[Top Direct Response Series] Mastering the Art of Webinars With Jason Fladlien of Rapid Crush

Jason Fladlien is the Co-founder of Rapid Crush, a company renowned for its groundbreaking marketing strategies and expertise in webinars. He has driven over $250 million in sales, reaching over 150,000 customers across 131 countries, making him a pivotal figure in the online marketing arena. 

Known for his unique journey from a Hare Krishna monk to a rapper before diving into the world of marketing, Jason’s diverse background fuels his innovative approaches to digital marketing and product launches. His work with webinars has set sales records across various industries and has led him to develop best practices that define today’s digital marketing strategies.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:56] Jason Fladlien discusses the origins of his One to Many: The Secret to Webinar Success book
• [10:31] How Alex Hormozi used the teachings from Jason’s webinar approach to skyrocket his own success
• [13:28] The transition techniques that elevate selling on webinars
• [18:35] The importance of beta launches and their role in market success
• [22:39] The various services Jason offers, including the chance to audit your webinar 
• [29:13] How longer webinars can lead to higher conversions 
• [35:15] Jason’s future plans to systematize his webinar coaching expertise
• [40:28] The GOAT Webinar and coaching systems for unparalleled success 
• [47:20] The critical elements of constructing a compelling offer in webinars

In this episode…

Are you looking to turn your knowledge into profit through engaging webinars? Where do you start, and what makes some webinars sell millions while others flounder? Could the answer lie in how they’re offered?

Jason Fladlien, the webinar mogul who has sold over $250 million worth of products, delves into the fine art of crafting captivating and lucrative webinars. With years of experience and a record for the biggest launch in internet marketing, he breaks down the anatomy of a successful webinar and the pivotal role of the offer. He recounts how direct response techniques and articulate transitions can transform pitches, demystify the selling process, and share actionable insights for anyone looking to leverage webinars for substantial profits.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Jason Fladlien, Co-founder of Rapid Crush, about webinars and direct sales success. Jason discusses the origins of his One to Many: The Secret to Webinar Success book, the transition techniques that elevate selling on webinars, the importance of beta launches for webinars, and how longer webinars can lead to higher conversions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jason Fladlien on LinkedIn | Website
• Rapid Crush
• One to Many: The Secret to Webinar Success by Jason Fladlien

Special Mention(s):

• Alex Hormozi on LinkedIn
• $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi
• Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Creating a Mass Movement of People Who Will Pay for Your Advice by Russell Brunson

Related episode(s):

• “Triggers, Toll-Free Triumphs, and Tales From a Marketing Legend With Joe Sugarman” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Boardroom Inc: Light Bulb Moments after 1.3 Billion pieces of direct mail – with Brian Kurtz [Big Lessons]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “What Inspires Brian Kurtz, VP at Boardroom Inc.?” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• ““But wait, there’s more!” – with Infomercial King Ron Popeil, Founder of Ronco.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “From Maxwell Street to Infomercials with Ron Popeil” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “P90X: Earning Food & Rent Money as a Mime to over $500 million in Sales- with Tony Horton [Business Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Just because I can do it doesn’t mean you should try to do it.”
• “Beta is the new alpha, as far as I’m concerned.”
• “Everybody wants to buy something; they just want to buy the thing that’s right for them.”
• “If one webinar is good, two webinars are better.”
• “I’ll give you a double your money back guarantee, and that’s the easiest, simplest, most powerful way I’ve ever seen to really juice up an offer.”

Action Steps:

1. Start hosting webinars to connect with your audience and sell products more effectively: This turns advertisements into valuable interactions.
2. Approach offer creation with a focus on reducing pain points rather than just adding value: This reduces customer uncertainty and increases the likelihood of purchase.
3. Implement beta launches to gauge product viability and collect user feedback: Quick market testing allows for adjustments and tangible stories for marketing.
4. Utilize unconditional guarantees to build trust and incentivize customer action: This offers assurances and motivates customers to engage with the product.
5. Consider creating longer, objection-handling-focused content to increase engagement and sales: Longer content can address customer concerns more comprehensively, enhancing the overall effectiveness of webinars.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Jason Fladlien. You can find him at rapidcrush.com and also his name, jasonfladlien.com. Jason, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Since Jason is, I consider one of just a direct response master. Some other direct response legends I’ve had on the podcast. Joe Sugarman was on he sold millions of pairs of blue blockers through direct response.

