Ep #224: Believing in Your Process to Double Your Revenue with Claire Pelletreau

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 224. Today I have one of my amazing clients from the 200K Mastermind, Claire Pelletreau, on the podcast. And we are going to talk about making lots of money and then a really, really powerful, incredible before and after. Who Claire was before, who she is now and how she’s gotten where she is. So, Claire, introduce yourself, tell everyone who you are, what you do and how much money you’ve made.

Claire: Okay, great. So my name is Claire Pelletreau, I help coaches and course creators learn to run their own Facebook and Instagram ads. And we also work with our higher level clients on their actual funnels, their copy, all that jazz. And I mean to date I’ve made 1.5 million but that’s over 10 years almost. My best year, which was while I was in the 200K Mastermind, my very first round was almost 500K.

Stacey: It’s so fun, okay.

Claire: Up from 330.

Stacey: Okay, so I thought it would be fun to start with, because you just had a great story that you talked about in your award acceptance speech. And so I’m just curious if you would tell everyone where you were in your mind, in your business when you came in to the 200K Mastermind. And then what were the biggest things that shifted to create that big of a jump?

Claire: Yeah. So it’s really interesting, Stacey, when I started listening to your podcast, I was at this point where I was like, I do not know how to sell. The money that I have made has almost been in spite of myself. And I was running this program and people were applying and I was procrastinating on messaging with them, on sending them the information. I did not actually want anyone to join anymore.

Stacey: How interesting.

Claire: Yeah. And it was because I was realizing that we didn’t have the way to get people the results that we promised them. Facebook and Instagram ads, it’s just kind of tough. So for us to promise such a big result and then only some people were getting it. It just became really hard for me. And when I heard you say, 100% client result, I mean I probably spun out for a week on the floor of my office. But I was like, “This is the person.” If this is her philosophy then this is the person I need to learn from.

And also you being the sales expert, I was like, “Okay, that’s going to be a big thing too.” What I realized after I joined, well, I did pre-enrollment. So I got to go through the modules six months before the live event. And I was like, “I don’t have belief in myself, I don’t have belief in my offer and belief in my clients.” So I didn’t have any of the beliefs at all. I came from years of paying attention to the people who were struggling, not having any way of tracking the people who were actually getting incredible results.

Stacey: Yes. Can we just, everyone point out what you just said, having lack of belief because I was just thinking about how this happens and you literally answered it without me having the question, which is so crazy. But this is how it happens. You condition your brain to look for the people who don’t get results, who aren’t doing well, instead of the people who are, you don’t track that at all. I even have my own experience of that. I think it was your class that came in for early enrollment.

I was on maternity leave and I had left, literally I remember I was due on a Saturday and on the Friday I was on the call with my team and they were telling me all these terrible things that people were saying about us in emails and all of the refund requests that were coming in. And I was so stressed, I had to say, “Listen, guys, I don’t know what the answer is but we have to pause for three months. And I know that’s unfortunate and uncomfortable but I’m afraid I’m going to lose my baby. I feel so, my whole body, I can’t be in this kind of stress, I’m due tomorrow, I can’t, no. End.”

And then I left and went on maternity leave, that was my last experience before. And I felt so terrible, so much of my maternity leave. And then I don’t remember why because I didn’t work on my maternity leave so I can’t remember what would have possessed me to do this. Maybe it was towards the end of it, I think maybe I was just amping up, I came back, and we went right into 200K Live.

Something, I don’t remember, but I was looking on Slack and I just happened across a conversation of, I think before I had left, I had told people it would be cool if we got client testimonials from the early enrollment. And then we sent them out every week to encourage everyone that was in early enrollment. And I think I had just said that offhand. I had no idea that my team had actually created a process and executed on it because they’re so amazing.

I’m looking on Slack for something and I see this document and it is pages and pages and pages of clients talking about, and you were one of them, how much money they had made with the member portal and how happy they were. And just what an incredible experience it was. And I was crying my eyes out. I’m like, “Neil, listen to this one. Listen to this one right here.” And it really dawned on me that I had spent my maternity leave, any time my business did pop up in my brain, I had been thinking about that and not thinking about all of the people who can get results.

And I think if I hadn’t had that switch and then gotten to go immediately into 200K Live and be in a room with so many amazing people and being on stage at the awards, I could have even gotten sucked into that after having so much success with my offer. So I think that that can happen if you just looks for all of the things that are going wrong, it’s so trained to do that.

So having that doc, I was like, “Guys, we’ve got to have this moving forward. I only want you guys sending me this. I’m going to give you a process for handling when people aren’t happy or aren’t getting results or whatever the case, if someone’s mad at us for any reason, even if they’re not our client. Don’t show me that. I don’t want to know. This is what I want to know. I want to know the people that we’re helping, the people that are happy. I want to think about them, I want to plan for them, I want to make decisions about them, all of that.”

So I know that was kind of a long winded thing but it’s so important, that I just felt like we had to stop and talk about that because it is so easy to feel like you’re being swallowed if that’s where you’re focused. And it’s really hard if you don’t have a way to see if they’re being successful and a path to create them being successful, I can 100% see why you would be not responding to people and not wanting them to buy from you.

Claire: Oh my gosh, it was the epitome of self-sabotage at that point. But I’m really glad that you share that, Stacey, because obviously you have made so much money and that happens to you. I am actually noticing now that it’s happening again, me focusing on the negative. So it’s just about, yeah, I was actually talking about this with one of the one-on-one coaches from 200K.

