Offering discounts is a pretty popular selling tactic—you only need to open your inbox to see the evidence! There’s no doubt we LOVE discounts…as consumers. But as a course creator, you need to think a bit carefully before slashing prices in the hope of making some extra sales.
No one knows this better than Circuit Sales System student Krista, who got caught in a cycle of throwing an offer out there, and inevitably discounting it to squeeze out more revenue.
The result? A list that was burned out, confused, and quickly losing trust in her brand.
Here we look at how putting her offer on a Circuit allowed Krista to build back her integrity, re-engage her audience, and massively improve conversions.
The Birth of Motherhood Simplified
Krista founded Motherhood Simplified back in 2018, after realizing the impact of decluttering on her life.
Krista and her family uprooted to Florida in 2013 with just the bare essentials, allowing them to focus on what truly mattered.
However, it wasn’t until five years later, with the arrival of a new baby, that Krista truly grasped the power of her decluttering philosophy. Observing friends drowning in the chaos of everyday tasks, she realized the extraordinary difference decluttering had made in her own life.
Now, Krista has created a community to teach other moms to declutter their homes so they can benefit from more time and energy.
Starting to Sell
In the early days of her entrepreneurial journey, Krista started a Facebook group, where she invited friends—predominantly pregnant at the time—to join her in discovering the benefits of a decluttered life. She recognized that building a community passionate about her offerings would lay the foundation for something more substantial.
The Facebook group became a hub for interactive challenges—all shaped by her audience’s needs. Through these small-scale free challenges, she could offer practical tips and turn her audience’s frustrations into manageable solutions. The enthusiasm and positive response from these challenges fueled the growth of her community through word of mouth.
Krista then experimented with packaging one of her free challenges into a paid online course to see if it would sell. It started out at $7, which got around 10 people in and from then, Krista has continued to increase the price, until it eventually turned into the course that she has today.
But all of a sudden it started to get a bit muddy what was actually working for her and what wasn’t: “I was in a cycle of telling myself, ‘okay, I’m going to do one launch, I’m going to do one challenge, and I’m going to build up some revenue, and then I’m going to figure out what to do in between to make it so that I don’t have to do this anymore.’ And so I would do that. And I would do the launch, or I would do the challenge, and it would work. And I would get some revenue and basically buy myself some time to figure out what to do next. But then I would never quite figure out what to do in between.”
In hindsight, Krista can see that she was burning out her audience and her discounts became far too predictable. All that was doing was training her audience to wait for the discounted price, while slowly eroding her own credibility. Krista admits, “I was selling my offers short, I think, because I was just focused on the sale. And so I’d pull out a part of my course and be like, well, if you don’t want to buy the whole thing, you can buy this one little thing. And it was just so that I could meet revenue or just so that I could figure out how to make it work. And I don’t regret doing that because I think everybody has to figure out what to do. But also it wasn’t sustainable.”
Circuit Success
In Krista’s words: “I just had a whole bunch of Legos on the floor and had no instructions on how to actually build a thing. I just needed the instructions.” And that’s where the Circuit Sales System stepped in.
Before, when Krista was running launches and challenges and blindly throwing things out there, it wasn’t structured enough to actually test and tweak in a consistent way. Now, her Circuit provides her with a strong, structured system that is easy to adjust and works long-term.
One of the biggest things that got Krista refocused was the market research element of the course. Those market research questions got Krista back in touch with the main struggles of her audience and made the building process much easier. She used that building time to snippets and quotes from her market research calls with no agenda other than getting them interested and re-engaged.
Krista was then able to put out the free training video, which everybody was excited about because she had already been talking to them about all of their pain points. And instead of talking from a place of desperation, she was talking from a place of empathy and expertise. That shone through in her opt-in pages and the video very clearly. So much so, when she sent it out to her entire list, she saw an amazing conversion rate of 15%!
(Yes, that’s the *same* list that was confused and exhausted by the way Krista had been trying to engage with them!)
