#41: Scale Your Sales In 2021 Using Highly Profitable Virtual Events

The Business Growth Show

Jesse Eker is on a mission is to help over 1,000 online coaches, course creators, authors, and experts create 7-figure brands online using his unique breakthrough method. His specialties include Informational Marketing, Marketing, Conversion, Lead Generation, Content Creation, & Trend Spotting. Today he is going to teach us how to scale your sales in 2021 using highly profitable virtual events.

Learn More Earn More Business Growth Podcast

Host: Brian Webb

Guests: Jesse Eker

Episode 41: Scale Your Sales In 2021 Using Highly Profitable Virtual Events

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TRANSCRIPT

Brian Webb:

Jesse Eker, welcome to the podcast, man.

Jesse Eker:

Thanks for having me. I am so excited to be here and share as much value with your audience as possible. I appreciate you.

Brian Webb:

Yeah, I have no doubt that you're going to drop tons of value bombs today. I've already told the audience about a book of your father's that I read, The Millionaire Mind, moons and moons and moons ago, and I would have to imagine, growing up in that household, that that's shaped you into who you are today. I'd love to hear you share about how that's happened and how it's affected your growth as an entrepreneur and as a leader.

Jesse Eker:

Yeah. So when it comes down to it, not many people, I would say, are in the position I was, with a, let's just put like a guru type of dad, right?

Brian Webb:

Yeah.

Jesse Eker:

And that's what most people think as far as, oh, you grew up with this guru dad, but most people don't know the full story as far as when my dad started to actually do extremely well, I was already 14 years old. So the first 14 years, it was very, very normal, very middle class. We had things, but nothing was extraordinary, nothing was out of the box, and we did okay, but nothing extreme.

Then when we ended up moving to Vancouver, that's when he wrote his book, that's when he came out with his new brand, that's when he launched Peak Potentials. And that's when our life really started to change. And it wasn't as much of growing up with T. Harv Eker. It was more of the witness of objectively looking at through the lens of before and after and seeing wow, what a difference life can be when you start to excel in your business and excel with money.

And we come from this family of immigrants, so nothing's ever given, everything's always earned. But when it came down to it, it was like vacations started getting better. The house was nicer. We were just able to have more choices. And so when I was able to see that and witness him working through that and building this, it started to ingrain new programming in me of what I really wanted my life to look like, as well. And so that's where I think I learned the most from. It was more of the modeling and viewing versus the actual teaching.

Now, when it comes back to growing up with him, and obviously everything in my life was a life lesson because he's very personal development, very personal growth, [crosstalk 00:02:54]. Everything is a life lesson.

Brian Webb:

Of course.

Jesse Eker:

And everything had those meanings to it. And I definitely felt like I was definitely a more conscious and enlightened kid than my peers. At the same time, though, it was more of what I saw, what I heard, and what I experienced than anything that he actually personally taught me. And I think that was his gift to me, was not like, hey, this is my way of how we do things. It was more of like, let me show you and be the model for you so that you know what you would like to do and not want to do growing up and starting your family and starting your business eventually when you get going.

Brian Webb:

Let me ask you this. How did you get started online, and what inspired you to start a new brand and Build Your Own Brand Online? What started that?

Jesse Eker:

Yeah, so it's a big gap between the two. So when I was first getting started, I was in the real estate space and I was actually finishing school through the crash. And I was actually living in Arizona at the time, and that's one of the places that got hit the hardest in the United States. Everything was down 60%, and there was a huge opportunity. And so I was interning in college and that was my first career, was fixing and flipping homes. And it just wasn't in alignment with what I really wanted to do for my full career.

And so when I talked to my dad about it, because he's always been my mentor, I told him about the things that I liked and things that I didn't like. And he was launching at this time the Ultimate Internet Bootcamp. And it was about blogging and affiliate marketing, with Alex Mandossian. And what ended up happening is like, why don't you just check it out because I've heard so many of these amazing things, and also the lifestyle that you could potentially create is work from anywhere, which is the opposite of what he was able to do. He had to be in places to work.

Brian Webb:

That's interesting.

Jesse Eker:

And so he thought that would be really cool. That would be really cool for you. So I checked it out, and I love the laptop lifestyle. And so I went and pursued it. I learned it. And after a couple failed attempts of trying to make some business opportunities work and affiliate marketing work, I started to understand how the whole system of online marketing and direct response marketing really works online. And that's when I understood the infopreneur lifestyle and business of selling information online.

