1800 – How To Grow Through Virtual Stages with Michael Tucker

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach, or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now, Michael Tucker. Michael, you're the host of the Million Dollar Secrets podcast, and you are also the founder of The Funnel pros found on the web at The funnel pros. Com and Million Dollar secrets.com. Michael, thank you so much for joining us man.

Michael (00:01:13) - Josh I'm so excited for this conversation.

Michael (00:01:15) - Let's add some crazy value to people today okay.

Josh (00:01:19) - All right. Well I couldn't imagine any other purpose for being here to give us an overview of the work that you do.

Michael (00:01:25) - Yeah. So we are a virtual event agency. And so we help entrepreneurs, business owners expand their reach, their credibility and their influence through virtual events.

Josh (00:01:35) - Okay. So someone who might not know what we're talking about when we talk about a virtual event. Describe that.

Michael (00:01:41) - Yeah. So we help craft virtual transformational experiences. Right. And some of you guys here, you may attended seminars, right. You may have attended workshops. We build out virtual seminars, workshops and some may call them webinars. Masterclass courses. There's a plethora of virtual events that we, you know, craft, but we are very specialized in crafting transformational experiences to help you really take cold leads to hot customers. Right? And I truly believe after the past five years, six years of doing this, that virtual experiences are the best way to build connections.

Michael (00:02:18) - Because, Josh, I know you, your community, you're all about connections. And I truly believe virtual stages, virtual events, the way we do it, um, is the best way to build connections with your audience or with your potential customers. So that's a little bit about what we do. There's a plethora and different variety of types of virtual events that we do, but I hope that gives you a little insight into what I mean.

Josh (00:02:38) - Okay, so a virtual event then would be what? Like how might it look from the outside like a summit? Or maybe be a little bit more specific on that?

Michael (00:02:47) - Yeah, each industry is a little bit different. Right. But we actually focus on a style called the five day challenge model. And if you're here and you're not much in the digital marketing space or you're, you know, you're kind of more of just on the, um, leadership realm of your company and of the organization you're in. These are five day virtual experiences we host where we step back and we actually ask, what do our potential customers need, right? Where are they at right now and where do they want to go? And we craft a virtual experience for five days straight.

Michael (00:03:19) - This is our model and we help walk them through over five days how to get closer to their dream goals and destination. And so we've done about 100 of these, and it's just amazing to see every time that somebody does this right and can can put this on, you can take people from having no trust with your organization to having a lot of trust and a lot of credibility. And so it's just so amazing. That's our model. And so it's called the challenge model. You may have seen it online, but that's what we focus on.

Josh (00:03:48) - So like for example, like let's say that it's a leadership consultant or, you know, a let's say a branding agency. And so they could design an event around achieving a particular outcome. And then the idea is that you would get an audience then to spend some pretty decent time with you during that event, obviously going to kind of that proximity leading to familiarity, know, like and trust a high degree of trust. And then, you know, hopefully there's opportunities for engagement on the back end.

Josh (00:04:21) - Am I getting that right 100% 100%?

Michael (00:04:23) - Yeah. This could work for if you're an agency, if you're a service provider or if you're even selling physical products. I've had some like health coaches and people that sell physical products do this as well. Right. And so here's a more of an example for you. Let's say that you owned a branding agency, right. You could actually market this to companies that needed, you know, maybe they're just I don't know your audience, but maybe they're just starting out and they need help with branding. Right. And you could take them through a five day experience on the basics of branding, like how to craft your messaging, right? How like is a logo you know, a good thing to have? Or should you just wait till your business has grown to actually do that? And you could take them through methodical steps to help them grow their brand and at the end, present an opportunity for people to take you up on your services and maybe become a client of your branding agency.

Michael (00:05:13) - And so that's in a nutshell, just kind of how I would do it if I was in that scenario.

Josh (00:05:18) - Yeah. Um, and so for the online events, you're again, you're going to put it on the calendar, you're going to, you know, kind of would you do many hours in a day or just kind of like a one hour a day over a course of five days?