And she was like, “Okay, yeah, you’re doing what everyone’s doing which is just focusing on those people who are maybe. You don’t even know if they’re unhappy, you’re not hearing from them and you’re literally focusing on that instead of all these other people.” So just happens, and I think it’s probably constantly going to be the work of redirecting your brain and that’s what I’ve learned from you.

Stacey: Even on a webinar for example, I couldn’t see the participation on the one I just did, but I have been on them, especially it’s a five day training I’m coaching. And this has happened a lot in the past too where you can see let’s say a 1,000 people started the webinar and then you get to the sales part and there will always be a drop, always, that just happens. But if you focus on the amount of people who left versus the amount of people who are there it will spin you out and you will lose power to sell.

And so I’m always, even me, I know this, I used to sell mops in Walmart and you had to focus on the people who were interested, not the people who were heckling you or I would have entire shows. And can you imagine the way people heckle you in Walmart live in person, it’s happening in front of you. But you would have people literally, you’re at a stage and people are walking off while you’re talking, you’re mid-sentence. And they would sometimes be in the front row, I’d be mid-sentence, and someone would roll their eyes, turn around and butt their way out of the group and leave.

And you couldn’t lose focus, you had to anchor into, okay, well, that person wasn’t interested, but here are four people whose eyes are on me and they are. And it is a constant, even at this level with all of that experience I still have to do this work. I think our brains, we just can’t change the human experience, but we can be aware of it and redirect it when it happens. And I love that you were talking to someone in 200K about it because that’s also the power of having a mastermind is that they can reel you back in.

Claire: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But I loved literally I did maybe 10% of the content that was in the portal during pre-enrollment, 10%. I just started selling myself on my own offer. And I had a $90,000 launch without the program starting, without 200K starting yet.

Stacey: That’s so good. Okay, so tell me, do you remember the specific things that you sold yourself on about your program, what shifted in your brain that created that result?

Claire: Yeah. So that launch was a little more complicated than the one I did not even six months later but from 200K. But what I did is I sold a $300 thing and then I sold the 9K thing. So it all started, I mean really most of the work was done on the $300 thing. And I found that if somebody doesn’t have a successful thing that we teach, the details don’t matter. If they do not make $300 back the knowledge that they would get about trying to sell a $100 thing and if you can’t sell that then you have real problems that you need to assess.

That is $300 to get the information that your people don’t want what you’re selling. That’s really important to have and to not languish around that for a couple of years. It’s this small very basic bite sized thing that you’re selling, if they don’t want that, you have bigger fish to fry. So I realized, that’s worth $300 right there. So I sold it to so many more people than I thought I would. Then people did get great results and the ones who didn’t, they still got so much value out of it. And then I actually had, I was like, “Oh, shoot, I haven’t really sold myself on the higher level offer, Get Paid Marketing.”

So I did that real quick and then we went into the launch of that. And I just spoke with more authority than I ever have before.

Stacey: I have a question, but I want to point this out first. So something you said that I think is important for everyone, I talk about this in Two Million Dollar Group, I think more than 200K. But the idea, if you solve something really simple for someone and you get them that win, they’re going to be yours for life. They want to do all of the things. So for me it’s sign that first client or make your first 2K. No one was doing that at the time. It was these big outlandish offers and make 100K or sign your first 10 clients.

It was challenge weeks that were sign 10 clients in one week or something ridiculous like that. But if people don’t get results from that, the idea was always, show them the beginning steps of it and then really sell them this bigger offer that will actually accomplish that. But if they come into the week and that’s the promise then they’re going to feel like a failure. So even, I did a training called Creating Demand. And the whole five days was just helping people believe, one belief, one thought, I am in demand, that was it. We didn’t try to create 10 clients, just one thought.

And then when they have success with that, we think when we’re talking about guaranteeing results, if they guarantee something huge, if they guarantee them $25,000 or $200,000. No, you can guarantee them 2K. You can guarantee them small amounts of success I’m always saying, just choose something small that you know you can deliver on. And I think that $300 offer, that’s what you’re talking about, you chose something so small that it would be easy to get people wins that also impacted you, your own mindset.

And then a lot of people did get wins so then the 9K offer becomes a much easier task because of that. It’s so much easier to sell people into 200K that have made a lot of money in 2K for example. If they paid me 2K and made 10 times that, they’re going to be like, “Okay, well, that’s probably going to be the same in 200K.” So I love that. And I just wanted to kind of send that out to the ether to everyone to just pay attention to it can be a simple thing. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing. When you hear Claire say that she had that much success, but it was a simple thing that she offered.

So then you said, “I realized that I needed to do work on my 9K offer so I did that real quick.” And I know everyone’s like, “Wait a minute, okay, but what was it that you did really quickly?” Do you remember any exercises you did or how did you actually do that really quickly and navigate getting onboard with the 9K offer?

Claire: Intentional thought creation.

Stacey: Do you have any examples of questions you might have asked yourself? I know I’m asking you to think back to a long time ago, but if you remember it’s worth it.

Claire: I mean I remember that after, five months later I had a $180,000 launch. So those thoughts might be better. When I say I did it real quick, I only asked myself a few questions which was, what do your clients love about this? And what evidence do you have that this is the best thing since sliced bread? And that forces you to go looking for all of the rave reviews, the positive posts, the, wait, this person’s podcast downloads have doubled with a really simple ad. How come I’m not flashing that around social media? I should be because it’s good. So yeah, literally those two questions.

Stacey: That’s so good. I love that the answer is super simple. So good, okay. And then you said that when you did the $180,000 launch the thoughts were a lot better. Honestly, I think simple and the jump from where you were to where, to the 90,000, I think that is the most valuable for them to hear because it’s so great when we’re like, “Okay, we definitely want to know also though what made you go from 90 to 180, we definitely want to know that.

