Hey, hey, welcome to the Summit Host Hangout Podcast where you'll learn how to host a high converting virtual summit that leads to your biggest signature offer launch yet. I'm your host, Krista from Summit in a Box. And now that we're back from holiday break, I wanted to circle back to the summit we hosted in December, and give you a little behind the scenes look of it. So December sixth through eighth, we hosted Sell with a Summit: Course Creator Edition, which was the first summit I hosted for Summit in a Box in over two years, so it was long overdue. We've hosted lots of summits since then for a different business, but it's been a while since Summit in a Box has hosted a summit. And really that's because I kind of hesitate to host summits for this business, because it's not the best positioning wise, like our target audience for this business is really any business owner who wants to grow. You know, specifically now that we have the Accelerator, it's more advanced business owners, course creators, things like that, but even that, even the course creator audience is still a really tough audience for something like a summit, and I know that.
So you know, it makes me hesitate to host a summit. I know, you know, when we go about it the right way, when we have the right goals, and the right mindset, and really get intentional about things in our decisions, it works out just fine, but it's just a big undertaking. And summits, bigger summits for a different business I have that is targeted a little differently has big events, bigger and better. But we needed the the results that summits bring for Summit in a Box, so we decided to go ahead and tackle it. So like I said it was called Sell with a Summit: Course Creator Edition. So it was a summit about summit to help course creators sell their offers through summit. It was three days long, we had, I want to say 17 speakers, we had some pre-party sessions, presentations were available for 24 hours, we had all-access pass, of course, and we launched our Launch with a Summit Accelerator through it, obviously. So they are just kind of spitting some information out at you about the event to give you a little context.
Our goals for this summit. First and foremost, were to walk our talk, you know, like I do notice the fact that we haven't hosted a summit for this for this business about summits in over two years. And regardless of what my reasoning is for that even though it is strategic, like, I still want to be doing the thing I teach, you know, even though I am doing it elsewhere, at least every once in a while. I also wanted us to have our own chance to test launching a high ticket program through a summit. So you know, overall, our strategies up to this point have been based on the strategies we use for launching a course through summit plus our own internal strategies for launching our high ticket program. We were able to test that with a sponsor, we've had some clients do it and see great results, but I wanted us to do it for us. So that was another goal. We needed leads, you know, before we relied really heavily on Facebook ads for leads, which worked until it didn't, So our leads have really been slow for the last year or more, and I was at a place where I was like, we need to do something to get leads, I know a summit is the answer. You know, it's we're not going to have record breaking numbers or anything like that, but I know some it will get us leads and it did, so that was a big reason we decided to go for it.
Cash injection is always good. You know, we'd like to launch a few times a year to reengage people on on our email list, get those cash injections, so that was a big part of it. I wanted to nurture some connections with people in the industry. And I wanted a chance to experiment with a whole bunch of things. You know, I'm always hesitant to experiment with our clients and students. If I do, I of course make it very clear to them like: Hey, I thought of this, I've never tried it, but here's an idea. I want in my own chance to be that what happens if I do this, so that's always fun to do, but those are the reasons we went ahead and hosted this summit. As for like results, these days, I only share detailed breakdowns of numbers and all of our experiments and lessons with our Launch with a Summit Accelerator clients, but I thought it would be fun to share at least a few of our biggest takeaways with you, so I have five of them here for us to go through.
So the first takeaway I want to share is that hosting a summit in December is just fine. We over the past, let's see 2020 and 2021, we ran really successful challenges in December, so I kind of had that experience to base our decision on and people always ask us about December summits. You know, it comes up quite often in the Facebook group of course, especially as the month of December is approaching that people are like this work to host the summit in December? Are people checked out? And I've seen a lot of people say not to do it. But because of our success running challenges in December. I was like, give it a try. For me. I will choose December over September or October, any day, because of how many dang people are launching in September and October. It also worked with our schedule, though. Well, I thought it was gonna work with our schedule, it was rough doing this plus producing the clients, I'm gonna at the same time. But originally it was going to work with our schedule until we took on that client summit.
