Untitled Episode

Online coaches and consultants, if you’d like to sign your dream clients and scale, there's a link below that shows how we can help. It's a funnel, obviously, but it explains what we do if you're looking to scale. 

https://youtu.be/P_H2U2jxYCQ 

I keep seeing challenge funnel operators leave 30–40% of their revenue on the table because they treat the challenge end date like a finish line.

It's not. That's where the follow-up window opens — and if you don't have a system running during that window, you're bleeding money from leads you already paid to acquire.

My team has generated $1.3 million from challenge funnels, and a significant chunk of that came specifically from that post-challenge window.

In this video, I'm walking you through the internal SOP we use — how we segment leads, prioritize follow-ups, handle objections in the DMs, and recoup failed payments in real time.

The goal is to squeeze every dollar out of the leads you've already paid to acquire, with as little reliance on a sales team as possible.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We have made 1.3 million dollars from challenge funnels, and 40% of sales usually come after the challenge should end when we've already pitched the offer. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact internal SOP that we use to collect at least 40% of cash even after the challenge has ended. And the cool thing about this is it requires you to use a sales team as little as possible. So literally less than 10% of our sales when we do a challenge funnel comes from the sales team. So this system is going to show you how to maximize your cash after the challenge should end so that you can increase your return on ad spend, you can grow your business a lot further, and you can get more for those who purchase challenge tickets from you. So we are going to go straight into the video and thank you for watching. So when it comes to a challenge funnel, there's usually four main segments that you want to follow up with after your challenge should end. There's people who have purchased, you don't need to follow up with these people, you just need to make sure they get access to the program and make sure you onboard them properly. For our clients, we typically have a welcome, should I say a welcome call that they have everyone who purchases on board them properly and then they're good to go. And the reason why it's important to take your challenge onboarding a lot more seriously is because with challenges, you're signing a bunch of clients at once, unlike your VSL funnel, where clients are coming in on a more consistent basis, where it's like one client a day, two to three clients a day. With challenges, you can sign 50 plus clients at once. So you have to take the onboarding extremely serious if you want to truly maximize your revenue and give them a beautiful experience once they become clients. So you also have people who are non-buyers who applied. So one of the strategies that we like to implement when it comes to challenge funnels is having people apply to hear about the offer. So we call it an info session, and people would apply to get access to that info session, and only those who apply would see the offer pretty much. For some clients, we still end up pitching the offer to everyone on a subsequent day of the challenge. But we typically want to have that info session be the day where people apply if they are actually interested in joining the program and they want to hear more about the program. So we have non-buyers who are applicants and we have specific follow-ups that we would do with those people. Then we have non-buyers who are non-applicants, and then people who did not purchase and did not apply. We have a specific follow-up that we would use for those people too as well. And they bought tickets but they did not apply for the info session. And then we have people who have just been on the edge for as long as possible. So everyone you've had a sales call with that's hasn't closed, you want to follow up with them during this challenge period. And the reason is because during challenges, you're going to have an exclusive offer that you have never offered before that makes it so that everyone who attends your challenge buys now. So you want to offer those people that same offer as well. And you say stuff like, Oh, by the way, if you are an X type of person, I'm sure I have this bonus coming up for you. I'm having this challenge, and I wanted to invite you to get access to this bonus and so on and so forth. And then we also have that in place too as well. So let's keep going. You want to have at least some type of CRM in place so you can track every single lead, and some of these messages are going to be manual as well. So you want to have a CRM in place for you to track every lead you've reached out to, the follow-up you've gotten from them, and so on and so forth. So we basically create a spreadsheet that has their name, their email, their phone number, their ticket type. So was it a VIP ticket to purchase? Was it a general admission ticket to purchase, and so on and so forth? We also have like a segment where we group them into applicants, non-applicants, previous people you've tried to close. One thing we also follow up with is people who purchase previous versions of this same challenge because when you have a challenge, you're basically repeating the same thing over and over again. Like the same challenge is what you're doing over and over again, like you build it once and it continues to make money for you over and over again. So you essentially want to follow up with everyone who has purchased tickets