But I just think the first one is the hardest, to get that first transformation, that first big jump. I think that, I don’t know, it was your experience, not mine, so you tell me. But was 90 one a little bit harder than that 180? I know the 180 was more but I bet it was easier because you laid the groundwork.

Claire: Absolutely. No, no, you’re absolutely right. The fact that I launched one course, I then delivered it live and then I launched the 9K thing. That was way too much. So it was me hustling. It was me doing a lot, but I was more sold on the 9K offer than I had been in the six months that I had been trying to sell it.

Stacey: I don’t know if it was hustle though, I don’t know, the way you tell it.

Claire: More calls, yeah.

Stacey: The way you tell it, I feel it was just the amount of work you needed to get out of it, out of the thought process. Sometimes you do have to do a significant amount of work to get out of the thought process and it might be a lot more than you want to continue to do repeatedly always. But if it’s a little bit of this is what we’re going to do, I like to always give examples for me. And I know I have a ton, they’re just not coming to my mind right now, but I just know that. That’s what made me key off on it is sometimes you need to do that to get yourself into a different thinking pattern.

And then of course you recognize, well, this isn’t sustainable, so we’ll do it differently next time, but I don’t know if it was hustle. I mean you tell me, but I definitely think it could be mixed with some really good things as well.

Claire: Yeah. I think the plan of teaching it live, so it was of course on holding paid live workshops. So it was kind of meta in the fact that I was literally showing them exactly what they were going to do. But I think that decision about doing it live, instead of, it was already a complete course. It did not need to be live. I think that came from some fear of it’s not going to be good enough as it is or they’re not going to go from that step to the next step with me. And actually now that I think about it, there were things in there where they really got a taste of what we do in the 9K.

So back and forth, I think it was smart, but did it come from a bit of fear? Maybe.

Stacey: Yeah. I just thought of an example of this. I did one time, I called it the 32 Day Business Reboot. And it was the beginning of the year, and it was 2K for 2K people. So we did it in 2K. So I don’t know if I did a webinar or if I just started marketing it. I don’t really remember the specifics of that. But I just remember we sold it as in, “You’ve got to get in 2K so that you can do this 32 Day Business Reboot.” And we made more money than we’ve ever made in 2K. And I was like, “Well, that was a win.”

Of course though I was adding so much value to try to believe people would buy. And getting myself to the place of, this makes it worth it for them to buy. However, I never did it again. I had the results now to believe tangibly there are this many people that will buy. And then I used it to serve, as an asset to serve people in 2K from then on out. It’s still in 2K. And so would I do it again? I mean not me personally for sure. We haven’t revisited it since in many years. And it was a little hustley.

But also there was a little bit of, it’s sometimes hard to define the distinction between hustle and just grind. And it was a little bit of grind to get myself to believe, to tip the value enough to get enough people to join, to get more word out. It’s one of those things where it’s walking a line. It was definitely walking a line. It sounds like it was like that for you. Okay, so let’s talk about the $180,000 launch. So for that you didn’t do the live thing.

Claire: I didn’t do the other extra course. So it was literally only the 9K thing. But what had happened was that at the advanced selling live event I went in very ashamed at where I was in my business, considering how many years I had been in business. I didn’t know anybody. And it can feel like a tight knit community. But it turns out that all these people who were there had taken my course. And I had no idea. My signature, Facebook ad course, they had maybe taken it eight years ago or two years ago and I just didn’t know.

And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s how I got all my one-on-one clients.” “Yeah, I’ve had one ad running for three years and I have a $1 million business.” It blew my mind. And at one point I was talking about in the breakout session, I was talking about how it felt like my reputation didn’t match my results, the results that I was getting for my clients and my own results.

And I forget how I came to this but Charlotte Smith at one point – I was saying, “I’m afraid that people don’t like me. If they don’t get results, they don’t like me.” And Charlotte Smith who coaches farmers, she said to me, “Well, do you like yourself?”

Stacey: So good.

Claire: And I started bawling. So that was just kind of really the beginning. And when I said to you on stage at the next event, “Thank you for fixing me.” It really came from that, this sort of deep seated low level self-loathing. And that I wasn’t good enough on my own, that everything was tied to the money that I helped people make or didn’t help them make if they didn’t get the results. And since I’m focusing only on the negative, I don’t have a really high opinion of myself. So I worked a lot on that.

I worked a lot on just the belief that there are people waiting, lining up for the next enrollment of Get Paid Marketing.

Stacey: So good.

Claire: I had my doubts, and I would then get coaching on that. And it turns out I did, I had a huge fucking live.

Stacey: That’s so fun.

Claire: We sold out really quickly and then we had people afterwards trying to get in, but we were full. So it really was just changing my thoughts about me and about the demand.

Stacey: That’s so good. I love that so much. For everyone listening, you’ve got to ask yourself that question, if you’re worried about people and what they think. Even for me in some of my darkest moments I’ve had in business and well, probably in life too, but I will ask myself that, do I like me? I need to do a podcast about my business boundaries someday, but I’ve been thinking a lot about well, I don’t have examples right now, but I have a lot of business boundaries. And it triggers people, they don’t like it, especially if you don’t have a lot of business boundaries.

And people will try to get me to break my boundaries or push them really hard sometimes. And just it really triggers people that I have such strong boundaries. And I always have to say, “But I love my boundaries and I really love my decisions and I really like me who has them.” Or even in life, I have some in life that I also think probably triggers some people, friends, family, whatever. And I’m always thinking, my best version of me has them and I love them. And so it’s just any version of this, it’s always so good to take yourself to, why do I love it?

