Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.
This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 81. The Trip wire business strategy. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Jason Lynette here, and thanks once again for joining me For the 81st time in a row, I’d like to assume.
You have listened to every single podcast session before joining me on this one, though of course, I know that’s not true. Many of you may be discovering this program for the first time with this recording and, uh, if so, welcome and if you’re a longtime listener, welcome back Once again, I’d give you a quick update though for any of you, whether you’re brand new to this program or whether this is an ongoing journey for you with me, head over to work smart hypnosis.com of.
All the other 80 podcast sessions at the time of this recording are there, but I just had my designer put a download button on every single podcast page, so that way if you’re not making use of some sort of podcasting app, or you don’t even know what I’m talking about right now, it’s never been easier to download these podcast sessions and really listen to them at your own time.
You know, of course you can stream these things directly from your smartphone, your tablet, your computer. Though I’m flashing back to, I think, oh, it would’ve been maybe 2006 when I was downloading podcast and burning them onto CDs to listen to in my car. Yeah, there’s an out of date statement, so, um, it’s like I was on my landline at home on hold with the Blockbuster video.
Thank you John Ney for that joke. So this is a solo session with just me here talking about a business strategy that I actually often make use of and a business strategy that came about by way of a piece of advice I’d share. I’ve got my private business training, which is hypnotic business systems. Get on the waiting list for that, by the way, [email protected].
And inside of that group, there’s a private Facebook group and, uh, I’ll generalize the question, but a student Craig in New York. Was basically asking that he wants to schedule his very first hypnosis certification training. He’s an instructor. He hasn’t yet done his first course and was basically looking for some tips on how to build the first class and to really set the stage for this, I will share with you a story of something which I lovingly share this story.
With the subtitle of that really smart thing that I did two years ago that I really, really need to do again, cuz oh boy, it worked and it’s gonna make use of a little strategy in business called the Trip Wire,
The concept of a trip wire. This is nothing new. Though in the information and marketing world, it’s probably one of those quote, newer big things that’s out there. But again, this isn’t new by any stretch at all. The concept of a trip wire is that of getting your potential customer to cross that threshold from, I’m curious about what you have to offer into that place of, here’s my money, but rather than asking that person as it is the case with Craig’s question.
Was about getting someone to journey from, they haven’t yet signed up for anything to, Here’s about $2,000 for a eight or nine day course. That’s a big jump. So the story goes, it’s a couple of years ago and I offered a two day event called Hypnosis 1 0 1, and the concept of Hypnosis 1 0 1 was, it was when I did it, and I’ll share you with you exactly what I did, and I will share with you exactly how I would modify this as.
The concept was it was a two day intro to hypnosis course, which at the same time I was offering a weekend version of my training, you know, in the Northern Virginia DC, Maryland metro area, big population, and it’s really easy for me to fill a class over the course of several weekends. So what did I do? I, at the same time had a class that was going on and another open weekend.
I scheduled Hypnosis 1 0 1. In the course of that, I covered a progressive muscle relaxation induction. I covered the beginnings of a day development induction. I covered suggestibility tests, and I covered the basic strategy of what I’ve branded as straight line transformation, which is in many ways similar to benefits approach with Roy Hunter.
Similar to the meta pattern for change from the uh, Melissa Tears, John Oder School of Thought. Basically future pacing by way of direct suggest. So those are the basic concepts that I covered as well as a, what is hypnosis? What isn’t hypnosis, and a little bit on NLP rapport to kind of round out the weekend.
And I offered that course, if I remember back, I think I did that for pretty low cost, like $195. and it sold really, really well. So the reason behind that was it was much easier for people to sign up for something that was a less of a financial commitment and also less of a time commitment as well. So what was the result?
Well, I had about maybe 10 people in the room. And as I track the attendance of those 10 people, this one time event that I did, three of them eventually crossed the bigger threshold and invested in the entire big course. Several of the others are now active subscribers of Hypnotic Workers, which is my digital access version of my live training.
Check that out [email protected]. And if I’m running some basic math in my head right now for the investment of a two day weekend, I basically earned about $1,200 a day, which. Pretty good. Just simply marketing it to people who had already been on my mailing list. And then on top of that, add on three certification students.
