Building a Relationship with Your Audience

Today I’m interviewing the very special Tash Corbin. Tash is the host of the Heart Centered Podcast. She has created an amazing group of soul driven heart-centered entrepreneurs. I’m very much in alignment with what Tash is all about. I’m so excited because she has the signature program, which is amazing for startups called Takeoff. I’ve watched you launch that a bunch of times and I’m like,it’s just not quite the right fit for me because I’m farther along in my business.

If you prefer you can go ahead and watch our interview instead.

 

I’m super excited about this new program that she has, I’m already enrolled in it. It’s all about leveraging and launching, and if you are at the stage in your business where you know your niche, you’ve made amazing offers and you want to take it to the next level.I am listening to Ms.Tash Corbin over here, and I think you should too. 

So I know there’s probably some amazing tips. One of the things that I want to share, Tash has an amazing, free workshop. Her workshops are also so amazing because there is so much content that you can use.

It’s not just sell, sell, sell. It’s here’s some strategies. Here’s some things you can use. If you come. I know you’re going to walk away with something amazing. So I want to share with you about that. 

I want to say one of the things that I really love about what you’re doing with this strategy is that you’re always modeling things. I think that is going to come out in this program very carefully. And I think it was something that you said either on one of your podcasts recently.

It’s one of the hard truths, but you want to give yourself some time. By giving yourself this amazing launch runway. Because I think the first time I heard about this and I hopped on the waitlist, I was still stranded in Florida at the end of April. 

What can we Expect from Tash?

One of the big principles behind the way that I market in my business and I teach marketing and sales is to have everything grounded in consent. So often when you jump into a launch of a program, you will be signing up for a free thing and you’re expecting one thing, but you get another. And then you also get this onslaught of offers, I think the industry standard now is about 17 emails in four days for a launch. And you get this onslaught of emails. And for me as a participant, I don’t enjoy that process. There are people who I love. Like I love them, but I will not sign up for their free things because I just don’t want the emails.

I also find that their lead magnets for their launches are around 20 minutes of them telling me how amazing they are and why they’re an authority and what their client results are. And then 10 minutes of content and then 45 minutes of a pitch about something.

If you really want the outcome, you have to buy the thing. And so for me, I have just been to enough of those webinars and I’ve participated in enough challenges that are just like the tiniest little drip feed, a little tiny thing, but I have to sit through an hour to get the little tiny things. And I just wish that my time was valued more. 

So when I look at the way that launching is taught, the way that group programs are taught, I knew that I wanted to create my consent driven alternative, and I’ve been leveraging and launching on my own as well as with VIP clients for years using these consent driven practices.

The thing that really sparked my desire to change how to get my program out there was when I was in another Facebook live and an industry leader in launch was talking about a couple of things. And I was like, that’s just not good enough.

Modern Marketing Focuses On:

It’s okay to make people like, feel more panicked and dial up their fear about getting a result because when they buy your program, you’ll fix it.

I was like, no, that’s actually not okay.

We didn’t have permission from that person to be dialing up their fears and worries. And what about all the people who don’t buy from you? Is it okay? Like the downside with those fears came out was like, this two choice thing.

You have two choices. Either you don’t invest in, you keep trying on your own and you suffer and your children suffer and you’ll never be successful. Or you invest in this thing and everything will be rainbows and sunshine lollipops. And you’ll just magically get the outcome. And I was like, no, there’s actually like eleven-ty billion, other choices here. You just want me to believe there are only two choices.

And so the people who don’t buy a left feeling like, whew, I made the wrong choice. And that’s something a lot of people have to recover from. Like imagine running a free workshop and people have to recover from it because they’ve been so brought down by the way that you’ve made them feel, because they didn’t purchase from you.

Emails and Unsubscribe Rates

The second thing that is a trouble are the number of emails that we are getting. We already discussed this earlier but feel free to hop back up and read about that again. There is truly no reason to be sending 19 emails in four days.

The third was the unsubscribe rate.

