Alright, dear reader, today, we build and SELL (all caps because it is important).
In other words, it’s time to start fleshing out the ideas that I’ve been talking about in my previous blog posts. This time, it’s all about making offers to people to get them to start buying our things. But before we talk about that, I just want to talk quickly about everything that we’ve done so far.
We’ve done the prep work (aka the work before the work), figuring out what our ecosystem is going to be, and deciding on our customer journey.
And in figuring out what the customer journey is going to be, we made it easy for ourselves to know how things are going to be structured. From the customer journey, we then figured out who we’re going to sell to.
The previous step is important because if we figured out what we wanted to sell and what the journey was, but we didn’t know who we’re going to sell to, it’s just going to be a recipe for disaster.
The final thing that we did before we arrived at this point is actually deciding what “Rome” is. My business coach said to me “all roads lead to Rome.” In my business, Rome is the Delegation Mastery Academy.
What is the Delegation Mastery Academy?
The DMA is a membership program where people get access to my SOPs and workflows to help them establish their SOPs and workflows in their business. Once those have been set-up, I then help them hire people to do the work for them.
I chose the DMA because it’s an easy central point to direct people and it’s an easy mechanism for building sustainability because it’s going to provide recurring income.
And that’s a recap of what we’ve been doing so far. If you’re following along with the blog posts, you’ll remember that I call all this setting up the “work before the work.” Now that the work before the work is done, now it’s time to actually start building.
What is this going to look like?
In this blog post, I’m going to cover the following things to show how I was able to set everything up:
- The tech stack
- Creating the offer and getting the copy written
- Selling the DMA
- Pricing the DMA
- The results I’ve gotten
- What happens next?
If you’re interested about how I was able to manage everything all the way from creating the offer to getting members for the DMA, stick around and read on.
The Tech Stack
In terms of having something tangible for people to go through, we need to have a website. In that website, there’s a whole bunch of steps that you need to do to get things set up.
Before I talk about that, I wanted to let you know first that this blog post is not really about how to start a website. I will talk more about what I have done for the DMA website.
Now for the DMA website, I chose to build it on WordPress because it allowed me the flexibility in terms of what I could do and what I could offer. I didn’t want to use any of the course platforms like Teachable or Thinkific, because they didn’t have the level of customisation that I needed.
I then needed to acquire a domain from Namecheap, which is what I use for the domains of all of my websites. I chose to build on a subdomain because with the primary or the root domain, I could just have that host the sales page and the sales material whereby the subdomain hosts the membership and hosts all the content that people were paying for access to.
I’m also using ClickFunnels to host the sales page. And the reason I’ve done this is primarily for speed, because I don’t want to sit there having to code a WordPress website from scratch.
I needed something quick because I wanted to be sure that the DMA really does land me an audience. If it didn’t align with an audience, there was no point in me creating the sales page on the primary domain only for it to not work. ClickFunnels allowed me to set up and test things real quick.
My web host is SiteGround and I’m on one of their shared servers under a GoGeek plan.
In terms of actually building out the membership experience and building out what people interact with, I’m going to use LearnDash and the BuddyBoss platform. If you don’t know what the latter is, it’s a WordPress platform that allows you to build social media type engagement sites on WordPress.
The next thing I use is ThriveCart, which is where people send me their payments for the DMA. This is how the cart page looks like.
For my email service provider, I use ActiveCampaign. It’s how I communicate with customers and my email list, which is very small.
And that’s my tech stack. And it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that, really.
The Group
At the time of writing this, I have already launched the DMA. Prior to launching, I was thinking about the group and thinking about what to do. I haven’t fully made up my mind yet what that’s going to look like. But I do know that I want there to be an exclusive community of people that are DMA members in a space where they can interact.
I still have to figure all of that stuff out and I’m putting it on writing now because it’s something that’s going to play a vital role when it comes to actually growing in the DMA.
Creating the Offer
The next thing that we have to do is to create an offer. Creating an offer is basically getting clear on exactly what it is people will be getting when they sign up to the DMA.
So when it comes to creating the offer, I realised that I have to put out a good offer to stand out in the marketplace.
And the reason for this insight is because at the moment, there is a mini revolution going on in online marketing. The audiences are pushing back against the big tech companies and the amount of personal data that these large companies have. These companies are specifically Facebook and Google and they are profiting off that personal data.
Targeting is becoming less powerful because they have basically been gagged due to privacy concerns. And Google is going to follow suit in 2022 and 2023 by taking away some of the targeting options that people have, with the idea being to give people more privacy and more control.
With this situation, as marketers, that argument is being made that the best way for you to maximise your ad spend or maximise your return on ad spend is to craft good offers.
This is why I realised that I can’t just put something generic together and hope to expect customers.
For the DMA, my offer was to create a special founder’s rate and by doing so, create an environment whereby the first cohort of people that came into the DMA would basically help me prove the concept. And from that, help me confirm that the plans that I’ve made are in line with what the market actually wants.
