Rule #1 of online sales: Don’t treat your customers or prospects like they are idiots, or like they don’t live in the real world.

Rule #2 of online sales: Don’t lie to yourself and kid yourself into thinking that your customers do not have an alternative supplier that they could go to.

What these rules mean: if you have a client in front of you, don’t spend the entire time you have with them telling them what you will do for them… once you have their money. This is how most people are taught to sell, to do marketing, to generate leads for their business, and to run product or service webinars. And it is completely wrong.

This may be surprising to you, but the vast majority of so-called “gurus” do not share real-world usable material on their webinars. They share basic content, success stories, testimonials, and promises of more content or instruction… all meant to sell viewers to their “bottom rung” paid services where they give a bit more content, and sometimes upsell them to a higher-ticket package where the most content lives.

If you are using or thinking of using webinars as a lead generation tool (which I highly recommend), please don’t spend 50 minutes of a 60-minute slot telling your audience that you are “going to show them how to [insert action here]” and then spend the last ten minutes pitching. You may well make some short-term sales, but the conversions are likely to be relatively low and you won’t build a tribe.

Okay, smart guy, you may be asking, if everyone’s doing that but I shouldn’t do it, what do I do instead?

Be generous. Give away the farm. If you have an hour in front of clients on a webinar, spend that hour giving them your best stuff. Especially if it’s the first time they’re seeing you. Give until you run out of time, and then give more.

Specifically, give them some kind of really valuable guide, video or other advice product just for registering, regardless of whether or not they actually attend the webinar. Then tell them that for showing up they will get something else for free, or that you’ll put their name in a hat to win something of value, like a free membership to an online coaching or instruction program. Offer them an additional bonus for staying on the webinar all the way to the end.

Then spend the whole webinar teaching them the best material you’ve got. If you’re a copywriter, teach them how to write the best sales pages ever. If you’re a relationship coach, teach them how to stop arguing with their partner all the time. If you’re a personal trainer, teach them the five things they can do this week to start losing weight. (These are just examples, it could be anything, but you get the idea.)

And at the end, where most people save space for ten or fifteen minutes of sales pitching…don’t. Just tell them how to get in touch with you if they want more information. Then thank them profusely for their time, give them their final bonus gift(s), and end the call.

These are the practices I use to get 45%-55% attendance on my full webinars, when most webinars are lucky to get 10% to show up and 5% to stay till the end. They’re also practices that have gotten me five figures of sales from just one webinar. And they can have the same kinds of results for you.

Why do they work so well?

First, because EVERYONE else is doing it the other way, where they tease and taunt you with a little bit of content and then slap you with a sales pitch. Doing the opposite of that is SO refreshing.

Second, because it’s about building an audience in the long term, not getting an immediate sale. Far better off building your audience, or as Seth Godin calls it, your tribe, than trying to convert 5 people in 100 to buy a particular product or service right now. In the long run, that tribe will get you all the sales you need—as long as they don’t think you only want them around for those sales.

Finally, because when you give so much away for free, people not only want to give back to you, they actually want to pay you to help them! Webinars like this leave them thinking “Wow! If this is what I get for free, I wonder what I get if I pay this person?”

So the question is: what does your audience need? What is it that you can give them that will absolutely transform their lives? Give it to them (especially on webinars) and your success will come at you faster than you ever imagined. As the great Zig Ziglar said, “You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.”

http://www.jasoneconomides.com/myfarm

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