Why do I love myself in this situation? Why do I like me because of this? It’s so good. If you like you and you like your reasons for doing things it will be very hard to ever knock you off of anything, success, anything, just your reputation, it will just be really hard to derail you. I think that was the proper word I’m looking for, but it will be hard to do that, even if you might derail temporarily but you’ll come back. I always think, there’s not anything I do in my business that I wouldn’t be willing to be honest about. I don’t act ever in a way that I would be un-proud of.

So I can always be super transparent and talk about everything. I just can’t think of the business boundaries. I’m going to do a podcast about them, but yeah, I just feel like I feel so good about them. So I think that’s really brilliant. Yes, you’ve got to like yourself first.

Claire: Yeah, I have some decisions that I had to make recently and they were hard and I really like them a lot. They were hard in the sense that I knew it was going to disappoint people. And well, I had the thought, this might make selling this a little harder. But then I’m like, “no, I don’t think that’s true. And I really like this decision so it’s going to be how it is.”

Stacey: Yeah. I just think you have so much power, there’s always getting yourself onboard with your offer. There’s always learning PSPR to sell that offer well. But when you just love your decisions, that goes back to even the Irresistible Offer protocol I teach. If you just decide, if you have specific decisions you make around your offer, and you really investigate each of those and then you love them, it gets so much easier to hear objections. Well, I can’t, I don’t know what people object to with my offers now anymore because I don’t see them if they do.

But let’s just say that someone was like, “Well, I need it in 12 months, I need 200K in 12 months and it should be a 12 month program.” I love the decision for it to be six months. It forces people to take action in a small amount of time. Coaches love to just be in clubs, not making money, paying people to hangout and I don’t want that to be the rooms I’m involved in. I want there to be a measurable amount of success. People have said negative things about revenue reporting, not in the room, but I’ve heard people, you just hear things.

You see things about, “She makes her clients revenue report.” And I’m like, “Yes, because we all need to know, is it working or not?” I feel like it’s such a good decision that there is nothing, that if someone was like, “Well, I’m not going to revenue report.” I’ll be like, “Cool, I’m not going to let you in.” So I just think if you can fall in love with yourself, your reasons, not even fall in love but just like, just remotely like your reasons and yourself, it doesn’t mean you won’t get objections or you won’t get haters, but it will be much easier to handle them and then it will be easier to sell.

Claire: It’s funny that you bring up revenue reporting because that was literally one of the things that I said, “Well, I need to be able to track the result.” One of the things that we do in Get Paid Marketing is, we help people improve their conversion rates on their webinar signup page for example. But before the only way we knew if that actually happened was if somebody was looking at the data, which is really not what a lot of entrepreneurs are inclined to do regularly. And then tell us, “Look, this version went out.”

So I said, “Well, I could have them track that, but what if people don’t like it?” And somebody in the room in Orlando was like, “Well, who cares if they don’t like it?” And guess what, somebody doesn’t like it and it’s fine. It’s totally fine. I mean we have a boundary, you don’t get access to this one particular feature of the program which everybody wants. If you don’t do it you don’t get access. I was really inspired by you. You don’t have to revenue report, but you don’t get access to the guarantee.

Stacey: Yeah, that’s it, you don’t have to. And so for everyone listening, if you’re not in 200K, you don’t have to revenue report, but then I don’t guarantee your money because I can’t, and it’s from the place of the best intentions. I can’t help you if I don’t know something is going on. When we see people who report under what they might be on track for making their money back or whatever, you always see people jumping in and saying, “Hey, how can I help you? What can we do?” I’m able to say, “Hey, what’s going on? Tell me, talk to me.”

And if I don’t know then I can’t be responsible for a result that I don’t know about. And no matter how big the group has grown I always know about those results. I’m in there all of the time. My team takes it from Facebook and puts it in a spreadsheet and I look at that. I’m always paying attention to that. And so yeah, you could come in and not revenue report, but then I just won’t guarantee the process because there is that piece of it.

So, listen, I will also say I was in a program. You didn’t have to do it, but I was in a program that I was losing the last 10 pounds and she had a tracker where you could actually input your data and see a little chart with your squiggly lines of where you could see your plateaus, you could see where you had gone up or where you had gone down. And it was just so helpful to input that stuff and see the journey. So anyways that’s a whole another side note. But I think it’s super powerful to have some capacity of a way to track how your clients are doing.

Claire: Yeah. No, definitely. Definitely.

Stacey: And I love that they don’t get access to a part unless they do it because what that also teaches them is to be a more mature entrepreneur. They have to know their numbers, they have to know what’s going on. Especially, it’s fascinating to me how many people are willing to spend money on ads and not willing to investigate that even a little bit. They just want there to be a magical end.

Claire: That was another thing kind of I learned with this particular cohort. So it’s funny because that 90K launch, just the people who came in, it was they got so many results. I don’t know if my selling was too good, Stacey, but I got a lot of people who we just haven’t heard from anymore. They decided, I don’t know what that’s about and we’re going to be looking at how we speak in the next launch.

But we’ve definitely had some people come in, launch ads to a webinar, not understand or really dive into why the costs are so high and therefore they don’t get many people on the webinar. And therefore they don’t convert anyone from ads. Yeah, of course you want your first campaign, you want that money to come back in huge waves and sometimes it does and sometimes it does not.

Stacey: Yeah. And if it doesn’t, you have to know that metric, whatever it is that you teach them. You have to know the numbers around that. It’s so important. I think that that shows up in 200K too when people do launches and they’re like, “Oh, it didn’t go the exact way I thought it would the first time around.” Or even this time around, I’ve coached people on they would have four or five successful launches and then one that goes completely off the rails. We get entitled to these results.

