The Course Mentors Podcast

Cracking the Course Sales Code - Our Journey Beyond Launches and Robots

• The Course Mentors • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Hey there, course creators! Aimee and Odette here, ready to spill the beans on how we've cracked the code for selling online courses without losing our minds (or our humanity).

In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on our own wild ride through the world of course sales. Trust us, we've been through it all - the adrenaline-fueled launches, the "set it and forget it" automations, and everything in between. 

Ever wondered why some strategies feel impersonal and overly automated? We challenge the status quo by highlighting the pitfalls of traditional launch marketing and the lack of human touch in evergreen strategies. 

Here's what we're dishing out:
1. Our brutally honest take on launch-based and evergreen sales (spoiler: it's not all unicorns and rainbows)
2. The repeat intake model: Our secret sauce for selling courses without the usual headaches
3. Why we're bringing the human touch back to course marketing (no, we haven't hired an army of carrier pigeons)
4. How we learned to stop being a jack-of-all-trades, and master the art of the niche
5. Our mission to make course enrollment simpler than assembling IKEA furniture

We're not holding back - you'll hear the good, the bad, and the downright ugly from our own experiences. We'll share how we stumbled upon our repeat intake model and how we’ve simplified online course sales so that we can keep the doors permanently open, without resorting to gimmicks.

This episode is your golden ticket if you:
• Feel like you need an energy drink IV to survive another launch
• Are tired of feeling like a used car salesman when marketing your course
• Want to build a course business that doesn't require sacrificing your firstborn to the algorithm gods
• Are curious about how to keep it real in a world of automated webinars and fake scarcity

So, grab your favorite beverage, and join us for a candid chat that might just change the way you think about course sales.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Course Mentors podcast, where we talk about everything online course success. I'm Amy Hill and I'm Odette Eade.

Speaker 2:

We're the Course Mentors and today we're talking through our entire strategy for repeated online course sales and how we're able to make sales on repeat every single month.

Speaker 1:

But before we get into that, Amy, how are you? What have you done this week?

Speaker 2:

I actually went to go see a psychic last night.

Speaker 1:

Oh, like a personal session, or like.

Speaker 2:

No, it was like a. It was an entertaining crowd work kind of show, you know the kind of thing where they come over to you and they say your grandma's in the room with us.

Speaker 1:

Oh, my god, amazing. It was really good. What a night out. What a Thursday night.

Speaker 2:

It yeah, just your average it was actually so much fun and it really inspired me did you learn anything about the future or somebody else's? I learned about stage presence. I feel cool. Yeah, I took away a lot about presenting and talking really loudly and skills. Yep, it was great. Inspired for today Super entertaining, super cool. Equal parts, funny and cool.

Speaker 1:

I love it. We have very different Thursday nights.

Speaker 2:

Daddy, how was your week? What did you get up to?

Speaker 1:

Good yeah, I set up a new office space in my house. It looks gorgeous. I bought some plants I it was all because I bought this gorgeous new painting, um, so I sort of worked the room around that and I'm really excited to have my new office. Uh feel fresh feel motivated.

Speaker 2:

Exciting. Buying a brand new painting is extraordinarily on brand for you. That is something that you would do if you were a like 20 million dollar in the bank. Whatever your house, I would come over and it would just be like every inch of the wall covered with something miraculous that would be art.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you for that, I feel complimented whether it was one.

Speaker 2:

all of that aside, we are going to be blowing some minds today. I feel we're going to be breaking down and uncovering some of the stuff that we see in the industry every single day, and I think we're going to be lifting the curtain on some of the things that go on behind closed doors in the online course industry and proving that there is a lot of gimmicks out there, but those aren't the things that work, thank God, so De, what is our model called?

Speaker 1:

Our model is called the repeat intake model, so currently you might have heard of launch marketing or maybe the evergreen strategy.

