In this LMScast episode, Kay Peacey discusses her knowledge and perspectives on creating and managing the Active Campaign Academy, an online learning environment that teaches users how to make the most of the Active Campaign marketing automation platform. Also she shares about the Masterclass presentation.

Kay Peacey is an Entrepreneur and educator. She is from Active Campaign. Her experience in education led her to naturally gravitate into teaching, even though she began her career as an Active Campaign consultant.

About two and a half years ago, Kay made the decision to launch a membership-based Academy in place of regular classes. She can support small teams using Active Campaign globally thanks to this membership model.

She finds it fascinating that companies of all sizes, from one-person operations to multinational conglomerates, frequently confront comparable difficulties and need comparable training and direction. Kay stresses the value of having autonomous instructors and technological platform specialists.

Kay lists Lifter LMS, Divi for WordPress websites, WP Fusion for connectors, WooCommerce subscriptions for pricing. And Circle for community involvement as part of her tech stack. Kay concludes by outlining the elements of her educational program at the Active Campaign Academy, which consists of live calls (office hours), resources, courses, and a community platform.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. She’s back on the show. It’s KPC creator of active campaign Academy. We use active campaign at Lifter LMS, and I’ve learned countless things from Kay. She’s literally probably the most power user of active campaign in the world.

She’s an educator, she’s built an online education. Business around her active campaign knowledge and helping business owners and active campaign users get into the tool, grow, scale, automate. Welcome back to the show. Okay.

Kay Peacey: Oh, thank you for having me back again, Chris. It’s just such a pleasure sharing the journey with you.

It really is. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s so great to have you always love our conversations for those who don’t know what it is. Can you describe what? You’ve built with active campaign Academy, which you can go find over at Kay’s website, slick business. co.

Kay Peacey: Yeah. I started out some years ago doing consultancy in active campaign and found that most of the time I was actually teaching people because we all like to be in control.

We want to be in the driving seat of the powerful tech that we own. And. Because I have teaching skills. I started out as a math teacher for teenagers way back in the day. So I have the teaching skills and it seemed to me like a very natural fit to fill that gap when nobody was really leading the way on how do I use this incredible marketing tech email automation platform, active campaign.

And so I decided rather than going down the courses route, because I love courses, but tech like active campaign, that is a big landscape. There’s a lot in there. My feeling was very much that it needed to be a membership. And so I created the active campaign Academy around two and a half years ago, and we’ve been serving members ever since we serve small teams from all over the world.

And. One of the chief pleasures I have with it is that the literally the only thing they truly have in common is that they all use this one piece of tech, which is active campaign and the, what it’s fascinating to me, the commonalities that occur from a tiny one person business right up to a big global corporation actually need the answers to the same questions and the same teaching the same nurturing.

It’s just, it’s a great way to spend my time and it’s made me very happy. And I hope it’s made other people very happy as well.

Chris Badgett: I’m sure it has. I’ve been in your community and I’ve seen people getting their challenges solved and, growing their business. One of the things I’ve noticed after over a decade in the online education space is that with software particularly, it’s often not the software company itself that makes the best education.

There’s a very old episode of LMS cast where I interviewed a guy that I forget his name, but they, he teaches how to use a book writing and publishing tool called Scrivener. He doesn’t work at Scrivener and he, Has done a fantastic education business of his own, and he teaches Scribner better than you can learn on the Scribner website.

Kay Peacey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I’ve, so just for anybody out there who’s trying to figure out a course topic, if you’re a power user of a tool, do it. And even I, hope somebody out there, there are people that train people how to make use Lifter LMS. There’s people that have YouTube tutorials that are better than ours, and that’s just, yeah.

The power of community around a tool, but any other thoughts on that?

Kay Peacey: I’m so, with you on that. And I, actually, it’s one of my soap boxes because my feeling is over time. I see it again and again, where customers of a tech platform will go and ask tech support of that platform to help them with something that is actually strategic or that involves other tools in their ecosystem that are outside of that tech company’s responsibility.

See. And or beyond their remit to solve my feeling is that as customers, as consumers, we often ask too much of the companies who are providing the tech because their job is already huge. They have to dream it up, build it, maintain it, service it, make sure all the buttons are working and deliver it in real time to thousands of customers every day.

Their job is not to teach you how to take this Ferrari tech machine. and go pull a wheelie down the highway. That’s not what they’re for. They are there to build the machinery. To sell it in the market, to service their customers and make sure the billing works. They have so much else to do, right? They’re not there to tell you how to use it to grow your business.

That’s what I think. You can see I got a bit soapboxy there. So anyway, in a nutshell, the Ferrari showroom is not the place where you go to learn how to speed your Ferrari down the motorway. You have to have a driving instructor. And if you’re really smart, you get an advanced driving instructor who really knows what they’re doing and knows how to teach you to drive better.

And that’s where someone like me comes in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Just to reiterate. Like business owners have used lots of different tools and you can’t expect like one of those tools to have the answers about how to integrate everything together. They, try, but the best expert, like you said, as a driving instructor who not only understands the car, they understand the road, they understand the rules of the road.

And whatever they understand how to get gas and all the other things you’re going to need to interact with to drive, right?

Kay Peacey: Yeah. And also I think who’s in a position where they’re independent enough to say, actually, this particular bit of tech isn’t the right tool to do this thing that you’re trying to do.

Yes, theoretically we could do it, but it’s a round peg in a square hole. So actually let’s join it up to this other thing. That’s going to do a great job of solving that problem in your business.

Chris Badgett: And

Kay Peacey: there’s this very human element that you need to have there of being able to understand the real question that someone’s asking you or the problem that they are looking to solve, which is often not the question they ask.

