Maximizing Revenue at Live & Virtual Events w/Bill Allen
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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 offer.

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 a lot of different virtual events, some challenges, maybe a webinar, you know, 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? The first thing that I would say is...

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today, we've got an interesting topic that you've probably not thought about. It's event sales and maximizing how much money you make

in the room, okay? And joining me today, my friend Bill, he's a very interesting resume, as you could say. He's flipped over a thousand houses, retired Navy pilot, made many millions selling his own info products. And he's helped a lot of big people like Funnel Hacking Live and big events add millions in event sales. And most fascinating I find is every time I see him, he's flown his plane to the event and often gives me, you know,

you know, offers me a ride home, but Bill, welcome to the show. Thanks, Rudy. I'm happy to be here, man. You're a great Uber friend. I can tell you not many friends have offered to, I've been offered several times to fly home on their jet, but not with them driving it. So you definitely stand out. Well, there'll be a day when we fly together. I don't know what it is, but every time I see, I'll just be like, Hey, you got a plan for the ride home. I'll just give you a ride. So you just got to go. And that's the problem. Usually.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully we'll get you to Miami soon. But anyway, let's dive in. So let's talk about event sales, right? So, you know, part of the I think a lot of people part of it is like actually launching an event and filling an event. And I realized after I'd done a few events, like, hey, all the money is made like in the room, right? So can you just give a bit of an overview for people listening? Yeah.

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. 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. And the thing that I think is a 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. They don't see the structure. And you

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 background in engineering and Navy test pilot. So I love data and numbers and most people don't. They're great marketers. 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. Well, yeah. And I mean, just to talk about the data stuff too, like I was a sports scientist, so I, you know, and did

did a lot of spreadsheet and math stuff too. So I always geek out on it. And even today, I was asking my tech guy to pull a report on a sales team and sales by revenue category, right? And he's like, why do you need all that? Like so specific. I'm like, I need it to make decisions. That's the whole point of data. So it goes into every part of the business. And I think it's fascinating with events because

you know, I'm a data guy and even I probably wouldn't think about that. Like, Hey, how many people more could we have sold to if there was, you know, a percent not in the room at the time. Right. So it's pretty interesting and we'll dive into it in a minute, but for someone listening that doesn't maybe understand, you know, the event side, like, um,

What are these people earning or generating in revenue at events? Because when I first learned many years ago, it was kind of crazy to me how much money can be made at an event.

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 don't, we do a lot of strategy and then a lot of like data analysis from the event from like nerdy tracking stuff. So, 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. And I would say a net of that just say 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.

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 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. 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 a lot of different virtual events, some challenges, maybe a webinar, you know, a half day masterclass, those kind 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.

Yeah, I love that. A few things I want to just highlight for everyone listening out the gate, like number one, you know, I often say like podcasting is such an awesome way because if you get someone listening to you for hours, you know, over a year, it's like it warms them up, right? And webinars are very famous for selling high ticket because someone spends an hour with you. But if you're listening just to break it down, like think about an event, someone's leaving their family, paying

paying flights, hotels, probably going for three days, right? And they're spending 16 hours in a room over a two, eight hour period. So super warm. Plus there's this like whole energy thing, right? Where they're like, you know, ready to take on the world and they love you and you're on stage and a rock star. So, and just to, you know, give context to my experience, I'm yet to run like a big thousand person event. We know they did one

during COVID and never did. But we've, you know, done probably 20, 25 more smaller events where we're talking 50 to 100 events.

people and buyers and you know we'll make anywhere from on the low end 100,000 to our best one we did 900,000 and obviously my results aren't typical and and you know I have a captive audience and a big brand so I'm not saying you'll do that but that really opened my eyes to the power of events.

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 up front. And then you sell them a high ticket offer on the back and you do like you love like.

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. I would just structure what you want to do, what's best for you. And, uh, 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. You know, structure it the way that you like to engage, the way that you teach the best, the way that you network the best. Like I'm a big introvert, so I don't really like

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. But a live in-person event is also a big challenge to fill the room to, you know, you have to

There's an upfront cost to it where a virtual experience is incredible to do where I can actually do all that stuff, go home to my kids. I can be here in my studio 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. Well, and especially the smaller sub hundred, like I think you definitely have, like you get diminishing returns as you do get bigger. So for like smaller people, 50, 100 people, you make a lot of money.

Like, it's crazy. I've had some clients make a month of revenue in a weekend, right? Or even two or three months. So it's and it's more realistic. And I mean, you know, every time we've started to plan a thousand person event, it's like I've started with event organizers, like nine months. I'm like, the opportunity cost is like millions of dollars for effort and energy.

And so now I just speak on other people's big stages and it's easier for me. But let's get into the nitty gritty. So, you know, maybe people are listening, right? They're hosting their own little events now, 20, 30, 40, 50 people. And some people are hosting bigger events. What is some before we get into the more tactical stuff, bigger picture, like three to five big tips for making sales at events?

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 have to do that?