Speaker 2:

Those are the two most dominant strategies that are used in today's space Usually launch marketing, or it's usually evergreen, or it's some sort of combination of the two of those things. And I want to go through today what launch marketing is, what evergreen strategies are and, at their bare bones, what's included in the two of those strategies. And then I want to introduce our strategy and what we do. That's a little bit different and maybe a little bit more traditional than what's currently going on in the industry.

Speaker 1:

We're not the type of people who just say this is the new big thing, this is where it's at. It's like no traditional business practices that work long term.

Speaker 2:

Totally so. If you don't know, or if you haven't heard much about launching or evergreen, launch strategies are generally built. They're also called the open cart close strategies. They're usually built around the premise that the enrollment for your course opens and then it closes and those are the two dates that you live and die by. So you have your open cart, you have your closed cart and up until that, until that open cart, it is all about promoting your program. It's all about promoting those dates. And then during your open cart season, that is where it's like black friday, like go crazy, go ham.

Speaker 2:

When you're marketing, it's like balls to the wall every single day on your stories on instagram, hammer, hammering, marketing. You close the cart, business is done for that season and you know advantages of the open-close cart. The launch model, whatever you want to call it, is that it is really a short season of hard work and then the hard work sort of finishes and you get to have a rest period in between and then the other dominant strategy that sort of is out there at the moment is evergreen right, and evergreen marketing is all about having a product that's available 24 seven so someone can buy your program, your course at any time and to get into your program, usually because there's not a lot of like natural drive, because the cart doesn't open and close and there's not that pressure that exists, usually you do have to rely on software to help push people through your funnel yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I think what we should do really is talk about our experience with those strategies, right, absolutely like this is so honest and so vulnerable and so hard to talk about, but it really was a really big part of my business journey. So I'm just gonna lay my cards on the table and say it straight I did a launch. I did a really big part of my business journey. So I'm just going to lay my cards on the table and say it straight I did a launch. I did a really big launch. This was back in 2020.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and basically and I will spare you all the details but basically what I did was I followed a really traditional launch plan, which is you have 12 weeks of promotion, you have a two week cart open date and it's like 10 weeks of really hard push, two weeks of open. You have a two week cart open date and it's like 10 weeks of really hard push, two weeks of open, and then you just kind of like go crazy and then you close the cart, right, and then you celebrate and say I had a $10,000 launch. I had a $200,000 launch on the back of that because you took all this money in one short period of time right. So I did it and, for context, I'd already ran regular intakes before that. So I had a baseline of like what you know I could get without that big marketing push right and without the cart open and close dates.

Speaker 2:

I knew like no, I kind of roughly sell like this many courses a month without having to do all of that extra shit and I'll be so real, cards on the table, fully serious, I probably did like an extra 15 percent of sales and I was going crazy, crazy marketing stories every day, post twice a day, everything on every platform, shouting about my course, shouting about everything, and you know what. It didn't make a difference. I mean I got a little, a few extra sales, a bit of a boost, but a bit of a boost. But you know what, immediately I was like okay, look, it wasn't probably worth all the effort that I put into it, but maybe it's the wrong time of year to sell my program, maybe like things just didn't align.

Speaker 1:

That's the thing. There's too many variables. Yeah, you know it could be, even if you've got great ideas. You're doing all this great work. Maybe it's not the right time. Maybe there's just too many variables. Yeah, the main reason we don't like it is because so much effort, too many variables and it's better to base your sales on consistency conversions, not hopefully, this will work. If I work really really hard, because we know you can work really really hard, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get the result that you're expecting. You know people hype up these big sort of launches like like this is the next big thing or this is the current thing. You know you have to do a launch, you have to do this crazy big thing and you'll get all these results. Some people will and some people won't. Like Amy said, she had consistent conversions. If it was going to bring her another 100% of you know sales great, but you know that extra 15% not worth it yeah, it actually wasn't.

