before they even get to your event. That’s kind of fun. But the other way is just simply leveraging the power of relationships and reminding them of, Hey, look, congratulations on taking this investment, getting your ticket. I just wanna be really clear, we’ve all been to events where nothing changes after the event’s over. Mm-Hmm . Like, you’re really excited, but then you go back to your network and you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And if the people around you aren’t also getting the same level of information, you’re probably gonna go back to their level of thinking. So if you really wanna make sure that you have an incredible way to or almost a just a, a more leveraged way of, of seeing results after this event is over, get your network here. You know, whether it’s a couple business partners or a couple friends or family members, depending on your offer. Send them a link. Get them to go buy a ticket. And that way you guys can join in on this together and even, you know kind of network and, and talk about the, the ways that this can be applying to your life. And we’ll see that you could get some extra organic traffic directly from that.
AJV (21:40):
Yeah. I love that. I, I love that. Thank you Paige. ’cause That could work, not just for this event, but for anything, anything you have immediately turn it into a referral source. Yeah. An affiliates, you know, referral partner relationship. So I, I love that now. Okay. So let’s just pretend that everyone who’s listening’s, like, great. Got it. I’m going to create an event, gonna host it a couple of hours for a couple of days. Yep. I’m gonna rather put some money into it or share it organically, but wanna get some humans to show up, right? Yeah. So here’s what, here’s my next question. Mm-Hmm . What would you say are the biggest wins that you see people making when they’re hosting the live events? Okay. But then also, what are some of the biggest mistakes? So what should people be thinking to do and not to do as they’re hosting these paid events?
KH (22:29):
Okay. just wanna make sure that we’re super on the same page. You’re talking about the in event experience, or are you talking about leading up to the event?
AJV (22:38):
My, like the in event experience? Yeah.
KH (22:40):
Okay. In event experience. I think your first question was what’s some of the biggest wins or like, things that they’re doing well,
AJV (22:46):
Yeah. But what should we be doing? Yes. Okay. And then what could people stay away from? Yeah. Like biggest mistakes.
KH (22:51):
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be, what I tell you to do is also the opposite of it is the mistakes. . So yeah. So in general, pre-framing, I think this is gonna be the biggest win slash mistake you could make when you start your event. Let’s address the elephant in the room. There are two people that will be at your event. Two types of people. Person number one, they have been to events and webinars before, and they know there’s a pitch coming and they can’t trust you until they know what your pitch is. And so they have their guard up and they’re actually not going to be able to see much of a transformation or get any value from like, the thought shifts or like the, the the ways that you’re trying to help them out with their, their mindset during it. Because they’re so focused on what are they gonna pitch and, and what’s this person just trying to sell me? They’re skeptical.
AJV (23:35):
What’s this leading up to? When’s it coming? Yeah. Yep.
KH (23:38):
And then the second type of
AJV (23:38):
Person that’s me. I’m always like that at the events. I’m like, when’s it coming? What is it? Hurry up.
KH (23:43):
Yep. Yeah, I’m, I’m right there with you. And then the second type of person, they’re there genuinely thinking that their life is about to be entirely changed over the next two hours. Whether it’s one hour per day or whatever. And you can address both of these people in the same statement. You open up and say something along the lines of, Hey guys, I’m so, so excited that you’re all here today, guys, as promised, we are going to teach A, B, and C over the next few days. Whether it’s today or over the next two days or three days, whatever. It’s gonna be extremely powerful. There’s gonna be a lot of shifts in thought that you might have never had before. There’s gonna be a lot of just kind of knowledge bombs that are getting dropped. Like make sure you’re ready to take notes.
KH (24:20):
But I wanna make sure that we’re all on the same page with something. We’ve all been to events and we got some you know, value and it was exciting and then you left and nothing else happened. And so to make sure that I’m not just leaving you hanging there, just, just to call what it is, I’m going to give you an offer at the end of this event. Not gonna sit here and try to say, I’m going to like, it’s not gonna be a bait and switch. I’m actually gonna give legitimate value. You guys paid to be here, unlike a webinar you have paid to be here. Mm-Hmm . And so I will be giving some of very legitimate value. And hey, some of you guys are, do it yourselfers. You’re gonna get the value from the next couple days and you’re gonna be good to go.