As for like results of hosting a summit in December, I don't think it really made any kind of difference. At least like I don't, I didn't see any direct impact in numbers, or not a strong enough impact for me to notice. On the positive side, all of our speakers were available, because they hadn't planned lunches of their own in December, and there was very little competition with other people launching or other people hosting summits. Like, I think I noticed like one other summit in our niche happening during that time. And it was a summit for course creators, which is usually has a lot of people launching all the things all the time. So that was definitely a positive for us, there just wasn't a whole lot of competition. Some things to consider, that I noticed with hosting a summit in December is that usually, at least for me, December is a time to slow down and reflect, catch up on things work on projects that, you know, should be done to improve the business. But we didn't have time for the rest of the year. We definitely didn't do that, because we had a summit happening.
So I definitely missed out on that. I ended up doing our planning and reflection stuff over Christmas break instead, because I just didn't have time before that between hosting this summit and our client's summit. So that's something to consider, it'll definitely make your month of December less stressful. You'll also want to consider having a longer promotion timeline to account for the US Thanksgiving holiday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all of the noise that happens in there. We opened our registration the week before that, so it was, our registration period was about a week longer than normal. Because I wanted to give us and our speakers time to get promotion in wherever it felt good to them, not really expecting anyone to do any type of promotion over the holiday and you know, those big sale days and stuff like that, so that's that's something to keep in mind.
And then I guess it is possible that it affected our all-access pass conversion rate, since that number did seem a little lower than I was expecting not significantly, but a little bit. And when I think back, a lot of the offers that our speakers contributed to or all-access pass were the same offers that they had just run Big Black Friday sales for. So it's possible that that had an effect, but I have no way to prove it, and it's definitely not enough for me to like stay away from December summits in the future. It's just something that like could have been a thing might not have been, I have no proof just kind of a thought there. So overall, running a summit in December works just fine, as long as you don't mind having a busy month, busy end of the year, and things like that, but I don't think I don't think there was necessarily anything negative about it.
My second takeaway I wanted to share is that you can really use your summit to make a difference, and like I already know this. I think way back in the early days of the podcast, I kind of had a quick episode talking about a few ways to make a difference through a summit like you can donate profit and things like that, which we do. But you can also include presentations that have the opportunity to to change your industry, or change the way people think. And about three-ish summits ago, I started including a series in my summits called Let's Do Better. So just kind of ways for people to, or I guess a way for me to draw attention to, things that I wish people were thinking about that they weren't. So for example, in our design summit, we had presentations on like sustainable design or green design, making accessible websites, inclusivity, for designers and things like that. Things we want to draw people's attention to. And I love that opportunity to sneak in that type of impact and teaching and highlight those types of speakers and those topics along with all the strategy stuff.
So I decided to do that in this summit as well. Since I had a platform through the summit, and the audience who was there to learn how to host a summit would go on to have platforms of their own, to potentially continue to spread that message, which I thought was so powerful, so I actually did this in two different ways. The first way I did it, which was like, you know, maybe less meaningful on a wider scale, but I think very meaningful to the people and their businesses was our pre-party sessions. So in this summit, we were teaching people how to launch a course with a summit. Think about that launching a course is a pretty big deal. Launching a summit is a really big deal. We were telling people to put those two things together. That is a lot. That's a big project, and like my goal with this is not for people to go on and like destroy themselves trying to do this big project. We want them to go about it the right way. So in our pre party sessions, we were we taught people about launching without burnout. That was the theme of our pre-party sessions. So we had sessions on like taking care of yourself, preventing launch burnout, and basically like having a manageable to do list and handling your tasks well. And I'm so glad we included those things, because it's so important to take care of yourself and make sure you're avoiding burnout and manage everything well when you're working on projects like this. So that was really fun to include, I think that was a really good addition.
The second thing we did is that we did have a couple of those, let's do better type presentations, and I did kind of include those as that theme. We only did two because we only had two days of presentations, but we had a presentation on creating inclusive and accessible events, and a session on inclusive payment plans. And yet, like I said, this was so important to me, because not only did I have a platform, but these people were gonna go on to create their own platform. And summits are a really powerful way to either let people in or really leave them out. So that's why we wanted to have the inclusive and accessible events session. And then one thing that really kind of irks me about the course creator space is how people handle their payment plans. And I'm not gonna give away too much because I want to have this guest on the podcast. But that session blew up as people watched it probably going in expecting to kind of be defensive, but instead, realizing the way that they had been taught to handle payment plans and price their payment plans actually doesn't align with the values they say they have. And it was so cool to see there were in the summit, there were all kinds of actionable strategy focused sessions, but this one, by far made the biggest splash and led to a ton of great discussion in the Facebook group, and it was just great.