Speaker 2:

And do you know what happened on the other side? Do you remember? What happened on the other side was it was really good. There was a week where we were like celebrating a little bit. We're like, oh yeah, some extra sales. We're like, oh yeah, some extra sales came in, like that's great, it's a cash boost for the business, like that's awesome, whatever, a week went by and then we got our first refund request and I got an email straight away that said, hey, I'm so sorry, I actually can't commit to this program right now. I don't know why I purchased Can I have my? And I was like, oh, that sucks. And then I gave that refund out. You know I was like, okay, whatever, the next day another one, the next day another one, the next day another one which never, ever, ever happens with you.

Speaker 2:

Never had one before in my entire life. And then they just started rolling in and I was like, oh shit, I can't. This is terrible, this is so bad. And then it just kept going. You tallied up the amount of sales. Without those refund requests, I would have made more on a regular month had I not gone to all of that effort of hardcore promotion. It was just like why did I do it? The students, like none of them, finished the program when I used to have an incredible completion rate. These people didn't come in. And then I looked back at it and I said it's just because people who purchase on the back of that much pressure are not mentally committed to what they're actually signing up to. And we know this. We know this so deeply now. Online courses are not easy, because if they were easy then there wouldn't be any real change, and people buy courses that have real change in them absolutely there.

Speaker 1:

Those are people who could have been really happy, done your course, had they an extra couple of weeks, or they didn't feel that pressure to buy. If you were like, hey, I do my monthly intakes 30 people a month, I start on the whatever of each month. Okay, cool, you know what, it's not the right time for me, but you know what I reckon I could commit to this. Give me a month to sort some shit out and I'm there yeah, you know, and then you actually get the sale.

Speaker 1:

You don't get the refund request, you don't get that person thinking they tried your program and they haven't, you know.

Speaker 2:

I know, but it's not just us. I mean, we've tried launching a couple of times since then and we've also tried launch model marketing, like our students have tried it before. They've come to work with us and we've seen a lot of people go through this now and it's pretty much across the board consistent results. It's so much work. You burn yourself out, you burn your audience out, because you're in the stories a million times a day, promoting, promoting, promoting. It feels icky and that's why, because you're just like constantly pushing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah that's right. The burnout is the is the one half of why I don't like launch marketing. The second and major one for me is if you were, say you were a brick and mortar shop, you know you had a storefront in what crazy land, in what crazy world would you open your shop up for six weeks of the year, or six weeks twice a year, to sell your product? You don't do that in business. You, if you have a shop, you don't do that in business. You, if you have a shop, you don't open for six weeks of the year and then say, oh no, sorry, you can't buy my thing. There's really great thing I have. No, you can't have it like that's.

Speaker 2:

That's a terrible business model, it's a terrible business model, totally, and some people have like multiple offers right, like they might have like five or six different courses and so they'll have like a launch for one course and then a look to another course and launch with us. That's like having a shop and one day you sell t-shirts and then three days later you rip it all down and now you sell socks.

Speaker 2:

It's exhausting, yeah it's exhausting and you and so fucking confusing if I come into a shop and I'm like these were the best socks ever. I've told everyone about these socks. They're so good and everyone rocks up the next day and there's pants in there.

Speaker 1:

What, yeah, you've committed to, I'm launching this product now so you can't then in another six weeks being like, hey, I'm launching that thing again that I said you could never have six weeks ago. You know, so confusing, so confusing and you can't get known for, oh, when I'm ready, I can go and buy that thing, or, oh, that's that really cool thing she does, she does, and then two months later, when I'm ready to commit.

Speaker 2:

Oh, what, this is different. I thought it was this yeah, I really wanted to buy those socks, but I was going on vacation. So I'm going to come back in two weeks. Can't wait to spend thousands and thousands of dollars of your shop buying socks on those socks. You've changed your. Now we're doing pants. I don't want pants yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, you just told me that I could have this cool thing. What I can't anymore why not? Is the problem. Why can't I?