KH (24:55):
You’re gonna be off to the races. You do not need to work with us. Fantastic. I’m so excited you’re here. The others of you, you know that you’d much rather have someone holding your hand or some sort of support after this event is over. ’cause You’re genuinely serious about seeing a transformation in this area of your life. Guys, I’m not just gonna leave you hanging. I will absolutely give you an offer if you’d like to continue working with us. I can tell you more about that on the last day. No big deal though right now. I just wanna let you know there will be an offer. So hope that doesn’t offend you all. Feel free if you I’ll even give you a heads up before I give the offer on the last day, if you guys would like to get out of the room, if that would offend you, you guys can go, go ahead and leave.
KH (25:30):
I I don’t wanna pitch anyone that, that doesn’t wanna hear our offer. Yeah. Is that cool with everyone? And you could actually have everyone say, yep, sounds good. They’ve, everyone’s, everyone’s guard just totally dropped. So that’s one big thing that you could do. And then now they’re not, they’re not like surprised when you give them the pitch. I think a lot of people will try so hard to give this incredible amount of value on the front end during their event, and then they try to switch into the pitch and people are like, oh, wait, I wasn’t expecting that. Or like, there’s just kinda an awkward gap. Oh yeah. But if you open up like
AJV (26:02):
That, it, it went on. I love you to, oh no, you’re just selling me. Yeah, yeah. Like that.
KH (26:06):
Yeah. But if you open up like that on the, whenever it comes time to do the pitch, it’s like also, I, I learned this specific from Russell Brunson in one of his 10 x 10 x growth con presentations. He gave an ask and he said, is it cool if I take the next 15 minutes or so to tell you tell you guys about a special offer I created for you all today? And so he actually had kind of a, a question saying, would you be willing to let me give the offer mm-hmm . And so you, if you open up with that whole thing that I just mentioned, and then when it comes time to actually give the pitch, you say, cool, as promised, I taught you guys everything I was gonna teach you. You is, is it cool if I have the next, you know, 15 minutes of your attention to tell you about an offer that we have?
KH (26:48):
And you actually wait for everyone to say yes. Like, drop in the comments Yes. Or whatnot. Cool. Now they’re literally giving you permission Yeah. To give an offer and pitch them. So that’s gonna be helpful. And then lastly, I would say there’s, I mean, I could continue talking on this, but I don’t wanna ramble. Lastly, I would say keep engagement high. There’s a lot of people that will focus so hard on just rambling as I’m doing right now. And they and they will continue to talk and talk and talk throughout the entire presentation for the entire, whether it’s one day, two days, whatever, and they’re not getting the audience to participate. Mm-Hmm . It’s got to be a two-way conversation. It’s gotta be a mutual dialogue. And so whether you’re dropping in polls in the chat, or you’re actually, you know, having some people get hot seated in in the middle of the whole thing, like get people to participate.
KH (27:34):
You could even share like have people share wins or a ahas after a certain session before you jump into the next session. And that way people are now jumping in and they’re actually reminding everyone else in the room of what they just learned. And so like when you do that, people are actually much more engaged. They’re not just gonna be jumping up on Facebook on a, on a different tab of their computer and start scrolling because they see that they are engaged. They are a part of this event. They’re not just watching someone teach.
AJV (28:00):
Yeah. That’s good. Now in terms of the offer, you said that you’ve seen as low as $2,000 mm-hmm . Like with your first one up to 30. Yep. Do you see that there is a sweet spot?
KH (28:13):
Yeah, probably like low end $5,000 higher end 15 k is probably the sweet spot. Reason being, there’s a few ways that you could pitch on the how to actually get the conversion. So you could pitch direct to checkout. My personal favorite. You could technically pitch to, you know jumping on a sales call. I don’t like that because once again, that now puts man hours at the bottleneck of how many people you could serve. And then there’s a third option that I’ve seen work pretty well which is you could pitch a deposit and say, Hey, this is exactly how much it’s, you don’t owe that right now. You actually owe X amount instead. I’ll give a direct example. The client that I mentioned, they’re, they they spend about 30 K right now per day. They have a $6,000 offer and their offer, they could go straight to checkout on this with no problem.
