Bill Allen
Appearances
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
We did an analysis of my company over the last three years, and we run a lot of events. I found that it takes somebody on average two and a half events to buy my $15,000 above all. And so if it's the first time you're seeing somebody, the first event you've ever been to, you're probably a lot more cautious than if you've been to multiple different events.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah, I'll use the live in-person events and you can duplicate the same thing for a virtual event. Just think about like all the data that you get from ins and outs of the room. So on Zoom, you can see when people logged out, they dropped and you can see who that was and their email address and things.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
So live in-person events, we're spending a lot of time trying to track who's actually in the room physically. Because like I said in the beginning of the podcast, if you don't see the offer, you can't buy it. If you don't see the repitch, you're not going to buy it. And what we found is, I look at all the people that bought. Last event I had, we had about 500 buyers.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Only one of them didn't see the offer in the repitch. And the guy's wife was in there for the repitch. So that's how they, you know, I can actually tell you that you have to see the offer and it makes sense, right? You're not just going to like hear about it in the hallway and go buy it. It's about trust. So the way to do that is to figure out how to get people back in the room for the offer.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And so we use text messaging, emails, things like that to be able to see who's not in the room and then be able to text them to get back in the room for the offer. And, uh, just, just real quick numbers we had about, um, It was a little over a thousand people that weren't in the room about a minute into the offer at FHL.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Well, there will be a day when we fly together. I don't know what it is, but every time I see it, I'll just be like, hey, you got a plan for the ride home? I'll just give you a ride. You just have to go and that's the problem usually.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And I was able to get 393 people back into the room that, by the way, had never stepped foot in the room that whole day to come in. And it was in the afternoon to actually see the offer. And 93 of those people bought it. So, you know, 25% of the people that weren't in the room that would have never seen it. And so I can track, you can track all this stuff.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
I think the way to do this is to, is to, to make your presentation inside of the event room and event space so intriguing that people don't want to be in the hallway. They want to be in there. So this is like a pitch to help you make the content good and the atmosphere good so that they want to be in the room, not out of the room.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And don't overuse that, by the way. If you've got a three or four day event, don't be texting nonstop the whole time that every single presentation is the most exciting one that they have to see. Even if you don't know who's not in the room, text everyone and say, hey, I'm sharing my best stuff here. Make sure that you're in the room. And that's the message I sent last year.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
It was, hey, Russell here. I'm about to share my best stuff. Make sure that you're here. And that was it. That thing got, you know, 393 people to come back in the room for the first time that day and probably a bunch of others that have been in earlier. And so.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And then keep in mind, if you have this data of who didn't see the offer in the repitch, which you do on every virtual event you could in person, then you can set up different email strategies and text message strategies after the event. My salespeople talk very differently to the people who didn't see the offer than they do to the people who did see it and didn't buy it.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
So that old email sequence, the way your salespeople are talking to them after the event. Can you imagine calling somebody and be like, hey, I noticed you didn't buy this program. Why is that? They're like, what program? That was a different conversation. And so we have different marketing sequences for them post-event, depending on what they saw. Did they see the repitch?
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Did they see the repitch but not the offer? Did they see neither? And they go down different funnels afterwards for marketing. And I think the marketers that are listening to would love that.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Totally. Yeah. Smaller events, 50, 60 people, 100 people doesn't make sense. Once you go over 500 people or so, having that actual data of like and the other thing is tells you what speakers are good. If you really think about it, you can do, you know, a post event webinar with the best speaker that retains the most of the audience.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
You know, you can see, you know, how much time do people spend in the room? When do they drop out? All kinds of stuff. But just just think about that, even if you do a smaller event. Think about the people that are leaving a day early or, you know, structuring your offer in the right spot where you're going to have the most people show up there.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And then using the data of all the negative, who didn't buy it? Spend time looking at that. We spend a lot of time on all the people that bought. What do they look like? How do we reverse engineer that? But, you know, 80, 90% of the room doesn't buy. So what can we downsell them? But, you know, maybe they just didn't see it as you wanted it. They just don't know about it.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Oh, man. You know, we just we just filmed a TV show called Kids Who Flip. And I there were six kids across three houses, flipping houses all across the country, ages 12 to 17. I think the thing that I'm most proud of right now is being able to impact the the youth.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
like the next generation these are like my kids age and just giving them they're looking forward to business making money that kind of stuff it's just the the coolest thing ever that I feel like I'm a little like micro celebrity to these kids that are looking up and they don't have maybe a business role model and mentor in their life so that's probably the thing I'm most proud of now is seeing these kids make more money than than most adults do in their life so it's been really cool
