Jeff: Correct.
Mike: Okay. It would just be foolish to have this type of information and not record it. So what we want you to know is that anytime you do anything, record it or put it into other forms of information. Like for instance, Tom and I can let you know that we’re actually working on a project called The 7 Figure Secrets.
What we’re doing is we’re taking all the information from The 7 Figure Code and we’ve mind mapped it and we’re having all the transcripts rewritten into a logical book, actually written. And then we’re going to take parts of the Power Point slides and bleed them in between with the mind maps and all that type of stuff and we’re going to create a front end for our back end product.
That’s probably going to sell on ClickBank for $97. So I'm getting off track. There was a reason for that but I did forget the question. So if you could turn me back on track.
Jeff: Yeah, you did the upsell at seminar.Mike: Yeah. So the key is that any opportunity you find to create content, take it. Because you can never have too much good bonus material to use somewhere else.
So we were at the event and Tom came up with the idea, “Hey, why don’t we hire Dan?” Dan Dennis, was that his name? “Why don’t we hire Dan to come in and just set up?” We got a separate room as a studio and he put the umbrella lights and the track lighting and a camera up.
We had Sky Mangram who used to work with us and Tom did a couple of interviews. And what we did is we took other millionaires that were in the room whether they paid or they were VIPs and we brought them back.
I think there were 15 people that went for about a half hour and we picked their brains and asked them specific questions about their seven-figure business. And all of those had like these bullets that you didn’t even find in the room.
So we were now able to create a $297 product as an upsell. So here’s the 7 Figure Code and after you buy it it's, “Hey, do you want the bonus millionaire interviews? They're about a half hour long of 15 other millionaires that were at the event, some of them underground people you may have never even heard of before, that are going to teach you some additional strategies.
And we closed at 19%. So almost one out of every five people that purchased The 7 Figure Code purchased our upsell which is, in our opinion, and you talk about Hidden Sales Project, a mandatory part of your process when you're selling something is you should have an upsell.
Jeff: That’s a great technique. You would have lost a lot of money or left a lot of money on the table when you're talking about 20%. That really paid an additional 60% of the money.
Mike: Yeah. Well we did 2,534 units in those 7 days. So that’s about 500 units. So that brought in roughly about $150,000. Is that right, 500 times 300 is about $150,000?
Jeff: Yeah, so that’s a good chunk of change.Mike: Five hundred times 1,000, yes, $150,000. Yeah. So that did very, very well for us.
Jeff: Well, can we get into then how you got all the affiliates that you had pushing your product? Could you walk through that process? First, how do you create the buzz for it, some of that you got in the contests, how you pitted people against each other.
I don’t know what percent of your sales came from affiliates, but I know they were going crazy at the end of that contest. So maybe walk the people through some of the techniques you used to really create this frenzy among affiliates.
Mike: Sure. I'm going to touch upon that. I see Tom getting ready to say something so I'm going to let him start on that and then I'll get in and give some additional feedback on that.
Tom: To briefly answer it in the best manner, I feel it goes back to what Mike said, over deliver in the event. I think that the reason we were able to have such a frenzy of affiliates is because we were able to get as many VIPs at the event as possible. Had they not come to the event and witnessed it firsthand, they wouldn’t have known or believed the value of the information that was being shared.
So I think it goes all the way back to pre-planning the event to make sure that it was heavily filled with VIPs, knowing that if they were there and they saw the information, they’d be more willing to promote it, stand behind it, put together great packages, put together extra bonuses. And that, I think was the key. Once the event was over, the buzz began already. So they didn’t even know, obviously they probably foresaw that there would be a home study course coming of it and most of the VIPs knew that I could do that, but they didn’t know when.
But the buzz happened automatically because we over delivered at the event. People just couldn’t help but talk about it. And then you have that much social proof in the marketplace from these figures who are blogging about it, writing articles about it, and giving trainings on it, and talking about the testimonials that came from each of those avenues, and e-mails to their lists.
The lists were like, “What the heck was this? How come I didn’t hear about it? Or maybe I did but I didn’t want to invest $5,000 in it. I couldn’t invest $5,000 but I hear there's a package coming soon.”
And the anticipation builds up to leading into the next logical step which is contacting those VIPs and saying, “Hey, we’re getting ready to launch it. It’s going to be called The 7 Figure Code. Here's the JV sign-up page,” and getting them excited. And then once they began promoting it, everybody else jumped on board as well.