KH (29:04):
But theirs is very specific to a type of individual and some financial criteria. It’s, it’s kind of a a credit based offer and that you have to have a certain amount of credit in order to be able to leverage what they help you with in the backend. And so they, to make sure that they’re not taking on the wrong clients, they’ll say, Hey, look, our offer is six K to you today. Normally it’s 10. Which is true if you go book a sales call with their team, it’s normally 10 K and they say it’s, it’s six K this week. However, you don’t owe that today. It’s on day two. They say, you don’t owe that today. You’d actually only owe $500 and it’s a totally refundable deposit by putting $500 down today. We’re gonna do a bonus q and a day tomorrow, answer all of your questions on whether or not this is truly the right fit for you or not, because not everyone is perfect for this strategy.
KH (29:50):
And they’ll tell you, like on the pitch, like, who, here’s who it’s fear, here’s, here’s who it’s for, here’s who it’s not for mm-hmm . But still some people really want to make it work for themselves. And so they’ll say, cool. Pay your $500 today, tomorrow we’ll jump on, we’ll answer everyone’s questions. And they’ll find that about two thirds of the people that submit the deposit will end up completing the $5,500 payment within the next probably 24 hours or so. So you could do that as well, but yeah. Yeah. The 5K to 15 K is great because you don’t have to leverage the sales teams at all. You could totally do it direct to checkout if you want. And also on the five to 15 k, if, if it’s lower than 5K, depending on your cost of acquisition, on the front end, if you’re relying on Facebook ads, I, I want you to have profit in here. Like, we’re not in here just to make revenue. Sure. It’s exciting to make $250,000 in 24 wanna, but if you had to spend $250,000 to do it, don’t want Yeah. 1 cents no longer sexy . So make sure you have some profit in there and it’s, it’s helpful if you’re at least charging 5K.
AJV (30:48):
Yeah. So now this is so fascinating and, and so helpful. What, what, what do you think makes a good offer? Like if you’ve been doing this for a while? I listen to it. I’m fascinated with offers. I sign up for all kinds of funnels. ’cause I just wanna see how they work. ’em, I love listening and some are really great and compelling and others are like, I can’t believe anyone is buying this right now. Mm-Hmm . So what have you seen, in your opinion, what do you think makes a great offer?
KH (31:14):
Okay, so I, I wanna make sure, I would imagine you’re asking the general question, but just to make sure I’m not misunderstanding. Are you asking about backend high ticket offers or the front end offers?
AJV (31:25):
Yes. It’s for a high ticket offer. Yeah.
KH (31:26):
Great. Okay. In general, it’s gotta be like, I would say categorized under a few different key transformations. So , I’ll give some examples of what works and then I’ll give some very direct examples of what does not work. So, examples of what work, people want to make more money. They want to save time, they want health. Now health can be broken down into two different subcategories. It could be they wanna live longer mm-hmm . Or they wanna look better naked, . Those are two, those are, I mean, honestly, like those are, those are two separate types of health. And it not about looking better naked, it’s just like, you know, you go to the beach or you’re prepping for your wedding or whatever. So there’s health and then there’s also like, I guess there’s relationships. Mm-Hmm . Relationships is a tricky one. It could be a little hard to grasp on the value of that, but like, technically speaking, masterminds are oftentimes relationship based.
KH (32:23):
People buy the masterminds because they want the networking. There’s also dating coaches or Sure. People like that. So there’s that. And then also if you could sell, like, anything that’s investment related, that’s you know, it’s going to be an appreciating asset or there is a certain value to it that, yeah, I mean, I’m, it’s like a, a a, just a super high quality or super high service, like a high quality service or high quality product. If you think I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give the best example. The best offers incorporate multiple of these all at the same time. So Rolex, for example technically high ticket offer, you don’t really think of it though. It’s not really a coaching space, but Rolex is a perfect example of a high ticket offer. They’re charging 10 to, I dunno, 50,000, probably more than that for certain watches and what they’re selling.
