What to Do After a Failed Launch in the Coaching Industry

In this week’s episode, Em and Lex break down the ins and outs of what to do after a failed launch in the coaching industry. Whether it be launching online courses or group programs and having no one sign up or failing to meet your goals, they walk listeners through the different steps of what to do post a failed launch. The hosts speak about their own experiences with failure and what they learned from them. They conduct a four-step mock post-mortem and coach the listener on what lessons to look for in the breakdown.

Here’s what you’ll learn: 

• Tips from seasoned coaches’ experiences with failure
• Tips for what to do after a failed launch
• Tips on how to organize your process before a launch
• What elements of a failed launch to pay attention to
• How to break down what worked and what didn’t in any launch
• How to strategize next steps after failure
• How to track various metrics during the sales process 
• And more!

Listener Links:

Learn More about the Ready Set Coach Launch Pack: 

https://www.readysetcoachprogram.com/launch 

Follow Em & Lex on Instagram at @readysetcoachcommunity

Join the Ready Set Coach Community: www.readysetcoachcommunity.com

Learn more about Six Degrees Society and THEPRBAR inc.

Transcript

Emily Merrell  

Lexie Do you have brown lipstick on?

Lexie Smith  

Is it brown? It looks it's what do we call this? YouTube?

Emily Merrell  

Oh it looks like a nude but it looks very No it's

Lexie Smith  

it's a shade of pink or red with like like a dusty rose infused oh is that when yeah I liked I don't know I was feeling extra pale guys and so I just slapped on some lipstick like five seconds before we hit record I went to a hot yoga class this morning which was 90 minutes and I didn't wash my hair after so this is like dried Oh glistening goodness,

Emily Merrell  

it's wild. When you go to one of those classes you're like, I'm fine I blow dried my hair yesterday I'm not gonna wash it. And at the end you're like Jesus Christ I just wet it's pure

Lexie Smith  

wetness. I rinsed my body off and I've been trying this product called square shout out it's a female founded product I met virtually met the co founder and some community anyways, you're supposed to spray it on and then like Towel dry your hair so I wanted to test it because it's been a while and I don't know if it like takes away the Stank. Can you come over here and tell me Emily?

I can smell it from here so

Lexie Smith  

that I'm letting it air dry and I mean look. It's not

Emily Merrell  

a mermaid. It's amazing. She's like, the longest mistake of

Lexie Smith  

my hair so long right now like it keeps going. Lady

Emily Merrell  

Godiva what a good Halloween costume.

Lexie Smith  

I need a haircut so bad get a

Emily Merrell  

horse and then be topless walking drive. You know going around your neighborhood with your hair covering your boobs. Done it's it's it's a vibe or you could be splash from the mermaid from splash.

Lexie Smith  

Such a great do I know splash?

Emily Merrell  

If you don't this is a movie you need to watch it's with Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks. And she is a mermaid who like rescues that guy and come to the big city and love story.

Lexie Smith  

I'm thinking of aquamarine I loved aquamarine as a kid with the blue hair. She is she's blonde like me and she'd like a streak of blue and then I put in a streak of my mom wouldn't let me do my hair but I had like a hair clip forever and fun fact multiple times in college I did legitimately die streak of my hair underneath pink

Emily Merrell  

I would love these pictures please went out early there

Lexie Smith  

is I'll find one I'll find one guys if you ever

Emily Merrell  

want dip in your hair like that was the dream and my mom would never let me also Mr. Brunette it's like you just did the tips. Can you like dip it into red or whatnot? I thought it was so fierce now I'm like no way in heck what I pulled that off but that's

Lexie Smith  

what I did the one strip underneath so I felt cool and edgy but I could hide it professional

Emily Merrell  

she basically had a mullet but would think I'm the last hair thing I will mention that I've seen and I think is so cool. I again I don't think I'm I'm guys like when I get my nails done I'm like can I have them short and ballet slippers and they're like What do you want like bound cool nails? I'm like no, that's too much for me. But a lot of people now have the glitter strands in their hair.

Lexie Smith  

Let me see that used to be a thing I for sure used to do that as a kid is it coming back

Emily Merrell  

so hot right now.

Lexie Smith  

So hot right now. Okay yeah, I know trends

Emily Merrell  

you

Lexie Smith  

know speak trends. How do we get here? What am I talking about? What podcast is this? I don't know. It's

Emily Merrell  

during this to a murder podcast.

Lexie Smith  

Oh, speaking of guys if we have any felon word murder Reno's out there Colorado you girl you girl being Lexi. Yes, we're a thing it's called murdery knows you're either like saying yes Lex right now or you're thinking I'm super weird. But if you're one of us, reach out, let me know. I'd love to know if we have any Marino's listening to this.

