How This Course Creator Had a $40K Month
without launching
By Christine Blubaugh
Last updated: April 28th, 2023
$3K in sales just 24 hours after updating a sales page.
5-figures in sales a week later.
$40K within a month.
That’s what happened for my client, Ann Pearson.
That’s Ann over there.
She’s a training expert for paralegals and other folks in the law industry who bill clients by the hour.
She’s got a load of experience as a former working paralegal that she now brings to courses and consulting to help paralegals be more efficient, earn more money, and improve working conditions.
Pretty great in an industry known for high-stress, 60+ hour workweeks, and cutthroat culture.
(I mean, have you seen Suits or The Good Wife? Scandalous – and I’m sure completely accurate depictions.)
Ann is an all-around rockstar.
She booked my Sold-Out Offer Intensive to get help with messaging and sales page copy for one of her programs, Billable Hours Bootcamp.
Students in this program learn how to improve the way they write up their bills – so they can bring in more revenue without working more hours.
Her methods were already proven – she had the results and experience to back up her claims.
She needed support with three things:
1. clarifying the words to attract ideal clients
2. structuring her sales page
3. and solidifying the process for guiding prospects into sales conversations.
Here are the 5 things we focused on to help Ann book $3K in 24 hours, 5-figures+ within a week, and $40K in a month…
1. Target Audience
When Ann booked with me, she was in the process of switching up the target market for Billable Hour Bootcamp.
She’d been selling this fully digital course to individual paralegals, but she realized the benefits of offering the program to mid-sized law firms who could use the material to train their entire teams.
Some of the benefits of shifting her target audience:
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- Multiple “spots sold” with each sale (each client now represents 10+ sales – instead of a single paralegal)
- Increased revenue per sale (law firms pay sliding-scale rates based on team size)
- Increased value for her clients (firms now have a solution designed specifically for them, that they could include as standard training to improve working conditions for their employees and revenue for themselves)
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The mindset of her new ICA – the manager or partner of a law firm – is different than the paralegals she sold to before. Her messaging needed to reflect that change.
THE FIX:
We shifted the way we talked about her offer to speak to the decision-makers in these companies – their unique problems, values, and desired outcomes.
Which brings us to #2.
“I was struggling with trying to change up the copy on a course that we were pivoting to a new customer base.
December is my slowest month of the year in terms of revenue. One of Christine’s emails convinced me to spend money in a super slow month, so I knew she must know what she’s doing!”
2. Promise
The most important piece of messaging we focused on was the “Promise” or “Unique Selling Proposition (USP)” of Ann’s program.
We made the main outcome of Billable Hour Bootcamp seriously enticing and eye-catching so her new target market would know exactly what’s in it for them.
We used my SDD Method for USPs that convert:
>> Specific: Clear, concrete, and easy-to-understand outcomes (no vague, generic, “live your best life” sort of language here.)
>> Desirable: Focused on what the ICA wants MOST (and/or what they want to avoid) and are willing to pay to achieve.
>> Deliverable: Results that can be confidently delivered in that particular program. No over-promising.
The Promise we landed on for Ann was:
Increase billable hours & boost revenue for your law firm – without piling more work on your timekeepers, scrambling for new clients, or raising your bill rates
In this new USP we focused on:
1. specific outcomes that her clients desire most (more billable hours and more money)
2. specific situations her clients want to avoid (piling work on employees, finding new clients, raising rates)
3. and results that Ann knows she can deliver (because she’s already proven her offer.)
3. Proof
Now that we’d made the bold claim (Promise) about what Ann’s potential clients could achieve with her program, it was time to back it up.
It’s not enough to just *say* you can help someone get a result. You have to prove it to them.
We *proved* Ann’s Promise in a couple of ways:
1. We used a simple example to demonstrate the potential results of her program.
Ann included a basic math equation on her sales page showing how much money her ICA was leaving on the table.
(FYI: over $500K annually)
Showing her ICA, rather than simply telling them, made the value of her offer SO CLEAR – and completely irresistible.
There’s no company on the planet that wouldn’t want to reclaim that much lost revenue – especially when it was slipping through the existing cracks of poor processes.
2. We also included her clients’ results and testimonials so prospects could see that her methods were creating real results for other law firms – and that her clients were raving about her.
“Christine is very good at getting to the meat of what the offer is about and then how to distill that to the ideal audience.
She’s amazing at what she does!”
4. Process
Ann developed her own system or proprietary process – The Billable Hour Framework – that she teaches in her program.
We made sure to explain this process in terms of results – outlining the parts of her process and the way each part contributes to an outcome her clients want to achieve.
Ann included a custom graphic on the sales page that made it easy to understand her method, its value, and the focus of her training.
All of this further positioned Ann as an expert with a unique method that focuses on solving the specific problems of her prospects.
5. Offer & Sales Process
Shifting from selling to individual paralegals to mid-sized law firms, meant Ann’s offer needed to change, as well.
Her program was previously offered only as a DIY digital course. But she knew some law firms would likely want a more custom experience with additional support.
Ann decided to offer tiered pricing for the new Billable Hour Bootcamp so her clients would have options based on their preferred method of training and budget.
Her pricing tiers include:
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- Option 1: In-person 5-Day Training
- Option 2: Live Virtual 5-Day Training
- Option 3: Pre-Recorded Virtual Training
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The majority of Ann’s clients choose Option 2, so including the higher-priced Option 1 creates an “anchor.”
It makes Option 2 look like a steal for clients who want the personalization of live training – without the in-person price tag.
Ann sells these programs via sales calls and handles pricing discussions in those conversations, rather than posting rates on the sales page.
Typically, I don’t recommend this.
Posting prices on your sales page is often a smart move. It helps pre-qualify prospects.
However, in her industry, hidden prices are pretty standard (you wouldn’t see high-ticket law firms posting prices on their websites.)
So for Ann, a system of asking prospects to fill out a brief form in order to book a call and get access to pricing makes sense.
Check out Ann’s results…
“Within 24 hours of putting up the new copy for the sales page, I closed $3,000 in sales. A week later, I more than 10X’d the investment I made in hiring you!
I now have $40k in proposals sent to law firm managers who have inquired in the past month. I’m so pleased!
I wish I hired Christine sooner. I could have saved months of headaches trying to tweak my own copy and getting no results.
Do yourself a favor and hire her for just one copywriting project, you won’t regret it. You’ll only regret that you didn’t do it sooner!”
Ready to see results like these for your own offer?
In my Sold-Out Offer Intensives, we focus on:
1. Refining your offer (packaging, pricing & positioning)
2. Crafting unmistakable messaging & sales copy
3. And creating a simple marketing plan
We’ll work 1:1 to make your offer a *must-have* for your ideal clients so you create more sales – with more ease.