before in the past but hasn't joined the program and tell them, Hey, by the way, I'm opening up my bonuses again. If you're interested, you can come and grab them and join the program. So you want to have that segment so as well, and then you want to have a spreadsheet that says, Oh, you've messaged someone, you haven't messaged them, and so on and so forth. So, just a very simple, straight to the point spreadsheet, just so you can track every single lead, and so there's no mistake. Then, in terms of prioritizing leads, so like which lead should you prioritize over others? Because what you'll notice here is there's so many leads and so many people to reach out to post challenge plus the fact that you're not using a sales team or you want to rely on a sales team as little as possible for this process. So you essentially want to know how to prioritize the leads, like who would you spend most of your time and attention on? So the people who we prioritize the most are those who purchased your VIP tickets and applied for your info session, those are the two people that we prioritize the most. If you don't have an info session in your challenge process, just focus on only those who purchase your VIP tickets. And the reason is because, first off, VIP people spend the most time with you throughout the challenge, and majority of them are very interested. You see, most of your conversions will come from those who purchase your VIP tickets. You should ideally close about half of them if you're doing things right. So these are the priority leads that we like to hammer first, like the VIPs who applied. And the next is people who brought the general admission tickets but also applied. Because if someone applied for the info session, it means they are very, very interested. And we like to prioritize these types of leads to as well. Because even if you didn't purchase VIP, because you applied for the info session, you attended the info session, it means you're more likely to purchase than other people. Then we now have VIP tickets holders who did not apply, GA tickets holders who did not apply, GA here just means general admission tickets holders who did not apply, and then we have everyone who has attended your previous sales calls but did not close, and then anyone who bought tickets to previous versions of the challenge but hasn't joined the program yet. So that's like the lowest tier leads. We want to follow up with them too as well, but we don't want to spend all our time and energy on these people. First three priorities majorly are the ones we want to spend as much time as possible with. So, in terms of timelines, usually we close the offer about three to four days after we pitch. So let's say our pitch happens on a Thursday, for example, and then we end our challenge on Friday. We will keep the offer open until Tuesday. So the hot buyers are the ones to reach out to first, literally. So the first group of people that we reach out to are those who have failed payments. That's a huge, huge one that we see. And we want to literally reach out to these people as soon as they are failing the payments, literally, calling them right when the client is pitching. Again, you're not using a sales team here, so you want to try and maximize every single lead while they are still hot. So we are literally calling these prospects while the challenge is still happening. We are following up with them, texting them just to make sure that if you have a failed payment, they are recouping that payment and giving you payment options and so on and so forth. And then we want to now start reaching out to applicants, VIPs, and so on and so forth from Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and so on and so forth. So the offer is going to close on Tuesday. The hottest leads, the ones who failed payments, be written out to them as soon as possible, and then from the day after the client should pitch the offer, that's when we now start following up with the remaining people, pretty much. And in terms of send times, if you're sending two messages a day, you want to make sure it is like one in the morning, one in the evening. This is not really important, just make sure you're not sending them at quiet hours when people are sleeping. So, in terms of response times, you want to make sure that you are responding as quickly as possible to your priority leads. So, like in under 15 minutes, you've already responded back to them or giving them a call, just because, like, you have to be really, really on it if you want to truly maximize these leads and make sure like no one falls through the cracks. Because, like I said, out of the 1.3 million dollars we've made from challenge funnels, about half of that has come post the challenge, and that's because of these systems that we have in place, just to make sure that there's no lead that is falling through the cracks and so on and so forth. So, the first thing is we want to follow up with those people who have a failed payment during the actual info session. So, when the host should drop a link, we are refreshing the payments dashboard in Go Ai level every single two to three minutes, and whenever we see a pending or field payments, we are literally DMing the person right inside of Zoom or wherever platform that you use, and we are offering to help these people. So, if it's an issue with a farm, that's usually the biggest issue that we see. People can't use our farm. We walk them through how to use that, and then we log the interaction inside of the CRM. So it's very important that we follow up with these people as quickly as possible, and then sometimes we even call them right when they are