KH (33:13):
Number one, it’s a high quality product. You know, that if you buy a Rolex, it’s not breaking a month later, it’s going to be around for decades and decades and decades. Also, high quality service, if you go on in, they’re gonna walk you back. Whenever you’re picking up your, your Rolex from your ad, they’re gonna walk you back into a private room. They’re gonna do a special unboxing thing, they’re gonna give you some drinks while you’re there. Like it’s a really nice prestigious service. Additionally, it’s an asset. You’re buying a watch maybe for 10 K that you can walk out if you really needed to. You could walk out and probably resell it to someone else for 15 to 20 K depending on which one that you’re buying. Additionally they’re selling ego . It’s like they’re, they’re hitting your ego. And then also they are selling you something that now levels up your ability to network and, and have new relationships.
KH (33:59):
So like that’s a perfect example of a fantastic high ticket offer because they’re selling so many different benefits all at the same time. Correct. A bad offer would be something that is just hard to grasp. Like, I had a client not too long ago, incredible, incredible leadership consultant. He helps people with, you know, seeing leadership breakthroughs within their organization. And when I say that leadership breakthroughs, it’s like, why would I buy that? Like that’s, I don’t know, it sounds good, but I’m not ready to just go pay $20,000 for a leadership coach. I think I’m a fine leader. How do I know if I’m a bad leader? Like, you have to, you have to solve for specific pain points such as like, Hey, I’m going to help you get out of your day-to-day operations, or I’m going to help you hire a COO to, or Yeah, that would be even more specific.
KH (34:47):
I’m, I’ll help you hire a COO to get you out the day-to-day operations or a CEO if you get outta the day-to-day operations. Or I’m going to help you turn your team of task doers into business builders. Mm-Hmm. And they’re actually gonna start focusing on revenue driven activities. Or I’ll help you deploy systems that SOPs so that everyone can leave the office at 5:00 PM rather than working until nine or 10:00 PM every day. So like, you have to get way more specific there. So you can’t just say, I’m a leadership coach. You actually have to say, I help with X, Y, and z Kind of an esoteric high level conversation. But does that make sense? A few of those examples I’m giving.
AJV (35:23):
Yeah. I think that’s great. And I think for a lot of people, this comes back to do you know the benefits Yeah. Of your offer. Yeah. Right. This comes back to the fundamentals of what we do at Brand Builders Group with finding your brand DNA. It’s like, what problem do you solve? Mm-Hmm. Right? What’s the cause of that problem? What’s the unique way in which you solve it? That’s your message. Mm-Hmm . But then what are your payoffs, right? Yeah. What do you get as a benefit of solving this thing? Right. and I think that’s a really important part for all of this, is making sure that as you guys are listening, it’s like, what are the payoffs? Right? Yeah. What are the benefits? Yeah. Those are the things that make a great offer. And you, you’re the one that has to figure those out so that you can attract the right people who would actually go, oh, that I want that thing. Yeah.
KH (36:08):
Yeah. It’s, it’s helpful. I, I love the way that you kind of reframed all of that, so it’s really helpful to understand Yeah. The pain points that you’re solving. ’cause I, I’m sure most of the people listening to this have already heard this before, but there’s only two core human motivators in life running away from pain or running towards pleasure. And so if you can understand your audiences, both of those, what specific pain points and symptoms are coming up in their life or in their business that they’re trying to solve for, and what specific desires are they trying to achieve? Mm-Hmm . And then going one step further you had mentioned your kind of unique selling proposition or your, your unique messaging, how exactly you help them do that. It really helps to go one step further and say, Hey, here’s why your other things haven’t worked.
KH (36:50):
You actually have to be able to point flaws or like kind of poke holes at Yeah. If you know them well enough, let’s say you’re a health coach and you help people, I dunno, lose the last 10 pounds of, of their little bit of belly fat, if you know that most of them are trying a certain solution and they’re not getting a result, you should also talk about that as well. So it’s like, Hey, I know you have the belly fat, you’re struggling to lose it. I know you want to have six packs, but here’s what you’ve keep. Like here’s what you continue trying to do, which is X, Y, and Z. Here’s why that’s not working. And now, and now you’re setting yourself up for why your specific solution is working well or why it can be the, the solve, like the, the true solution to their problem.