That’s $6,000 plus hypnotic workers. The annual income from that, and basically I’m looking at about total lifetime customer value of this one week in event is now close to about $10,000. Why do I tell you that? I don’t share those numbers ever to brag and boast. Instead, it’s to point out that as we think about our businesses differently, , we can find all sorts of other opportunities.
There is no shortage of business out there. Instead, there are only shortages of strategies to help you get to where you’d like to be. So Craig asked the question about how does he establish this upcoming class? and I’d encourage the concept of the trip wire, which to give you again, let’s break it down with a very simple explanation.
A trip wire is a lower priced. Lower stress entry point, which then has the goal of navigating to use the sales and marketing terminology into a core offer, which in this case would be a $2,000 class, a $500 product, whatever it might be. So to look at this funnel that someone would go through, let’s use an example that you might not have thought about and realized this is a trip wire strategy.
About three quarters of the way through watching the, uh, rest of I am Not Your Guru, the, uh, Tony Robbins documentary that’s on Netflix, which is phenomenal, and to realize you can get a taste of what it is to work with Tony by going to Barnes and Noble by hopping onto amazon.com and buying one of his books.
And I’d imagine, just off the top of my head, these books are likely anywhere between about maybe $10 on Kendall to maybe 25, $30 for a hard back edition of any of these books. Realize his entire business is not just selling books because this documentary, I Am Not Your guru, is all about Date With Destiny.
An event where there are people, Well, no, everybody in that audience has invested $5,000 to be there in that audience. And think about it for a moment, do you think people have signed up for that event? Cold? No. Are there people that are there because someone strongly recommended, or strongly suggested and strongly endorsed, they go, Yeah, absolutely.
But I would wager that the majority of those people have read every single one of his books. They have already interacted with some of his products, the audio versions, the video versions, and then here comes the offer for Date with Destiny and there they are. So take note, you know, perhaps you can identify ways that already here in the hypnosis profession, you have already engaged in trip wires.
In many different ways. I mean, there’s, there’s me. I recently did a promotion of my hypnotic age regression course, which typically nowadays sells for $57. You can check that out. There’s links to that over at Work Smart Hypnosis, though for the span of about 10 days, I did a flash sale, offered it at $17, and I will very openly share what that was.
That was a trip wire offer, which then spun around and offered hypnotic workers. Which by the way here is, let me give you some advice here, which is actually really, really effective, which is that you hear this concept of an upsell, that now that you’ve bought this other thing, let me now upsell you to something else.
And right now, strike that out of your terminology. Strike that out of your knowledge of what it is to run a business and instead shift it to this mindset of an upgrade. Because I’ll walk you through. Let’s go back to Hypnosis 1 0 1. What was the upgrade strategy from that two day offering? Well, the upgrade was, at this point, you have two methods for hypnotic induction.
You have these suggestibility tests, which are awfully FiNet parties. You have a basic outline of a hypnotic change process. However, what’s the upgrade? Many of you want more than this. And inside of the course, you’re gonna learn more induction methods. You’re gonna learn how to customize to the individual.
You’re gonna get the actual certification. You’re gonna get business strategies to get your first clients. You’re gonna really join a outstanding organization, and here’s all the outstanding things that you get by upgrading your experience. makes sense, right? Let’s go to Tony Robbins. You’ve read the books and you’ve got on paper a lot of the strategies written out on how you can do this for yourself, though sometimes you need to be a part of the entire experience to really get the full value.
And for that, here’s the products. Here’s Date with Destiny. Here’s the business course. He just recently did. Here’s everything, work with one of his coaches. It upgrades the experience the entire way. Chances are many of you engaged in my hypnotic age regression trip wire offer, and well, now that you have the hypnotic age regression process and how to navigate through it, what do you do if regression is not the method you want to use with your client?
What do you do if you need more induction methods? What do you do if your client is not sufficiently deep in order to to do the techniques? And if that’s the case, well, here is hypnotic workers. More than a hundred hours of digital access on demand, Netflix for your hypnosis business training. So you see the idea.
The idea is navigating them throughout that experience, navigating them to that place where the experience gets better and better. The more that they buy, the more that they engage in the experience. Which, by the way, the concept of a lead magnet, which is the free offer for something, that’s the difference.