Emily Merrell  

Do we really call him a murderer you know

Lexie Smith  

it's the thing just me. I'm very well inter integrated in the in the Murray Marino community.

Emily Merrell  

That's like a weird fear I have is that I will get murdered and then I will be on one of those podcasts and then people are gonna pick through my life and I don't want

Lexie Smith  

to happen. That's why it's SSD GMC, sexy and don't get murdered.

Emily Merrell  

But all the sexy people get murdered so this is why I do my hair like this so I don't get murdered.

Lexie Smith  

So don't stay sexy and don't get murdered. Yeah, you know, if you know you know, all the acronyms Okay guys, today we're talking about what oh, oh, I know position. Murder is like post mortem, which we're going to bring up today later because we're going to talk about what to do after

Emily Merrell  

your murder punch

Lexie Smith  

up a body what to do after a launch fails. That's that's what we're talking about today. If, and

Emily Merrell  

as you're on top, no, mortician got it. We're gonna No stop Emily, stop. Okay.

Lexie Smith  

I'm going to stop some of us, one of us, you know,

Emily Merrell  

just, it's weird. But my question for you Lexie Smith murder mystery Maven. Can you define what a failed launch is? Yeah,

Lexie Smith  

this can be many shapes and forms. This could be the first time you try to launch a group program. And maybe you only get one buyer or no buyers. This could be the first time you try to do a time sensitive launch. And again, we got crickets. It can be Lexie in 2018. Thinking that I could just launch a digital course passively, without anyone knowing who I am. And no one buying it's basically you're not hitting your goal. Whether that's not failing, or completely, you're hearing crickets.

Emily Merrell  

Like see, can we have a raise of hands? If you have ever tried to launch something and not had failed it or have not successfully completed? Yes, if you are watching on YouTube, you will see that both of us have two hands up. And it is a hair

Lexie Smith  

like we just don't care which that you do care.

Emily Merrell  

We do care, especially your first time you're like, Oh God, I'm a failure. I should just I should switch industries and careers and maybe become something different. I honestly do think not not to like knock people who work in fast food. I like think I would suck at fast food. I think I would be a terrible.

Lexie Smith  

Wait, how did we get here? No,

Emily Merrell  

I'm just thinking of like switching careers. Like if I Oh, career I'm like, or something that's so easy. I still think I would suck at it. So anyways, that's a that's a limiting belief I have about my opportunities and faster to

Lexie Smith  

do anything. So what we're going to do first and foremost, we want to normalize this, let's let's start there, because stars just like there's I don't think I know a singular coach out there who hasn't had a less than stellar or failed launch of something. Seriously,

Emily Merrell  

even the one and even the ones that are like, Oh my God, you are feeling such FOMO and you think they are crushing it? Guys, they're not. Or maybe they are but they also they to feel anxiety and they say

Lexie Smith  

pot at least they've had it. They've experienced it probably many times before they got to success. Correct?

Emily Merrell  

Correct. Correct. So Lex, you just defined what a failed launch is. So can you tell us what happens once that deadline has passed? And you had told the world that you are going to execute XY and Z? What do we do? Okay,

Lexie Smith  

so you're going to do what I call a post mortem. Right? So this is where that that transition comes back in. Um, you know, you can call this a lot of different things. I don't know why in my career, I always call this a post mortem. And this is applicable to so many different things. I feel campaign this is honestly industry agnostic. But basically, once you've gone and done something, we're now going to break apart. What happened. And I want to talk through a very specific example. We have had various we do this often with clients who have given an effort to let's pick group program as an example. Maybe they've tried to launch a group and they didn't fill the group, what we do is a post mortem, and we break down alright, let's figure out what worked and what didn't work. And so we take it person by person, if they had sales calls, and we articulate and write down what happened. So let's say you're trying to fill group program a with eight people, and you ended up on four sales calls. We're going to start with sales call One, who are they? How did they come to you? What they say, why didn't they close? And you're going to write it all down, get it out of your head onto paper, you're then going to go to person number two, same thing, Person number three, Person number four, what are some other things we're going to look at in our post mortem em, you're going to also look

Emily Merrell  

at the objections like you're going to see if there's any common themes that stand out when you look at this reflection. So a lot of common themes that can happen could be pricing I think that's can be like theme number one. The number two especially for group is a lot of people don't see themselves as group people. Also squirrel but I think a lot of people think that about workout classes too. They don't think see themselves as group workout class people until they try it. And then three, looking at my brain just melted well

Lexie Smith  

okay, so I think what you're you're what you're doing a good job of art. deleting is what we do with our post mortem. But before you get to analyzing, I just want to make it very clear that we're breaking down and we're writing down and we're brain dumping absolutely everything that went into that. So how did we mark it? Did we send out four emails? Did we post five times, we want you to literally take the time, time block 30 minutes of your day, and write down every single thing you did for this launch. I will also want to know what happened with your newsletters. Did anyone click? Did you send it out on a Tuesday? Or were you trying Sunday? You know, depending on how organized you were on the front end, it could be just taking your front end marketing plan and writing out some results. Right. So essentially postpartum Step one is to brain dump, and get it out on paper, everything that happened, so that step two, as Emily was teeing up perfectly, we can start to look at this wild amount of noun data, qualitative and quantitative in front of us and start to pick out themes.