Michael (00:05:32) - Yeah. Great question. Because a lot of people come to us and they're like Josh or Michael Mann, I don't have time to spend hours and hours a day with people. Well, I get that. And so what we do is we primarily structure these events. They're an hour to an hour and a half a day for five days straight. Okay. So it's not like you're spending 3 to 5 hours a day doing a long, long workshop. It's just enough to where you can get people in there for an hour, hour and a half to teach them what they need to know. And I like to say this is not necessarily about the content that you're teaching, right? It's not necessarily about the content because, yeah, you can have amazing content, but it's about how you deliver that content and actually what journey you take them on.

Michael (00:06:12) - Right. And so there's going to be a lot of people coming through these events with different self-limiting beliefs or different thoughts about your industry, right? In the case of a branding agency, they may come in and they may say, Josh, I believe that my brand is good. I believe that, you know, I don't need all this messaging, these core values, all these things, but you can actually take them on a journey of helping them overcome what they maybe do or don't know is good for them. And so helping change their belief system and their mindset is an important piece to that. But yeah, just an hour to an hour and a half a day if you want to go longer, cool. But we've seen that does the trick and people will come in on day one not knowing you, not really familiar with what your mission is and how you help people, but on day five, they are ready to become partners of yours and ready to become customers. And ultimately, you're going to have made a bigger impact in their lives.

Josh (00:07:04) - Yeah. Are there and I suspect that someone may have concerns that they say, well, that's that's kind of a big ask, you know, to ask, you know, five hours of someone's time. Uh, I'm skeptical that people would show up for the full week, like maybe they might check in on day one, day two, but then, you know, they're going to get swamped with other stuff, and that's going to be a hard commitment. Uh, to keep them is how would you normally, you know, kind of share your experience around that.

Michael (00:07:34) - Yeah. And I think there's two different routes we can go here. Right. Because a lot of people I've heard that time and time again, Michael, who wants to sit through five days and who has the time for that. And I think it depends on which route you go. You can host a free event right where you pull as many people as possible. And if you do that, you're probably going to have lower show up rates, right? Or you can charge for these types of events, right.

Michael (00:07:55) - Your organization could actually charge a fee for people to come and attend these. And if you do charge a fee, listen, we've seen 80 to 90% show up rates because people who pay pay attention. Right. And so ultimately it depends on which route you go. But if you are going the free route and you're scared that people won't show up, well, let's focus on adding value to them and helping them experience transformation in the first day or two. And then they're going to show up the rest of the days if you feel like they're not, I promise you people and they show up and they experience a connection. If they experience a transformation, they'll want to come back for more.

Josh (00:08:35) - Yeah. Um, is there a way to test the concept with an audience just to gauge that there would be the interest? So the fear, I think, would be I'm going to go through all this effort. I'm going to, you know, because obviously it's an investment in resources to put an event like this on if you want to do it well and, you know, make sure you've got great material and obviously a lot of promotion, that sort of thing.

Josh (00:08:57) - The fear may be I'm going to throw a party. No one's going to show up. And man, I wish I would have just done a little bit of research to gauge interest, not just in would my audience be interested. But, you know, if I've got some options on what we can focus on, how do we hone down on that focus? How can we learn? That's a great.

Michael (00:09:19) - Question because not many people ask that. So that's cool. Number one, I always look at it as it's never if if you do run this and you do put something on like this, the worst thing that can happen is that you get better at your messaging and your presentation skills and your, you know, that's the worst that can happen right now on the front end. How can we be proactive and actually figure out if this is going to be a good thing for you? What I tell people is start out instead of just doing a five day, maybe start out with doing an hour training, what some may call like an online seminar or a webinar where it's just an hour, 60 to 90 minutes and then throw this in and teach on a topic.

