The Nitty Gritty of Launching Anything

As is often said in the marketing world, everyone thinks that people will buy from you once they understand you and all the things you do, but they actually buy from you when they feel understood.

Welcome to the Soul-SourcedTM Podcast, unconventional business advice for the highly creative, secretly sensitive and wildly ambitious entrepreneur. I’m your host, Christine Kane. Let’s do this.

Okay. Welcome everyone. This is episode number 21 of The Soul-SourcedTM Business Podcast, where our topic today is all about launching, and that is putting something out into the world, and some of the nitty-gritty behind that work. And I’m going to start this off by quoting the late and legendary marketer and author Dan Kennedy. He said that fame is manufactured and maybe this is like a duh kind of statement to you. But when I first heard him say that I was still performing and making music and it made me look at the music business in whole different way. And it also made me really disillusioned, but probably in a necessary way, because there’s nothing like a hefty dose of disillusionment to take us out of our trances. And Dan Kennedy knocked me down with this one, the truth that fame doesn’t just happen. That it’s manufactured, it’s created. It’s not passive. No one gets discovered, fame is strategic.

All that was really big news to me. And this ties into the topic of launching today because the thing that I see that disappoints so many people when it comes to marketing and launching a program or a book or a product, is that they often want their, their thing to just sort of magically sell. They want to be discovered. I can’t even count the number of coaching sessions I’ve done with people who have designed or created or built some really great program. And they’re so wildly excited about it. But then when I say, all right, so now we got to design the marketing so that you can sell this thing. They look at me like I’m an evil bitch . Their face drops. One person actually said to me, “well, I was hoping I didn’t have to do that.”

So here’s the thing. I love my peeps. I call us Soul-SourcedTM because we can find so many great and authentic ways to succeed at business while keeping our voice and our message and our authenticity alive and well. And there is quite a bit of magical thinking among us Soul-SourcedTM types. The idea that fame is manufactured or that launching a program as a strategic venture can kind of kill the buzz. The illusion, that if I make something and I just put it out there, they’ll all come and buy it because it’s simply so wonderful that I attract everyone to buy it, like the beautiful magnet that I am. But if you want to sell something or launch something, and even if you are a beautiful magnet, there has to be forethought given. So we call this part, the Strategy Track at Uplevel, but it doesn’t have to be awful or pushy or manipulative.

You can still do this stuff and stay aligned and authentic. And with that in mind, I’m going to share three key things that I have learned from experience right here on this episode. So I have generated millions and millions of dollars from launching, and I’m not going to pretend that any of this was overnight or that I was out drinking margaritas and surfing and then it happened to show up in my shopping cart and there was the millions and you can too. I learned how to launch, just like all of us learn through trial and error. And as you know, I’m launching a book right now, it’s called the Soul-SourcedTM Entrepreneur. And it is officially released to the world on Tuesday, November 17th. And if you pre-order a hardback copy of the book, you also get a very cool bonus, which is that your book is your ticket to my Click Retreat, which is happening on December 9th and 10th and 11th.

It’s all online. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to wear a mask. And by the way, yes, I know those dates have changed. And that’s because Hanukkah is the next week when we were originally going to have it and I wanted to be respectful of the Jewish faith and not hold my event that week. So we changed it. We bumped it up a little bit. And you also notice that I changed something else, which is that you only have to buy one book to get a ticket and not two. So if you go to www.solesourcedbook.com, you can go ahead and get registered for the event there, if you’ve purchased a book already. And if you haven’t yet, it will point you to how to do that.

So now I am going to share three key components that I have learned about launches, and these are from direct experience, and while there are many, many things I could teach about launching on this podcast, I want to focus on really digestible takeaways that can be applied broadly. So with that said, let’s dive right into the first point, which is really just about simply being aware. If you are launching or selling your own program or product, be aware of this, the energy of creation is radically different from the energy of conviction. So when we build a program or create a training or write a book or lay out the structure for a three-day retreat, we enter into the energy of creation. It’s a very receptive energy. We’re really just being with this service we do, and we’re with our clients, or we’re really looking at the content and generating ideas and coming up with tools that we know will help. We’re creative and we’re creating an experience for them to go through, right? That’s all the energy of creation. And if you’re like most of my clients, you love this part. You could do this forever, but selling or launching requires that you put a price tag on this thing.