So this person was talking about spending $10-15 a lead in his launch. He was happy if she had less than 25% unsubscribe rate, he expected 25% of people to unsubscribe during a launch because of the onslaught of emails. And it’s just burning these leads that you’ve spent money to get and you’ve burnt them.

He also gave that overused statistic, which is that if people don’t buy in the first 30 days, they’ll never buy from you, which is not true on average. My average time for people to purchase the takeoff product for me is 180 days. And if I have two launches quite close together, it’s 120 days.

We’re building that relationship with trust. Trust is huge foundation. For me, it’s a huge value of mine. And trust is not built overnight.

For me personally, I literally was waiting for you to open the card for the VIP’s and I’m like, come on Tash. When can I just give you my money? When can I take my money? And mostly it’s because I want to learn from you because I love all of this stuff in terms of the consent based marketing.

Ariana says, I love her message. I will sub, unsubscribe super fast, if I sense that somebody’s abusing permission. It’s exactly what we’re talking about. And it’s so important to know that it takes that time, that 180 days to know your stats. And to know that it takes 180 or 120 on average. There are some things that we can do in a launch to help people to make a decision faster, or get to know us faster and all of those sorts of things. But none of those things dialing up people’s fears, making them feel like they should have sorted this out years ago, making people feel horrible and despondent before swooping in as the superhero, who’s going to save the day. 

For me, when it comes to creating a business that is completely aligned to who I am and who I want to be in, how I want to show up. One of the most important things that I want to focus on is the way I treat people and the impact that I have, even for people who don’t buy.

Tash Focuses on Making it a Value for Their Time

So one of my key principles of launches, anyone who comes along to one of my free workshops or participates in a launch will leave feeling like it was a valuable use of their time, regardless of whether they purchase or not. That’s a big commitment to make. But for me, it’s been one of the foundations of why my business continues to grow and why my audience stays so beautifully loyal.

And why? When I do run a free workshop like this, I have hundreds of people sign up straight away, regardless of whether they have even read the information or not. Some people have even said, oh, I just want you running workshops. I’m coming because I know it’s going to be great. And that’s the kind of business that I want to run.

I don’t just want to be here for the people who pay. I want there to be value available to my audience, regardless of whether they’re in a space to invest right now or not. And that is such a powerful space to be able to run a business from, I feel like it’s a space of abundance rather than a space of fear.

If I don’t pressure them to buy in the first 30 days, if I don’t have fake countdown, timers that reset when they get to zero, if I don’t do this, then I’m not going to make the sale. That’s all built on fear. And so I get very passionate about talking about launching.

I have my takeoff program, which you talked about Meredith, that I have actually closed the doors to that program for an extended period of time, because we went into an intensive coaching period and I was redoing all of the modules. And so it was easier to hold the space for the students without new students coming in. So I could avoid having to explain over and over again, why there’s these new modules and then there’s archived modules.

So I did a cart close for that, but I don’t do a fake cart close. So I don’t pretend the doors are closing. And then people can still actually buy evergreen in my funnels, I’m very honest with my audience. And there are other ways to incentivize people to jump in sooner rather than later, without manufacturing a reason.

If you don’t need to close the cart, if you do want to have people buying on evergreen or you want to leave the doors open, you can do that and still have really powerful and high conversion launches. 

The last thing that I got really excited about when I was listening to this guy was he was excited that he had a 2% conversion rate from his launch. So he had a thousand leads and had 2%. And I was like, I’ve been thinking all of this time that maybe I won’t get as much conversion as the big guys. Maybe my conversion rate isn’t that great. But I feel like my launches feel really aligned and all those sorts of things. My, what you joined the leverage and launch program on was my wait list. From that wait list, my conversion rate was 11.7%. I’m just sitting here going, oh, I thought maybe without all of that pressure and all of that fear and all of that FOMO and all of those sorts of things that my conversion rates might’ve been lower, but no, they’re not. 

I convert, I consistently higher. My unsubscribe rates never change if I’m in launch versus not in launch. My unsubscribe rate is still exactly the same because I’m not overwhelming people with emails. So you don’t necessarily need to cook during cart closed cart open, but if it makes sense for you to do that, so you want to have cohorts of people coming into your program. You can do that.