Speaker 2:

yeah that it doesn't make sense and people aren't stupid exactly, and I think it comes back to doing one thing really really exceptionally well and then building a brand around doing that one thing exceptionally well and becoming known for it and becoming the authority and becoming the educator on that one thing, not one tiny thing, one field of thing. One cool thing, one cool thing of thing. One cool thing, one cool thing, one big thing.

Speaker 1:

So those are our pretty unfiltered thoughts about what launch marketing is. Let's talk about Evergreen. So Evergreen is about making something available to purchase all the time. Often, it's touted as this hands-off, automated strategy that uses software to peddle your course.

Speaker 2:

If you ever hear someone talking about you know they have the secret to an automated funnel that is going to make you billions of dollars. In your sleep they're generally talking about an evergreen strategy. That's kind of like the umbrella term for this field of strategies.

Speaker 1:

It isn't going to make you a billion dollars overnight, just quietly. Again, that's it. It's kind of scammy, it is scammy, um, and it just simply doesn't line up with like the real world. Again, it overextends on pressure because it lacks that genuine substance. So you have this basically, you've created this course and instead of like showing up for your students making sure the transformation works, actually like standing behind the product you've created, you just pop it on a website, put some software behind it and then do like there's there's trip wires, there's upsells, there's pressure, pressure, pressure.

Speaker 2:

They absolutely triple down on the pressure and it makes for a really uh, scammy sales process yeah, it's really hard to explain what evergreen is because it's so many different things, but generally the structure of it is you have a course, right. You have a program or a product or something. You're not usually showing up on calls to talk about the product with somebody you're not really showing up live in the course. The promise is that you're making something automated, right, so you make sort of a series of videos, you put some worksheets in there, you kind of build something out that can be really automated and then you put it on a website and then generally you're going to drive a bunch of traffic to that website usually via ads usually and then there'll be something there in between the ad and your course which is usually like a video or a master class or a webinar or it might be a low product or something, a low ticket offer, something cheap that they can buy in between, and then they buy this or watch this, and then you sell the course at the end of it and you say I gave you a little bit of something, now give me your money for my course, and then you might upsell your course all the time over emails. Hammer them with emails.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and generally the problem with evergreen strategies is I'm missing one key, incredibly important thing, which is human touch. Yeah, it's when you go for the fully automated business, the selling hands off, no sales calls, no support, when you have a program that completely lacks humans, you lose substance, you lose authenticity, you lose the heart of a program, because when it comes to education, people need to be involved in that. You cannot learn something that is important, that is life-changing or that is transformational from a YouTube series. You cannot do that. You need people involved in you. Education requires back and forth, and so does a really good sales process too. It requires bloody discussion. Yeah, I want to ask a question about this thing. Yeah, but because you don't have that substance in this automated, evergreen world of like selling YouTube video series is basically what they are. When you don't have that substance, you have to double down on fake pressure to sell something, because if a program had substance, people would line up to buy it.

Speaker 1:

It would have sales points it would have. This is all the things you get from the course. You know you can't say you get weekly calls with me. It's basically like smoke and mirrors you have a shop front but no staff in it in it. You know they can't even send you an email. There's no one behind the scenes maybe some admin not even like. There's no one behind the scenes to actually support your learning. Yeah, yeah, it's like. It's just like a get rich quick scheme, except you're not really going to get rich like and there's even now it's turned into. You don't need skills, just come to us and we'll teach you how to sell a course. You know a course on what? Anything.

Speaker 2:

Get AI to write it in two days.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, just pick something and then we'll just make a sales page around it. It's not for us. It's not for us, yeah.

Speaker 2:

But this evergreen world, it's something that we stay so clear of because you know we talked about it. But it's about getting something together, driving it up quick, chucking it on a website and then and then, yeah, taking away all of that substance and human emotion out of it. And when you do that, you really have to lay on the thick those really low vibrational feelings of like fear and scarcity, because you really have to yeah you have to pile on and you have to say this is all gonna go to go away.

Speaker 2:

It's going away forever. There's countdown timers, there's expiring things Like it's so stressful that you need to buy it, otherwise you're never going to get it.