Brian Kurtz, that’s actually Jason spoke at the Brian Kurtz event that I was at. Brian sent billions of direct mail pieces out. Ron Popeil was another interesting one. Sold billions of pride through infomercials. The infomercial King. So if you’ve heard But Wait, There’s More. That’s Ron Popeil. Tony Horton was a good one of P90x and many more. So check those out on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is actually brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships, and we do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.

We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So Jason, we call ourselves the magic elves that are running the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content and create amazing relationships and focus on running their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Jason Fladlien, and he’s sold over $250 million worth of products to over 150,000 customers in over 131 countries, and based on his strategic initiatives, his company, Rapid Crush, holds the record for all time, biggest launch in internet marketing space, 57.9 million to be exact, Jason, if I my numbers correct, as well as the record for most commissions generated as an affiliate in a product launch, which was $9.8 million in eight days, what some people accumulate, not even in our lifetime, actually. So Jason is also the only marketer zoom brought in to teach its user base how to create high converting webinars, which makes sense, Jason, because that makes their service stickier. So I’m sure there’s other companies that should be hiring you as well. But Jason, thanks for joining me.

Jason Fladlien 3:01 

Jeremy, it is my pleasure to be here today.

Jeremy Weisz 3:05 

I also want to point out you can check out his book, One To Many: The Secret To Webinar Success. This is the OG version. I don’t know if that’s the new version on your desk there. Jason, if you want to hold that up for a second, someone told me this chase. I don’t this is true, but when they’re selling books, I don’t know if it’s Chandler Bolt that if you hold up the book and they could see it, it sells more. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s the newer version of One To Many. And what I love about books is Jason poured his heart and soul into this, and people paid $5,000 ahead to be at an event. And now you could buy it in a book. And I don’t know how much is this book. It’s like…

Jason Fladlien 3:41 

10 bucks on the Kindle version.

Jeremy Weisz 3:42 

10 bucks, like, that’s ridiculous, right? You should make it $1,000 a book, just because. But let’s start off talking about the origin of the book, which was a $5,000 genius webinar event.

Jason Fladlien 3:56 

Yeah, it’s a good story. It’s about 2017 and I had been doing webinars since 2008 which is makes me a dinosaur on the internet. I’m like your grandpa. Back in my day, when we used to do webinars, we had to put 210 cans together with a piece of string. I never taught the stuff, really. I did it, and occasionally I’d publish little guides or booklets that people would pick up and use them. So one of the people that picked them up and used them was Russell Brunson, and it really kind of shaped how he launched what became Click Funnels, with some of the strategies that he learned what I taught on a webinar, like one of the things I learned early on selling software on a webinar is you don’t sell the software, you make the software a bonus if they buy like an educational product.

And when you change it that way, it completely changes everything. And so they did that with Click Funnels, and it became really big. And Russell wrote a book called Expert Secrets, which he told me one day in an Uber he said was inspired by me because I was teaching people how to shift belief patterns. That’s a big of what we do on webinars. So he wrote this book. It sold hundreds of 1000s of copies, and then people got to know me through Russell and through the techniques that I had shown him and that he had modeled and used. And so people started coming at me like that. So I’m like, I better start teaching this stuff formally, because I was using it. I wasn’t really teaching others how to use it. And I was going after, typically, beginner markets, startups, I wasn’t teaching seasoned veterans. So, my audience didn’t want to learn how to do webinars.

They wanted to learn how to sell products on Amazon. And we’re really good at that. So we used webinars to sell people on Amazon, training program, software, etc. So I finally, one day was like, I want to teach the methodology of how I do webinars, but I don’t have the audience for it. But my friend Joe Polish, who runs Genius Network, I developed a really good relationship with him, and I’m like, he’s got the audience. So I’m like, dude, you got the audience. I got the training. Let’s partner on it together. You put it in front of your audience. We train at your facilities in Phoenix, and I’ll do the rest of the work. It’s a hell of a pitch, by the way, I do all the work. We split the profits, good pitch.

Jeremy Weisz 6:13 

But you are good at pitching, I have no doubt, yeah.

Jason Fladlien 6:17 

So we could fit 73 people in that room. So we did a webinar to sell the webinar training, and we sold 73 people at 5000 bucks a pop. So it’s a nice little payday. Now my plan was to use that to create the recordings from that and then sell the training for like $1,500. So here’s a little secret for anybody listening, it’s called price anchoring, if people over here paid 5000 for it, and you can get almost the same thing over here for $1,500, you’re not looking at how much it costs you, you’re looking at how much it can save you. The real trick is doing it in a way where both people are happy, where you don’t disappoint one audience at the expense of another one.