still on the challenge, just because don't want to lose that sale no matter what. We are really, really on it to make sure we actually get that sale. So calling these prospects as quickly as possible and trying to recoup that sale will do you like huge, huge benefits when it comes to recouping sales post-the challenge page. So for those who apply and did not purchase, we follow up with them in a very specific way. The first thing we ask them is okay, what is holding them back? That's the first thing. We also reach out to them via SMS and via email just so that we can have as much touch points as possible. Because we tested it and we found that oh, some people respond back via email, some will respond back via SMS. So we send them an SMS and an email with the same thing, very or very similar to be honest. I have templates here. Um, if you want me to send you this like SOP, like the actual detailed step-by-step walkthrough, you can DM me on Instagram and I'll send this over to you. So, this is the template that we use. The first thing we are doing here is just asking them if like you join the info session, like what do you think? Is there anything holding you back? So, if they respond, the goal is to either try and overcome the objection directly, if it's very simple, like if it's a simple objection, like hey, I'm struggling to use a firm, or hey, do you have this option for payment plans? It's something very direct and simple like that. You want to overcome the objection directly, right there and then, or give them a call quickly to solve the problem. But if it is more complex, like oh, I have to speak to my spouse first, or can this work for this specific type of thing that I do in my own use case? You want to basically try and book them on a discovery call, and that's where we now use closers. So you can see it's going to be very little volume of calls, and even like the clients themselves can take these discovery calls because it's not going to be a lot of calls, and we do our best to actually address the objection. Like we really try to address the objection inside of the chat, it's when we see this person is really pushing it. That is when we now just like have the clients have a look or like um try to solve the problem or like booking them on the discovery call and so on and so forth. So, again, like I said, if we are going back and forth for more than three messages without progress, you want to basically pivot to a quick call with them, and you don't even have to book a discovery call in some cases, you just need to get them on your phone. Like, you can just dial them on GHL, like be very, very open to calling these prospects as quickly as possible. Like my business partner is really cracked on stuff like this, and whenever we have like challenges, like is literally in the DMs all day, just like speaking to these prospects, trying to close them, calling them, fixing their payment issues, giving them payment options, and so on and so forth, is usually a time where I just really cracked during this period to try and maximize sales for the clients as as much as possible. So, for those who did not apply, the goal is because there's more volume with these people, we want to try and ask them a simple question like, Oh, what part of the challenge resonated with you the most? That's kind of like the first thing. And then when they respond back, we will tell them, Hey, we love hearing that, but by the way, we haven't seen you apply. Is there a reason why? And the reason why we had sent that first message is we don't want to just blast every single person with, oh, you haven't joined the program, why have you not joined the program? Something creepy like that. We want to try and engage them first, and then those who respond, we now just continue the conversation with them. So that filters out a lot of people for us because let's say you sell about 1,000 tickets and you only have hundred VIPs, for example, you're not going to have a good time if you want to follow up with a thousand prospects manually. So we want to filter out as many people as possible who would not even engage with us at all, and then now continue the conversation from here. In some cases, people might say stuff like, Oh, I have I wasn't able to attend, or can you send me the recordings? We would send them the recordings, but we would also tell them that by the way, we have these bonuses that are expiring. If you're interested, just reply back to the message when you finish watching the replay. So there's that too as well. And then when they tell us what they loved hearing about the challenge, then we follow up with them and try and see if they have any questions about joining the program. And then if you've taken a call with someone before in the past and they haven't closed, I could just say stuff as simple as hey, I just wrapped up the challenge and I thought of you. A lot has changed since we last spoke. We've had some new bonuses that weren't available before. Would it be worth a 10-minute call to catch you up on this? And then you book a bunch of calls from your old people, offer them the bonuses, and then you can close these prospects. Again, you can even do this for previous challenge ticket buyers, and you can send something as simple as this and just book like a shit ton of calls in like a very short time with leads that you know are actually likely to convert. So, again, it's not like we want to eliminate the sales team completely. We've done that in many cases and still had very successful challenges, but we want to have them do as little work as humanly possible and have marketing do a lot of the heavy lifting. If someone