You’re now asking people to invest in their results, through you through something you created. And this is very different from that creation process. Now you have to enter into some level of conviction, meaning that the energy of creation has to shift into the belief that this will help people and help them enough, that they will pay you. And this now engages the skill set to communicate that this can help or serve people. Now, if you’re a seasoned veteran in selling your stuff, you’re probably fine with this. This is not a big deal to you anymore. But for some people, this is a very uncomfortable skill set to build. It means you have to know that they will get results. That will be worth that price tag, whether it’s entertainment value, or outcomes, or new ways of thinking or new habits they create. And what I’ve seen with my newbie clients is that at first, this part can be really daunting because you may not even know with full on conviction, that your stuff is going to help your peeps, or once there’s a price tag involved, you may suddenly experience massive self doubt, or you may start to feel small or that whole, who do you think you are voice might arise from the halls of your high school days and plague you to where you don’t ever want to enter the energy of conviction and face down those voices.

So I just want you to be prepared for this and aware of this. It’s not a big deal, but it is very good to know. When you launch your program or product or service, what you’re ultimately doing, is that you’re now creating the story around why someone would want to buy that item. It’s just a different energy. That’s all. And I teach something called The Five Energies of the Entrepreneur. And I created that model because I wanted my clients to be aware of the many different parts of ourselves that we bring to the table each day. And the truth is that most of us would much rather be in the creation mode forever. We love it.

Launching and marketing, land us in the conviction mode, which is a very definite zone where you just got to say, I know this can help people. And sometimes you haven’t yet gotten clear that it will, but I can promise you, you will get there. And Hey, you guys want to know the biggest hint for getting over this little hurdle. Don’t create your program first. Sell your program first. So I will tell you that with the exception of just three of my programs, this is what I’ve always done. When I was creating new programs, new retreats, new ideas, I always sold it first. And sometimes I would do it as a pilot program. And I would say, this is a pilot program. Sometimes it was by application only, but all of this is called building the plane as you fly it. And I would wholeheartedly recommend getting your students and participants to pay you first and then build the program because that pressure is there.

And after that, you can just tweak it every time you offer it. And this is a much more motivational approach to creating any kind of training. And I didn’t do that with my book, though, cause it’s out now, but I have heard of some people crowdsourcing their books or their CDs before they ever even write them, again, major motivation right there. Okay. Let’s move on. The second thing about launching anything and actually really about having a business at all is that you have to think campaign, not transaction. So I want to illustrate this one by setting up a scenario. Let’s say you’re at a little outdoor gathering and everyone’s being socially distanced, of course, and someone who’s there with a friend comes up to you and stand six feet away, of course, and asks you what you do. And you then explain your services to her. And then she says, Oh my God, that’s exactly what I need. How much do you charge?

How and if you answer that question points to the difference between the transaction and the campaign. If you answer in the moment and you toss out your hourly fee or something, that means that you probably haven’t thought strategically about what you do or your services at all. And it also may mean that you should come to my Click Retreat online. So you should multitask right now and go to SoulSourcedBook.com and pre-order a hardback copy of my book. And then wait for me to email you on Tuesday. And I’ll tell you how to get fully registered for Click, because this is the kind of stuff that we do at Click. But anyway, the bottom line here is that if you have a business, you have to step out of transaction thinking. I call it becoming an anti-trans actionist.

So a launch is a campaign, and why this is such a different mindset is that a campaign is the opposite of a transaction. A campaign is all about building a relationship with someone almost like dating your ideal client before they become your client. Many people still consider the sale or the launch to be a transaction, and that’s partly because too many people are in a hurry to get money. And so they don’t want to do what I call slow down to speed up, which means stepping back and considering what is the path that your ideal client takes before the transaction even happens, laying out that path, is creating the campaign. And sadly, I’m just going to go ahead and say this, many of the people who are in the biggest rush to make money are the ones who would never admit that about themselves. It’s people who are the spiritual people or the healers or the artists, and why this is, is that they’ve bought into the story that marketing is too strategic or too manipulative. And so they end up defaulting to just needing that transaction to happen.