So people were like, some people are like, I need it now, and I’m willing to pay a premium for it to be in the room, and then other people later on were like, I would rather just buy it, or maybe they didn’t hear about it. So you get paid to create the product. That’s how we did it. And we had some of the most world class people that are in that room, and it still blows my mind to this day, that actually attended live. So like John Benson, who is pretty much the inventor of the Ugly VSL that sold billions through that methodology. He was there learning how to do webinars. The late great Sean Stevenson, who was just this really short guy with a really big heart in the personal development space, touched millions of people. He was in that room.

Susan Garrett, who was like a dog agility World Champion multiple time. She was in that room in the pitch webinar that we did Jeremy to sell the product her and more than her. But I remember her specifically. I think she sold over $200,000 just from what she learned on the webinar that sold the program to her. So this is another lesson for all of you. Can you make your advertisement so good people could win with just the advertisement without even having to buy the product. So she was in the room as well. And it’s like a who’s who. If you watch the recordings, you’re like, oh, wow. That person was there. That person was there. Perry Belcher and Roland Frasier, who were running Traffic and Conversion at the time, with Ryan Dice. Ryan wasn’t there, but Roland and Perry were there, and Perry, since has become a business partner of mine.

We run a mastermind now called driven, which is $30,000 a year, and that’s a whole bunch of fun. So we brought all these people in, and it was incredible. And then from that, I sold the course, and then people like Alex Hormozi bought the course, and Alex gave me a testimonial, saying it was the single greatest course he ever bought on offer creation. And he’s obviously used that, and I’ve consulted with him since then, and he’s just become like the darling of the marketing world, which I’m really excited about, like a proud papa. So people like him bought the course and applied it, and countless others. Some people have made nine figures from a webinar that they designed from that training program. And I also Jeremy at the time, I’m like, a book is the best thing anybody could ever do.

A book is your legacy. It will have more impact ultimately, than anything else you could create. So I took the same material that was in that training program, and that became this book. And this was written in 2017 2018 somewhere around there, I can’t remember exactly when, and that’s how this book came to be. Was it was a derivative of the recordings of the thing that I did live in the room, and it has since become pretty much the standard of how everybody, who’s anybody, is doing webinars, which just blows my mind as a small town Iowa boy, former Hari Krishna monk, former rapper, college dropout like have that impact in the world. It’s still surreal to me to this very day.

Jeremy Weisz 9:57 

I want to talk about a lot to unpack there that Vice that Alex Hormozi, what stuck out to him and your conversations, of what he implemented, and if you’re taking a look, if you listen to audio, there’s a video version. We’re on Jason’s website here. So if you think he’s joking, there is a picture of him here as a monk. And I actually scoured that in a little bit, Jason to see if I could find you rapping. I maybe didn’t dig deep enough, but I wanted to find something on there. What did Alex Hormozi take? What did he say that was impactful for him?

Jason Fladlien 10:31 

Yeah, and he’s quoted me very generously in his book, which is nice, because I oftentimes do not get the credit out there, by the way, I’ll take the money or the credit. So if you say, give me the credit or give me the money, just give me the money. I prefer both, if I could get it. So he’s credited me. I believe I am the most quoted person in his book, $100 Million Offers, which is the best-selling book on the subject. And Alex is very intuitive on honing in on the few things that matter the most. So he was able to take in, I taught it under the framework of webinars, and he was able to extract that and apply it in general in business period.

The other thing, if you notice in almost all of Alex’s keynotes in his trainings, one of the things that he does there, there’s two major things that you’ll see him do over and over again. One of those is he always presents a roadmap. He’ll say, these are the four things we’re going to do. Then he teaches the first thing, then he checks it off. Now we’re on the second thing, and he checks that off. And that’s something that I’ve taught. And this is really important, regardless of whether it’s webinars or not, is people need to know where they’re at, where they’ve been, and where they’re going to contextualize all the information that they give. And if they do that, then they learn, and it’s easier for them to understand in bonus points, it’s easier for you to create the content, too.

Now, again, interestingly enough, because I’m the Pioneer that’s breaking the trail to try to figure out the Wild West here, I was applying that really only to webinars, and then Alex takes that and applies it and turns it into keynotes. He turns it into YouTube content and other valuable things. The other thing that you’ll see Alex, Alex will use a lot of the same transitions again, and oftentimes they are word for word replicas of the transitions that I’ve written in this book here, and that I teach to people. You’ll find at least I found this to be true. This is so interesting, and if you think about it, makes logical sense, like if you listen to a comedian, the punchline to the joke is like one sentence, but the setup to the joke could be minutes. So the setup is actually more important than the payoff, and that’s true when you make an offer, and that’s true when you’re training as well.

