Whether they’re webinars, Zoom lectures, workshops or seminars, live events make great tripwires. Remember, the Customer Value Journey is made up of incremental steps that build your customers’ adventure with your brand.

And a big part of that process is when they make their first purchase in the Convert stage.

At this point, you also have to remember that people buy with 2 things: time & money. These are the 2 most valuable resources we have, & if you can get your prospects to invest either one in your brand, you make them even more invested in what you do.

Remember: tripwire offers are successful because the conversion of a lead into a customer—even for just $1 or a couple of hours—is magical. Now that they’ve spent time or money on you, they are primed to get real value from your product or service.

That said…a live event, whether it’s free or costs a small amount of money, can transform your customers’ relationship with your product or service.

And that’s why you need an event promotion strategy.

How do you do it? We’ve got a very specific marketing and sales funnel to make it happen…& it works.

Get ready to learn about the Live Event Funnel & find out how this international speaker & entrepreneurial consultant cashed in by using it as part of his event promotion strategy.

How The Live Event Funnel Generated $250,000 In 2 Days

Meet Gerry Robert, an 8-figure motivational speaker & entrepreneur coach. He’s made a living teaching small business owners how to write & publish their own books to spread their message to their audiences.

In just 2 days, Robert raked in $250,000 with the Live Event Funnel. Here’s how it worked…

Step 1: Create a Free Event

Yep, you read that right. The first step in the Live Event Funnel is a free event.

At this point you’re probably wondering…If the event was free, where’d the money come from?

That’s a fair question…& it’s the genius of exactly how the funnel works.

In this case, the event was a free seminar about how to brand yourself as an entrepreneur by writing & promoting your book.

To create awareness, Robert ran Facebook ads for the event. While he also went to some additional media outlets for publicity, 85% of the eventual attendees first heard about it through paid traffic on Facebook.

The thing about free events is that they work. They work so well that you can expect anywhere from 30 to 40% of your registrants to show up.

After engaging with a landing page about the event, prospects then converted to subscribers by registering for the free event.

Step 2: The Tripwire

Immediately after registering, the new leaders saw a post-registration tripwire offer for a VIP lunch with Gerry after the free event at $97 a ticket.

Of the 900 leads who signed up for the free event, 20 people took the VIP lunch tripwire. The costs generated from this offer covered all the expenditures for the free event itself plus ad spend.

Step 3: Post-Event Upsell

Fast forward to the day of the free event. At the end of the seminar, Robert made an upsell inviting attendees to a 2-day publishing bootcamp event that would help them take what they learned in the free seminar & take it to the next level.

The event would take place in 10 days & tickets sold at $49. Because of the authority he builds during the free event, Robert regularly achieves a 40% conversion rate for this next offer.

This means that if 160 people out of 400 who attended the event took the offer, Robert would take in $7840 in revenue—which paid for the expenses of the bootcamp event.

Step 4: The Core Offer

Here’s where things really start to get interesting.

By now, Robert’s participants had successfully signed up for 2 events (3 if you counter the post-seminar lunch)—NONE of which were the actual event he was selling.

This is how the Customer Value Journey works. Each stage advances your customer to a new level of relationship with your product or service, letting them experience more & more value from your brand.

As we’ve said before—you wouldn’t just walk up to someone in a bar & ask them to marry you. Trying to sell prospects your core offer right out of the gate is equally absurd.

So back to Robert & his 2 day event.

Throughout the weekend (NOT at the end, when there’s no time left for attendees to consider their options), he made 2 different offers.

First, he discussed the $25,000  core offer—a 1 year mentorship where customers complete their books, PLUS publication of the book from Robert’s company.

Later in the weekend, he introduced the downsell, a $5,000 online program that would teach customers communication & public speaking, as well as how to use live events to promote their books.

So now you’re probably thinking, why offer 2 different things & not a “lite” version of the $25,000 program?

Robert’s logic was that since very few people would likely purchase the core offer, there needed to be a lower cost offer that would present value & generate sales without competing with the main program.

Since writing & speaking are skills that go hand in hand, it made sense to offer 2 separate programs.

And it worked. Throughout the course of the 2 day program, 7 people signed up for the $25,000 program, while a total of 15 people took the downsell, generating a grand total of $225,000—$234,780 if you count the additional revenue from the previous event.

The Takeaway Of The Live Event Sales & Marketing Funnel

The key to the live event funnel is remembering that the free event is not the main product. It’s the lead magnet. Anything prior to the core offer exists to move your customer further through their Value Journey.

Another thing to keep in mind is that while Gerry Robert used multiple events to move customers through his marketing & sales funnel strategy for event promotion, your business’s funnel likely will look different.

As a professional speaker, it makes sense that he would promote a series of events. However, all it would take is one free event for you to demonstrate the value your product offers & then offer your tripwire & core offer.

For example, if you own an ecommerce store that sells health products & supplements, you might hold a webinar about how to create a lifestyle that balances fitness & diet. As a tripwire, you could offer a low-cost personal consultation to talk about the products after the webinar.

The point is that live events give you a unique opportunity to build authority & trust with your customers that other types of lead magnets would not necessarily give…which shortens the gap between the subscriber & convert stages of the Value Journey.

Want to find out how we use multiple varieties of the sales & marketing funnel to move customers through their journeys? We want to talk to you! Email hello@ciriusmarketing.com with your questions or call 855-607-7766.

In the meantime, make sure you download your free Customer Value Workbook so you can start with using our patented Customer Value Journey model to map your customers’ adventure.