Krista’s Newfound Creative Freedom
Krista’s Circuit has not only impacted her conversions, it has also given her much more creative freedom: “I have the base thing, but I can also be a little bit more creative. I’ve created some decluttering supplemental tracks for people, which they really love. So that’s fun, which wouldn’t have been possible for me before if I was so focused on just trying to get things to sell.”
Krista has also found a new love for her podcast now that she doesn’t feel the pressure to sell to people all the time. She’s also had a lot more space to create social content and has been enjoying the creative freedom to make reels with messaging that pulls in the right people. She finds it much easier to just direct people to her free training across these different marketing channels, making the whole process a lot more fun for her.
Building Back Trust
One of the parts that Krista has found most surprising about her Circuit is that her full price offer sells just as well as her initial offer. Her full price offer converts at 9% compared to her initial offer, which sells at 4%!
Before, Krista knew people weren’t buying at full price because they knew eventually, there would be a random discount. But she doesn’t do that anymore. And with the initial Circuit that she sent out, she was very specific in telling them that she wouldn’t be doing that anymore.
That allowed her to build back the trust in what she was saying and that the price they were seeing was the price she was sticking to.
“That integrity really helps people understand that this is your opportunity right now. And it’s not going to just come around. I’m not going to decide later that I’m decreasing the prices or anything like that. And I think that’s an important part of building that relationship with all of our customers and our clients. It’s given me that foundation and that predictability for my own revenue.”
Incorporating Live Events
Krista is proof that you don’t have to give up on the live events that you love, you enjoy doing, and your community loves. You *can* make them all work together and still get that predictability of income.
Krista always likes to do an October challenge called “ghost your clutter”. Now, she has enough understanding of the backend of her business to know that she can stop her Circuit a month before to promote her live challenge.
That means people don’t get confused by what they see on social media versus their email. She still wants to add those parts of her business that she enjoys and that is completely possible alongside her Circuit now–the only difference is she can choose to do it just once a year rather than all the time!
Handling Feedback
Something Krista struggled with when she launched her Circuit was getting feedback from people who had watched the free training but were angry that they didn’t get everything for free.
While it was tough to hear, Krista soon came to realize that no matter what you do, there’s always going to be somebody who’s mad that you didn’t give them enough—even if you gave everything away for free! (Trust us when we say some people are seriously *impossible* to please!)
Unfortunately, we tend to give comments like these much more weight than all of the other positive comments and emails we receive. But the truth is, these are clearly not the people that you want in your program anyway if they are so entitled and expect everything for free.
Luckily, CSS has helped Krista to handle feedback differently now: “I think having the structure of the Circuit and knowing that it works for way more people than it doesn’t, makes it easier for you to grow that ability to take that kind of feedback and not make it mean something about you.”
Reflecting on the CSS Journey
The CSS has been game-changing for Krista in being able to sell and scale her offer on autopilot. For anyone questioning whether this is the right move for them, she offers this advice:
“If you’ve been trying to figure out how to set up a good, solid structure and system for yourself, do it. If you’re the type of person who especially struggles with creating your own accountability or your own boundaries, this will set them up for you. I think that was the biggest thing for me—when you’re an entrepreneur online, you don’t usually start with a team or with other people who can show you where your blind spots are or give you insight into where your boundaries need to be stronger. So if you struggle with those kinds of things, the boundaries, the structure, the consistency, just get it because you will be able to take it and use it, but then it will naturally be something that you can apply to all of the other areas of your business.”
Watch More
In this episode of the Energize Your Online Business podcast, we check in with Krista, who shares her experience of implementing the Circuit Sales System. After periodically offering discounts to her audience, Krista had begun to lose credibility. Since switching on her Circuit, we hear how introducing a Circuit not only re-engaged her list and built back her integrity, but also led to a conversion rate of 15%!
Your Turn!
Have you implemented your Circuit and found success like Krista? We’d love to hear about it! Tell us in the comments below.