Mike Weiss

Mike Weiss is the founder of Client Engagement Academy.

His company consulted, co-designed, built, launched and hosted Digital Marketer’s new Certification Program. Mike Weiss has become one of the top experts in online sales and marketing. His design and architecture of automated sales funnels have produced millions of dollars in sales. As founder of Internet Sales Experts, he has created a dynamic enterprise devoted to teaching small and medium sized businesses to grow their sales. His proven automated online sales model is taught in an easy to learn step-by-step video training series.

In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, Michael has been coaching, teaching and working with business owners and Fortune 500 executives for over 25 years.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Mike’s success

Using onboarding best practices for your online course

Result if you follow the steps in Mike’s session

Reduce friction in your online courses with greater completion and retention for your membership site by focusing on your student outcomes

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

If we think about what stop students or clients from getting the course and getting an outcome, there’s a whole lot of different category, right? Basically, the course content is either good or it’s not good. The actual technology platform is either good or it’s not good. The experience of the student, because most all students, or most all individuals are not good at technology.

So when they enter in, can I find out where they were, where they are, where they need to go? So their actual experience inside the platform, and then how you actually bring them through with leaderboards, points going, gamification, and also how you reward them at the end with a digital badge.

So all those components sort of all come together, along with a lot of other stuff. But that friction part is the one thing that we spoke about.

And I think, if I share a few slides that I use in, you know, a lot of the presentations I do, that’s going to get us into the granular level so people can actually get an outcome from spending 25 minutes with us, right?

Like my only objective and everything I do now online is, are they going to get outcome? Are the people watching you and I right now, when they walk away 25 minutes from now or 20 minutes from now, would they be like, wow that was 25 minutes? I checked that off my time. 25 minutes? That’s god I’m never getting that back again. Was it worth it?

How are they going to measure was it worth it, was that at least one concept or idea that they can actually put to use to make an impact on their students and on their business? That’s it. Everything else is, I guess, entertainment value but that’s not we’re in business. We’re talking about can we risk two down people that are on this call?

So let me go in here and share my screen.

And I think that, just as you’re preparing, I think that’s something really important for everyone watching, to understand that you want to get your students results and on a regular basis so that if you’re looking for that recurring revenue, so people are paying every month.

You want to make sure that they’re at least heading towards that final outcome. There’s maybe little milestones or checkpoints along the road, that they can see, that they’re making progress and they’re getting those small wins to the ultimate outcome that you’re providing your members.

Yeah, and what you just mentioned is critically important to stitch together. So there’s, you know, there’s a couple different ways that we teach, right?

So one straight up courses, any type of courses, it can be like a four module sprint course. It can be a more in depth course, like 10 or 15 modules. It can be at the certification level, which is at a higher level.

It could be a train the trainer, which is actually empowering people to get into business at more even a higher level. So that stepping ladder is that’s one concept of training. There’s a beginning and an end to everything, to every one of those courses.

The other, as you just mentioned, isn’t a membership site. And this is where people completely missed the mark, because there’s no concept of student outcome. It’s just about, am I adding more content every month to join justify them spending the money? And basically the checkmark, is there enough stuff being put in every month?

So when they log in to like, oh, there’s a lot of stuff. It’s worth 97 or the $297 that month. And that’s not how you’re going to actually extend. The average life cycle of continuity program is 3-4 months. It’s not by adding more stuff. It’s not even by adding better stuff.

It’s by actually focusing on a student outcome and trying to figure out a way how do you take something that’s monthly 1,2,3,4 or 5, 6, and string together a narrow pathway, so that person can actually get an outcome. It’s sort of like the example of walking into Walmart and it’s 100,000 foot superstore and all the information there.

But it’s a difficult task for the person and they sort of navigate to get what he needs, or versus walking into IKEA, which I believe you are in Sweden, and that’s a great Swedish company. But that halfway, it’s been, it’s continually optimized globally by that organization and watching every footstep to maximize that student outcome.

And they’re taking you through a pathway that’s great for the purchaser and it’s great for them. And so that’s what we need to figure out is okay, in a monthly continuity, how do we, even though it’s just monthly stuff coming, how do we string together something that’s kind of a progression?

So people can keep saying, hey, I’m getting an outcome, I get an outcome. And I’m out, there’s no reason to not stay in the continuity for 12 months, 24 months, and that’s going to radically change everyone’s business because it takes you out of this, which is, unfortunately what most of the people in the online education space are in.

And this little rat running on this thing is because the business model is you’re in the attrition versus retention model. You’re just trying to bring clients in faster than you’re losing them. And that’s not a good model. And that’s like, not only is it looked like this, but it feels like that as a business owner.

And even if you scale from doing 10,000 a month, 200,000 a month to, you know, hundreds of thousands a month, all you’re doing is scaling a low margin business, and it just stressful the entire way, even if you get net of 10 million, because the minute you stop bringing clients, your business suck, going backwards, that’s not cool.

So this is the rate, you know, roughly three months for people sticking for continuity. This is the rate for actual courses, which is a disaster. It’s only 3% of the people in business opportunity courses finished. And the MOOCs, Harvard Yale is like 4 to 6%, Udemy around 8% of people finish, in personal development like 12 that means like 88% of the people.

This is like the failure rate. This is horrific. It’s what amount to change and help 100 million students around the world get an outcome by now working with people to say hey, it doesn’t have to be this one.

You know, what I share with everyone Liam is that, if you’re an educator, any of the areas that we’ve described, if you don’t fix this what we’re talking about now, then you’re going to be done in the next 18 to 24 months, you’re going to be out. And the reason why you’re going to be out is because the people that do this, well, they’re going to rise to the top.

And there’s going to be measurements of student success that is going to value the worth of an educator or a course. So the same way you have a Yelp rankings, that I’m out to create, the first Yelp rankings for online education based on success, student success.

So this is how important this is. And now dropping into client friction, let’s talk about what this looks like. So people really get it and then you can actually investigate your business. Right? We want you to have a student outcome. You listen to Liam and I. You only have 25 minutes.

So what’s going to determine whether it was worth it or not? Is there something that you can actually take from what I’m explaining together?

Investigate your business and optimize something. And Dan Kennedy’s imperfect plan in action is better than a perfect plan, not an action. Just take something from this call and test it.