And I’m always telling them, “Listen, I used to kill it.” I’d be doing a show on Walmart and sell 50 slicers to a group and then do the next one and expect 50 people to buy on the next one and sell zero. And I did relatively the same exact show. It’s not like a sales call. It was the exact same words, the exact same movements. There was nothing ever that changed. And you could say it was different people but store to store it was the same people. The same people shopping in one Walmart on one part of town versus another part of town. They all had the same vibe of people.

And so if you have people buying, the 100% crowd and 50 of them buy that store’s just buying. That is a buyer’s crowd. So then if you sell zero the next time it’s like, what happened? And so anyway, some people get entitled too. So I’m always telling them, “Have you sold less than you expected, or you just didn’t hit it out of the park?” Okay, so now we have to just evaluate. We have to figure out what happened and then we have to make a plan to move forward.

Claire: Sorry, I’m becoming the podcast interviewer now because it is my nature. Do you find that you can always identify the why?

Stacey: So this is such an interesting question because I know you’re probably more data and metric driven maybe than I am. So we probably have two different philosophies about this maybe. I don’t know. And this is the best part about having a podcast conversation, but I think sometimes you can identify with data and metrics.

I’ll give an example of if someone if you looked at your email open rates. If you actually went into your email server and you saw how many people opened an email and the percent was extremely low. But also that’s up for grabs because apparently even, I was just coaching with my mastermind, I was like, “I must be terrible at selling, I only have an 8% click through rate.” And they were like, “8% is really good.”

Claire: Everyone and their mother wants 8%, Stacey.

Stacey: I was like, “I don’t know how to sell. I might as well give up. I don’t know how I’ve made the money I’ve made, 8% seems really terrible.” And they were like, “It’s really good.” But whatever, so it’s relative to what your thoughts about it too which is why I like people to stay out of it. But let’s just say it was two people out of 20,000 people clicked, then you might know, you’ve either got a delivery issue or you’ve got a subject line issue. That gives you an idea of where to look.

But I will say for me, I have, for the last, I mean since forever up until, or just now really getting into data and metrics with our company. Because we’re at the point now where my Chief Technology Officer was saying, “We just don’t want to spend any more money or make any big decisions without having full visibility for the rate of scale that we want to do.” We’re looking at hyper growth and so you need to know your visibility at that point. But up until now I just ask myself my best three guesses of what I think it is.

And it always comes back to typically thinking, decisions I made, things I did do or things I didn’t do and because of why I did them. And sometimes it was from good intentions and sometimes it was from fear. And either way, sometimes it’s just you had a good idea, and it was a miss. And then sometimes you were hustling, and it was a decision out of fear, and it was a miss. It doesn’t matter. It’s just these are my top three theories of what I think it could be.

And I just think if you solve for that always you’re going to just hone yourself and your brain as an entrepreneur that you get so good at narrowing down the hunches. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s kind of my philosophy about it.

Claire: No, I really like that because sometimes even with the data, I always ask my clients, “Did you get less eyeballs on the sales page this time or is it a lower conversion rate?” That’s pretty much as far as we go to troubleshoot what happened in a launch. A lot of people had kind of rough 2022s although I noticed that’s not true in the world of your clients, just FYI. I saw so many people have great 2022s, myself included while others did not. And I asked them, “Was it an eyeballs problem or a conversion rate problem?”

But even after that, I really think that best guess, the three best guesses is a great way to go about it because the numbers do not tell you everything, especially if things are similar.

Stacey: Yes. Well, okay, so this is a great example of this. I did a few, I always hesitate to talk about this because then I’m like, “Everyone’s going to want me to do this.” And I won’t, it’s a boundary. But I did some launch audits for my Two Million Dollar Group to make up for a meeting that I missed when I had COVID. And I went through and read all of their emails. Literally they were able to submit every social post, all of their emails, webinars, if they did a webinar that they were going to do again.

I mean it took me three to four hours, but I would go through and read everything. And I would type up better ways to say things, ways to reorganize things, pull out pieces that I think could have been entire emails themselves. But the big thing I did is I would show them their top three to four beliefs that they were having that were coming through in their copy. And some of them were really big beliefs, really big glaring ones. And then we would always laugh hysterically about them even though it sucks because it’s costing them money.

But then when I would show it to them they’d be like, “Oh my God, I am thinking that, that is showing up.” And so now I always say, “It’s unfair because I don’t have anyone to do this for me.” And I’m sure my thoughts show up too. But all of our thoughts show up in our copy so that’s something where you could say, you could have data happening. I do think from what I’ve heard and from what I’ve experienced in my own business, yeah, there is something definitely happening.

It’s maybe possibly circumstantially harder to make high amounts of profit with ads right now, with whatever algorithm thing they had, that is a challenge. I don’t know many seven figure earners that aren’t necessarily experiencing that. Their ads might be working but they’re not as profitable as they used to be. It’s costing a little more to get to people, things like that.

However, what I think makes a business that can navigate that no matter what is the business that can operate, no matter what’s that’s happening, they can still use their brain, their sales tools, their evaluating skills to come out on the other side with either what they want or close to what they want. So I know a lot of people are also, I think it’s a combination of fear of the economy and the ads changed that I think is the reason people didn’t have the best years. I didn’t for other reasons, but that’s neither here nor there. But I think those were the top two reasons, fear.

