As a business owner, mom, and wife, Megan Sumrell is no stranger to juggling #allthethings. But the great thing is, she gets to do it while being 100% present in everything and STILL having time for herself.
Megan’s 20+ years of experience in her former role in the software/IT space as a quality architect taught her a lot about creating systems and processes to turn complete chaos into harmony. For those in the know, she is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Certified Scrum Trainer, Certified Software Test Professional, and has a few other big-time titles to her name!
She is the creator of the TOP Program and TOP Planner, a program and planner that teaches her proprietary planning and productivity system and processes. In simple terms, she helps women create work and life harmony by mastering time management, organization, and productivity.
Her program, “How to Plan, Manage, and Organize Your Life…Even With a Crazy and Unpredictable Schedule” helps women ditch overwhelm and achieve work and life harmony. She coaches busy, exhausted women on a unique time management strategy through her company The Pink Bee.
Megan had modest success selling her online course, but she wanted to find a way to scale her business and grow her revenue without disrupting the boundaries that are so important to her. She looked for ways to automate her program and found the Circuit Sales System.
Automating her course sales has totally changed the way she is able to approach and continue to build her business. Let’s find out how she embraced the Circuit Sales System (after much hesitation and second-guessing!) to achieve an 83% profit margin selling her online course.
Marketing Tactics With Limited Success
When Megan thinks back to the first time launching her product years ago with a live event, she was clueless as to whether anyone would actually buy it or not. At the end of it, just one person bought it.
With so much hype in her community of business owners around evergreen, she then decided to hop on the bandwagon and get herself an evergreen webinar.
After investing a lot of time and energy into learning how to do a webinar the right way, Megan assumed it would bring in money on autopilot. But she made just one sale, and it was to someone who had gone to her live event and had followed her for a long time. Over the next four months, she made only one more sale. At that point, she’d spent more money on the software to support the evergreen webinar system than she had earned in sales!
In the meantime, she was continuing to run some live launches, which brought in money and showed her that she did have a product that people are willing to purchase. But the evergreen model simply wasn’t working and whenever she used live launches as evergreen, she got nothing.
Megan shifted to doing one big live event per quarter. Although it resulted in extremely high profit margins, she was craving more consistent revenue each month. She knew how much of a financial gamble live launching was and that if something went wrong just one quarter, it would have an enormous impact.
On top of that, live events were a huge energy drain. “I love nothing more than interacting with my community live. But man, I feel like it takes me 10 days to recover from just showing up live for 30 minutes a day! I’m always open to exploring what can I do to remove the live and the time-sensitive nature out of my business to free up both the emotional energy and the time and the unexpected,” she says.
Megan understands that many business owners face the frustrations of traditional marketing tactics. “We’ve all been through it where we’ve literally done the exact same thing and it’s gone gangbusters and a month later it’s crickets and there’s literally no explanation. And so, I just needed to find ways to have my program always automatically selling itself.”
At the same time, Megan knew she didn’t have to say goodbye to live events forever. “There are some things I adore doing live, and I will continue doing those. But now I get to come with the energy of ‘this is the cherry on top, and I’m showing up here because I love it’ instead of the nervousness of ‘my revenue and my business is depending upon this’. So, I get to show up with a completely different energy in my events now than before. And it feels really good.”
The Power of the Circuit Sales System
After hearing Nicki give a talk about the CSS, Megan implemented *some* aspects of it that she thought would fit. But—like a toddler with selective hearing—she picked out and implemented the parts of it that felt good to her and ignored the parts that were scary.
Admittedly, that didn’t lead to a great deal of success. But Megan doesn’t like to learn anything the easy way and, having not invested in the course at this point, she also didn’t have full skin in the game.
Megan had to fight against her fears of not having her program available for sale all the time. She told herself that people wouldn’t buy it and she wouldn’t make any money. And if she suddenly told people that they could enroll now, she would come across as pushy. None of those are true, but that was the fear-based conversation she was having with herself.
Because Megan had also had a lot of success with one particular bootcamp that she ran, she truly believed that people needed to spend that amount of time with her in order to feel comfortable purchasing, instead of just flipping on the switch (even though she has purchased products herself that cost far more than her program just minutes into listening to someone talk!). But our good old friend resistance was making her come up with every excuse not to go all in on the Circuit.