The opt-in offer on a website, I mean, On H Work Smart Hypnosis, for example, there is the offer of the Go Deep hypnotic deepening course, which that’s available over on the homepage. That’s what’s called a lead magnet. That’s a opt-in offer, or as Jeff Walker would call it. That’s an ethical bribe to exchange your email address for something of value.
I mean, webinars are a great example though. Take note that the financial transaction doesn’t necessarily have to be a purchase. So if you think back, many of you have been aware of me for a couple of years now, and a few years ago I did a webinar titled 12 Ways to Grow Your Hypnosis Business, 12 Ways. It was right around Christmas time, and what I actually did with that webinar was that it was a fundraiser, it was a $5 registration to be a member, to be a participant in that webinar event.
And the outcome was that for every $5 raised that went to toys for tot. and I actually did something, uh, kind of clever and I’d. Wonderfully meaningful, which is what I did, was that I also matched every donation. So we had a good 180 people on that webinar event. So I cut a check over to Toys for Tots for $1,800.
Now, on one side of things, I did that because it’s a fantastic organization. I mean, in our modern era of all things fundraising, all things involving nonprofits, there’s a bit of a dilemma sometimes that sometimes the money is not necessarily going where it ought to go. And to look at the statistics of Toys for Tots, the majority of the money is going directly towards funding this amazing cause.
We’ll leave out the ones that are not necessarily of that nature, though. I’d reference that I did that because it’s a good thing to do though. At the same time, let’s talk business. What did I do? I added 180 people to my mailing list that were now already buyers. Here’s the interesting phrase. And whether it’s $5, whether it’s $7, whether it’s $17, and really take note that a trip wire does not necessarily mean less than 20 bucks.
No, because I very comfortably share that. Yes, I have training programs that either are a single investment of upwards of $600. You can look at learned virtual gastric band.com. There are programs like hypnotic business systems and hypnotic workers that are ongoing membership rate programs. There’s my live trainings though.
Sometimes there are those people who reach out to me that sometimes need that little bit of more. and for that, that’s why I offer on a limited basis, just based on my availability, private consult. private coaching where it kind of becomes this balance of let’s do the work together to help you make that phone ring to make you more effective as a hypnotist, which I’d comfortably say that well, think about it.
That’s not gonna be a $5 transaction with me. No, That kind of begins at about $3,000 because that’s time away from my clients. So that is a much, much bigger transac. So it’s from this journey of curious shopper to here’s my credit card. The concept of the trip wire is again, getting someone to cross that threshold of becoming a buyer.
To tie up a bit of a thread here, what about that hypnosis one on one course that I offered? How would I do that differently? Well, the truth is that nowadays, if I were to do that again, I would probably just make it a one day event and make it much less money. You know, make sure it’s still something of value.
Make sure it’s something where you are delivering wonderful value, and chances are you might be like me on this. You are currently actively making use of a beautiful trip wire business. group on living social. Now, admittedly, I’ve only ever done living social once for my business though think about it. I am actively ravenously making use of group on and, uh, living social just for my personal life.
My wife and I are going to Washington, DC this weekend. It’s right up the road and, uh, we’re going to see, uh, comedian and before it we’re going out to. So what did I do? This is romantic. I hopped on group on, and it turns out there’s this outstanding Italian restaurant and perceived value is, I think it said $180, but basically for, I think I bought this thing for $47, three course dinner, glass of wine for.
And there aren’t many restaurants you can get that kind of experience. Now, what’s the business model of this restaurant, though? They’re banking on the idea that we’re gonna have an outstanding experience and we’re gonna come back for more. As I’ve shifted a lot of my health goals into strength training, my protein intake is definitely up.
And my favorite shop has become here in the Alexandria Springfield, Northern Virginia area, Little shop by the name of Springfield, but, Is always on Groupon and I’m able to buy that $17 voucher, which gives me $30. And on a regular basis, that’s my more affordable source of high quality foods. And granted, it’s kind of difficult to go in there and only spend $30.
So that’s their trip wire, that’s their foot in the door of the strategy. So, What’s the other example? My daughter Claire, is about five years old. I is five years old and there’s all sorts of after school activities, weekend activities where what’s the benefit? We can sign her up for this one week of karate classes and for one week she gets the outfit.
She gets to take as many classes as she wants. They get, we get this night out for parents where they give us a voucher for the restaurant next door, and you get this incredible. For like $27. That’s a trip wire because what are they banking on? You’re gonna have an outstanding experience. Your daughter’s gonna love going there.