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Cool. And opposite of that, biggest failure or hurdle that you think? Yeah. So in 2020, I'm pretty vocal about this. My wife and I, our relationship over a few years, just kind of like a few degrees of separation over a long period of time, got to a really breaking point in 2020 where she asked me for a divorce. She went to a uh, facility. She was thinking about suicide and depressed and things.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And, um, I think I could have done better over probably the three or four years leading up to that of keeping her in the loop and the decision-making and stuff of the, all the, the business and entrepreneurial stuff that I did. So I think that had the opportunity to be my biggest failure. Um, we got through it. We reconciled. It was amazing. Um, we're back and
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah, absolutely. So whether you're a big or small event, I don't think it really matters. It's about the kind of what you're selling, the offer, the structure, and who you fill the room with. If you get the right people in the room, you can have a small room that you can get a lot of money out of, or you can have a big room that you get even more out of.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
probably stronger than ever right now. So it's probably both sides. But I would say to all the entrepreneurs out there, we get addicted to what we do, making money, running the business. Don't forget to run the business that you have at home. And that could have been my biggest uproar and almost was, and was a really challenging one year of my life.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah, my personal social media is our Bill Allen REI, like real estate investor. It's a good place. I spend time on there on Instagram and YouTube and stuff like that. So and then seven figure flipping is our real estate coaching company. And in the room dot live is our is our software business event software business. So.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
But if you put the wrong people in the room, it's a bit of a challenge. And then once they're in there, most people spend all the time on who bought their product and look and see who that person is, track them back. but they lose sight of all the people that didn't buy.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And the thing that I think is the biggest problem is if they're not in the room to hear the offer, they can never have the opportunity to buy the offer. And so bigger events, a lot of times you get people that are in the hallway or they're upstairs or they're taking a break. They never see the offer. They don't see the repitch.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And that's a way to structure your business to do a lot of different virtual events, some challenges, maybe a webinar, a half-day masterclass, those kind of things to accelerate the buying process. What is some bigger picture, like three to five big tips for making sales at events?
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
They don't see the structure and you're not following up with them and you don't know it. So there's a lot of things virtual and live, I think that we're missing. And As an engineer, I got a background in engineering and Navy test pilot. So I love data and numbers and most people don't. They're great marketers.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
They love to fill the room, make a killer offer, collect the money, but you're leaving a lot on the table by not understanding who didn't see it, if that makes sense.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've run and helped people run events. And just so you know, I'm not like an event planner. We do a lot of strategy and then a lot of data analysis from the event, from nerdy tracking stuff. But we've helped people. I've been part of events that have made $16 million on the top end. That's probably the highest earning event that we've seen.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And I would say a net of that just is probably about... 50 to 60%. So those events cost a lot of money to run. And then, you know, smaller events that are making, you know, 80% net up to, you know, 300,000 to a million dollars. And so what I love, the thing about events that I think people miss a lot of times, whether it's live or virtual, is it builds trust.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And so the more time you can spend with people, the more trust you can build, that's needed in order to buy a high ticket product. So most of the events that we run are high ticket conversion sales events, anywhere from 10,000 to $50,000 offer. And you need a high level of trust to be able to invest that kind of money with somebody. So-
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
We did an analysis of my company over the last three years and we run a lot of events. I found that it takes somebody on average two and a half events to buy my $15,000 or above off. And so that was my money ball. If you ever seen that movie or read the book, The Money Ball, So we decided to do more events over a shorter period of time.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
So if I could get somebody to usually about three events, two to three events, that's the average. And their trust level goes up and they're willing to buy. And so if it's the first time you're seeing somebody, the first event you've ever been to, you're probably a lot more cautious than if you've been to multiple different events. And that's a way to structure your business to do
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
a lot of different virtual events, some challenges, maybe a webinar, you know, a half day masterclass, those kinds of things to accelerate the buying process. So that's kind of what we found over a period of analyzing, you know, thousands of people that came through my real estate coaching program.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you just said. You said smaller events. We've never done these thousand people events. What I would say to anybody listening is run the event that you want to run. Like what do you need to do? And maybe you want to get an Airbnb and have 15 people that pay at 5k upfront. And then you sell them a high ticket offer on the back and you do like, you love like
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
the managing the Airbnb and like nights out and maybe a party or a VIP experience for them. And then the content is during the day, or you want to run a huge event. That's, you know, a thousand people, 2000 people in person, or you want to run like a virtual masterclass where you just teach for, you know, four hours, five hours, interactive, things like that.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
I would just structure what you want to do. What's best for you. And I can tell you, you'll be a lot happier that way. Don't look at what everybody else is doing. There's not one size fits all. Structure it the way that you like to engage, the way that you teach the best, the way that you network the best. I'm a big introvert, so I don't really like...