There are ways to do that without it unnecessarily pressuring and in a way where you’re helping people to decide if this is the right fit for me or not, without trying to convince everyone they should buy it. And that’s what I love about this more abundance space in launching. I think it’s also a really transparent space. Like if you’re going to do the cart close, you’re authentically doing a cart close, you can tell them what the reason is. And all of those things I know as I started launching my membership in my program I said I think things are changing and we’re doing different things. So honestly, I don’t know what it’s going to look like next. And after I did my last launch, I’m thinking I’m going to do something different. But we’ll see, when I finish listening to my new mentor, Tash Corbin. 

How did you come up with Consent Based Marketing?

I originally started talking about consent based marketing probably three years ago when I literally was going through someone’s launch and they sent me three emails in a row that all were gaslighting in the title.

Gaslighting is when the title has something like, it’s not what you think it is. Then there was one that said, “you’re never gonna make it”. It was kind of like trying to be a reverse psychology thing. I was just trying to like, goad me. And there were three emails where if I had opened my emails that morning and looked and seen those three subject headings, and I hadn’t been in a good space, it could have really derailed me. And I was like, I didn’t consent to this. 

Then that’s where I was like… hmm, consent driven, consent based marketing. That’s exactly what I do. Sso I’m sure other people talk about it but I’ve never found someone else who talks about it using that same terminology. But there probably is someone out there. That was literally how it came about. I was just sitting there and saying out loud, I don’t consent to this. You didn’t ask me to do this. 

It’s like, when you friend somebody on Facebook, you find a connection in a group or something. Then the next thing that they do, they’re like, Hey, let me send you my thing in my notes with it. Here’s my newest event. Here’s what it, and you’re like, dude, I want to get to know you. I actually unfriended somebody recently, who I know is a go-getter. And I like that go-getter spirit but I was just like, I would love to get to know more about you and your family and your life and your business and things like that. And that’s why I decided to be friends with you. I do not want you pushing your stuff all day long. It just feels icky. Yeah. And I think everybody in my audience feels similarly. It’s why I align with the things that you teach, because I’ve learned a lot of those marketing strategies. I’ve done many of those things.

So in the launch workshop, I am going to be talking about the overall launch plan and how we can set up that launch so that you are still getting great conversions and what emails I do recommend sending and all of those sorts of things.

When it comes to doing a cart close, I give my audience plenty of warning that the cart close is coming. So usually I will do a launch right before my cart close, and I will have around about a six week launch period, including a little bit of runway, time to start warming up and generating some leads. And then I have a four email sequence that’s for between the webinar and the cart close, or the challenge in the cart close. So on the webinar itself or on the challenge itself, I let people know I’m closing the cart. I’m closing the doors to the program for the next few months and I’m really upfront about why I’m closing the doors. And it might be, you just want to take a break from new clients coming in. And you just want to give everyone a chance to get to know each other. It might be that you want to do a big launch relaunch in four months time. And so to get ready for that you’re going to close the doors to the program. It’s totally up to you. How much you tell people about why you want to close the doors. But if you’re going to close the doors, close the doors, that’s my first rule. Don’t go, oh no, I’m going to extend it for three days. 

Be authentic and do what you say you’re going to do. The number one driver of trust is that I can reliably predict your behavior. So I’ll say that again, the number one driver Of trust is, can I reliably predict your behavior? Can I reliably predict your behavior? So if you say, you’re going to close the cart and then you change your mind. Then you say, you’re going to email me every Tuesday but then you change your mind. You don’t, or you say you’re releasing new videos every Wednesday, but you don’t. Then what you’re actually doing is dissolving trust. So we want to be the kind of entrepreneur and the type of business owner who does what they say they’re going to do.

It sounds really obvious, but it’s something that a lot of people struggle with. And you know, I know people who, they’ll say I’m going to send out a newsletter every Tuesday and then they don’t because they think, oh, it feels spammy or every week too much, or that kind of thing.