And now here’s the monthly membership, which is quite reasonable at, I think it’s like $80 a month, but they’re building that entry point to get you in the door a lot faster. So how can we make use of this as hypnotists? Well realize this is where selling products. Selling products is an outstanding strategy.
So here’s your stop smoking audio program. Here’s your weight loss program, and all these things you can niche down, you know, reduce cravings, motivate, exercise, have a different audio program for any of these. And the benefit becomes is that if someone purchases this, it’s doing several things. First of all, it’s letting them have that user experience of what it’s like to work with you before they even work with.
Now there’s a greater benefit to this though, is that if we look at the structure of creating the sale as a funnel, it’s positioning you at the end of that sales funnel, which I’ll tell you has an interesting side effect. It puts you at the end of the sequence and your value to that individual client actually begins to increase more and more the more they interact with you.
Before they actually engage in the official transaction, which was your goal? It’s the celebrity effect. It’s what you might have heard me talk about as being the Willie Nelson Effect, which. I share with you, and we’re gonna keep this content here brief and to the point because instead of listening to a bunch of different random ideas, which are all valuable to you, I want you to leave this audio program and take action, which I’d share with you back to Craig.
Craig, if I can give you one piece of advice on your trainings. It’s from day one to design your life Trainings instead of being a linear eight day course, a linear two day course, a linear from start to finish. But instead, think of everything as being modulars. Think of everything as being modules that you can break off or splinter off and break apart.
So the easiest example, you could do a two hour workshop on suggestibility tests. And that could then lead into the full course. You could do a 90 minute workshop on effective suggestion management, and you could actually offer that to coaches, counselors, therapists, which then leads them into why they need to sign up for a hypnosis course.
Well, here’s the example of my hypnotic age regression course that I offered online, that I gave that experience, but that’s part of a bigger product called hypnotic workers. , you know, here are all these individual examples. This is why, if you might have been aware of older products that I used to have, why I’ve been rebuilding them and over the last couple of years, because it’s that specific strategy of allowing things to break apart as their own individual modules.
It’s just a side note, actually makes me more effective as an instructor because suddenly now I get a call and they want me to speak at this convention and okay, great, and I’ve got all these individual modules. Ready to go Hypno thoughts live. This year I did a two hour on hypnotic phenomenon, which was the module of my live course, which was part of a module of the product.
I have hypnotized with conviction, which is also a module inside of hypnotic workers, and I’m not having to reinvent the wheel over and over and over. I’m able to give you that little bit of a taste, that little bit of a journey into so, By the way, here’s a bit of a strategy, which I share with you. I have not done this one though.
Chances are you’ve made use of it as well, the free book, the free video offer, but you have to pay shipping to get it. That’s a trip wire. The concept being that, Oh, here’s my new book and you can get it for free. Just pay 7 95 shipping and. . When you look at one of the biggest things that’s making use of this nowadays, this is a big trend in, uh, in culinary services companies like Home Chef.
Blue plate, Blue Diner, I forget what it’s called. These are all over Groupon, all over living social, by the way, where it’s these, They’re not quite meal delivery services, but it’s where you’re getting all these high quality ingredients and these wonderful, wonderful printouts that are teaching you how to cook for yourself.
It’s really, really a cool service. Unless you’re someone like me or my wife, and we cook all the time, and we’re just kind of going, I could have done this myself and spent less money. So it’s the concept of the trip wire all over again because for $29, you’re basically gonna get six high quality meals.
You fall in love with the company and then you sign up for the membership. All these different diet and weight loss companies, Nutrisystem, Slim Fest, Isogenics, they have these trial offers where you’re able to get for a low cost. Maybe a one week supply, a one month supply, but then it automatically renews at the entire monthly rate.
So spend some time on this. Consider this idea of how can you create an easier entry point for your clients, which I’ll share with you the Groupon strategy that I did when I did it. I call it Groupon, even though I did mine with living social. I already had a packed office of fully paying clients when they reached out to me, so forgive the language, but why the hell would I bother doing a whole bunch of single sessions for an income of $14 by way of group on offer?
