Jeff: Well, this is Jeff Dedrick with “Hidden Sales Project.com” and it's my pleasure to have Mike Filsaime on the line right now. And are we going to also be able to have Tom on the line or is he off doing other stuff?
Mike: No. Tom should be available for comments. I'll let him answer that. But he is available as we speak to chime in and offer additional content for us.
Tom: Right. I’m just here in the background. I'll be here if needed. Jeff: Alright. Great. Well, this is going to be a great call because of the reason that I got these guys on the line, and one thing that we’re going to have to watch is we’re pretty good friends and typically our conversations aren’t the cleanest. So we’re really going to have to concentrate ourselves.
Mike: I’ll be on my best behavior. I promise.Jeff: The reason I got these guys on the line is because I witnessed something earlier this year. I was a member at one of their events and I was able to watch everything kind of unfold.
And within the span of, oh, I don’t know what it was, five months later they rolled out one of the most successful launches of this year with the 7 Figure Code. It was a product that I believe was it July 7th that you launched at around midnight? We were talking about that. Is that it, Mike?
Mike: It was at exactly, on July 6th you could say, at 11:59 and 59 seconds p.m. So as soon as the clock struck midnight on July 7th we started that promotion.
Jeff: Well, yes, and it was, like I said. It was one of the more successful promotions of the year. And the main thing that Mike’s going to be talking about, or Mike and Tom is they're going to be talking about not only the hidden sales that they used from that original product earlier in the year, but I also want to get into the psychology.
Because they had a game plan to that launch and it was, unbelievable. I know some of the stuff kind of behind the scenes but I know there's a lot of stuff that I don’t even know. I'll be asking you a lot of questions on not only how did you come up with the whole process and the product but how did you get your affiliates excited, specific things on the launch itself. So we’re going to be getting into some really good content here.
Hey, Mike? Why don’t we start off with, “When did you guys first come up with this product idea? How far in advance from the launch were you guys first talking about this?”
Mike: Okay, well, you know we’ll probably talk about it later in there, what the strategy is. But what we like to do is this. There is a proven strategy. J. Abraham’s been doing it. Dan Kennedy is doing it. Gary Halbert’s done it.
And what the strategy is, is after you’ve built a brand or if you can associate yourself with people that have built a brand, what you do is you create a seminar. Now what's important to understand is it's not really as important how many people show up at the seminar, rather what's important is who attends the seminar and what the price of the seminar is.
And finally that you provide in your heart and in your attendees’ admission, when they admit it to you, that they would have paid three times the price for the information. So we have to understand that we must know that the information that we provide has to be the key.
You have to deliver what you promise. And in fact, always deliberately have some things that you don’t put on the sales page that you know you're going to do at the event to over deliver.
You know we call them critical nonessentials and that’s like having a magician show up or a comedian show up or a foosball table, or giving a meal that they didn’t expect, or having nice photographers around so that they could get photographs taken for their Web site, all these critical nonessentials that they are like, “Wow! This is like an expo almost. It's fun. It's exciting,” as well as all the learning that you promised. So the key is at this point to create a price somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500 to $5,000.
J. Abraham used to do them for $25,000. So what J. Abraham would do is would make a seminar worth $25,000 where he would say, “You pay me $5,000 up front and you can break that up into 3 payments. And then you pay me the other $20,000 once you implement my strategies, you pay me 10% of your profits until you pay off the $20,000.”
Or as John Childers says, “Come to my $6,000 seminar and it's really a $25,000 seminar. You pay me $6,000 to come and you pay me $19,000 as you start your success. You pay me based on a percentage of your profits.” So what that does is it allows you to create content and put a value on it of $25,000.
In our case we made The 7 Figure Code a $5,000 event. And the other thing I said is, “It's important who attended there.” So there’s nothing wrong with inviting a John Reese or a Jeff Dedrick or any other expert in the industry to be on hand as a VIP guest to help the people mingle and network and everything like that. Because then they also provide you testimonials and the footage that you can put on the sales page.
And now what you have later is a product that you could position as, “I'm going to give you everything that was in the $5,000 workshop in a recorded version for only $497, $997, or whatever the price is you're asking.” So the important thing to do is to remember to first do the workshop for high value at a larger price, then in contrast the DVD home study course will look as if, “This is an incredible deal.”
If you notice that exact thing is going on right now with Evan Pagan with www.GetAltitude.com, right? He did a seminar for $10,000, got industry experts there as well like Joe Polish. Then he shows a room full of maybe 70 to 100 people whatever it was, on the sales page.
And then he can show that as, “These people paid $10,000 and I'm going to give you this same exact information recorded every single session from start to finish for only $1,497.” So it's just a great strategy.
To answer your question when you say, “When did Tom and I first get this,” we understood the strategy first. It wasn’t just, “Hey, let's just do a seminar. And what are we going to do the seminar on? Hey, now we’ve got content. We should sell it.” We necessarily didn’t have the name The 7 Figure Code, but we knew we were going to follow this model. We didn’t know exactly when we would launch. All those things just came later.
So what happened was Tom and I were talking right around about a month before we released The Death Of Internet Marketing back in I think October of 2006. And we said, “We want to do a seminar but we want to do something different that’s never been done before.”
So our topic was on the foundation and the principles of a 7 Figure Business. And we still believe to this day you don’t worry about a 7 Figure Business when you have a six figure business. You start thinking about a seven-figure business from day one. Like we said on the sales letter, you can't design a business to make $3,000 a month.
So it's great for you to say, “I'd be happy if I only had $3,000 a month. You can design something that says, “Let me provide that value to the world. We’re going to make $3,000 a month. If you are providing value, you will make more.
And so we wanted people to understand that you don’t have to think that you're going to have a seven-figure business, you may never have a seven-figure business. But it's important to know the foundations of a seven-figure business because that will help you in a $3,000 a month, a $5,000 a month and a $10,000 a month business.
So Tom and I said, “Let’s do a no-sell workshop. It's not a seminar where we’re going to invite speakers and we’re all going to sell at the end and we’re going to have 15 different people. We’ll do two thirds of the content and then we’re going to bring in other experts where they're going to show how they learned their seven-figure business as well and there will be no selling. Then we’ll package those recordings and then we’ll later sell them.
And so I would say that sometime in September of 2006 was when we got the idea. We did the seminar in February of 2007 and we launched the DVD five months later, March, April, May, June, July. Five months later, in 2007, we launched The 7 Figure Code.
Jeff: So you launched that product and was it the $497 price point to start with?Mike: The introductory price was $497 plus shipping and handling.
Jeff: Okay. Now you also had an upsell on that. Did you want to explain that to the people?