Emily Merrell  

And I want to I, thanks for clarifying that Lex. Because I think that's really important for you to document everything because a lot of times, especially with your first launch, reality is you're probably not super organized, you probably are kind of prey in sprain, you're maybe not having a strategy behind it. So outlining and in putting in front of you, your strategy, or what you did do, I think will be helpful. Maybe were marketing or messaging it in one way on one channel. But then you were saying something completely different in your newsletters, or you're burying the lead to the very fourth Scroll of your newsletter. So I love that exercise, Lex. And I think that is such a great visual to have in front of you before you dive into the body.

Lexie Smith  

So when we're conducting the post mortem, and the autopsy This is my kind of episode like my dream is coming true. I now have a true crime podcast.

Oh, rebrand.

Lexie Smith  

I know, right? I'm

Emily Merrell  

loving co teen death and coaching. I think coaching.

Lexie Smith  

Murder by murder Lex wrote. Anyways, we digress. Okay, so we want you to start to see if there are themes. For example, did three of your four calls price object? did five of your Instagram posts get zero engagement? Did you not even book a sales call? Did you feel like there wasn't a lot of traffic? Did you see in your newsletters, everyone was clicking on this call to action, we want to see if there are any themes that exist, that we can then take with us and learn and and see what we want to do with that information moving forward.

Emily Merrell  

And and I think it's so cool to be able to track all of that and do the due diligence on it. So maybe your email got tons of opens and no clicks. But why did that email get a ton of opens versus the email that you sent before. So diving into the language that you wrote, same thing. I think one of the biggest mistakes that we've seen and I just in terms of launching is a lot of times people will put it out there once. And that's it. And maybe they'll put it once on their newsletter and once on their Instagram and once on their LinkedIn and assume that the whole world saw what that they're launching in those three or four posts. And aren't i That sounds terrible cramming it down your throat or like really getting annoying about it. So lacks, what do we do now that we've gotten? We have learnings we're getting granular How do we do CPR?

Lexie Smith  

How do we bring it back to life? And yeah, have a zombie apocalypse? Um, okay. Well, there's let me give you guys a couple of examples here to to make this feel really tangible. Let's say you're launching a group program and on every call, maybe you're starting to see a theme that no one wants to join group. They'd rather work with you one on one. I don't the scene is escaping me right now. But sometimes an apple is an apple and sometimes an orange is an orange. Meaning. Sometimes the information is telling us something as obvious as obvious as it sounds maybe in that case, our people don't want a group. That could be one thing we take from postmortem. So you need to start to decipher your themes and decide how much value you want to give it. Were these anomalies or you know where the algorithms aren't in my favor and I don't even have enough views to let alone know if my People were interested, or was there really a common theme that my people were telling me, x. So I think we have to validate what data we want to keep with us, right? And bring with us into what we do next. Because after this, we now have a decision, we have a decision of how to move forward. And that path forward usually looks like one, let it rest, move on, or to go back to the drawing board with now this new information and try again.

Emily Merrell  

Yeah, and I think, I think that's so so great that this isn't something where you should feel shame, or you should feel bad about yourself. It's a lot of times just like small little micro tweaks, maybe that person who had objections about working in group, they also want that one on one support. And that's not what you were offering in your initial launch. So then, like iteration two could be layering in an element of like one on one support. So then that person who has objections to group, you're like, you're getting the best of both worlds here, you're getting me and you're getting this, this extra benefit of being in community with like minded individuals, or, you know, maybe we're speaking to men and women and you're realizing that there are two different audiences. And you need to focus on one of them at a time and make like a for women only in a very specific place. And they're like, maybe they're all moms or maybe they all have children in middle school. So they're going through like a shared experience. And so then that way, you can tailor this this offering that it's not bad. It's just been reimagined.

Lexie Smith  

Exactly. So I think you know, from here, another thing I want everyone to hear is the, after we take learnings from our first failed launch, we aren't guaranteed that our next launch is going to be successful. All we can guarantee is now that we are making a more informed and educated hypothesis, right? That we then have to go back to market and test and then do another post mortem. Essentially, when you're getting started started out with business. Think of it like a lab experiment, expect it honestly think of each campaign or each launch as an opportunity one way or the other, to learn and refine, learn and refine until eventually you you nail it.