It’s a perfect example of the danger of the sunk cost fallacy—even when we’ve been doing something and it hasn’t worked, it can be very hard to transition to something new and different simply because we’ve been doing it a certain way for so long.
“Both of those felt just challenging for me because, again, it was a fear-based—not from any intellectual, great marketing skills that I had telling me otherwise. It was sheer fear-based.
“I really had to have a lot of internal dialogue with myself before I went all in on the true Circuit Sales System. If I’m going to invest my time and money in this, I have to trust the process. I’m paying for this because this is [Nicki’s] area of expertise, not mine.”
The Need to Automate
Megan was drawn to the Circuit Sales system because she loves automation. “I’m a tech geek at heart. So anytime there’s a chance to play with technology, I’m instantly going to be drawn to it.”
As a mother of a younger daughter who she homeschools part-time, she didn’t have 40 hours a week to work. “But I have big dreams and big goals, and I want to help as many women as possible. And the only way I can do that is to say, ‘what can I automate? How can I create systems of this?’ Because it can’t be me live all the time. Because if that’s the case, then I would’ve maxed out my revenue potential 18 months ago with the business.”
Another bonus Megan hadn’t expected came after she spent the long hours building her Circuit. She realized that the assets she had built could be repurposed over and over. They’re foundational assets that she now uses to give talks, promote herself in social media, write articles, and more!
A Look at the Numbers: 83% Profit Margin
In case you want to know just what’s possible from a growth perspective, let’s take a look at Megan’s numbers. Her core program is one that lists at $597. They only have five days where they can get it for $497 and she did all her projections and planning based off that lower number. “I’ve never sold this product for $597. Every time I do an event, I always offer it for $497. I have almost 50% of my sales coming in at $597.”
“I want to be fully transparent because I think people don’t talk about this enough. All people want to do when it comes to business is go, ‘I had a six-figure launch and it was amazing.’ And then you kind of want to throw a punch, right? I launched my Circuit and invited people who are already on my list through it. They’re not even warm leads, they’re hot leads, and that’s something you teach us to do. And I was thinking, ‘no one’s going to buy it; they’ve all had the opportunity before. I had a week where I had 10% conversion organically of people who were just sitting on my list. That’s huge!
“How do I scale and grow my reach, revenue and profit without disrupting the boundaries that are important to me with my time?
Have I mastered it? No. Has it been scary? Hell yes. But am I very profitable and getting a cost per customer at a fantastic rate? You bet! So I get continued validation that I what I have built 100% works and sells my system.”
“Now, when it comes to the true cold traffic, what I loved by doing it through that list first was it proved to me, this Circuit can sell things. They didn’t need to spend five days with me. This works. And I continue to see people coming to my website, opting in on their own, and purchasing.”
“I get super excited that I can look at my revenue from my Circuit alone, including my ad spend, is running at an 83% profit margin. My cost to acquire a purchaser is $80 right now.”
A New Way of Selling Her Online Course—and a Better Work-Life Balance
Megan says a large part of being a business owner is having data to look at and understanding what matters. Riding the emotional rollercoaster of Facebook Ads is tricky, but necessary and Megan cautions against getting obsessed with cost per lead and focusing instead on cost to acquire an actual customer—great advice!
She recommends taking a step back and looking at revenue from one time of year versus the last. For Megan, it’s nearly DOUBLED, and that’s without doing any of those big live events that she’d done before—just once-a-month live coaching calls. She is now serving more people and loves the steady stream of people coming in instead of the unpredictability of live launching.
Megan has weeks where her sales are higher through other avenues. and she encourages other business owners to build relationships, get affiliates, get themselves out there, and publish.
“I have the time to explore all those other things because I’m not spending all this live time and energy. Last month there were no live events, no nothing. I spent the month tweaking and adding enhancements to my Circuit and then building out the relationships and building new organic streams coming into it. I’m so much more working on my business than in my business ever before—and I love it.”
Read More
Megan found a way to work ON her business and not IN her business successfully. Here are some other tactics to avoid burnout when you build your online business.
Watch More
In this episode of Energize Your Online Business podcast, Nicki is joined by Megan who shares how automating her course sales has changed the way she is able to approach and continue to build her business. Megan digs into how the CSS has allowed her to spend so much more time working ON her business versus IN her business than ever before. Check it out now!
Your Turn!
Does Megan’s story resonate with you and your experience selling your online course or program? We’d love to hear from you! Comment below!