The problem was I was this college kid that had no skills, no experience, no nothing, and I didn't know what the heck to sell online. And the people that I was trying to promote, like the affiliates, I didn't really like. But I did know this one person, and his name was Dad to me, but for most people, it was Harv. And he had no online presence. He only had live events. But at this time, it was a crossroads for him because he'd just finished selling his company, but not his IP, his intellectual property.

And so what I did is I presented the opportunity to repurpose his live in-person events online so that we can reach a broader demographic in more locations, to people who would never go on. And so for a decade, I ran Harv Eker Online and grew that into a multiple seven figure brand by really repurposing his information in the live setting for the online products. And that really gave me the experience of really helping experts and coaches understand what the online space is all about. And that's where my new brand came in, where I was like, man, I'm really good at taking brands, I'm really good at taking experts, I'm really good at taking people who are pros at what they do and teaching them how to productize and how to put a package together online so that they can grow an online presence and they can do what they do best and let me help them with their marketing and sales.

So that's where this new brand came in, called Build Your Brand Online, which really is helping really experts and online entrepreneurs build brands online. And we use a very specific methodology, but the whole way that we position this is helping you do more of what you're good at and using a mechanism that you're going to succeed in to really have success online.

Brian Webb:

So I'm going to skip a couple of other questions that I had because I really, we're always on a limited amount of time, and I want to jump into the meat of what you're here to talk about today. So I know that you help people use virtual event to grow their revenue, grow their business. Why do virtual events in your mind, or in your eyes, work so well, and why are you so passionate about them?

Jesse Eker:

Yeah. And when it comes down to it, it's not only virtual events, it's the event model. And so this event model has been in my blood for my whole life. My dad, T. Harv Eker, came from the event model. When I say the event model, these are in-person seminars. And so most people, and I'm sure most of your audience, has been to a seminar before in person. And this model's been around forever. And the reason why it works so well is because you go to this seminar, you fly there or whatever, you have the intent of spending your time there. You go and you sign up for this topic that you're super interested in learning, and you sit there and you learn from this one person.

And there's this speaker there, or this trainer there, and they teach you. And if they do it right, they build this automatic authority with you. They build this know, like, and trust with you. They build this credibility with you as far as I can help you. And they give you some sort of result where you have kind of this identity shift or transformation of wow, before this event, I was this person, after this event, I feel very different than I was before.

And then usually they make an offer of how we can continue working together. And the natural ascension for a lot of people is, hey, the event was great. I'm going to go by myself, which is fine. Or there's going to be a big group of people that say, I want to keep working with this person because they're taking care of me. And so that's the event model. And so what we have done is we really have just taken the event model and put it online because of the circumstances that in-person events aren't really working right now. And a lot of people are kind of nervous to go to them, and they'd actually prefer to do it from their house.

And so we kind of molded the two together because in my life, one of the things that I noticed with my dad was he was traveling 250 days of the year. And I have two kids now. One is 26 months and the other is eight months. So two youngins.

Brian Webb:

Congratulations.

Jesse Eker:

Thank you. And so for me, it was like, I don't want to miss those steps. My daughter is like getting close to rolling, I mean, to crawling, and doing all that fun stuff. I don't want to miss it. And so the best part about what we do is I do it from my office. I literally can walk out my door and be with my family and kids and I don't have to travel. So it's like the best of both worlds.

So I get this amazing model in my hands. I can do it from home. I can kind of have it all. And it's really effective as far as a lead generator, an audience builder, a sales mechanism, and also a mechanism that you can use to actually grow your business without changing much at all. So the process works the same with five people to 10,000 people. There's really no difference at all. So yeah, that's why we're so passionate about it, is because when we come to people like yourself or come to your other experts in your audience like we were just talking about before, they're really good at what they do. They're not the marketers, they're not the salespeople. They're great at solving problems, fulfilling on their promise, being the instructor, but also coaching and stuff like that.

And so the event model, especially online, puts them into position to succeed because they just need to do what they do best. And they don't have to worry about the marketing. They don't have to worry about the sales. They just worry about doing what they do best, which is what does all of the persuasion and influence and authority building within the event itself.

Brian Webb:

And that makes sense. What if the people are like, when I say people, people in the audience, and they're like, this sounds great, but they're thinking, okay, they might know what they're doing. They might be great at coaching and consulting. But they might be thinking, what would I say for all this time? How do I come up with all of these words? What do you say to that?

Jesse Eker:

That's such a good question. And probably the most common, this is the most common thing, and I think when people think of an event, they get scared in two different ways. One is what the heck am I going to say? And two is like, oh my God, I have to talk in front of people. So I'll go to the latter first because it's a shorter answer. When we think about events, we think about in-person events and talking in front of people, it's kind of scary, right? You've got these lights on you or you're potentially in front of a bunch of people, you can see their reactions and stuff like that, which we can still do online, which is great.

