Are You Doing a Good Job? [Setting Expectations]

Hey everyone, this is Julie Hope you’re doing awesome today. I wanted to talk to you about expectations and how important they are in creating momentum in your business. I have a private message here from someone who had an expectation that their webinar that they were using to sell their offer was going to convert right away on the first shot, and for those of you who are new to the online business life, you may not quite understand all the ins and outs of sales funnels and webinars, but I see this happen all the time. Whether you’re a beginner or whether you’re advanced, you have an expectation of how your product or service is going to sell in the market. Oftentimes that expectation comes from various sources. One of the biggest sources of expectation creation comes from other marketers, comes from other people in the space, from competitors. Now, remember, when you’re on Instagram, when you were on Facebook, you’re looking at other people’s ads, other people’s sales pages, other people’s offers, and unless you intimately know them and their business, you don’t really truly know what’s happening behind the scenes.

For those of you who do funnel hacking, this is another problem where you’re going through somebody else’s funnel to try to reverse engineer it and figure out how it’s working. Unless they’re actually showing you their profit and loss statements every month, it’s very hard to know if that is generating revenue and if it is, what are the profits on that revenue. So we, even though we know this logically, emotionally, what happens is expectations get created. Every time we see a competitor or we see an ad or we see something on instagram that kind of shows off how something is supposed to be working.

So this guy, he messaged me and he wanted to thank me because he had gone to funnel hacking live back in March and came and sat around my table. There was like a roundtable discussion and he almost didn’t come to my table, he said because he didn’t really know me that well.

He just didn’t really think that I was the right guru for him. But traveling to all the tables and seeing that my table had a crowd around it. He also thought, okay, you know what, Russell Brunson has invested in Julie. So maybe I should listen to her too, which I guess is another podcast for another day about giving people a chance. And having kind of a, like an open heart for learning. Anyway, he came to my table. His webinar was converting at one percent. He had an expert expectation that this webinar sucked, right? He was in fact, he, he told me on the message that he was going to give up on this webinar. So one of the valuable things about, about expectations is when you set them correctly, they’re sometimes the difference between quitting versus continuing to go on forward. And so when he came to me and he said, his Webinar is converting at one percent, I said, well, that’s a great start.

I immediately switched his expectation from, no, you don’t suck. No, don’t quit. No, don’t give up too. Actually, no one percent is a good start. And if you’re new in the online business space, your expectations, if they’re being created by Gurus, by Instagram, by Facebook, as you’re going to have a completely whacked out expectation of what is good when you’re starting, when you hit 10,000, when you hit 100,000 when you hit a million. And so I said, no, that’s really good. And I gave him a few tips to help boost it. And so his message was, thank you. I was ready to quit. I thought it wasn’t working. You gave me some tips. I decided to finally listen to you. And then I went and I did my webinar again and this time it converted at eight percent and I’m so grateful. So I thought that was a really important message to share with you all because had he let his expectation rule and not gotten some outside perspective, he would have given up on it.

And I can give you a story. I’m gonna tell you a story now about how my expectations really screwed me up. And, it all starts back in 2016. I was launching the first version of Create Your Laptop Life. And I applied to be a part of Russell Brunson’s inner circle. And for whatever reason, at the time I knew that I needed a mentor. I knew that I needed someone to speak into my life and into my business and to help create expectations that were correct. Because you never know how hard to push yourself or how hard to let off the gas when you’re just kind of in your own bubble and the online business life is totally a bubble. It’s you and your laptop and whatever you’re allowing into your feed. So I applied for the inner circle, but at the time I was still very, very scared to bet on myself and that was ultimately the problem that I had was like his inner circle at the time was $25,000.