I just think there’s a fear in the world about the economy. And I’ve been paying attention a lot to will that affect my clients? I have not seen that so far in our rooms, in 2K, 200K, Two Million Dollar Group. And the landscape of ads which I also really haven’t seen. Now, if my people are doing ads, they’re doing them clearly with you. So you’re doing something right. So if those were the two reasons or those were the two things, those things are just circumstances that might contribute but you still have your problem solving skills.

You still have your theories, and you can still hone your thoughts that are still going out into that ad copy, still going out into that email copy. And if you change those it might be enough to shift it in your favor even if it’s a higher ad spend and even if people aren’t converting as much. They’re a little bit more gun shy to spend money. That’s the things then that you want to focus on. That’s where you want to spend your time and your energy and put your focus in when, you know, there are other contributing factors. That will be the difference of people like you having a good year.

You weren’t over there complaining about, maybe you were, but complaining about the ad space or thinking about the economy. You were focused on doing intentional thought creation on your offers. And creating better beliefs on your offers, so that’s why your business grew. It’s not rocket science, it’s just hard because it’s intangible I think.

Claire: Yeah. I mean what we focus on with our clients is using ads in ways that are now different because it is true. What a lot of people don’t know, I mean I know that you started running ads in 2019 or the 2K funnel.

Stacey: Yeah, when did I start that? It was the year that I made 860,000, I think is the year I started ads. So I was at 325. I don’t remember what year that was though, 2018, it might have been 2018.

Claire: So the little secret is that I was running those ads for you in 2018. I was on the team. It’s hilarious. You worked for an agency. I happened to be a subcontractor for that agency.

Stacey: Yes, that’s right.

Claire: And we were working on funnels that no longer exist now. So I wonder if your great 2K for 2K funnel was a 2019 funnel.

Stacey: I don’t know. I don’t think you guys ever did that funnel with me.

Claire: No, no, we didn’t, no. It was still Diva Business School back then.

Stacey: Yeah, because if I remember this correctly, and I could be wrong so if Tony’s ever listening. This could not be a factual account but emotionally what I heard from him was that my messaging was not clear enough and a little bit all over the place to do well in the ad world. And I just remember, I think he said something kind and along the lines of, “When you clean this shit up.” And he didn’t say that but, “When you clean that up come back.” But it was just that time where I had tried to start them.

And then, yeah, it was 2K for 2K in Diva Business School, it was I was in that weird transition. It hadn’t come out yet. And he just knew, I think that he couldn’t help me with that weird message. And I had actually had someone before that, that was just like, “Put $30,000 in and you’re going to make this amount because it’s just all about how much money you put in. And then you’re just going, typical to convert this many people of”, anyways, whatever, it’s fine. I learned my lesson.

Claire: And now you teach other people about that lesson. I heard you say it on this webinar because you and I sort of differ in opinion about whether or not people should hire somebody to run their own ads or understand the basics first.

Stacey: Listen, only from my experience, I’m like, “I don’t want any part of that, I want to spend my brain coaching and selling.” But I do know for some people, I mean Brooke and you agree, she’s like, “You should definitely know how to run your ads.” And also some people agree, you should start ads right away. And I’m like, “You should not start ads until you’re at a place where your messaging and your conversion rates are so clear.” Everybody has a different thought.

But I also think that it matters like your personality. So someone who has the ability to learn it, for me and someone who has a personality like me, what I would run up against to figure that out would just not be worth it. Even now where I am, we’re actually positioning myself as a tech company, as our company is a tech company. And we’re moving everything into the tech initiative. Literally it’s going to be so crazy. I’ll talk about it more in the future. But not because I have become a tech savant. It’s because I have hired someone who is one.

I have hired someone who is really big in the tech world and knows a lot of crap that when he talks I have to listen really hard and then ask him to repeat things and then trust him and give him that thanks. So I just have to say, there is no, in my feelings, there is no sort of I’m right, you’re wrong or you’re right, I’m wrong. For certain people it’s going to be miraculous either way.

Claire: The thing is though, Stacey, I have to bring this up because I’ve heard a number of people say, “I can’t. I can’t learn them and be successful with them.” And, Stacey, isn’t that a thought?

Stacey: Yeah, yeah, of course, it always is. But I think that there is a piece of knowing yourself and saying, I’ll give this example. And first of all, let me just be clear. If I had to do it, I would do it. I just didn’t have to. I learned the sales skills, I rocked the organic marketing. But for the person listening, if you are like, “I could not imagine ever stepping foot into a fucking networking event. And if I had to be on social media and have conversations with people.”

And if you listen out all the ways to organically get clients, and you were like, “I could not do that.” For sure, did you know that you could just pay and run ads and people will send it out into the world? So this is what I mean by it. There are things that would just take so much energy to coach yourself on. I’m a believer in start with the things that require the least amount of coaching and build up your confidence. And I mean there’s so many examples of that, but I do that even now in my business.

I’m like, “What are the big ones that I can go for now?” What’s going to require a lot”, even with my new tech guy. He’ll tell me things in the future and I’m like, “Let’s talk about that a year from now.” I just don’t want to waste my time on, this is a good example, pricing. When people are like, “Should I charge $1,000 or $2,000?” Which one requires the least amount of coaching for yourself? $1,000, go with that. But they’re like, “No, I’ve got to coach myself into $2,000.” And I’m like, “But why?”

So this is just my own philosophy is I want to work with my brain as much as possible instead of against it. And I want to save the things that I have to – the hot mess story. That one for me, breaking out of that was life changing in such a big way. And there’s no one I can really truly hire to not make me a hot mess unless they’re going to come scream at me to get out of bed in the morning and to get ready on time. Maybe there is someone that does that. So that’s my philosophy, but I don’t disagree with you at all.