And I think underneath all of that is just fear. It’s the fear of having the aforementioned conviction and taking the time to really look at it. So it becomes more about, I just want to toss this out there and get this over with, give me the money and let’s get on with it. And this is why I teach selling as service because when you do it right, selling and marketing are really a service because of the campaign, which means that you, the business owner, have in-service, spent that time to consider your client and their doubts and their problems and their dreams sometimes even more than they ever have. So thinking about a launch as a campaign is very strategic. And when you create a campaign, you’re creating the story or the angle of the message around the thing you’ve created.

You give the customer or client, a chance to see themselves in what you’re talking about, not just tell them your business name or the program name. You want people to see what problems you solve in that path, what results they can get during that path. And you don’t share that because you’re just telling them out, right, The idea of a campaign is a storyline that you create. It engages your ideal client through the campaign. And if you do it well, it can be a fun experience. And by the way, this is why I’m not a huge fan of taglines and little slogans, so I know we have a tagline at my company, Upleve U, and that tagline is “Go Deeper Than You’ve Ever Gone to Rise Higher Than You Ever Dreamed.” And that is copyrighted. And we use that in different places. And I remember the day I sat and came up with it.

And even though it kind of embodies how I truly teach and what I believe about business and life, I can tell you right here and right now that not one person has ever seen that tagline and whipped out their credit card and said, I’ll buy it, whatever it is. I’ll just take it! Taglines and slogans and subtitles and all that stuff are great. But whenever somebody is only concerned about some little short, cool tagline, I haven’t looked to see if they’re procrastinating on really building a campaign or a path toward creating a relationship with potential clients. I’ll often pry a little deeper to discover whether or not their mindset is all about just getting it over with a campaign is hard. It’s hard for business owners because it obviously requires deep thinking and consideration of the client. And it can even make you wonder, you know, shouldn’t my people just already know this shit about themselves? And no, they shouldn’t. So much of marketing when it’s done well is about educating people on the things they don’t understand and showing that there is a better way.

So can this be done with manipulation? Yeah, of course, but it can also be done with service. And when you create a campaign, you’re thinking deeply about this person who is your potential client and your’re creating an experience so that they can see themselves. As is often said in the marketing world, everyone thinks that people will buy from you once they understand you and all the things you do, but they actually buy from you when they feel understood. And this is where Soul-SourcedTM entrepreneurs have a leg up on all those strategy types. We are often empathetic to a fault. We naturally think this way. We actually naturally think like marketers and we, we naturally see these things. So the good news is that creating your campaign is always going to be a little bit more about mining for those things than it is about just thinking shit up out of thin air and tossing it out there, which is the difference between being true and being false and markety.

You are probably way better at this than you know, but often it’s just a fear of taking a deeper look at the path that you want to lay out. The last point I want to make about launches is this. And that is that you want to play the long game. Launches are a lot of work. So it is very valuable to ask yourself, where does all of this go? And yes, this means we’re applying strategy yet again. And here’s why. When a business owner has never asked the question, where does all of this go or has never gotten strategic about the customer path and their business? Typically what gets created is something I call the Upshot Model and it’s what my entire music career looked like for years. It’s simply doing the gig and getting paid and then doing the next gig and getting paid.

And then the entire thing just keeps on. Like that year after year, you just keep doing the thing and getting paid, which of course is fine. If that works for you. I’m not going to tell someone you should get strategic and scale this thing if their model works for them. But for me, it was a little exhausting. And then I started doing these retreats for women here in the mountains of Asheville. And if I even mentioned those retreats, when I was on stage at my shows, if I even just even talked a little bit about them, people would come up and ask me about them afterwards. And those retreats grew really fast and they were very lucrative and I didn’t have to go out on tour. And I loved doing them, which is most important. So that was my first back-end product. All my gigs started to lead toward that. And then those retreats grew. And I begin to host them four times a year, which was my first experience of turning an upshot business into what I call an Uplevel business.