It was so good, honestly. I will ask her to be able to reuse that presentation or re-interview her and every summit that I host for this audience in the future because it was such a great and powerful way to see an immediate impact in other course, creators businesses, and that's exactly what I was going for. So like I said, I'll try to get this guest on the podcast as soon as I can, but I would love for you to take some time to think about how you can include presentations that will make a positive change in your industry or in the world or whatever, whatever that looks like. Get creative. Think about that. You can include those things right in with your main presentations, you can have them in a pre party session, you can have them in your own category. But you're creating a really powerful platform where you can make a change if you want to, so I would just encourage you to use that opportunity.
Alright, on to takeaway number three, which is surprising nobody, the fact that relationships pay off, specifically here when it comes time to pitch. That's where I really noticed it with this one. So we have several episodes on this podcast that talk about the importance of relationships, and how they increase the likelihood that speakers will say yes. We'll link to those, a couple of those at least, in the show notes. But I always love to see it in practice, even though I know it to be true. So we pitched some pretty big names for this summit, and not only, you know, bigger names, but people who I know are very picky with what opportunities they say yes to because they have to be they're pitched for all kinds of stuff, they have to be picky. And I was freaking out before pitching these people. I was talking to our team, and I was recording a behind the scenes podcast that people some people could get access to as a part of the summit, and I was freaking out before I made these pitches. And Elli told me a few people she wanted me to put on my pitch list. I was like, oh my gosh, no way. I can't do it. But I was like, well, no, I'm going to do it. What would I tell one of our students? They can't say yes, unless you ask them. So I'm going to ask them.
So I did kind of change up my pitch strategy a little bit, I took a different route that felt good. I leveraged my relationships that I had with these people and also like acknowledged, hey, I know you're busy here. Here's this thing I have for you. Here's how I'm gonna make it really easy for you. All but one of them said yes. All cooperated in the process of like getting what we needed from them. Which if you posted this before, you know, it's like herding cats to get those presentations. If you have not, here's your warning, all of them also promoted at least a little. And you know, the bigger names tend to be the people who don't promote. I'm gonna talk about that more, I think maybe two episodes from now. But there's no way these people would have said yes to a cold pitch. And it was really fun to see the stress that I put on relationships throughout all of our business in action. Not only did they say yes, they were excited to say yes, they were excited to support the summit. A couple of them were like, well, duh, I'll do this. Even though I totally expected them to say no. Even though we had those relationships, like I said they're bigger names who are pickier about things. And honestly, I was just really honored that they said yes, but it was because of those relationships, so get to work on that if there hasn't been a focus for you yet.
The fourth takeaway I want to talk about is that I just love the addition of podcast feeds. This one's kind of a more fun takeaway, I guess. And I know like audio summits are things people do and talk about. There are reasons I haven't done one, don't plan to do one. I don't know, we won't get into that. But in the past, the only way I have included audio feeds or podcast feeds, is in a private podcast feed of presentations for all all-access pass buyers to have access to. This time around, I went all in with the podcast feed, so we had that one that people who bought, the higher, no, either tier of the all-access pass could get access to, to be able to listen to the presentations on the go anytime. I also added a behind the scenes of the summit, private podcast feed for our higher tier all-access pass buyer. So if they bought the higher tier by all-access pass, they could go listen, listen to episodes I had recorded through the past, like three months of planning the summit every step of the way. Here's what I'm thinking through. Here's what we decided. Here's me freaking out about going to pitch these speakers. Oh, they all said yes. You know, like they heard every step of the process. So we included that.
We also included a attendee only private podcast to get them up to speed on summits share success stories of our clients and like drive actions we wanted them to take. And this was also really intentional, because I did not want to have like 101 style summit presentations in the summit itself. But I also just didn't want to assume that everyone coming to the summit, knew what a summit was, knew how it worked knew the basics. So I use this private podcast as a way to get those people up to speed. And then you know, build some awareness of our program, show off client results and show them what was possible through the client results and things like that. So that was really cool. That was something new we experimented with, along with that, behind the scenes, podcasts as well. And then a last minute thing I decided to add, like literally, I think Day 1 of the summit, I decided to add presentation feed access for everyone. So even if someone had the free ticket, we let them access the presentation feed, as long as the regular presentations are available, so they could listen to them for 24 hours, which I'm really glad I did. People really enjoyed that. So I'll definitely do that again as well.