And so I spend a lot of time on these transitions where I’m transitioning from, say, teaching to selling, or I’m transitioning from one point to another, I spend a massive amount of time to the point where I’ve really got very precise on the language patterns that allow that to happen as easy as possible. And so oftentimes you’ll see a lot of language patterns that Alex and many other people use are the language patterns that I’ve figured out through 1000s of hours of being on live webinars with real people trying to decide whether they should buy the product or not.

Jeremy Weisz 13:23 

What’s an example, Jason, of when you’re talking about transitions?

Jason Fladlien 13:28 

Yeah, so I’ll give you the most common one that I have that people model from what I’ve taught. So it’s a real dilemma when you go from education to selling on a webinar. People oftentime, feel very uncomfortable doing that, like they feel like it’s a bait and switch the presenter does, or they’re usually really comfortable, like experts are really comfortable at the education portion and not so comfortable at the selling portion, and that’s really tough for them to make that transition. And what I try to do is create a transition that puts the presenter in the most comfortable state to then start pitching at the same time make the audience most receptive to hearing the message.

Because if you think about it from this perspective, if it’s the right person who you had in mind when you created the product, then they’re supposed to buy it, like it would be tragedy if they didn’t buy the very thing that is tailor made exactly for them precisely. And so we want to get around that. We don’t want them to not buy something that would cost them more money to say no to than to say yes to. So the transition that I taught people is what we call the two choices transition, where you can say, I’m faced with two choices, I could send you on your way and hope and pray that somehow, all by yourself, left to your own accord, in the dark wilderness, all alone, that you could make a go at this.

And if that was the only option, it would be a worthy ideal to pursue. But there’s another choice. What if we could together work on this? What if I could be accountable for your success? What if I could arm you with every resource and advantage that I could possibly you to help influence your outcome and be alongside of you every step of the way. If that was an option, would you be interested in hearing about it? And everybody says yes to that, and I freestyle it, but like we literally teach an actual exact word for word that people can use for their transitions these days? Well, all it does is contrast the choices. The choice is you could do it alone with no help from me, or you can listen to something that I’ve produced, that you can spend money with, and I’m giving you the choice. And it’s better to have the choice to decide to buy something or not to buy something than to have no choice at all.

And when you frame it to somebody. They get it, they say, oh, wow, yeah, I want to hear what you’ve broke your back on spending 1000s of hours to try to figure out. I want to know what that is. And then you feel really good because you’re like, yeah, if I don’t sell them anything, I take zero active responsibility in their outcome. But if I sell them something, I also have to be accountable to them to some degree. I better deliver something to them. I better have support surrounding to them. I have a more vested interest if I sell you something to see to your outcome. And everybody wants that. Everybody wants to buy something. They just want to buy the thing that’s right for them that gets them far more value than what they invest in.

So when you frame that transition, so they understand that, I’ll give you another one real quickly. Here, everybody’s all freaked out about price all the time. Presenters are very nervous about prices and how they sell on price, and so one of the ways that they’ll do it is they’ll try to minimize price, and they’ll act like it’s not a big deal, or they’ll somehow try to justify it, and that’s okay, that’s not bad. But instead, I try to go out there and say, listen, this is going to hurt a little bit when you make this investment. It’s going to be a stretch for you, and it’s not going to be an easy pill to swallow. It’s going to be a lot, however, when you make this investment and now we’re selling so the transition there is framing it as, yeah, it’s a significant investment, and yeah, it’s going to hurt to do it. Should you do it anyway, though? And so that transition is, it’s one that I use all the time, almost.

My favorite time to use it, by the way, Jeremy, when it’s not that significant of investment. I build it all up, and then they find out it’s only $500 or whatever. Like, dude, you’re crazy, man, this thing is a steal. And I’m like, I guess you’re right, but I’m always trying to frame the price as, yeah, it’s super expensive, and it’s still worth it, versus most people, they’re transitioning where they don’t even want to acknowledge the premium version of what they have, and then they’re using the standard kind of communication that anybody would use to sell anything. So to me, the transition is, how do we position this thing so when somebody hears that, it has the most impact. And so the transition is the most powerful way when you go from communicate or content to selling, and also the transition when you go from price to value or value to price.

You should really think about those, how you switch from one point to another, because you can set them up in ways where people are now eager and excited to know versus if you don’t set them up, then they’re very passive. They’ll listen to you, but they won’t really absorb it.

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