AJV (37:32):
Yeah. I think that’s so good. And that kind of comes back to one thing, and then I know that we’re almost outta time, and I have one really big question that I wanna hit before we do this, but before I get to that, it kind of comes back to a question that I meant to ask earlier. And I was just looking at my notes. It’s like, do you find that for these, you know, very low dollar paid events, that it is better to have a super niche specific targeted topic? Kind of like what we were just talking about? Yeah. Or do you think it’s better to Yeah. Okay. . Yeah. Yeah.
KH (38:03):
Going broad is not the way to go get as specific as possible. And that’s where people actually make a, a lot of mistakes is that they’ll try to make their event or any of their marketing in general, in general, so broad to be all encompassing, but when you try to talk to everyone, you talk to no one. Yeah. So make it really specific to solve a very specific problem.
AJV (38:20):
Yes. Our favorites not our favorite. One of my, well, it’s my, maybe it’s my favorite, but one of our sayings at Brand Builders Group is so cheesy, but you’ll never forget it. It’s the more specific, the more terrific . It’s like we we’re always going, like, it’s more specific, the more terrific. Right. And it’s like, you just, you gotta know. And that also makes it a lot more successful with your paid campaign efforts as well. It’s like, you know, you know, it’s like dialing it in. Yeah. Get the right person so they convert right. Was what makes it all worth it. Okay, before we get to this last question already learned so much, and I think there’s so much here that’s applicable. No matter if you’re trying to, you know, have some paid traffic put behind this, try to run it organically.
AJV (39:04):
But if you’re one of those individuals who’s like, I don’t, I, it’s not that I don’t wanna build a team, I don’t have a team, right? I have to figure out something. I am the sales team. I think these are, these are the great options and why I wanted Zach to come on the show today. But he also has this awesome playbook called the paid events playbook. And you can go to paid events.com/playbook. And in that it’s gonna cover high level overview of how to plan for your event, how to fill your event, and how to convert attendees at your event. Zach, is there anything I’m missing with that?
KH (39:39):
Not really. I, I mean, you, you covered the high level overview for sure. Yeah. It’s, it’s more in depth than most people would think. And obviously if you have any further questions, you could either go jump on chat GBT and go find information, or if you want direct help, sure you can reach out. But that is a really good overview of yeah, how to plan for your event, make sure it’s actually gonna sell and attract the right people, how to host it, keep people engaged, and then how to make sure, you know, it’s, it’s not really helpful to have a hundred people there if no one buys in the end. So how to make sure you are getting those backend conversions.
AJV (40:08):
Yeah. So again, it’s go to paid events.com/playbook. Yep. Get it, read it, use it. All right. Now before our time runs out I have one last question that I think is universally applicable. And I mentioned this in the very beginning during my intro that we said we were gonna talk about how to test an offer Yes. Before you invest into or invest too much time, money, or resources in it to make sure that it’s an offer that will work. So Zach, how do we do that?
KH (40:40):
? Yeah. So this actually it’s, I love how you ask this question right on the backend of the playbook idea, because this, these are, these are congruent with each other. So I had the idea, this was pretty recent that we came across this I said, you know, we’re gonna be doing our own event in March. I wanna make sure that I’m not investing. I’ll, I’ll probably put 40 or $50,000 into ads on this. And I was like, I wanna make sure that it’s the right event name and the event topic. And I had a few different ideas and they were all kind of solving for different pain points and different core desires. I’m like, well, let’s just test it out real quick in a, in a quick ad campaign. And so I jumped on there is a website called Gamma App, GAMA app.
KH (41:24):
You could use it totally free. Everybody jump on there and you can make an account and it’s a, it’s an AI essentially presentation builder. And you can give a quick one sentence prompt and say, prompt and say, give me a presentation that, or like, give me a PDF that teaches X, Y, and Z. And so let’s say that you’re a health coach and you’re like, give me one that’s like, lose five pounds before your wedding. And then another one that’s like, how to gain five pounds of muscle in the next six months for bodybuilders or whatever. It’s all like, maybe you have a few different ideas, jump on there, create a PDF for all of them, and then we put together a quick Facebook lead form and Facebook lead forms. You can instantly have a download be given to the person, like without even having to set it up with your CRM.