And then we used several strategies with the JV blog to really create a frenzy. We were giving them a lot of analogies like, “The starting gate just opened and so and so took off on a huge lead but someone’s right behind them. Who’s going to stay ahead? Who’s coming up? And who’s going to win the great prizes?”
And Mike touched upon the power of the awesome prizes that we had for the JV partners as well. We really knew that it was going to be a successful launch. We didn’t really know it would get as many units moved in that short period of time as it did, but we knew it would be successful.
So with the value that was at the event and was captured in the video in I-format, then the production that we were able to put together with an awesome in house person, Mike Merz, we just knew that the product was rock solid.
So we stood behind that with some great promotional materials for people who were top JV partners, and the Rolex for number one, widescreen TVs, trips on a cruise. So we really step it up. We had fun with a little video too to preview when the JVs…
Jeff: They can still see that. Mike: You can go, and this is not a public page, but you guys on this call we certainly want to let you learn from it. And you should bookmark this page. Go to www.The7FigureCode.com/thejvblog. And if you scroll down to the bottom there will be a link that says next page.
I think you might have to do that once or twice and I think the second blog post is a video that shows Tom and I pulling up and having some fun with our affiliates saying, “The first place winner is going to win my brand new Corvette VO6 and the second place winner is going to win Tom’s Accura and then we said, “Not.”
[Laughter]And then we said, “Come on inside. We’re going to show you the prizes.” The other thing that Tom touched upon, one principle in that is the law of reciprocity. It’s that if you invite these VIP members, it's all like part of a master plan, if you invite these master JV partners to the event, or you get the product in their hands, or both, then the law of reciprocity comes in.
They're like, “Wow, they let me come to this $5,000 event. They let me learn from them for free. I really like the information. I'm going to turn around and help them promote the product.
So if it's not an event, the advice would be to make sure that you get your product in the hands of your JV partners and your affiliates ahead of time so that they can actually learn from it and profit from it and have heartfelt testimonials about their results and the quality of the production and everything like that.
But, how did we build the buzz? That’s how we got our JV partners. But a couple of other things that are important, Jeff. And Jeff Walker and I disagree on this. But we both agree on each other’s points.
My thing is to pick a date, claim stake, mark your territory very, very quickly, and state that like two or three months early. Like we’re launching on this date and then e-mail it out to your list. We sent an e-mail out to our list 90 days early stating that we were launching on 7/7/07.
Within one day we got an e-mail from Mark Joiner stating, “Oh, I was going to use that date. I guess I'll move.” We got an e-mail from Joel Comm and we got an e-mail from somebody else that, “I was going to launch on that date.” Who was that? John Reese, that’s right, yeah originally for www.Income.com but that got pushed off the blog in a rush so that was never an issue, luckily.
So what was good about that is a couple of people, because it was
7/7/07, looked at the date. So next year I would think that August
8, 08 would be good. It's a good number in the Asian community. It would probably be a good day to launch.
[Laughter]
But the bottom line is that there are other people that are thinking like you. So you don’t want to announce three weeks before that you're launching because then everybody else has been planning the same type of thing.
So we like to really block out that date on everybody’s calendar by e-mailing and letting them know that something big is coming. The community is going to stand still for a week and that lets everybody know, “Alright, well this guy is doing it this week so I'd better go the week before or the week after.”
Or what ends up happening is somebody says, “So when are you launching?” “Oh, I'm going to launch on September 4th.” And they say, “September 4th? You might want to move that.” “Why?”
Because I just spoke with Jeff Dedrick and he’s rallying a lot of affiliates and he’s working with Harris Fellman and they're launching on September 4th. “Oh, alright. Thanks for letting me know. I'll move to the eleventh.”
So you want to be the person that everybody knows has to move around you. I think that’s the key. Now again, the reason why Jeff Walker doesn’t agree with that is because many launches sometimes get moved off.
And if your affiliates are ready for you on July 7th and you're not ready and you’ve got to move them to July 14th they may say, “Dude, man I locked that out for you, but I've already committed to so and so for the 14th. So I'm not going to be able to help.” So my point then is stick to your date. Stick to your date. Many times people don’t, but my thing is to stick to your launch date come hell or high water.
Tom: And it wasn’t easy for us to do that. Mike was traveling like crazy. I was traveling like crazy.And even one of the top figures we just mentioned, John Reese was on the phone like, “Dude? There's no way you can get all this stuff done in that amount of time. You need to push back the date. The dates good, but you need to push it.”