Emily Merrell  

Yeah, I think that's great. God blacks, can we talk about your first lunch just as a, you know, highlight reel of the past? Yeah,

Lexie Smith  

it was I mean, I made a passive course. And I thought, build it naval comm I tried to host a workshop with my small audience, no one showed up. No one bought, I did a mistake, which we talked about on this, this podcast before is I tried to launch a volume passive offer out the gate when I didn't have volume to sell to. So it was a lesson that I learned really quickly. I then took that what I did in my post mortem, and said, You know what, I have really good content here. I don't have the volume yet to sell. So I'm going to keep the content the same. And I'm going to try to change how I'm selling it and go one on one. So for me, it was iterating how I was delivering it and what the program was.

Emily Merrell  

And I think that's a beautiful lesson too about like you were fresh in the coaching world. And you're expecting 1000s of people to buy this offering without having established like no interest or being an authority in the industry. And being a name that now everyone knows. Yeah, and then similarly, oh, my gosh, I mean, we've talked about this before, but the first time I launched, I had one person sign up, and rather than abandoning ship, I went through it. So this woman was getting one on one coaching, but for like, free, essentially. And it was great. And it was a humble sandwich. And it definitely gave me the opportunity to assess how I marketed it and how I wanted to do group again in the future. So it looks very different the second time around.

Lexie Smith  

Some other things to look out for to if you're trying something new, if you want seen a ton of competitors on the marketplace. There might and you have data that supports the people you were talking to didn't necessarily want the format you were offering. You might not have something that the market wants. That's like kind of the blunt reality. So can we instead figure out what it is the market wants. Now of course, there's always people who nail something new that's never been done, but at this point in the coaching industry, it's pretty hard hard to come up with a new a new vertical on what people are willing to buy. So competition, the kind of flip side that is competition is a really good sign. It's proof of concept to some extent. So that's another thing we want you to look at, as you're evaluating, bless you, no one heard that. But if you're watching YouTube, Emily, just

my child, she says,

Lexie Smith  

This is not I'm not saying this to discourage you. This is, you know, us putting on our business hat a little bit and looking at this from a non emotional standpoint, do I have something that the market and my people want a need? Or do I need to go back to the drawing board? You

Emily Merrell  

know, lacks, this is a great exercise to do that I recently went through myself was taking time to focus and identify who some of my competitors are in in a particular sphere of my business, and identify what they're doing without looking at their website, like How would I describe these individuals to someone at a cocktail party? And then reflect on what am I doing differently than them? And what are they? What am I doing that they are not doing? Or what do I have that they do not have? And I thought that was a really interesting exercise to just to pull out more differentiators, too, because to your point, like competition is great. It means that it's that people want what is out there. But just remembering like, what is that special sauce that you add to your offering that Joe Schmo doesn't have and that you can bring to the table that, you know, they they lack at this moment in time.

Lexie Smith  

And actually, we have a really, really awesome exercise in the ReadySet coach launch pack that takes you step by step through this process in a way to do competitive research to where you land at, you know, looking at what's the opportunity at hand. So I'm glad you did it. It's great that we're taking a piece of our own advice, right. Okay, guys, so what we want to do now is transition into a little bit of homework, and we want to turn you all into Marino's. Now he's gonna say you're gonna go out

Emily Merrell  

there and kill it,

Lexie Smith  

you're gonna go kill it, that's okay. And conduct a post mortem. Okay. Now if you've never launched fully a program, fine. Have you tried marketing? Have you? Is there something you can truly dissect? And again, to kind of recap the steps. Step one is just to get everything out of your brain get granular and get it out onto paper. What happened, right put numbers where we can pay attention to what people said. Step two, can we pull out themes? What do we see from in front of us? Step three. What? What themes do we want to validate and learn from to then step four? Let inform how we move forward.

Emily Merrell  

Beautiful I think I'm deceased hearing this.

Lexie Smith  

Did I knock you dead? Did I did I?

Emily Merrell  

You killed it? I can't say kilted again I'd already did that one. No, I think this was this was great. And this is just an incredible example of if you are listening to this and you were feeling a little down in the dumps about wherever you were in your lunch just know that try try again. So and let us know.

Lexie Smith  

He says Just keep swimming. Just keep

Emily Merrell  

Exactly. And just don't get caught and eaten

Lexie Smith  

anything. And let me tell you guys the secret between those who die and lay still in the grave and those who make it in this industry is they don't stop after one failed launch. They don't stop after second failed launch. They truly keep going.

Emily Merrell  

And they run faster than their murderer. Yeah,

Lexie Smith  

this is this whole episode is a great one guys. Okay, with that said, until now.

Emily Merrell  

Just beautifully done, Jesus.