But actually there are people who are sitting there disappointed that they didn’t hear from you. And instead of focusing on them and the promise that you made to them and what they were looking for from you, you’re focused on you and how you felt and whether you felt comfortable with it. And I think one of the things that we can be is overly focused on is ourselves.

You said it at the beginning, that when we focus on serving them and when we serve them consistently that 180 days, whether they came in today or they’re ready in 180 days, it’s who we’re being in that timeframe that helps to build that trust as well. That consistency speaks well to them. 

My podcast goes up on YouTube, but we don’t put proper keywords on it. We don’t do anything with it. We just put it on YouTube. So let’s get a bit more strategic with YouTube. And someone recommended a YouTube mentor to me and said, sign up to our mailing list. Because if you sign up for this freebie but you don’t buy quickly, you’ll get a 30% off voucher. I was like, okay, cool. That’s fine. But within the first three days, we had 29 emails. There were some emails that if I didn’t read it within the first hour, it got resent with a new subject heading. And then if I did open the email, but didn’t buy it. I got an email that said, “I see that you looked at it, but you didn’t buy. Why not?”  It just felt really invasive. And I also felt like it was very disrespectful of my time. So on the third day, when I woke up and I had eight emails in our inbox from this person when no one else had a chance to get into my inbox. I just decided I don’t care how good your YouTube training is. I can see your marketing principles are built on fear and on not consent driven practices whatsoever. So I don’t want to accidentally be doing this to people with my YouTube strategy. I don’t know what your YouTube strategies are going to be. 

YouTube strategy. I don’t know what your YouTube strategies are going to be. 

They will often say if they unsubscribed, they weren’t hungry enough anyway. Or they’re not your ideal client or whatever it is. I was her ideal client. I had the money ready to buy. The reason why I didn’t buy straight away was because one of her clients told me I could get 30% off. And I always love a bargain. And I just wasn’t willing to jump through the 29th email hoop in order to wait for that discount. Now it might’ve been in one of those 29 emails, but I didn’t read them all. 

I think the idea of somebody asking me a question and having an answer is a much better way. Like asking questions today, it’s possible one of the people who are here and engaging might be somebody who says yes. 

What is so interesting is if you ask a person why they had all of the emails in their launch find out the answer to that. Like, do you realize what you’ve just done? And they’ll say, oh, that was just part of the launch strategy that I was taught by such and such. And that there’s been no discernment about what exactly you are doing to people here? 

So there’s for example, the testimonial story arc. You’re supposed to put these eight testimonials in a certain order and have certain testimonials that speak to certain things. But if you actually unpack why those testimonials are being put in that certain order, it’s actually to create fear and it’s to create shame.

So that testimonial story arc is set up in a way that it’s trying to get you to feel like you are embarrassed and ashamed that you haven’t had that result yet. It’s making you ashamed that you haven’t yet invested correctly. What kind of CEO are you? If you have not invested in this outcome yet, don’t worry though, you can invest with me and I will catch you up.

And so I think it’s important for us as entrepreneurs. And I say this to everyone who comes into my world of launching and sales and marketing. I don’t care if you don’t buy from me. I don’t care if you don’t learn your strategy from me, but for whomever you learn that strategy from, I want you to ask yourself the question, why is it being taught this way? What impact does this strategy have on people who don’t buy versus people who do, and how would I feel if this was the way that I was treated? The number one thing that I want you to push back on is just how we do it. This is just how we do it, with 17 emails.

That’s just how we do it because people only open three emails. Okay, well, what if you could send three emails and people open all three of those emails, wouldn’t that be better than sending 17 and knowing that people will most likely just open three of them. And so, you know, with testimonies, testimonies is just what we do. It creates social proof.

No, you don’t have to. That’s not just how we do it. And in particular using the testimonial story arc, I completely disagree with. I’m not saying don’t use testimonials. What I’m saying is that there are certain structures of testimonials that you’ve put these eight testimonials throughout a webinar and they’re creating a story arc and you don’t even realize they’re the story that you’re creating.

So that’s the type of testimonial that I object to. The second thing I want to say is if you only use your best case outcomes in your testimonials, how do people feel when they join your program and they don’t get that level of result? You’ve got a bunch of people in your program who are like, I joined this expecting $40,000 launches and I didn’t get a $40,000 launch. Is there something wrong with me? 