But then like, oh, the offer will 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. 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 event would be my biggest tip that most people miss. Yeah, I just jumped in because I actually did this and I sat with like Jason, Flatlin, and Bill, another friend.

friend, um, Bill, uh, does a real, uh, attorney events and a couple of other friends, and they really broke it down properly for me. And I went from making like a hundred, 150 K in events, same amount of people. The next one I did like, uh, you know, 600 K because I, you know, I was always just teaching what I wanted to teach. And then I was trying to like,

fit a square and a circle. So I just wanted to emphasize how key that is. Yeah. I think this is like, if I gave only one tip on this whole show, it would be that. And then 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 map it out. So these are my non-negotiables. 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, 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, 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. 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? 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. 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.

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 it.

Yeah, love that. And let's just add, I know we didn't plan to talk about it, but I do want to just do one minute on virtual events because that's how I started. Like we've run massive virtual events now. Like biggest one is 50,000 people registered and we had 10,000 people live, which is crazy to think still. I've done very well with those. But like I think since COVID, like live events, virtual events have taken off.

Right. What's your thoughts on live virtual events? 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, they're low, it's a low overhead, low cost and high margins. So

So I highly encourage you to, and I would start there. If you haven't started doing events, I would start on virtual. I would do the same thing. 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,

know, 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 it's virtual events are

It's like, I would absolutely start there. The 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. 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. About seven to 10 days before the event is when I turn ads on and I really start running traffic. Three days for us, we spend like 40%, 50% of our budget now because we tested that over like 10 of them.

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.

Yeah. Yeah. And we had to, again, being a data guy, we had to track close rate based on the day they registered. And as you would expect, the close rate was higher when they registered close to the event. And obviously show rate was a big difference. So day seven to 24 hours before the show rate was almost off, like seven days out and beyond because people forget about it. But anyway, back in the room, 24 hours,

When I say room, I mean event room. How do we maximize the nitty gritty, right? Give us some of these juicy tactics that you've been using at, you know, some of the biggest events like Funnel Hackers Live and out the box things to maximize conversions out of events.

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. So at 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. 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, 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

So the way to do that is to figure out how to get people back in the room for the offer. 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 just real quick numbers we had about...

It was a little over a thousand people that weren't in the room about a minute into the offer at FHL. 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. 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 tell you, make the content good and the atmosphere good so that they want to be in the room, not out of the room. Well, that's,

We've seen it at these big events, like, you know, they're texting and stuff like that, you know, someone's about to chop someone's head off in a magic trick or something, right? And it's, you know, like, it's a lot of like the curiosity slash scarcity and urgency all baked into a cake.

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. 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 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.

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? 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.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just like, you know, we do all that kind of sexy stuff for like, you know, our big live virtual events, right? Everyone's segmented if they were on or did the show. But it's really cool to kind of see it, you know, and I think it's not quite as needed, maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. But for when I've got, you know, 50 or 100, it's like, you know, our event location is that pretty much all in the room. But definitely I can see when there's

you know, you're talking 3,000 people and it's like, yeah, 1,000 are in the, in the hallways, right? And doing work and digging little holes. Like,

That's a massive difference. You close a million. Well, you could add a million and a half if you just got those other thousand people in the room. So 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 speakers.

the speaker that retains the most of the audience. You know, you can see, you know, how much time do people spend in the room? When did they drop out? All kinds of stuff. But,

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. 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 so figure out how to look like that good so last couple of questions rapid fire for the last minute um i would love to put you on the spot and hear from you so first one uh biggest success that you're proudest of in business oh man um

You know, we just filmed a TV show called Kids Who Flip. And 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 youth. 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 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. Cool. And opposite of that biggest failure or hurdle that you think, uh,

Yeah. So in, um, in 2020, I'm pretty vocal about this. My, uh, 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, um, 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. 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 all the business and entrepreneurial stuff that I did. So I think that had the opportunity to be my biggest failure. We got through it. We reconciled. It was amazing. We're back and 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 uplaw and almost was and was a really challenging one year of my life. So.

Good. Well, I'm glad you came out the other side. And last question, an easier one now. It's social media and where people can find you if they want to learn more.

Yeah. My personal, uh, social media is our Bill Allen REI, like real estate investor. Um, that's a good place. I spend time on there on Instagram and, um, uh, YouTube and stuff like that. So, uh, and then seven figure flipping is our real estate coaching company. And in the room dot live is our, uh, is our software business events, software business. So

Great. Well, Bill, it's been a pleasure. Next time, hopefully we can record some content on the flight that we'll take together. Guys, I hope this, you know, pushed you. Maybe it's your first event, thinking about it, getting started, 15, 20, 25 people. Maybe you're already running them, not structuring them properly, and you got some nuggets from today. And at the very least, maybe you're at

a Funnel Hackers Live or another event and now you can start to watch these things going on because that's also a great way to learn like once I really learned this it's kind of fascinating to see it happen you know and you can learn so much from that too so Bill pleasure thank you so much and guys as always keep living the red life I'll see you soon