But the thing is like, when you're online, you're doing it from the comfort of your house. So there's this comfortable essence to it, of like your home, you're literally talking to a computer.

Brian Webb:

Sure, like you and I are right now.

Jesse Eker:

Yeah. It's like, you might get nervous for a second, but it goes away really quickly once you get into the zone. The second part of that is when you know what you're talking about, the confidence is always much higher than when you don't know what you're talking about.

Brian Webb:

For sure.

Jesse Eker:

When we are designing events with people, the main thing that we talk about is, you know, you help someone get some sort of outcome, some sort of result, some sort of transformation. That is the promise you give someone. So in exchange for what they're paying you, you're delivering them some sort of result or outcome. And so what we teach people is instead of trying to give them the whole outcome right away, what we're trying to do is just give them some sort of result in advance, meaning like a head start towards getting that outcome, meaning that, let's just say, for example, you help clients make $10,000 per month, and that's the outcome you do.

And so the starting point for them would be like, well, let me help you see how to get your first client. And so that's kind of like point A to point B, is getting your first client. Now that you know how to get your first client, let me help you get to $10,000 a month, because there's going to be different processes and systems that you're going to need in place to get to $10,000 a month versus just one client. And so our goal is really in the event to come up with one tangible mini outcome for them to do. And that's what you're going to say and teach, because that's what you know what to do, right? You're literally just coming up with the path of how someone would get that outcome, and getting them from point A to point B. And that's what you would talk about.

And it can be 90 minutes, it can be three hours, it could be eight hours, whatever you decide it takes for you to get them that outcome. It really gives them this, again, sample of whoa, this is what it's like to get momentum. This is what it's like to get a result with you, which they never got results with other people, and you're doing it for free. So that's kind of how we design it and how people really get to understand what they are going to say, because they know it, right? It's not like they're doing anything that they don't know.

Brian Webb:

So Jesse, let's shoot the elephant in the room and let's be the listener for a half a second. And they're thinking, man, this sounds fantastic. I can get the vision of what you're talking about, but they're thinking, I'm not T. Harv Eker or Tony Robbins. I don't have an audience. How can they get people to get to that event?

Jesse Eker:

That's a great question. And I know that a lot of our clients have a similar thought process around this. Now, most people, when they look at these great people like Tony Robbins, my dad, T. Harv Eker, or maybe Brian Tracy, they look at the lag effect, the lag result of them doing this for 30 years. But that doesn't mean that they started that way.

Brian Webb:

Precisely.

Jesse Eker:

Everyone one started at point A. And so I was actually on a clubhouse with Brian Tracy, and we were talking about his event, and his first event only had 17 people there, and he kept doing it and he kept doing it. By the end of the year, he had a hundred people there. 55 years later, he is one of the most well known people in the world, but that's after times and times and times of doing that. So instead of thinking, oh, I need a bunch of people there, it's, oh, let me dial in a process that will build over time.

And so that's what we've indoctrinated our students in. And we get, you know, some students just get nine people there, but they still collect 25, $30,000 in cash because they know the process of how to do it. So it's not about having a big group of people. It's about having the right group of people. And there's a stat, and I can't remember where exactly I heard the stat, but there is a stat out there that you are already connected to enough people to be making $100,000 a year in whatever you want to do.

Brian Webb:

Absolutely.

Jesse Eker:

What that means is you are already connected, whether that's social media, or your phone book, or your Rolodex, or whatever, your contact book, whatever you want to do, they are either your ideal client or they know your ideal client. And that's usually how we start. If we're like, hey, the goal is for you to get 10 people, that's it. Then you go through your contacts, your network, and you find those 10 people, or try to pass a message on for 10 people. And that's where you start.

Like, I don't want my mom to come to my event, but at the same time, my mom knows a lot of different people. And I could say, "Hey, Ma, you could be my advocate. So talk to five or 10 of your friends who you think would be good at this, spread the message, and see if they want to come." And guess what? We'll probably get a couple people from that way. Endorsed traffic. So that's how we start to structure this in a really simplified way before we think about big audience, before we think about any advertising, before we think about anything that's big time. We don't need that. We need to dial the process first, get a couple people there, which you're already connected to, and then work it. And then you build over time.

Brian Webb:

Yeah. So many people think that you have to have a huge audience. I think it was Seth Godin. I've read tons of his books, too. But he once said that you only need a thousand. Was it him or Malcolm Gladwell? One of the two of them. But they said that you only need a thousand true fans to have all the success. And of course they don't mean Facebook followers. They mean truly devoted fans. Just a thousand is all it takes to be enormously successful in life.