Michael (00:09:57) - Throw this out to your audience, to your whoever is on your lead list or in your CRM, and just do a 60 to 90 minute class and test it. See if people show up, see if they like the content, and then from there, doing a small test like that, which only takes 60 to 90 minutes. And it doesn't have to be anything super professional. It doesn't have to be something that you take weeks and weeks to prepare. I've had some people do this and they'll they'll just prepare with a few days time, throw something together and they are able to test it. And actually, this is what we're doing for one of our clients. And this is a really cool conversation here. He came to us and said the same thing. He said, Michael, I'm just not sure how my audience will respond to this. And so we said, okay, this January, which at the time of the recording was about 30 to 45 days from now, we said, let's just let's just test the water.

Michael (00:10:40) - Let's just do a free 60, 90 minute class to see if people show up, how the engagement is it the energy good. Are you confident in your presentations? And we'll see how it go. So I like that model. If you want to test the waters before and you're not doing many virtual events or anything up until this point, test it out with one of those free 60 to 90 minute classes.

Josh (00:11:01) - Now and then when someone understands the concept of what we're talking about and they say, okay, cool, I, I'll go do it. Uh, versus if they work with you, how do you make that run a lot better?

Michael (00:11:15) - Yeah. So there's, there's that's a loaded question. But we do everything for our clients. So people come and work with us. We set up everything emails, text, graphics, funnels, websites, whatever, anything pertaining to that. We set it up and make sure it's running. You just show up and teach and add value to the audience. We'll help craft that content with you so you we know exactly what should be said every day, how everything should flow out.

Michael (00:11:39) - We'll build the marketing plan, the whole shebang. We build it. But you can make this as simple and or as complex as you want, right? You can go out and build out all the automations and build out all these fancy, uh, things to run this event. Or you can just do it in a zoom, like, like we're doing right now in a zoom, just sharing this with the with the people that are there. And so you can make this as simple or as complex as you want. But the difference between working with us and doing yourself is that we have a whole team that we specialize, and we do this every single day.

Josh (00:12:09) - Michael, tell me more about the the work that you do particularly I'm thinking about, you know, a friend that's listening to us and and they just want to get to know you a little bit better. Um, you know, obviously you're a podcaster, but but tell me more about kind of where folks go from here if they've enjoyed what we're talking about and they want to do a little bit more learning on this.

Michael (00:12:27) - Yeah. I would love to chat with you. You guys can go to the funnel. Pros. Com and we actually just set up a time where we can chat. No sales, nothing. Just where we can see if this would even be a good fit for you. Right. Because we're all about connection as well, and we're all about building long term relationships. So if you can come to us and just chat with us, book a time where we can just sit down, have some coffee over zoom and just see, you know, how we can help you increase your income, but most importantly, your impact and your influence through virtual stages. And so that would be the next step for them is just let's just have a conversation. Let's just chat a little bit for 15, 20 minutes to see if this is a good fit.

Josh (00:13:03) - Sure. And aside from that, um, any other resources you recommend in terms of content that you do and kind of your what you've created out in the world?

Michael (00:13:12) - Yeah, 100%.

Michael (00:13:13) - So we actually talk a lot about this on our social media. So you can go and, you know, connect with me on Instagram official Michael Tucker I'm there. But you guys shoot me a message. Just say, hey, I came from the podcast, I would love to chat with you and I'd love to report back to Josh just to let him know, like, hey, you know, the people are loving this, so shoot me a DM on Instagram or you guys if you want. I do have other resources. Like I was telling Josh, you can go to Million Dollar secrets.com if you just want to kind of dive into learning a little bit more about virtual events, and maybe just want to learn a little bit more about digital marketing, we have tons of tools there where you can just get access for free, no cost at all. Just jump in and get those resources.

Josh (00:13:51) - All right. Michael Tucker again, founder of the Funnel pros and million dollar secrets. Com Michael, thank you so much for joining us.

Michael (00:13:58) - Thanks, Josh I appreciate you. Bye bye.

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