Episode 44: Pivot

The Master Sales Funnels Podcast

In This Episode:

• The reason for a new season
• Knowing the right time to pivot
• My pivot in course platforms
• How to take a good look at your goals and make a successful pivot

Resources:

Master Affiliate Marketing to $10k Course - Hoping to launch on AppSumo soon, but here’s link to the FreshLMS Course in case you want to check it out beforehand.

FreshLMS (affiliate link) - If you are in the market for a learning management system, check out FreshLMS. They still have a lifetime deal going, so grab it while you can!

Episode Transcript:

Hello everybody and welcome to the Master Sales Funnels podcast. This is officially a new season. It is Episode 44. The reason for the new season is because I'm kind of tired of the themed seasons and trying to keep the format of the podcast within that season one didn't really have a theme. Season two was affiliate marketing, and season three was lead funnels and well it's probably so good to talk about each of those things.

It's a little hard to schedule these things and kind of keep motivation doing the same type of theme for a whole season. So officially a new start officially the start of season four. And this is probably going to be a long season because again, there's no theme, so it'll probably just possibly be season four from here on out. Kind of relevant, but yeah, I just felt like that was a direction I needed to go in for creativity and keeping going with this since I haven't exactly been hitting on every single week for podcast because again, that spark wasn't exactly there.

Lately. I've been spending time working on my affiliate course and I wanted to share with you a lesson that I got from working on this course. So it was one of the goals, one of the marketing objectives for the course to get it listed on App Sumo. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I am an avid customer of App Sumo. I buy tons of lifetime deals from them because I like not having monthly payments.

That's kind of drain my business along the way. So use that sparingly, make sure you have a focus and you're only getting programs that you really, really need and not just the ones that are really cool because they have a lot of really cool stuff on there. But anyway, one of the goals was to get the course listed on there and they have a special going on right now for Black Friday. It's crazy that we're thinking about Black Friday already for 2021. This year's flown by fairly quickly, especially since 2020 lasted about 20 years.

This year's gone especially fast, but they have a million dollars that they're giving out to creators who list a product or a course on their platform. I thought it was a good time to get my course out there and start promoting it to a larger audience. The course is now $37, as I've been adding more videos and things to it, but on AppSumo it's going to be $17 once I get approved for that, I assume they have quite the influx of creators submitting things because the prize money they're giving out to individuals so they can bulk up their offering for Black Friday.

They have some stipulations that you have to meet in order to get on the platform. You have to be able to have at least 5000 promo codes for your course or product that you can upload to them in a CSV file.

So once people buy from AppSumo, they essentially get that code that they can then put in on the website that I facilitate. They'd be able to put the code in on my website and get the course for free. It had to be able to take away all the billing information, couldn't ask for a credit card and you had to have 5000 to 10,000 codes in the course. I say on some of my videos that I'm strictly Groove Funnels. I moved everything to Groove Funnels.

I've put all my courses. I'm going to put all my courses and Groove Funnels and I hit a roadblock with this major goal of getting on AppSumo. Because number one, they wanted 5000 to 10,000 promo codes and on Groove Funnels, they only allow you to create one coupon code at a time. Imagine the roadblock that this created in my plan. So I set one of my VA'S to start creating all of these codes.

We got the codes generated and we're starting to create them. We got the random codes generated. We're trying to start creating them on Groove Funnels and it was going to take her. I don't even know how long days, weeks to create 5000 individual codes, but I said her on that path. She did a great job working on it as we were working on it.

And I was trying to find better solutions because I was like, Man, I don't want to do this. I don't want to make anybody do this because that's a ridiculous task for anybody to have to do. Luckily, I had started the course on Fresh LMS before I moved to Groove Funnels. Fresh LMS is fairly new to the game for Learning Management Systems or LMS, but I had a lifetime deal with them and they didn't have at the time quite as many features. They didn't have an affiliate program.

It seemed a little bit slow developing. That's why I switched everything to Groove Funnels and made that first Pivot. But now one of my major marketing goals was being blocked because Groove Funnels wasn't cooperating. And as I found out, even with the codes, we were starting to create 5000 individual of. If people put it in and it said $0, they still wanted billing information. They still wanted that credit card and AppSumo wasn't going to let me list the course because of this.

So again, it was just a major major roadblock in getting to where I wanted to be and fulfilling that part of my marketing plan and getting eyeballs on my course. So I went back to Fresh LMS and checked out their system again. And I don't know, a third of maybe half of the text lessons were already on Fresh LMS and a couple of the video lessons, so it didn't take too long to move it over. I was able to move it over within like an hour back from Groove Funnels because it was just copying embed codes and some text and putting it back into the modules I already had created on the platform and they allowed me to create 1000 codes at a time.