It’s now double that, but at the time I was like, oh my gosh, that’s a lot of money. How am I going to make that money back if I invest in this? Like I knew he was amazing. I knew his inner circle was amazing, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to turn out the goods. I was all ready to sign on the dotted line and I called up. I was on the. I was on the phone with the salesperson’s name, name’s Derek, really nice guy and I gave him my credit card. My credit card declined. He’s like, oh, that’s normal. This is a really big payment, just call your bank, and so I called my bank and I said, I’m trying to process a $25,000 payment, can you help? And they’re like, no, we’re not going to let you do that. So the banks kind of shot me down and that I had only just this very, very tiny little fragile piece of confidence and it got shot and so I bailed and I decided not to join the inner circle at that moment.

So hold that thought because what happened was as my business grew, as my funnels started to work, I had a wrong expectation and this wrong expectation number one caused me to shut down a program. Number two, cause me all kinds of hassle and problem in my business. So I had a membership. It was selling at $97 a month and I had, I think in one month I had about 100 people sign up and I wasn’t sure my expectation said, oh that’s good. Right? So My expectation was 100 people in one month was good, but then what would happen is the next month I would lose about 10 or 20 people in the membership. So out of 100 people who signed up 10 to 20 percent, we’re not renewing the next month. My expectation was that I was failing. That was terrible. Now had I been in the inner circle, because I know this because I did join the inner circle several months later, had I been able to reach out to Russell, reach out to other people who had more realistic expectations.

They would have told me that that churn rate on a membership is outrageously successful and to keep going. But because I had an expectation that it wasn’t working, that I was losing 10 to 20 percent of my members, I shut down the program and wrote it off as a failure. And I had all kinds of issues when I did that. People that were already in the program and how to get them onto a different type of program. It was a mess. Like it was probably one of my biggest mistakes to date, I shut the funnel off, I stopped the ads all because I had an unrealistic expectation and I didn’t have the mentors speaking into my life saying, no, you’re doing great. Keep going.

And so that’s. I know that sounds, you know, when people say, Oh, you need accountability, you need mentorship in the online business life. And it sounds so just cheesy, it sounds like, well, okay, come on, I need skills, I need hardcore skills, I need hardcore tactics, I need hardcore strategy and that’s all true, but you also, expectations will either make you successful or it will crush you. And so even this guy telling me, thank you so much for speaking to my webinar that was converting at one percent to my failure as to not having someone speaking into me about how successful I was actually being. I was very, it was very. It was a successful funnel, successful program. Everything. So that’s kind of my word for the day is like expectations and, and how are you creating those expectations?

Because I think that there are several ways to create expectations and number one is to obviously study. So if you’re doing sales funnels, if you’re doing online marketing, you need to study what the market, what is a benchmark for your market, what is the benchmark for ads, for Webinars, for funnels, for you know, conversions. You need to study those benchmarks so you understand them.

Secondly, you need to join a community, a community of other people that are doing it so that you can sort of start to gauge how it’s working for other people. So create your laptop life that membership community has a thousand members who are doing their online businesses, both the course creators, coaches, service providers. You can start to get more realistic expectations and you would ever get just reading somebody’s blog post or you know, looking at a Facebook ad. And then the third way is to get a mentor and to have a mentor that you can actually communicate with, whether it’s through a Q&A session, whether it’s through voxer access, whether it’s through one on one, whatever way you can. So that you can say, is this, is this realistic, is this normal?

You know, one of my dear, dear friends, she started her business and she hit like $20,000 a month in like the first two months of her business, you could tell that her expectation was that she wasn’t really doing very well because she was comparing herself to people who were making a million two, $3,000,000 a month. And I wanted to shake her. I said, no, you don’t understand like I have all these people starting these businesses similar to yours and they’re making, it’s a 5k or 10k, maybe in three to six months and you hit 20 k and two months. Again, expectation, you see it in dieting, you see it when people go on a diet, if they don’t lose weight, if they don’t get that momentum, that expectation can crush them. So that’s my advice to you is to make sure that you have really good ways to set expectations and to get whatever expectations you already have course corrected by a mentor, by a community and by studying the benchmark. So I hope that helps. I hope you guys have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you again soon.