So let me ask you this. So people are listening and they're thinking, I want to do this. You've been doing this. You've got the experience. What are two or three key elements that they want to make sure that they have before they go to run their first event?

Jesse Eker:

Yeah. So the biggest one when it comes down to is they need to have an offer. And the offer is what are you going to offer someone to ascend with you, to go to the next level with you? And the reason why this is the most important thing before you put on an event is because when it comes down to it, we need to have congruency from start to finish. One of the biggest mistakes that you'll see newbie people making, whether it's in business or with the events, is incongruency within their marketing and sales. And you know this very well, right?

Brian Webb:

Yep.

Jesse Eker:

And so when you're incongruent with your marketing and sales, you lose a lot of the potential prospects because what they're seeing is different from what they're getting. And so we need to make sure it's congruent. So we always start from, we reverse engineer it, start from the back front. So if you know what you're offering, whether that is a program, whether that is a product, whether that is a service, whatever you're offering them, that's what we start with. And we look at that offer and we say, "Hey, what's the outcome, the result, or the transformation of that?" And then we say, "Okay, great. That's what it is. What are the steps people are going to need to do to get there?" And then we start from the very beginning.

So we need the offer because that dictates the whole event. So number one is we definitely need an offer, and it can't just be any offer. It's got to be a really no brainer offer for people to say yes to. We want them to, basically the stress test we say is I've got to feel in my bones silly saying no to this offer, if you're the right person, right?

Brian Webb:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Jesse Eker:

So we definitely, like number one, make or break, is your offer. This does 80% of your heavy lifting for the whole event. And then number two make or break is not the amount of people, but the right people there. And the way that you get the right people, and I'll use this analogy because I really like it and I think it really hits home for most people, is we all know these topic based conferences that people go to in different cities. There'll be stuff in Vegas, there's all these different conferences that people have. And maybe it's like a health conference.

And in the hallways of these conferences, there's always these sponsorship booths that people have. And it's really interesting to watch, that there's always going to be this one booth with so many people lined up, everyone's around it. And there's this other booth that is absolutely ignored. Someone's like, their feet are kicked up. No one's going by it. Everyone's walking by, ignoring this thing. Right?

Brian Webb:

Yeah.

Jesse Eker:

You can picture it and you know it, because it's so common. And so we look at this and we say, okay, if you're in the right place, which is the health conference, you're like a health practitioner, you know you're in the right place with your booth, but why is one getting all the traffic and why is the other one getting no traffic? And the answer is because one has the right message and one has the wrong message.

And so that is the difference between getting the right people and the wrong people, is you can be in the right place, but if you don't have the right message, your messaging, then you're either going to get ignored or you're going to have the wrong people for your event. So the next make or break is making sure you're in front of the right people. But also, this is more important, is having the right message to go in front of the right people. And that's how you're going to get the right people to attend your event. And that's why you don't need tons of people to make this happen and make it work.

Brian Webb:

Yeah. You know, Jesse, I've been looking forward to this interview for quite some time and you really have shown up like a rock star. My last question is for those people that may be hearing this soon or a year from now, and they're like, I want to connect with what you're doing, learn more about it, where's the best place for our audience to learn more about your services, connect with you online? Where's the best place for them to reach you and get in touch with you guys?

Jesse Eker:

Yeah. One of the things is we created this guide that kind of goes over the four pillars for our events, and that's design it, fill it, monetize it, and run it. And it's a really extensive guide. I'd love to offer that, because that's going to be like a great whitepaper introduction for people. It's buildyourbrandonline.com/guide.

Brian Webb:

Guide.

Jesse Eker:

So it's buildyourbrandonline.com/guide. That's going to give you free access to the guide. Of course, you've got to put your name and email because we've got to send it somewhere. So just want to be forefront on that. The other thing is if you're on social media, I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook. You're free to connect with me. I answer and reply to messages all the time. I really treat people like people, not just like numbers. So feel free to connect with me on any of the social media platforms.

And you'll see that every about four to six weeks we start promoting our events, and I'll be going live in there and giving [inaudible 00:24:07] value and doing all that fun stuff. So those are the two hotspots I would say to come check us out, and you'll get invited to our events that we do on a monthly basis. And you'll love them, and you'll see if it resonates with you.

Brian Webb:

Well, man, thanks for being here. Thanks for inspiring our audience and dropping some value bombs. It was a pleasure having you, and I hope we get to have you back again someday.

Jesse Eker:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to hear the replay of this, and I'm excited for your audience to listen, as well.

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