I just, for my flavor of coaching it’s just too much of an uphill battle even with my own confidence now. Now, I’m a lot more involved in it now. And I do think the thing I’ve developed is that I think is really important is whether you’re doing it yourself or not, you have to understand the language. You have to be able to have a powerful conversation. You have to be able to be very clear about what your metrics are that are important to you because there are literally a million ways you can pull ad metrics to look at all the different things and to decide if it’s performing well or not.

You have to be able to have an educated conversation, whether that’s you taking a course and learning rudimentary for yourself to just be able to navigate the conversation, if it’s you actually doing it or if it’s you hiring someone and they’re willing to kind of walk you through and let you ask all the questions and learn as you go. I do think you have to have the language down if you’re going to run them.

Claire: Definitely. Facebook makes it so easy for you to spend money and think that things are going really well.

Stacey: That’s the quote of the whole podcast. Facebook makes it really easy for you to spend a lot of money and think things are going well. Yes.

Claire: Yes, I think it’s true. People will tell me, “But, Claire, look at the cost per engagement I’m getting.” And I’m like, “I don’t care about that, are they going over to your site and signing up? What’s the cost for that, for each signup?” And yeah, I’m not going to lie, Facebook just makes it easy for you to throw money and feel good about yourself. Oh my gosh, look at how many people are viewing my video. That doesn’t matter. So absolutely, knowing the language and knowing what metrics matter.

That’s what I really need, everyone who encounters my work to walk away from it and be able to understand. This is what matters, Facebook, ignore Facebook and their recommendations.

Stacey: Yeah. And listen, so many of my people, now I just created the Two Million Dollar Group content. And one of the things I talk about in there is you’ve got to have both. So there’s nothing wrong with ever having both, best of both worlds. We’re going to be entrepreneurs for life, so we have to, I imagine at some point I’m going to get better and better at the ad thing. It’s not going away any time soon. But it’s pick your flavor of what would be easier potentially to coach yourself on.

And for me also in the beginning I had no money, so I could not have even put out $25 a day or $5 a day. I don’t think I could have done that. And my brain needed way too much work. But anyways, no argument on my end.

Claire: Very good, I’m glad we got that out of the way. But it’s so funny about the coaching thing. I need more coaching on the idea of being on Instagram daily. I’m like, “No, I would much rather have Zuckerberg and friends, please just be my podcast marketing company.” That’s what I do. I don’t post about my new episodes, I just run ads. And it’s easier for me. So that’s a great thing.

Stacey: Yeah. At the million dollar level the way that I’ve been thinking about it is ads bring me people that I would have never seen before without me having to invest the time to go out and get them. I used to do that. I used to do live streams. I would do webinars more frequently. I was just producing more content more frequently. So ads gave me time back to not do that. And then especially now whatever’s happening, I don’t even know what’s happening. But there was a change apparently and now ads are not as good.

But what I think about is, okay, so maybe I’m not making as much profit anymore off of those initial ones. But now I’m going to come in with organic marketing and I’m going to just get the ones who didn’t convert in the ads. And so if you’re at the multiple six, I mean my opinion is if you’re for sure at the multiple six figure, you’re moving into the seven figure range. You want to have a good robust mix of both of them.

You want to be able to get people you would have never gotten on your own, thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, I know everyone hates him, but we’ve got to be like, “Well, but there’s 50/50. He’s human like everybody else and he’s got both 50s.” So there’s the money that comes in from that and then there’s the work that you do to nurture the rest. And that’s where you have a big business.

Claire: The real difference is that gone are the days of $1 in, $5 out in a weekend. Ads really need to be looked at as a long term thing. I’ve heard you say, “If I don’t make a huge profit on my ads when they’re coming into the 2K funnel, every dollar, you just said it on the webinar, every dollar that’s profit is profit.” And so I really encourage my clients to first try to break even. Because then, I mean hopefully they have the business model where they can increase that lifetime value of the customer. So they get them in for free, you don’t make money off them necessarily.

Stacey: That’s your thought. Wait, so hold on. That’s your thought, we have to tell them because they may not know this. Her thought, which is a good one, if I were to pay $2,000 to get a $2,000 client then I got a free client.

Claire: You got a free client.

Stacey: Free client, that’s the way to think about it, not I had to pay, I made nothing. That’s the thought that people might think is, I made nothing. Not, I got a free client that I can now sell other things to.

Claire: And this is what people don’t pay attention to is in order to get that free client, you probably got 100 people to sign up for your webinar or 50 people, whatever your conversion rate is. You have all these people now who got a lot of value.

Stacey: That you get to sell to.

Claire: Yes. They got a ton of value from your masterclass or whatever. Now they’re opening your emails. They’re listening to your podcast. You got them for free without lifting a finger. I mean, it’s incredible. It’s only incredible if we look at it in this longer term strategy.

Stacey: Yeah, 100%. It’s the idea of overselling. You’re either, you’re always selling for the people who are warmed up and ready to buy right now. The people who need a little bit more warming up, and the people who will find you while you’re in a launch for the first time ever. And so if you’re thinking about that always, that those three people are always coming in and that you’re talking to those three people and you’re putting enough effort.

I’ll never forget the time that Brooke told me, it was the second or third time I sold 200K and we were only allowing 30 people in the room. And so we would get 50 applications and we would have people renewing. So there might be seven spots open. And I told Brooke, “Well, I just don’t think I need to do a launch for this one. I think I can just send an email out and sell it probably just with one email.” And so I was thinking this could be a really awesome story about how I just sent out an email and sold out a launch.