And we said, “Yeah, we appreciate that. We probably should. But we’re going to stick with it. It just fits too well.” And we did and it worked.
Mike: Yeah, I mean we launched the site and I was still writing the bullets for the DVDs and the site launched and DVDs nine, ten, 11 and 12 said, “Insert bullets here. Insert bullets here.” And we had so much traffic to the site that while I was still working on it, when I was done five minutes later, I couldn’t get a connection to the site for three hours.
Everybody was e-mailing us and instant messaging us and calling us saying, “Do you know your sale page says, ‘Insert bullets here?” And I was like, “Duh! Of course I know. We wouldn’t let that happen on purpose.”
So just getting back to a couple of things there, I think the date is very, very important. And then finally what we did is this was a little bit sneaky and it had to be done this way because I was traveling for three weeks in Australia and I actually didn’t have the time to do the full pre-launch that I wanted.
Butterfly Marketing, the pre-launch was for 34 days. For the 7 Figure Code it was 12 days. There was a 12 day pre-launch from the time that we announced that we are in pre-launch to the time that we went. And the reason was we were just trying to get production done.
I would have thought I wanted to go for 30 days, but in hindsight people were already starting to say, “Enough already. Can't they just launch the product? Why with all this hype and everything?” Because we did a good job creating buzz.
So here's what we did. We were in a dilemma that we weren’t able to start rallying our affiliates until 12 days before we were getting ready. So I actually sent an e-mail out to my entire list, and the email said, “It's official. On 7/7/07 we are going to be launching our biggest home study course that we’ve ever done. It will be one of the biggest launches to date in Internet Marketing history.”
And then what we said was, and I was laughing because I remember what we did here. And I said, “I can't tell you anything about it, but tomorrow you will hear about it from my affiliates. I'm going to let my affiliates announce it.
“In fact, I have personally hand picked and hand selected what I feel to be the top Internet marketers out there. So you can rest assured if you hear from someone, they are somebody that I believe in as a top Internet marketer in this industry. So look out for them. They’ve already signed up for the program. They’re going to be telling you about it. Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
The truth was, I hadn’t told anybody and then I hit the Submit button. Two minutes later we’re getting IMs and phone calls. “Dude, you forgot to tell me. Am I not invited? I thought I was a friend.”
“I just searched my Gmail. I can't find anything that I have gotten from you on this.” So that was a classic take away. You know it's kind of like everybody is being invited to a wedding except for you and it’s like, “She was invited in the office?”
“Yeah.” “He doesn’t even like her. And he invited Tom and he invited Joe and Susie?” “Yeah, they're all invited.” “And he didn’t invite me?” And then you say to them, “Yeah, but you wouldn’t even want to go.” “Yeah, but now I want to go because I wasn’t invited.”
So it becomes that type of thing that people want what they can't have. And when they think that everybody else was invited and they weren’t invited, they reached out to us and said, “Hey, how do I get a link?”
And we’re like, “Oh, here you go. Sorry about that. You know we were going to be contacting people as well in the next 24 hours. We didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feeling or anything.”
The truth was we ended up getting everybody coming to us with that little strategy that we used. I don’t know if necessarily we would do it again but it is a good strategy and I like to talk about it.
Tom: Leading up to that you obviously have to be out there known in the industry to pull off something like that. So the relationships are really key as well. In order for us to put those VIPs in the room, you’ve got to have those relationships with the people which happens by going to live events, which happened initially by going to live events as attendees and then Mike being up on stage giving seminars and training people about the Butterfly Marketing techniques and I5Gold coaching mentoring program, all that fun stuff.
Mike: Yeah, getting out to the events is really, really the key thing. You take a look at what Jermaine Griggs said recently with his launch. He didn’t go to events very often, but three months before his launch, he went to every single event that was out there.
He went to Russell Brunson’s. He went to ours in San Francisco. He was at Yanik’s Underground event and he got to speak to people. He was at a couple of other events, JV Alert Live.
And next thing you know, I'm hearing everybody talking about Jermaine Griggs, I'm seeing everybody with videos and pictures of Jermaine Griggs and look at this. He knows Russell Brunson.
He knows this person and he knows that person because he was strategic in the fact that, “Hey, if I'm going to get out there in the marketplace, I need to let people know I'm a real guy and just to go out there and not to create JV partners, but to create friends.”
Because the truth is, friends will do anything for you. If you create a good product, they’ll be there to help you. Because I think, Jeff, you know the last thing you need right now is another product to promote, right?