Speaker 1:

But it's actually just evergreen. It's available all the time. Yeah, it's a world that we try and stay away from. So, amy, that's evergreen, that's launch marketing. Well, how are we different? Tell us about our model.

Speaker 2:

So what we teach is our repeat intake model, and we've been teaching it for a very, very long time now. We've been running it in our own programs for a very, very long time now, and shit, it works.

Speaker 1:

We based it on consistency and still automation. We took basically the good parts of like launch marketing and the good parts of Evergreen of like launch marketing and the good parts of Evergreen and then we took what was lacking from them as well and added that to make a really well-rounded model.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, basically, if you haven't, if you don't know before what I do, but I teach Japanese and I've always done that. I used to do it in a tutoring capacity and I used to be an interpreter. But when I first got into the online course world, I felt so fucking dizzy. I felt like what is going on like this? I've been an educator my whole, like my whole career, I've been educating people, but now I have to force people to buy this education. I have to tell them that there's like it's expiring. I have to tell them that there's a two-week time period for them to enroll. Like it was so complex and, honestly, immediately I was like I don't think I need to do any of that.

Speaker 1:

Like it doesn't feel right and this just doesn't make sense to me. This doesn't.

Speaker 2:

Yeah right, like it doesn't make sense. And so I was like, okay, I guess launching is where it's at. And then I was like, no, okay, everyone else is talking about evergreen funnels and automated systems. I was like I guess that sounds really sexy, but I don't know, it just wasn't. It never felt in alignment with me because it's not what I had done my whole career. Just feels what?

Speaker 1:

it is which is unauthentic. Yeah, You're actually selling something really great, so don't need to rely on scams.

Speaker 2:

So, as soon as I had sort of had this realization that this just wasn't, it just wasn't what we were doing in my career, I went back to what I had done my whole career with teaching, which is intakes, and I had used the same system that I'd used my entire life, which was hey, I can take, I can fit about 30 people in this classroom every month. If you want to come, there's about 30 seats in this room. If you can't make it this month, I'll see you next month.

Speaker 1:

That's it, and that might sound familiar, because that's how courses work. Yeah, I want to learn something. Okay, when does the course start?

Speaker 2:

Oh, the course starts on the 1st of August.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you can't make it this round.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's fine, Don't worry, it's because we've got another round starting on the 1st of September, another one on the 1st of October.

Speaker 1:

The other thing with our intake. It's not rigid. It's not like you have to sell this way. You know, if you have a 12-week course and you want to run it in 12-week rounds, that's okay. You repeat your rounds every 12 weeks, but all through those 12 weeks you're selling for your next round. Therefore, your doors are never closed. Someone closed, someone can always purchase your product and then, just like any other school or course, they wait for in the enrollment day, what is it called like? The start date of the course. So it's extraordinarily communicable, communicatable whatever.

Speaker 2:

It's extremely easy to communicate to whoever wants to buy your course is what we have designed the most fucking insane thing you've ever heard of.

Speaker 1:

The most intelligent strategy in the world no, no it is not the new big thing, it is not the new best thing, because that in itself tells you that it is temporary, that you are going to have to do the next big thing after this next big thing, you know. That's why we are so insistent on consistent, repeated intakes.

Speaker 2:

It's not groundbreaking. It's not the world's next big, crazy strategy that we've sat down and genius whiteboarded out. It is quite literally the thing that every single university, college, school, educational institution does every single time they run intakes. And then what do they do in between? They take payments for the next intake. That's it. That's the. That's the groundbreaking strategy that you guys are given today. It is take it back to basics and don't over complicate it. We doesn't need a big strategy. It doesn't need something that's going to melt your grandma's socks off we still obviously within the model.

Speaker 1:

We'll still teach you how to create. You know that bit of urgency, but it makes sense. It's not, it's natural. It's natural urgency. We create natural reasons why you would need to buy the course now, not later. And with evergreen, with all that automation, we automate the sales process. We have all those things within our repeat intake model it's completely automated.