And I also see people inside programs like that being told, you’ve clearly got a mindset issue because I gave you the strategy when actually no, the strategy wasn’t the right fit for their business, but that’s a whole other conversation.

So much of it is really about being aligned with who you are. This strategy might work, but it might not work for your personality or for the way that you communicate, et cetera. And I think so much of it’s individualized and really has that understanding that just because you came in and you’re clear on your niche and you’re clear on your thing and you just need a couple of strategies, then you have results. But what if you come in and you’re like, I’m still trying to figure it out. And I still don’t know. I mean like then how people on different stages of their business growth or whatever the product or services that they’re offering.

If people want to read testimonials, I have some screenshots of people from inside the program on my sales page. Sometimes I’ll have like just a little quote or something from people, but I don’t present testimonials as a, I want to tell you, you could get this result, but I don’t want to be responsible for everyone getting this result. So I’ll use a testimonial to say it. Instead. The big question I ask whenever anyone wants to use a testimonial is what is it that that person is saying that you don’t feel confident to say about your program yourself?

And if you’re not confident to say that about your program yourself, then I don’t think it’s appropriate to expect a testimonial to say it for you. You need to have the confidence to be able to say that about your program. And so the use of testimonials as well, this person says, it’s amazing, so it must be. It actually can be quite a bit misleading, especially for women. I see this with women and non-gender conforming folks that the reason we love testimonials so much is because it feels weird to say it about ourselves. Like, I don’t want to say that, we shouldn’t blow our own trumpet. 

We have been taught that it’s yucky to talk about ourselves that way. So it’s safer to rely on someone else to say it. But when I see, especially when my clients are doing this and they’re falling into this pattern, what they do is then they don’t say the things that they also need to say to instill confidence in their audience.

So they rely on the testimonials to say it for them. And they just like gloss around the edges kind of thing and never really speak confidently about their work. But the testimonials can’t do the job for them anyway, because I can’t buy from you.

You need to be confident in your program yourself. I know that I can help people produce these results. And I think that’s why the people who say yes to me say yes to me. It’s because I know where I’m strong. 

Yes, toot your own horn, but also confidently speak to the value proposition of the thing you’re selling. Understand what is the before? What is the after and why is that important to your ideal client and be able to speak to that transformation confidently and when you’re able to speak to the transformation confidently and the process that you’re taking people through, you no longer have to say to people, it’s really good so please buy it and just trust me instead.

You can speak to that journey that you’re going to take people on. You’re going to speak to the outcomes that you are able to help people to achieve. And you are able to speak to it in a way where you are balancing. You’re not having to make false promises and create false hope, but you’re also not relying on other people to speak to the value for you. Almost like claiming other people’s successes as a way of expressing how good the program might be. And I think there’s a lot of work to be done in getting those foundational messages and your value proposition clear, and being able to speak confidently about what you’re here to do and how you serve people that takes away that like, but I need to use testimonials because I can’t promise that people will have a 10k month after working with me. Well, you don’t have to promise people that they’ll have a 10k month, but you do have to be clear on what outcomes they will achieve? What outcomes will they get, they might not use those outcomes to get to the 10k a month.

So if you come along to this launch workshop, what I’m going to help you to do is look at what type of launch is going to fit your business, where you are right now, how to prepare business for that launch and an outline of your launch plan. So those things you’ll walk away with from the workshop. And then if you would like to keep working with me on creating your group program, preparing for launch all the detailed analysis of what goes into which emails, all of those sorts of things, the leverage and launch program is what I’ll be promoting on that workshop. And Meredith is also an affiliate for that. So I’ll let you know a bit more about that program on the workshop, but even if you don’t buy your walk away with that simple launch structure and some clarity.

Any suggestions on how to build trust when you deal with a disability that can prevent you from being as reliable as you would like?