So I was able to just put in a couple of different orders and it spit out the codes and then it would take away the billing information so that platform was able to help me meet everything I needed to to get listed on App Sumo again, a major goal of mine.

I had to make the Pivot. I had to wherever I say in videos on the course that I'm all in Groove Funnels, I'm gonna have to put some kind of Disclaimer in the text that says that is not true because I want to be transparent. I don't want to say I'm on. All my courses are on Groove Funnels just to sell Groove Funnels because I am an affiliate for them. I mean, I'm an affiliate for Fresh LMS too.

I try to be an affiliate for everything that I think is awesome. Groove Funnels is still pretty awesome for funnels functionality. But again, just these couple of things weren't quite there in order to meet my goals. So for the course aspect, I had to abandon the Groove Funnels membership platform and go back to Fresh LMS. I had a chat with the creator of Fresh LMS to make sure that all of everything could be met.

And since they had a deal on there previously on App Sumo, he said he was going to try and push it from his end to get me approved. Another person in my corner. That's really cool. And then I also gave them a video testimonial because I'm really happy with their product because it's allowing me to get what I want in my marketing plan for my course. So I had to make that Pivot and it's hard sometimes, but we do have to pivot.

We do have to take our end goal into consideration and make sure that what we're currently doing is setting us up for success to that goal. So I had a goal for to get on App Sumo. It didn't work. It involves switching an entire platform, which for me again didn't really take a ton of effort. But I have to redact some of what I said.

It's just something that we have to do in business. You have to kind of bite the bullet and know when you need to pivot. Know when you need to switch systems, whether it's something like I had where a platform just didn't work out for what I was working on or even your CRM. If your CRM, you have all your people in there, all your contracts and everything. But if the company just decides that they want to quit doing updates because they're happy with the customer base, that they have the money that they're getting and they don't want to have any more overhead and development, maybe things are starting to break, and it's not working.

You might have to make the decision to move everything from one CRM to another. And things like these can be painful. They take time, but really, it's a part of business. It's part of being an entrepreneur to part of being a course creator. Whatever you're doing, you have to recognize that point of needing to make that pivot so you can still be successful so you can still meet your goals.

The earlier you can see the need for pivot, the better. Obviously, if you foresee needing a pivot and you drag it out and drag it out and drag it out, you're going to hit a crisis point where your business is going to ultimately fail because of that single point of failure that you didn't, you know, take action on earlier. I mean, look at the history of businesses like Blockbuster. They didn't pivot to digital. So Netflix want out.

And I think all but one blockbuster is closed. That one. I don't know if it's still open, but within the last year or so, I think I still read that there was one, but it's not just about systems. It's about trends, recognizing trends, whether your business model is going to become a dinosaur and it's going to fail eventually, you have to kind of have the foresight to see that changes in Google, anything. You have to be able to have that foresight to know when to pivot.

And like I said, it can be painful and it can cost a lot of money. But sometimes you just got to do it. Thank you for listening. Hopefully you're taking this message to heart and you're kind of taking a look at what you're doing right now. Even in your personal life, you might need a pivot in business a lot of times.

You need a pivot. Really think about what your end goals are in all aspects of your life and see what you need to change up. I'm not afraid to change things up if I need to, as you can see from what I did, moving my course over, but it does take a lot of foresight and a lot of planning, and you just got to know when to make the jump. Be sure to check out the affiliate marketing course. I'll be sure to update you in an episode, but when we are officially launched on App Sumo because that will be the best price you're going to get the course for is the $17, as opposed to the $37 that it is now.

The price is going to keep going up from the $37 as I keep adding content, because that's not my end point, but that's what I feel it is worth at this point, as I'm continuing to add videos that I already have filmed and adding more lessons in the future. If you ever want to reach out to me and let me know what you want to learn that would be awesome. [e-mail] I will be sure to either make a podcast episode about it or if it's affiliate marketing related.

I may even throw it into the course so you can learn from my experience. I mean, that's what I'm here for.

I want to make a course or podcast to the best of my ability to what my listeners want. So I would love to hear from you. Make sure that you tell anybody that you think could benefit from listening to the podcast. About the Podcast so they can tune in weekly and get some awesome tidbits of information. Thank you for listening and as always, Keep funneling.