Read time: 3 mins…

Picture this… it’s 2.42pm on Live Webinar day.

Me and the team are in the studio. It’s all hands on deck.

We’ve been spending £3,000/day for the last 10 days getting people signed up to this free event.

So we’ve placed a £30k bet…and today is the day we spin the wheel and see how much we are going to win back.

At 3pm we are going live…

…and as with any live event we are crossing our fingers (and toes) that the show up sequence does it’s job and people actually show up.

Ding.

First person enters the chat.

Ding. Ding.

A couple more.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.Ding. Ding.Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.

Okay… there’s a lot of people here…

(we breath a first small sigh of relief)

The pressure starts to build.

The clock is about to strike 3pm.

I hear Miguel begin the countdown…

5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

It’s showtime.

Nigel starts doing his thing.

It’s going well.

The chat is buzzing.

We get past the intro.

And he’s diving deep into the value.

Then the unthinkable happens………

It was 3.37pm.

23 minutes before we even got to the pitch.

My second screen that’s watching the event stutters…

Then it goes quiet.

My eyes dart to it as fast as lightning…

Why’s it gone quiet?

Then I see it.

The dreaded words…

I hit refresh… praying it was but a momentary glitch.

Nop.

It’s still offline.

Miguel springs into action.

The network cable connecting the cameras to the livestream has failed.

He calls our Techy Tommy immediately.

1 minute has now passed.

The chat is going crazy.

“It’s crashed!”
“I can’t see anything?!”
“WTF is this a scam?”

All those people we had paid for to be there… now questioning everything.

Every second that ticks by we lose more of them.

Another minute has now passed.

After some techy wizardry… the team reboot the stream.

And 2 minutes 30 seconds later we are LIVE.

I look at the viewer count… damn, we lost 20% of our viewers.

Not ideal.

BUT that means 80% stayed…

So we’ve still got an opportunity here. The show must go on!

And it does.

Nigel made a big deal about the glitch and apologised to everyone.

Their response was surprising.

“Ha - no problem, happens to the best of us!”
“atleast we know it’s really live and not a recording”

It seems our humble error actually built more trust with those that hung around.

And the event proceeded to run very smoothly.

We booked 54 qualified calls on the day. Another 20 or so in the days after. We did not recoup all the cash in month 1 as we had planned… but thankfully (the beauty of the recurring model) we added enough in MRR that we will recoup it the next month and then be profitable after that.

I share this story for two reasons:

We always see the wins online but in marketing there are plenty of losses.

It’s easy to see the big headline numbers that people like me share online and think we have some kind of midas touch… when the reality is FAR from that.

For every big success there are normally 10 hefty failures.

But that is part of the game.

Increase the frequency and size of your failures and you will increase the frequency and size of your wins.

Things can and will always wrong.

But we can drastically improve our own odds of it going right by adopting this mentality.

The best sales team in the world “train for cold, and hope for warm”.

As always, I hope this was useful… 👍

Elliott

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, there’s three ways I can help…