doesn't respond back to our messages at any point in time, here we want to follow up with them every 24 hours, pretty much. So we have different ways that we follow up. One of the cool things that we do if the lead is very, very hot, like VIP or they bought tickets, or they apply, they didn't join the program. You can have our final last ditch follow-up is having the founder just record a Loom video and send it to them. So it doesn't even have to be individually, it can be a general video, just one pre-recorded video. Like, hey, I saw you attended a challenge. I know you're interested. I'll really love to have you join us. You can use that loom AI thing as well to add their first names in it, just swap out their first name automatically and just say hey, I'm Jane, and then you have the same video, but to say hey John, to say hey Joseph, it to say hey Michael, and so on and so forth. So you can have that video just like populate and then send these prospects the loom video. That's our last stage follow-up. So we'd like to start with social proof first, then we do like a bonus, like, oh, we have X amount of spots available. This bonus is going to expire, and so on and so forth. Then we now do like a personal follow-up from the founder that just says, Hey, I know you're interested in this, you haven't joined, blah blah blah. Here's the link to join the program. I would love to see you in the program, I'd love to work with you one-on-one. If you have any questions, make sure you respond back to the person that reached out to you and so on and so forth. So, this is usually the strategy that we use for our follow-up at any point in time when anybody who is already engaged is no longer responding, when they are already warmed up and they're already like we're already talking about the program. It's not like it is the non-applicant sequence, but we are still talking about what they enjoyed about the challenge. When we are already talking about the program, that is when we now introduce this bump sequence, right? So we also send like subject line emails, and this is pretty direct. Like I said, they're following up via SMS and following up via email, just because we know that some people would not check the SMS for the life of them, and some would check their email, so we're just maximizing all the touch points. So I have like a subject line guide here for my team. It's nothing too serious here, so you don't have to worry about this. It's straightforward stuff on how to write an email. So now there are a couple of objections that you can get. This is more detailed just because I have a team and I have to train them on how to do these things. Some people might say they don't have it's too expensive, so people might say they need to think about it, they need to talk to their spouse, they are not ready yet, the timing is not right. Like whatever objection they give you, you want to try and overcome them inside of the chat. And when it starts to get too complex, if you're having back and forth too much, just ask them for a quick call. I won't go into like the frameworks to break down all these objections. Like I said, if you want access to these documents, send me a DM on Instagram and I will send you these documents. So, yeah, people might have payment issues, they might say, Is it worth it? Time when it's not right, and so on and so forth, whatever the case might be, just try to solve the problem. And if you have two to three messages and they are not still responding back, then you can offer to book them on a discovery call. It is a caveat to this: if you are the closer and you're the one doing this, there's no need to book them on a discovery call, just call them right away and try to close them. But if like you're doing this on behalf of a closer or on behalf of the founder, then you can suggest booking a discovery call with the founder and tell them that if they show up, you'll make sure that you honor the challenge bonus. So that's another very important thing that you need to take note of when it comes to this. So we have some escalation paths here, like this is more for my team internally. Like I made this document on my team, I didn't make it for YouTube, but I just felt like this would be valuable for people as well, and that's why I'm making a video around it. So, escalation pathways here, like who to message for what is um what we have here. That's not really important for you. And then if you're handing over like a conversation to the founder or to a closer and so on and so forth, because if you're not the one taking the action yourself, like you are the team member, you are the operator, and if you're the operator, you should be able to handle this. If you're like an assistant on the team that is doing this, you want to basically have a framework that you would use to hand over a prospect to the client, like oh, this person has booked a discovery call, or can you please speak to this person soon and so on and so forth? So we have that framework here too as well. Again, if this is not relevant to you, it's because I'm making this for my team, so not all of the things here will be relevant to you. So I have like tonality guys here, that's nothing to worry about. Compliance, that's nothing to worry about as well. Yeah, and that's basically it to be honest. This is literally what we do in order for us to maximize leads post challenge. If you want me to send you this document, like I said, just send me a DM on Instagram and I will get it to you. If you have any clarifying questions, you can let me know in the comment section. And yeah, thank you for watching the video. I hope to see you in the next one. Bye.