This is much better than just putting something together that I think the market wants and then not selling anything in the end.
My initial offer was more about selling this idea of what I felt people wanted based on the work that I did for private clients and research, and then putting that out there to a broad marketplace.
If you want to check out version one of the offer, you can access it HERE. That’s the sales page where I show them that they can get access to my SOPs, training, the WHO First Hiring System, and how they can hire someone else to work for them after. They can also get access to our team whenever need be.
And that’s basically the offer.
In terms of how the offer is different from the product (because there is a difference), the example I will give here is when you go to McDonald’s, you’re not just getting burger fries, you’re also getting a Big Mac, right?
So an easy way to think about the offer is how to dress up your product. So my product is all of the stuff I talked about in the sales page, and how it’s dressed up is the DMA.
It takes a while to get your head around it, but when you do get your head around it, you can see how what I’m talking about makes sense.
For the sales page, I chose to hire out to another copywriter for this task because the time constraint I was working with between the launch date and getting the website right was a little bit too much for me to add working on the copy myself.
I outsourced it to a good friend who is a copywriter and has worked with some pretty big names. He has a pretty in-depth process that he put me through, to dig out the ideas I was sharing. He asked me to fill out a questionnaire to help him do the work that I was contracting him for. And we ended up with this sales page.
Selling the DMA
In terms of how I sold the DMA, most of the sales primarily happened on my Facebook profile. The reason why I chose to use Facebook is because that’s where anybody knows me.
I imagine if I tried to sell this via Facebook ads, it would have been incredibly difficult because nobody knows me.
Here is one of my “teaser” posts:
I like to call this a little bit of a teaser post because the goal of launching this on social media is to simply talk about what I do and then make an offer to people. I wanted to start planting the seed of that idea in people’s heads that I have a business and I offer services for clients.
But even before the DMA was created, I was already posting about my business. I tell stories about myself and use an image to catch people’s attention.
Simply by creating content and posting it on Facebook, I made people aware of what I do. Then on the 26th of November, I opened the cart for the DMA with this post:
Then on the 27th, I did another post for social proof to show that there are people who have worked with me and are happy with the results that they’ve gotten from working with me. I then broke down exactly what people were going to get in the DMA.
The reason I did this was because I was assuming that not many people would read the sales page. They just wanted to know what they would get from the DMA.
I also had a post that created intrigue by teasing about the results that we got and telling how one of the features of the DMA led to somebody getting results like that.
With all these posts, I made sure to engage with everyone who commented and answered any questions. And from all those posts and engaging, I was able to make sales.
For the launch day, I decided to open things up with a very special offer for the period of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. If you don’t know, Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving in America. Cyber Monday is also the same. So the cart was open from Friday to Monday, just after Thanksgiving 2020.
Pricing the DMA
Choosing the pricing for this was a little bit of a fluid situation. Fluid because at the start of the entire process, the price was going to be 47 pounds. But because I was launching this on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I wanted to do something special.
So for the pricing, I made it at 29 pounds per month or 295 per year with a limit of 30 members.
I limited it to 30 members so that I could work closely with each of them and actually deliver meaningful results. And in working closely with them, I can figure out exactly where they are and fine tune my message.
Results
In terms of results, I was shooting for 30 founding members and I ended up getting 29. And of the 29 members, two people signed up for the annual package. The rest of the 27 got the monthly pricing.
What Happens Next?
After this entire journey so far, the next thing for me is to figure out what happens next.
And just to give you a clue of what happens next, I’ve been working with another product specialist to figure out exactly how I can make the DMA my “Rome.”
I now have proof of concept that there are business owners out there who are struggling with the idea of creating SOPs and creating documentation and systems in their business. And with that proof, I’m going to double down, speak to those people, and help them put systems in their business to create better offers.
Basically, I want to help more business owners systemize their business and hire help for their business.
With the initial goal being accomplished, which is getting 30 founding members, my next goal is to get to 100 members and then 200 members. I hope to accomplish those numbers in 2022.
I’ll probably talk about how I’m going to accomplish that in another blog post. But the plan is to take the initial offer and make that better.
And how can I make it better?
Well, that’s a puzzle I’m going to have to solve. And that’s really what’s going to happen next because I have to build up the DMA and get it to a point where it’s the foundation in which the business is built. And from there, we can then sell the other services that we devise based on the customer journey map.
What happens next is to get a solid foundation set for the DMA and then start testing the different offers for the higher level program.
I call these programs higher level because these are more done-with-you and done-for-you. Those two types of services take more time and are obviously going to cost a little bit more than what the DMA costs.
I know that at the start of this blog post, I mentioned that it’s time to get building, but as you have already read, the building and the selling have already been done. But I just wanted to walk you through everything including the results I was able to get.
The next blog post for me will probably be about diving more into what’s happening with the DMA and how the team and I are building the DMA and putting a solid foundation in place. We’re slowly figuring out how to make DMA our “Rome” and that’s what you’ll see in the blog posts to come.