And when I began coaching people in their businesses, this is what I then taught them to do. So the first person who comes to mind is Colleen O’Grady. She was one of my first clients. She is a therapist and a coach and an author. And back when she first started working with me, way back when, she was just the therapist, she was working sessions for dollars, hours, for dollars as we call it. That’s how most therapists work. So Colleen and I got strategic. First thing we did was we raised her prices. And by the way, I want to say something really quick. I’m telling the story as if we, you know, when one day we did this and then the next day we did this, this is not just some callous thing that you toss out in one week.

Sometimes it takes mindset work and much trepidation to create a more elegant pricing model. That is just the truth of how it is for many, many entrepreneurs. So after we did that, I helped Colleen build out a coaching program. And that was called Power Your Parenting. It was a program specifically geared toward moms with teenage daughters who made up the bulk of her clientele. And it wasn’t until that entire funnel was set up, her back end, that Colleen wrote her book, and her book is called Dial Down the Drama. It became a best seller. And at a time when so many authors have to write book after book, again, the upshot model, they’ve just fallen into that model. Colleen wrote her book and she already had created what I call the Uplevel Model and her book, and now her podcast, leads people to her Power Your Parenting program.

And she’s created some other backend services as well. But my point is, that her launches in her book sales all now lead to a very strategically set up end game. So she can now, what she’s doing right now, is she’s writing another book, but she doesn’t have to stress over it because her business runs itself very well. She left behind that Upshot Model and she turned it around. Guys, we have Finnegan here for us and I’m just going to not even try to worry about it, ’cause he’s just decided he’s making his appearance. We’ll just make that a thing. How about every podcast we make, we just know that there’s going to be a Finnegan moment. All right. So even when you do a launch, and I know a lot of you guys have done it, even when it’s successful, you still have to either repeat that launch or you have to find some kind of end game that keeps the whole thing moving in the direction you want it to move, because trust me, you don’t want to be launching all the time. It is way too much work for you to keep building out campaigns and selling. Your model can be much more elegant than that.

So ask yourself, what is the ultimate end point for your client who begins on that path with you? And if you are interested in doing that work, I mean really, and truly, almost every aspect of what I’ve been talking about here is something that I am going to be covering at the Click Retreat. And you know, I’m going to go ahead and reveal one more little bonus tip about launches since I just said that. When you offer any kind of a bonus or any kind of a premium as it’s called, as part of your offer, when you do a launch, you always want that bonus to be worth more than, or at least equal to the thing you’re selling, like make that something really exciting for people.

And so in the case of my book, for instance, my Click Retreat has been an annual event here in Asheville, in person, of course, in the past. And the only people who could come were people who had been in a $1,500 training of mine called Uplevel Your Business. So this is a very nice bonus that comes with buying my book during pre-sale, that’s called the bonus part of the little offer. And, and by the way, we did change it from, we were going to do it buying two books to buying just one, and I will be completely open with you, that was just because writing the copy and trying to explain that at SoulSourcedBook.com was a pain in the ass. So I just made it one book. And if you were one of the people who bought two books, I love you and I will make out with you with a mask on, of course, and I really, really appreciate it.

And I’m hoping you aren’t feeling hard feelings towards me. You can give it to a friend for a Hanukkah gift and hopefully they will get a lot of great stuff out of it. And so this is it,everyone. This is launch week of The Soul-SourcedTM Entrepreneur. And so even if you don’t come to Click, I would be so appreciative, If you have gotten value from these podcasts in any way at all, and we’ll keep going, I promise you, I’m still going to be doing these, but if you would please buy the book, it is still on pre-sale as of this recording, but as of November 17th, 2020, it will be live and ready to purchase. And there will be an audio version of the book on audible.com as well. And I think on Amazon too, and you can buy it also at a local bookstore or anywhere you like to go to buy books.

Um, I’m not sure when the audio goes live, but it is ready to roll right now. So the hardback copy gets you into Click. And if you go to SoulSourcedBook.com, that is S O U L S O U R C E D book.com. All one word, you will see all the details about how to get into Click. You guys, we’ve gone through it. We’ve done another episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening and continuing to show up and your emails are totally touching my heart. I’m loving that you’ve been getting a lot of value out of these, and I really do appreciate the reviews you’ve given this and purchasing my book and leaving a review on Amazon about my book, if you feel so moved and, um, I will see you next week here on the Soul-Sourced Business Podcast. Thanks everyone.