KH (42:10):
And so we had a, we, we had the lead form for each PDF, we tested out a few different PDFs. And on the PDF, or I’m sorry, on the, on the lead form, we were asking name, number, email no, I’m sorry, not even number, just name an email company name. And then we wanted to know not just what was gonna get the lowest cost per lead, but what’s gonna be the highest quality lead. And so we had some custom qualifying questions in there, one of which I said, which of these describes you best? And that question changed depending on the lead magnet they were opting in for mm-hmm . And and so like, we actually ended up coming up with the paid event profit playbook, which is what you just mentioned, the paid event, profit playbook. I was asking which has been your experience with events?
KH (42:53):
And it was like, I’ve never hosted an event trying to create my first one. Second one was I’ve hosted them, struggled to convert. And third one is like, we crush events, we’re just looking at scale. And then I also asked, where’s your company revenue at? And I think that was it. And so I was asking the revenue question for all of our PDFs, and then I was asking a different kind of intention or sophistication level question for the other PDFs. And so what I did, I set it up for about a hundred dollars a day, and within 24 hours I had very crystal clear data. , one of the PDFs had zero leads. Another one had cost per lead was like 60 bucks. And then the the paid event profit playbook, that one was a cost per lead of like $7. And same audience, the ad itself looked identical from one ad to the next for it was just had a, I went on Canva, used the exact same template and just changed out the headline for each one.
KH (43:49):
So that way I was minimizing all variables except for the actual lead magnet. And then I was, I, I was like, well, I don’t care about the cost per lead. I wanna make sure these people are actually qualified . Then I went through and was looking at all of their answers. I’m like, yeah, these people are perfectly qualified. And so I, I took that hypothesis and I said, let’s test this out for a few other clients. So we just did this for one of our clients. He sells a mastermind to accredited investors and he was having a hard time of what kind of angle was going to attract the right accredited investors. We just did that literally this week. And one of his, he was getting a cost per lead for around $15 and 75% of the people that submitted their information were accredited investors.
KH (44:25):
And they specifically had a, a, a unique experience with real estate investing. We’re like, okay, cool. That helps us out with the pain points and the desires. And anyway, you can do this. Literally go set it up for $300, go come up with two to three PDFs and I mean, you don’t have to spend much more time than two or three minutes on the PDF I beef mine up a little bit. But yeah, do that. Then go set up a lead form, ask some sort of questions for how qualified they are. I’d say like, a financial qualification is probably helpful. And secondly, what’s their sophistication level around what you’re helping them with? And now you’re gonna have way more intel of like, clearly our lowest cost per lead is coming from this type of offer, and here’s the majority of the leads. Here’s their core desire, core pain point, and we actually know they’re qualified. Great. Let’s actually start putting some bandwidth into creating a more robust offer around that.
AJV (45:15):
That’s awesome. Love that Gamma app.
KH (45:19):
Yes.
AJV (45:19):
Love it with Facebook forms, what AI saves the day. ,
KH (45:24):
It really does.
AJV (45:25):
Right. love it. So, so good. Zach, if people just wanna connect with you or follow you on social media, where should they find you?
KH (45:33):
Yeah Instagram’s good. Just my first and last name, Zach Hesterberg or YouTube. We’re starting to treat quite a bit more seriously. And YouTube a lot of it’s going to be biblical based content talking about events and selling high ticket. So if you want long form, go to YouTube. Short form, go to Instagram
AJV (45:49):
And we’ll put both of those handles in the show notes. Zach. So good. So many good insights. And I think also just a, a good reminder of like, Hey, just because everyone around you is doing it this way, doesn’t mean there can’t be another way. And I think this is a good reminder for all of us who’s like, you don’t have a sales team. You are the sales team, but there’s other ways to still reach the masses and help scale your business without having to scale your team. So this was such a worthwhile conversation. And everyone who’s listening, don’t forget to stick around for my recap episode, which will be coming up next. And Zach, thank you for being here, everyone else. We’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.