EP #31
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] It's September and Tim Cook is on stage and behind him a black screen illuminates one white word, iPhone. It's always amazing to me watching Apple do a product release. There's so much we can glean from the way that they do the buildup to a now multi-year strategy that we've all been a part of, of watching these releases happen.
The key to their releases is anticipation before launch, momentum during launch, and loyalty after launch. And if you can crack that for your own releases, your own product releases, your own sales motions, the sky is the limit. Let's talk about launching like Apple on today's podcast. Let's go.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass. I'm your host, Trey Sheneman, and it's our goal each week to be your weekly mic drop for business breakthrough. We say that as helping you learn timeless business principles that [00:01:00] apply to today's business problems. We do that by teaching you through the core four drivers of growth, marketing, sales, operations, and leadership.
In today's podcast, we're talking about the sales bucket specifically. We're talking about launching products. How do you do launches really, really well? And how do you do them? If you heard the opener, like our friends at Apple, 'cause I think Apple is one of the best launch companies on earth. They could be very quiet about the way that they launched, but you know, it's never quiet.
CN N's always buzzing, tech crunch and tech bloggers are always blowing them up. And so I started paying attention to what Apple was doing a couple years ago because I've, I've been a part of. Several launches myself, some that have gone well, some that have not gone so well, and I wanna make sure that in today's episode I really distill down for you what I learned in the launches that went well.
What I've learned from studying other great brands and all of it kind of nests really well under the five laws of launching like Apple, which is ultimately we're gonna talk about today. [00:02:00] So we've got a lot to cover. So I'm just gonna jump in Law number one in launching like, like Apple is building a runway.
Think about an airplane. Airplanes can't just go from zero to however fast they go. To take off, I'm gonna guess three, 400 miles an hour. I think they have to have a runway. They have to have a buildup. The same thing is true for a launch. Your runway is the time before you open your cart or release your product.
And so what's a good rule of thumb? A good rule of thumb in building a runway, which is the first law. Is that when you're teasing your offer, your upcoming offer, you're seeding a problem, you're showing behind the scenes content, and you're getting people emotionally invested before they ever even know what it is they're gonna get a chance to buy.
A few years ago, I helped run a launch for a coaching program, and we had about a 28 day sales window we were gonna work from. So we spent nine weeks before that 28 day sales window showing case studies, running ads that weren't even. Selling anything. They were just solving micro problems, adding value in people's feeds.
And [00:03:00] then from there everything was funneling people just into a free Facebook group to get them to ask more questions so that by launch day when it was time to really open up the 28 day window and tell 'em what it was, we had to sell. We had over 12,000 members in this Facebook group for free, and in that very first week of the 28 day window, we ended up having a rough.
Thousand of them buy the offer. Just like that. So having a good runway is a great way to ensure you're gonna have a decent launch. Okay? Law number two, use the four C's in your message during your launch week. Every piece of messaging needs to hit at least one of these four. Number one, clarity. What exactly are you selling?
Would a seventh grader or an eighth grader understand what it is? Number two, credibility. Why should they believe you? One of the my favorite ways to talk about credibility is when you create content that allows you to say, don't take my word for it. Take theirs, and then you fill into who the theirs. The theirs is.
Number three. Contrast, how is [00:04:00] this different from the other options that they have on the market that might solve their problem in a different way? And then number four, commitment. What's in it for them now? Why? Why is now when you launch this, why is now when they should buy it? Why is now, uh, the time that their life is actually gonna change?
So you gotta answer those four C's. We worked with a SaaS client kind of in like what I would call the legal tech space. It's kind of an interesting thing and. When we were really working with them, they kind of came to us with a, you know, a three quarters baked launch plan, is the way I would say it. And we were really, uh, reticent about some of the emails that they had written up in their launch that were just, every email was basically like a, like a feature sandwich.
It was just feature, feature, feature, feature. And, um, they finally then showed us a graphic they had been working on that. That kind of showed what life was like without their tool versus what life was like with their tool. And that was when I leaned in and said, this is exactly the frame that you really should be using, because this graphic that they had made, basically [00:05:00] overcame the four Cs that I just talked about.
Clarity, credibility, contrast, and commitment all in one. Easy to understand graphic. And so that's a great thing of thinking about how can you say a lot without saying a lot, if you know what I'm saying. And the cool thing was when we looked at that email's performance against the rest, that email had doubled its conversion rate compared to the others.