So instead, what did I do? Through the Living social service, we offered an introduction to self hypnosis class, and the investment for the course was $49. Valued at 175, you’re able to buy it for $49. The way the math works out, my income for each person who signed up, basically the math, is that for whatever the offer value you’re seeing on Groupon or Living Social or any of these other ones, what happened was that you basically get to keep 45% of that.
So for a $49 offer that they were selling on Living Social, my take was like $22. However, We typically had about maybe 10 to 15 people in the room. When I offered this introduction to self hypnosis workshop, well do the math. For a 90 minute session, I was basically earning about $350. That ain’t bad yet.
From that low cost entry point, I was able to then offer my private services. And again, think about it in terms of the. You know, you can make use of this outstanding self hypnosis strategy that I’ve shared with you. However, I know that many of you want a little bit more help and a little bit more focused attention to achieve your goals.
So for that, and then from there, I detailed what my package offer was at the time. This many sessions, this much money though, if you wanna a really, really cool strategy. To build some immediacy when you do this. My favorite principle is to discount what somebody has already paid. I’ll explain this here.
So when I did the hypnosis 1 0 1 course, let’s just use round numbers here for the sake of conversation. Let’s assume the, and these are pretty close to it, I’m just rounding up to make it round numbers. The investment for hypnosis 1 0 1. Let’s say it was $200. The investment for the eight day certification course was $2,000.
So the easiest method that I could do to build the pitch of offering the bigger course was towards the end of the class. I always want to do a recap to make use of what you’ve already learned from me. You’ve learned how to hypnotize, you’ve learned this, you’ve learned this, you’ve learned that, but then you want to hint at basically what they’re still.
So what you need to know is also how to navigate the process, how to get the clients, what they’d learned from the rest of a certification course. But then I wanna go for a piece of intrigue. I wanna peak their curiosity by making an empowered statement. And you’ve all signed up for this weekend course, but wouldn’t it be cool if instead of spending $200 in this course, this weekend was absolutely free?
And I pause. Now I’ve got their attention because to satisfy the goal of learning all these things about hypnosis and getting certified and all these other great benefits, here’s my certification course and I hit the bullet points. I hit the features, I hit the bullet, the features and the benefits of what you’re gonna get by signing up for the full course.
And here comes the limited offer, Basical. And the typical investment for that class is $2,000. However, right now it’s Friday, and if you sign up by Sunday, I will discount that course $200. So it’s basically as if you got this weekend for free. So that builds a bit of an immediacy, that builds a bit of a ticking time clock, a bit of immediacy to that offer though.
You can also take it one step further. And spur the action even faster. And on top of that, for those of you that sign up today, here’s this extra offer. Here’s a cd, Here’s this, here’s that. If you saw me at Hypno Thoughts Live or ngh this year, I was basically selling three programs. Hypnotic business systems, hypnotic workers, and virtual gastric band.
And for the people who signed up for all three and paid in full that weekend. They got a private coaching session with me valued at $350. So calls had a little bit of a bonus as we’re here talking trip wire of how to add more immediacy to your offers as well. So I’m gonna wrap this up here in just a moment though.
I’d encourage you take a look at what you already do. Maybe there is a technique you teach your clients. And maybe that technique could be recorded as its own audio program, video course, workshop, whatever it might possibly be, and that might be something you can offer on a regular basis to get more people into your streams that are already motivated buyers.
Perhaps this might require a little bit of thinking to consider how you can modify things you’re already doing. To make your offerings, let’s call it trip wire friendly, as I’ve referenced, that’s why I’ve been rebuilding a lot of my content. Though, the idea behind this is, again, realizing that you can make all sorts of growth in your business simply by thinking about things just that little bit differently.
So this has been the Trip wire business strategy, and I want to hear your ideas. I want to hear your thoughts on this. Head over to the Work Smart Hypnosis Facebook page. Just go over to facebook.com/work Smart Hypnosis and leave your commentary under the posting for the session or. Head over to the show [email protected] and share your ideas, share your strategies, even share your questions there.
This has been the Trip Wire Business strategy. See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis [email protected]. Jason Lenette here once again, and thank you so much for participating in this program. And head over to work smart hypnosis.com and at the top right corner, click the training page, and over there you’re gonna see all sorts of offerings, whether it’s hypnotic workers, hypnotic business systems, learn, virtual gastric band, plus some of my live trainings and coaching as well.
Thank you so much for joining me. I’ll see you next time.