But overall, I loved having all of these podcast feeds, the behind the scenes feed wasn't nearly as big of a hit as I'd expected. Overall, we usually get really great feedback when we do behind the scenes type episodes and trainings and things like that, so I thought people would love this. But at least as of last time I checked, there were very, very few people who even bothered to download the episodes, let alone listen to them. So I wouldn't do that again, for myself, but it was fun to make. And I think it was worth a try, and it was a good experiment. The other ones though, were were really fun and overall easy to create. The one that was the most work was, of course, that private attendee podcast since it was new content we had to create. But now we have that podcast to reuse in the future, I could use it as a bonus somewhere, we could use it as a list builder, I can use it to supplement other events, we host moving forward and just have to kind of update the calls to action and stuff like that. So not only was it a great experience during the summit, we got really great feedback on it, but now it's something we have to leverage moving forward. And we are also working now strategy into our client's summit too. So I'm excited to get some more proof as to what works and how it works and what it can do and things like that. But overall, we saw it as a great way to build trust and give people a taste of our business since this podcast is a big part of what we do. And our programs have like, you know, video elements or elements, you can listen to the podcast feeds as a part of our programs as well. I felt like building that into the summit was a good way to give them a taste into how our business works.
All right. final takeaway is that summits work for high ticket offers. I already knew this, of course, and you can hear more about it in Episode 182 with Shannon Mattern, where we talked about how we launched her high ticket program through my summit, but I really wanted to test it ourselves. We saw it work there. We've seen it work with our clients. But I wanted our own results to speak from and experiment with and tweak and experience basically. So I definitely learned a few lessons throughout this process that could have gotten us even better results. Not necessarily like overall strategy wise, but more things that are specific to our business that I'll probably break down more with accelerator clients. But overall the conversion rates of people who applied for our program from the summit and then joined, we're really good. That was great to see. And the reason that this takeaway is the fact that this works, is because we got our first ever live sales on the webinar we launched with during the summit.
We have never made live sales on a webinar for this specific program before. Typically people want more time to think about it. They want more time to ask us questions, things like. As where, you know, if we launch a course or something we expect quite a few sales live, but for this offer, we've never seen one before. And we had two people purchase live on this webinar. And to me, that says a lot about how effectively the summit warmed up the people who were a good fit and gave them the opportunity to get to know myself, my team and what we're all about. Because we did build in some aspects from the Accelerator into the summit. We did like copy reviews. We did set up positioning hot seats. We did a Q&A session. I was all over in the podcasts and things like that. So they got to experience us, which I think really removed some hesitation from people going ahead and feeling comfortable making that purchase right away without talking to us more. And then there were a couple of people who had been on the fence for a long time, who were like, oh my gosh, yes, now I'm ready to go because of the summit. So again, there are some things I'd change just for our business overall, specifically with how we position the summit. But this was so fun to see, and I'm excited to be able to like apply what we learned and saw to our Accelerator clients launching their high ticket programs.
If you're ready to host a high converting virtual summit to replace your slow growth marketing strategies, and use it to lead into your biggest course launch yet, I've got an exclusive training just for you. This training is for those who are interested in working with me in our Launch with a Summit Accelerator to host a summit that blows industry standards out of the water, uses feel good engagement based strategies to create an amazing experience for everyone involved, seamlessly leads into your biggest course launch yet, and sets you up for additional post summit profits on the back end. Inside the Accelerator, we help our clients consistently host life and business changing virtual summits and in the free private training, I'll show you exactly how it works along with all kinds of examples. So apply for an invite to the Launch with a Summit Accelerator and a training at summithosthangout.com/apply.
So I hope you enjoy listening to this little behind the scenes episode. It's fun for me to record, and thank you just for tuning in. So for show notes and resources mentioned head to summithosthangout.com/208. I don't ask for this often. But if you are up for leaving us a review on iTunes, I would really really appreciate it. You know, it helps. It helps to have those nice reviews. It helps for people looking for a podcast about segments to go to find out and see that there are people saying good things about it. So please take a couple minutes to leave a review if you're a listener and haven't done that yet. Thank you so much. In the next episode, we'll go back to what everyone else was thinking about while I was hosting this summit and I will share a look into some goals and what I'm leaving behind and stepping into in this new year. So a little late to share an episode like that but better late than never right? We'll go with that. For now, go out and take action to plan, strategize and launch your high converting virtual Summit.
