Lowering buyer friction & musings on my masterclass

anatomy of a sales page

What’s good young and eager mind!

Man… some days I don’t know what to talk about and some days I got a million things to say.

I guess this is one of those days.

I never realized this about collabing

Saturday, Jen & I ran our masterclass! Yay us :)

I was expecting to have a good time but boy… it was even more fun.

Something I kinda knew but was really brought to the forefront of my mind is synergy.

As much as we all hate that corporate consulting buzzword, there are situations where 1+1=3.

This was one of ‘em.

Neither Jen nor I could’ve done as good of a job alone. Or even half as good a job. By working together, we probably increased the value for our customers by an order of magnitude… something to think about for you solopreneurs.

How I’m getting testimonials

You’re gonna wanna collect testimonials when you do anything.

While scientifically, testimonials don’t really make sense but persuasion-wise, they’re the gold standard. ¹

For the first few years, I never collected testimonials because, when you’re so exceptionally brilliant as I am, you just wanna play the game on hard mode you know… otherwise it’s TOO easy.

It sucks though cuz some of my old students did tens of thousands of dollars in extra revenue because I helped them with pricing architecture & proposal design and some of my old students are doing 1M+/yr. I’ve asked them and it’s not that they’re bad people but it’s just forever ago and people are busy. There’s also the issue that testimonials should be delivered, like pizzas, when they’re hot. When your clients are still riding that high in the moment. Afterwards, bad shit might’ve happened with their clients or perhaps they forgot/rewrote in their mind your contribution.

Then I started asking for them and got about 10%. It's not that happy customers don't wanna help. It's just that entrepreneurs are busy with a million things.

Eventually, I got it through my big ol’ head that if you want people to do something, you gotta incentivize (read bribe) them.

So Jen & I created a couple of bonuses and gave the customers a deadline of 48 hours.

That also gives me the excuse to follow up a few times to remind them to leave a testimonial.

Don't hope you get testimonials & social proof.

Design systems that guarantee you will.

Tip: follow up at least 3 times and remind people that the can get bonus stuff in exchange for a testimonial. I like deadlines cuz (hoping you guessed it)… artificial scarcity.

Where I’m putting my social proof

Your headline should make a big promise.

That’ll cause skepticism in the reader and makes them think, “Oh really…”

You should immediately address that.

If you don’t have testimonials, give a convincing explanation as to why your promise is legit.

Show proof. A strong, concise explanation that helps them understand why your special method will deliver where others fail.

But if you do have testimonials, immediately showing that after the big promise helps combat that skepticism.

So I’ve placed our best testimonial below the headline with the others at the end of the page.

You could sprinkle testimonials throughout your sales page but ours isn’t that long.

P.S.

We’re selling the recording so if you wanna grab it, you can do so here:

Thanks for your time!

Go chop wood & carry water.

RJY

Notes

¹ Why are testimonials trash in science? Because you can get testimonials for everything. I’m not even talking about faking them by being them off of Fiverr or something. Suppose I help people with back pain by drawing smiley faces on their butts with Sharpies.

Now, CLEARLY… that’s gonna do a bunch of nothing.

But with a sufficiently large sample size, a number of them are going to heal naturally. And some of them will attribute their positive outcome to RJY’s special butt sharpie smiley treatment (trademark) or RJYSBSST for short. (love how it has BS in it)

Then of course you also have things like selection bias.

E.g. the people who want to work with you share your viewpoint (“they share your religion”).

I’m a big fan of qualitative market research so most of my fans are too. That can skew my perception (because I see positive & real results), such that when I then advise the general public, they fail to get the same outcomes.

That can be for a myriad of reasons, one of them being that they simply dislike it. Meanwhile, I’m super biased because I see tons of clients getting great results.

Ugh… science (separating fact from fiction) is hard.

That’s why mouthbreathers have the advantage. They don’t care about any of this stuff.

² Your homework is to watch this vid. It’s a conversation between a PhD in nutritional science and a practicing doctor. The topics of mouthbreathers & the limitations / issues of science comes up and it’s definitely worth a listen to become a better solopreneur and a more careful thinker.