Speaker 2:

In fact, if someone wants to enroll today, they'll enroll, put an application in, we'll see that application, we'll approve it or deny it, and say and then they'll be approved, and that application process is entirely automated from that point onwards, all the way through to when we meet them for their first call.

Speaker 2:

Best of both worlds and none of the garbage, yeah and I think the important thing is that what we do is we come back to basics and we really, really believe in the basics and doing the basics well. All of that extra shit is just noise. All of that stuff about expiring countdowns and timers that go away, and all of that extra stuff. People are so much more intelligent and just because it's new and it's working now does not mean it's going to work next year. So if you build an entire business around you know these crazy launches and these big hype driven campaigns where everything ends on the September, the 12th, and it's all going to go away it's not good business practice.

Speaker 1:

You're going to bring it out again next year, in 2024, and everyone's going to go oh, yeah, or you're going to just burn it out completely and you can't launch that product you just worked so hard on again and you said something before, dad, about natural urgency.

Speaker 2:

That natural urgency is baked into our p intake model via the support that you offer your students. And no, I don't mean one-to-one support or endless calls or being on zoom for your entire life. What I mean is one call a week, one call call a fortnight, a couple of calls a month, group calls, whatever. A couple of group calls, exactly Email support. Yeah, what I mean is showing up for a couple of hours a month, but that support is a very real and natural limitation on how many people you can have as part of your intakes, and that is where our natural urgency is founded. So you have recurring repeat intakes that run back to back. You can have one a month. You can have one every three months. That's completely up to you.

Speaker 1:

And we model that. We show you how to do that. That works in your life, it works for you.

Speaker 2:

So think, just like a university, would they have an intake once a year or once a semester or whatever it is that they do? You're just intaking just like they are, and you have a limited number of seats that you can sell in your intakes 150, 30, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Again, we'll show you how to do that and tailor it to you. But let's bring this back to in the context of what's going on out there in the world right now. Right, let's lift right up launching hype driven bullshit that just drives a ton of refund requests, bad customer purchasing behaviors and basically just burns you and your audience out to death. It's also like closing a store like for no reason stopping having money come into your business not good business.

Speaker 2:

Evergreen selling something totally automated, hands-off, having a series of videos or a course or worksheets or materials soulless, soulless, soulless. That you basically don't have any connection with the teacher, there aren't a lot of live components to it, or if any, and there's no in-person sales process, so you're basically just buying via masterclasses or webinars, and it's a lot of traffic. It's just buying off robots. It's a numbers game and it's a lot of traffic. It's just buying off robots. It's a numbers game and it's a bit ick. It's a bit ick. It's low vibration, great.

Speaker 1:

Moving on. So back to basics systems that make sense, strategies that work for both you and your student, Not complicated, not brand new, not the next greatest best thing in the entire world, Just shit that works.

Speaker 2:

Consistency is thing in the entire world. Just shit that works. Consistency is our absolute key for sales. Yeah, consistency, authenticity, honesty, transparency these are the dates that I'm enrolling. Pay for whichever intake you like. See you there. See you there and, crazy enough, we can show you so clearly how to make those intakes 10, 20, 30, 40k each and every single time that you run one. But it doesn't involve all of the robots and the systems and the automation and the crazy type driven strategies.

Speaker 1:

Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. It's all going away tomorrow. Don't get us wrong, it's still automated. You're still selling your sleep. That's not a fantasy. But it's not just run by robots.

Speaker 2:

So I hope that today we were able to break down what it is that we do and why it's different to everybody else. And no, we haven't been able to give you the entire picture, but we will. Over the course of the next few episodes, we'll go through what it is and how we drive traffic to our offers and how we're able to get to those 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 months.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely Hopefully that explains some of the noise out there and brought it back to basics for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's really not as complicated as it needs to be, but that's about it from us guys. See you in the next episode. See you then, bye.