Okay. Let's move on to law three. Stacking scarcity and urgency together. Scarcity equals limited quantity. Urgency equals limited time. The really best launches, figure out how to use both. It's not just enough to say the price is gonna go up on Friday. That is urgency. You know, you might also say there's 200 seats available.
That scarcity, it's really good when you're able to say those two things together. The price is gonna go up on Friday, or when the first 200 seats are sold, whichever one comes first. Okay. I once ran a launch for an event where we only had 350 seats in the room, and I always think about events. Kind of like the way I think about cruise ships, it's like once the cruise ship leaves the harbor, [00:06:00] there's, there's no more getting anybody on that boat.
You know, once an event comes, the calendar's there, there's no more of getting any tickets sold. So you really gotta maximize ticket yield on the front end of event. And so we only had 350 seats, and so of course we did the standard early bird discount when we opened up the cart, but we also put a cap. On the number of early bird seats that were available.
See, most people that were buying tickets to the event didn't know there was only 350 seats, but they did know there was only 250 early bird seats available and we were able to actually sell out 70% of the room by doing that topic, and that happened. Inside of I think 48, 72 hours of us even turning the early bird on.
So that kind of a dual constraint of time and pressure working together on the supply side. Um, you know, the pressure on the supply side of there being a limited amount of supply available. It's a huge thing psychologically in your ability to run a better launch. Okay, let's move on to law number four.
Engineering, what I kind of call the middle push. So most launches have a really great open [00:07:00] and a really great. Close and the middle was kind of a slump. And so if you don't plan for the slump, you might panic halfway through and think the entire plan is needs to be thrown out and start making some bad decision.
So here, here's the fix. Go ahead and pre-plan a mid-launch Surprise. Some sort of a bonus drop or a new case study that you're gonna release or a middle of the launch live q and a that you're gonna host or some sort of a pricing option in your mix of options for your offer that goes away halfway through the launch.
Something that's gonna drive momentum in the middle of the launch. So I'll give you an example. We ran a 10 day launch for an online course company. At day five, which we anticipated was gonna be a soft day for sales, we released a special bonus. And of course when we did that, we grandfathered everybody in who had bought before day five to get the same special bonus.
But it helped us move a little bit more momentum, kind of in the middle and, and day five, it ended up being the second highest day of the entire campaign, not day one or day 10, which is what would [00:08:00] normally have happened on a 10 day campaign. Alright, law number five. Close with a bang. The last 24 hours are where up to 50% of the sales in a launch typically come in.
But they're really only gonna do that if you push. So what does that mean? It means you should be sending multiple emails on the final day of a campaign. Probably one at 24 hours left. One at 12, one at three. One at two. One at one. One at closing time. Yes. Five or six emails on the last day of a cart. Um, it means you should have a countdown timer that's actually counting down somewhere.
And when it goes to zero, the whole thing disappears. And you might even want to consider having some sort of a live stream the last few hours of your launch, really pushing those people over the edge, uh, letting them get on and ask questions. We helped launch a high ticket mastermind a couple years ago, and I'm gonna tell you those last three or four emails ended up driving an extra $280,000 in sales for that brand of having that.
Thinking on the last day. So those were all, those, the methodical buyers that wait till the end, they were still thinking about, and they kind of just needed a little shove. So when you're running launches, if you wanna [00:09:00] launch like Apple, you apply these five rules. The, the last kind of general rule that I would say is, is don't think small.
Don't think that things. Only work for big brands that they won't work for small brands. So, so do think small, do think maybe I can run a launch of my business. Maybe there's a new service, service tier you wanna release. We just did that in Herald back early in the summer. Maybe there's a seasonal product you wanna sell if it's worth selling.
It's worth launching. And remember Apple, even though the phone is the big thing that they release, think about all the ancillary things that they sell on the back of that phone too. And how can that apply to your business? I hope you got something out of this episode. If you hadn't subscribed to our newsletter yet, go to 10 minute mc.com.
The link will be in the show notes for you to join us. You're gonna get a really cool tool. For this episode to help you launch like Apple. So I hope you'll get in and download it. I'm so grateful that you took the time to listen to this. I hope you got something out of it. And until next time, see you on the flip side.