And she was like, “No, but you’re also selling for the next launch and the launch after.” And it was the first time that kind of concept started ruminating in my brain. And I was like, “Wait a minute, I am always selling for this launch and the next launch.” And then I started thinking about, wait, who am I selling? And that’s when that kind of that concept was developed. So I did a full launch. And we turned away so many people and then the next launch we opened it up to a lot more people.

But yeah, so it’s the same with ads, you have to think about, I’m getting people on my list for now for next launch or next month. And then for every month after from here on out. And the thing I had said on the webinar, for everyone listening is, I used to think about if I spent $1,000 to get a $2,000 client, I would think, I lost $1,000 of profit, but what the reality is, is that was never going to be my client because they were never going to find me without the ad. So I actually gained $1,000 of profit that would have never been mine.

And if you do decide to ever run ads, that is the mindset you have to have is I’m spending money to get leads that would have never ever been mine. Or in my case especially with 200K, we have such a low ad spend for 200K and it’s such a great payoff but it’s because the ads are really nurturing people who are just on the cusp and it just keeps showing them that ad over and over and over until okay, let me apply. So there are sometimes where ads are still producing lots and lots of money. 200K is for sure one of them for us.

Claire: Awesome. I love that.

Stacey: Okay, we’re over on time. If you’re good I want to ask you the question I always ask people which is, when you think about being on the podcast typically you have a little bit of leeway time leading up. People always think about what I might say to people, what wisdom can I impart on this, what part of my journey, I want to make sure I don’t forget to share. We’ve covered so much but is there anything that you were like, “I’ve got to make sure to share this or I’ve got to make sure to say this”, that we haven’t covered yet? Final thoughts, statements, things to pass on.

Claire: Well, I shared this on stage for the 200K award ceremony. But a huge thought that has helped me in the past 12 months is I couldn’t fuck this up if I tried. And that helps me when it comes time to just make decisions where I’m like, “What is the right thing? What is the right webinar topic? What is the best email to write or podcast episode?” I actually don’t think it matters because really what I learned from you is what I have been doing for so long is just providing a ridiculous amount of value.

And so I am always going to be doing that. If I go a week and there isn’t a podcast episode, we’re going to survive. I am the, I feel like the most imperfect entrepreneur.

Stacey: I have that thought about myself.

Claire: It’s such a good, I mean I think it’s a good thought because this imperfect entrepreneur has made so much money. I couldn’t fuck it up if I tried. And obviously I’m learning from the less awesome results, but it’s all working.

Stacey: Yeah, it’s so good. I agree with you on that a lot. I remind myself that always, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be valuable to someone else. And that, if you focus on that always even in the landscape of all the things happening in the world, that will get you through, it really will. And you’re such an example of that. It’s so fun.

Claire: Thank you. It’s been so much fun to learn from you and to just watch what you have been through in the past year, becoming a mother. I mean I didn’t hear about the tough pregnancy until after Jackson was already born, all that. But it’s just, it’s so refreshing I think to hear women talk about motherhood, especially early motherhood and trying to grow. And just the reality of that and so I just want to thank you, Stacey.

Stacey: Yeah, you’re so welcome.

Claire: It’s great to be a client. It was great before I was a client too. It’s so much better over here, but the value that you provide, it’s fantastic.

Stacey: Yeah. I really appreciate that. Yeah, I am always going to do my best to share because there isn’t a lot of people out in the world talking about some of the things. I mean I just knew so little about having a baby and being a mom. When you come from focusing on your business and basically nothing else for a long time, so yeah, that’s a super important piece of it. Alright, well, thank you for coming on. I just want to acknowledge you. You’re such a fun client to have in 200K.

You make the room better because you’re there. I was thinking about you and had you and David Vox and Sara Fisk, and you guys are just all such beautiful humans in the group, down to help people. I was thinking about the pool conversation where Kimmy was talking about her launching. You were like, “Let me just see your ads.” And you’re just, the all-in-ness that you play gives permission for other people to do that who may not have the same level.

I know that you had a lot of self stuff to work on, but there’s something in you that has deep self-confidence because you just walked into that room with that. And so every time you guys do that you just give someone else the permission to say, “I’m going to do that too, she’s doing it, I’m going to do it, or it’s safe for me to do it.” So you guys, when I was thinking about who I wanted to have on, I wanted to have transformation stories, but also I wanted to think about who really makes an impact just by being in the room?

Their energy is valuable for other people to experience, and it was definitely, you stood out among them.

Claire: Thank you.

Stacey: You’re so welcome. Alright, well, I will see you very shortly on the 200K call. Before we get off here, we’re going to link this up in the show notes as always, we always do this. But will you tell everyone how they can connect with you? And if they want to learn ads, how they can learn ads with you, and all of the things, give them the places.

Claire: Absolutely. So I mean I think the best way to come and hear me ask people how much money they make and how they do it is over on my podcast, it’s called Get Paid Podcast. If you search Get Paid Claire in your podcast app, you’re going to find it. And then if you want to come learn ads, head over to clairepells.com and we’ve got all the links to the different ways to learn from me there.

Stacey: So fun. Are you on social media, did you say that?

Claire: I’m getting ready to put up a grid on Instagram that says, ‘We don’t make reels, we run ads’.

Stacey: So good.

Claire: I’m on stories every once in a while. But to be honest, for my mental health, I keep that shit off my phone.

Stacey: Yeah. No, I just wanted to make sure that we didn’t miss anything. That’s so good, please do that though, that is fabulous. That’s so good, we don’t make reels, we run ads. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, thank you so much. I will see you shortly on our call.

Claire: Okay, thank you.

Stacey: Bye.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.