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
You know, the events where I got to spend all the day, the night, the evenings, all weekend, all that stuff. I like to go on stage. I like to give my presentations. I like to shake some hands and socialize and network. And then I like to go to my hotel room and crash. So I like a bigger live in-person event because I think it makes a big impact on people, builds trust really fast.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
But a live in-person event is also a big challenge to fill the room. There's an upfront cost to it where a virtual experience is, is incredible to do where i can actually do all that stuff go home to my kids i can be here in my studio at my locally in nashville and not have to travel too so structure it how you want to structure it and there's a way to maximize the profitability of any of those
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah, the first thing that I would say is design everything starting with the offer. So most people like design the content. Then they like, who am I going to have there? Who's going to do that? But then like, oh, the offer, we'll just like, we'll figure it out. Like we'll offer something or something we've always sold. So the first thing that I do is I look at the offer.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
I design the offer like an irresistible offer. And then I build all the content, all the speakers based on that. So almost like reverse engineering the offer. The event would be my biggest tip that most people miss.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Yeah. I think this is like, if I gave only one tip on this whole show, it would be that like, uh, and then it's, it's not even like price point structure inside of the offer. Take your non-negotiables. So the thing that you're like not willing to do and, and map it out. So these are my non-negotiables.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
These are a couple, maybe three or four like bullet points of what are the biggest impacting things inside that offer. So the results that I can help people get, um,
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And then I'm going to map out my entire event and strategy and speakers so that I give them like a small taste of that, but not enough that they, I created, like I gave them what they need to kind of go run, like give them enough content and enough tactics and those kinds of things.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
But they're going to get to the point where they're so overwhelmed that they're saying, Hey, we can do this together for the next, you know, three months, six months, year, whatever it is. But. if there's any ever deliverable inside my offer, I'm usually seating that at the event.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
So if it's maybe a coach that I'm going to have be coaching with me along the way, they're going to be one of the speakers at my event for sure. Versus just having anybody come in and talk and present about something or I'm there talking the whole time. So that offer is number one. And then number two is map that out of like, who's the right fit client?
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Like who's the ideal customer and client for this offer? And then where are they? And I'll market to them. I'd rather have a smaller event of the right buyers than have a big event of the wrong buyers. So I see a lot of people, they just want numbers. And usually what happens is, when you make an offer to the wrong audience, you're not getting as many takers.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
And what happens is people will see that, they'll feel that. Even the ones that are on the fence decide not to buy because a lot of people aren't. You get a small event, Rudy, like you talked about, maybe 50 or 100 people in there, and 60% of the room is buying you know, they're taking you up on the offer.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
It just starts to, it's a domino effect that you will knock down way more of those buyers from that. So those are a couple of tips that I would give folks is put the right people in the room, even if it's a smaller amount of people, because you're going to have a higher return on your money, on your offer, and then build the offer and reverse engineer.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Totally agree with that. So I love that you said live virtual event because it is definitely a challenge to get a recorded event to convert really, really well. You've seen the webinars and people know kind of whether you're live or you're virtual or live or like prerecorded. So a virtual event doesn't mean it's not live. So I would definitely call it a live event and virtual events.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
They're low is a low overhead. low cost and high margins. So I highly encourage you to, and I would start there. If you're, if you haven't started doing events, I would start on virtual. I would do the same thing.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Think about the offer, reverse engineer the event and the structure, put the right people in the room, same thing, market to the right people because the chat is really important in a virtual event. If the chat is really busy, it's really excited. People are buying, people know like the momentum and the feeling of a lot of, you know, um,
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
getting people active in the chat, getting them to turn their cameras on, engage with them, call their names out, really have more of a live feel. But virtual events are, it's like, I would absolutely start there. They're high margin, they're great. The one thing I'll say about a virtual event is I wouldn't treat it any differently than a live event.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
I would map out my live event and really think about the process and the feeling that all those people get on that virtual event. And you're still building trust. Keep in mind when you're marketing for a virtual event, usually we get our most opt-ins like seven days before the event. So I wouldn't spend like months and months marketing it because your show rate is going to go down.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
About seven to 10 days before the event is when I turn ads on and I really start running traffic.
Living The Red Life
Maximising Your Events With Bill Allen
Totally agree. I was just going to say that about 60% of our opt-ins usually come from about three days before the event. So keep that in mind. If your event's not filling, it's just the fact that it's probably too far out that you're marketing.