As a business owner, mom, and wife, Megan Sumrell knows exactly how hard it is to juggle #allthethings while still maintaining your own sense of self and purpose.
Megan is a former corporate executive turned entrepreneur who now teaches a proprietary system based on over 20 years in her former corporate life in the software/IT space as a quality architect. 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!
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,” turns “chaos into harmony.” She coaches busy, overwhelmed women on a unique time management strategy through her company The Pink Bee.
Megan had modest success selling her online course, but she was looking for a way to scale her business and grow her revenue without disrupting the boundaries that are important to her. She looked for ways to automate her program and found the Circuit Sales System.
Automating her course sales has changed the way she is able to approach and continue to build her business. Learn how she embraced the Circuit Sales System (after much hesitation and second-guessing!) and achieved an 83% profit margin selling her online course.
Marketing Tactics With Limited Success
Megan recalls her first time launching her product years ago with a live event. Like many first-timers, she didn’t know if anyone was going to buy it or not. One person did.
She then decided she needed an evergreen webinar and thought it was going to bring in money on autopilot.
She made only 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 had only one more sale. At that point, she’d spent more money on the software to support the evergreen webinar system than she earned in sales!
She continued to run some live launches about four times a year that brought in money, but the evergreen thing wasn’t working. When she used live launches as evergreen, she got nothing. Then she shifted to one big event per quarter. That resulted in extremely high profit margins, but she wanted consistent revenue every single month because she acknowledged how precarious it was if something went wrong just one quarter.
Also, live events were a huge energy drain. “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 it’s the same frustration many business owners face. “We’ve all been through 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.”
She knew that didn’t mean she had 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 into my events now than before. And it feels really good.”
The Power of the Circuit Sales System
Megan heard Nicki give a talk about the CSS and implemented some aspects of it that she thought would fit. Admittedly, that selective program didn’t work. She had to fight against her fears of having her program available for sale all the time and feeling pushy encouraging people to enroll. She fought against thinking that because she had success with this particular bootcamp that people needed to spend that time with her in order to pay. They had to be with her live in order for them to feel comfortable purchasing.
“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 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 she hadn’t expected came after she spent the long hours building her Circuit. She realized that the assets she used 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
Megan wants other entrepreneurs to understand what’s possible from a growth perspective. Her core program is one that you lists at $597. They only have five days where they can get it for $497. She did all her projections and planning based off $497. She never sells. “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. (She also says it’s important to ride the emotional rollercoaster of Facebook Ads, for example. She 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.
Today Megan is no longer doing any of those exhausting live events and she’s serving more people. She now offers once-a-month live coaching calls.
She used to hold a live event and get maybe six people. Now she has a stream of new people who come in every month. The rest of the community doesn’t feel like the entire call is about talking to new people
She says that she has weeks where her sales are higher through other avenues. In turn, she encourages other business owners to build relationships, get affiliates, get themselves out there, and also 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!