Just be upfront about it. Don’t think that that makes people less likely to work with you, that makes people more likely to work with you. And so you can also build your business model and your business structure around not relying on you showing up four days a week, every single week. So you can set up some structure and you can say things like, I don’t do a regular podcast because I have fluctuating energy and my disability doesn’t allow me to do something every single week or instead you could build your business. So you pre record your podcasts when things are great. And then that’s going to hold you over. And you’ve got a team who had taken care of that predictability for you. 

So I am dealing with some chronic illness issues at the moment, and I’m off for surgery in July. And as part of that process, I’ve been really upfront with people. And I’ve been dealing with chronic fatigue for almost four years now. So something that I realized was, I do want people to be able to reliably know when my podcast is coming out, but I have some really good bursts. And I know if I do want to go on a little getaway on my own and set myself up with massages and being looked after and I make it a really great time, I plan it for the right time in my cycle.

I’ve found ways to build my business so that it is reliable and it is predictable, but it’s not relying on me being there every single day of the week.

So similarly I have scheduled content on my Facebook page, I have some scheduled email content that goes out when I launch now, my launch preparation is I have one document that my team has set up for me. And I go through, when I review that document, I check through my emails, make any changes I need to, it takes me about two hours to do that one document.

That’s my launch done. The only thing I need to do now is show up for the webinar and come and do some Facebook lives when I feel like it, that’s it. So launching, doesn’t have to be this thing where you burn yourself out, you’re working 16 hour days, or go on to the days where we glorify the hustle.

I would also say Missy, that of anyone else that I know who deserves to set their business up in a way that you do have a team member, right? You deserve a team member. I think a lot of people stop themselves from getting the support that they need in their business because they think they need to earn it or do something to deserve it.

And like, I always, I always ask the question, what would a white, straight married middleman in the fifties do. Like you’re a CEO of a business. And so if your business is not yet at the point where it’s able to sustain, even just like a five hours a month team member, to help you with some of those sorts of things,then we need to work on that. There are things you can do in the very short term to bring in that cash, to set you up and you don’t need to have a website and a weekly pod and content going up every day in order to access those sales. Make those initial sales, get that foundational level of income coming in, and then give yourself the gift of a business that doesn’t require you to burn yourself out work when you can’t.

You don’t have to say I’m going to go for the best of the best first, but it’s great practice to go on to Upwork, to hire someone for $12 an hour or $8 an hour and give them two hours of work a week. It’s such great practice at being a manager at delegating at thinking things through systematically so that you’re setting people up for success in your team. Then when you do have the budget to hire the OBM or the more advanced support, you already know how to do it. You already have that practice of what to look for. My first hiring decisions, a lot of them were big mistakes. I hired a few mini me’s and so we just all have the same weaknesses. That’s not a fun team to finish anything because I’m not a finisher. I’m not an ongoing repetitive task person. And so I hired a bunch of people who were exactly the same as me, but didn’t go very well. But I needed to hire them to dispel the myth that I just needed a clone myself. 

I want to say is one of the things that I want to reassure people about launching as well is that I don’t subscribe to the put everything on the line and it better make sales or I’m going to go bust. I don’t subscribe to that model of launching either, because I think there are certain personalities that might thrive in that particular environment. But for most of us, that pressure is actually counterproductive. So even in the style of launching that I teach, in the way that I teach launching, it’s not about like, I need to get 500 signed up and then I have to open cart. And all this pressure is on the launch itself. There are ways that you can even baby step your way to a launch. So I wanted to leave everyone with this one tip. And that is, if you are thinking about creating and launching any type of group program, a membership, a mastermind, a course or anything like that, I want you to go and set up a little mini sales page for that thing where people can sign up to the wait list and set yourself a little mission to go and get 50 people signed up to the wait list in the next 30 days, just get 50 people signed up to the wait list.

You don’t have to commit to when you’re going to do the program, you don’t have to commit to what the pricing structure will be or what the launch will look like. You have an inkling that your audience want this outcome and would join a great program in order to get that outcome. Let’s prove that what you think is true is actually true first so that you can then go into launching that thing with the confidence that I know my audience want this because people have given me their email to sign up, to find out about this course when I release it. And that’s something that I did with this launch of the leverage and launch program.