And I’d also argue that tech support teams do not have the time to, to spend with you on that. They don’t have time to get to know you over time to get to know the tech stack in your business and what skills you have in your team, what budget you have in your team. There is so much going on there, right?

To find how should I do this one thing? You need a human who knows you and understands you and has with whom you have a relationship and you can trust them. That’s big ask for a support desk. That’s not fair to put that on them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, a great point. And we’re going to get into the main segment of this show, which is how Kay grew her audience by 60 percent doing a masterclass.

But before we do that, I want to just get a little more context for people out there watching and listening. So with your online education platform, what are the main tools in your tech stack? Since we’re talking about using different tools to make it come together. So you teach online through a membership.

What are the key components of your tech stack?

Kay Peacey: I love this question so much. Lifter LMS obviously has been with me right from the start from when I made my very first free training, which is called accelerated active campaign. And that is still available for free. And it’s like core active campaign know how that you just got to have.

So lift has been with me right from the start. On top of that, I use a Divi to make my WordPress websites with WP Fusion, which is the secret source of everything. And that ties up WooCommerce subscriptions, which is how I’m running the billing and things. It, I have two domains that talk to each other through ActiveCampaign, and then we run our community on the Circle platform, which I’m extremely happy with.

I know there are lots of options for community. I have found that The Circle platform has really served our particular way of doing things, which is we deliver a lot of technical stuff in a short space of time and Circle has unleashed us to be really fluent and fast solving problems just day to day.

So I’ve really enjoyed bringing that into the tech stack. It’s, just, it’s a dream team. You put them together.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And let’s talk about another stack, which is the offer stack. So when somebody joins active campaign Academy, like what is the package of the learning offer? What do they get?

Kay Peacey: Yeah, cool. Okay. So they get courses, resources, calls, and community. And so the courses of the standalone they, pull together as a coherent learning unit, and that’s what I’m doing in lifter every time. The resources is the stuff that tends to live in the circle community. And that’s more like short tutorials that answer a very specific question, or it’s a screen grab with annotation.

We run office hours, calls twice a week, every single week. And that’s the, ask me anything. And it really is. Those are amazing because you can ask me literally anything related, even tangentially to active campaign. And we can answer it right there. And then it’s super powerful. I love that bit. And then the community where we’re just hanging out together and it acts as a kind of a library as well as a place we can chat, share news, announce stuff, the whole package together is it pulls together very, nicely.

And we have two levels of membership as well. We have an essential level and an advanced level, and that comes back to the fact that active campaign has this big range within it, you can be on a plan, which is incredibly capable on a lower budget, right up to enterprise where they’ve got huge teams. So we actually put a split in the middle so that our more starter users are not going to get completely overwhelmed by hearing about webhooks and API calls and all that crazy stuff that they just do not need to know.

Chris Badgett: I love that. So like beginner and advanced levels, two, two plans to choose from. It’s not over complicated, quick side question you brought up and I’ve watched you execute well, which is I see a lot of education entrepreneurs have a desire or a dream to build community. You’ve built. Built community successfully.

People show up to your calls. You’re asking me any things I’ve interacted in your community with other users and stuff like that. What do you think makes your community work? Cause sometimes people build a community and it doesn’t work. It obviously takes like actual management plan, time investment and stuff, but why does your community work?

As part of your education offer.

Kay Peacey: That’s such a thought provoking question. I was heavily into community from the very beginning because the first place I started to connect well with other active campaign users was in their Facebook global group as a community. And so it became very visible in there and connected with people.

I then started my own Facebook group where I had ownership of it and I could lead on the tone. I’m a strong believer in we set the tone for the communities that are under our leadership, and it’s our responsibility to look after those people. And right from the beginning of that, that my open face group, so that’s not even my paid offer.

That’s an open group. We have led with value, integrity, and just being really human. We have never allowed the spam bots in there. Nobody disses anyone. You’re not even really allowed to dis active campaign. Like you can criticize it and say this bit is a bit sucky right now, but we’re not in there to be negative about the world.

So we set the tone. And that tone then for me carried into my private community. When we moved to the paid membership, that tone was already established because our founding members had all seen how, we are in the world. What are our values? How do we interact with humans that was already in place.

And so we had a really wonderful call from when we launched the academy. We had about 125 founder members. And so our membership community had that lovely tone right from the start and honestly, I cannot tell you how much I value

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s a little master class on building culture and community And I love how you got your first, users off of the facebook group that you own But you were helping in other groups as well demonstrating your expertise

Kay Peacey: and I still do that I’m a super user in that active campaign global community.

I probably answer four to five questions in there every single day You And honestly, I’m obsessed with active campaigns. So I’m doing this like I’m on the sofa having a cup of tea in the evening and watching TV with my kid. I might be answering your question at the same time because that’s where I live.

And as a subject matter expert, that’s I think that’s what we do as educators. We, That’s going to sound really cliched, but we do live to serve. That’s how we get our kicks. All right. So selfishly I’m doing it because I like the feeling of, ah, I just solved that person’s problem. Look at that.

That’s cool.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That is part of wearing the expert hat is you actually have to love and be passionate about. Your subject matter expertise, just because you spot an opportunity somewhere doesn’t mean you should build an education company around it. You really have to live and breathe it and enjoy it.

Kay Peacey: Yeah, I don’t think you could, I don’t think you could do it to this level of expertise and it’s like immersive. Immersive expertise and know how and, the, and it requires, and I’m going to use the word love. It does require love to lavish that level of attention and care on your learners. But for me, that’s what fuels me.

It fills me up every day.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And love requires commitment. And like you said, every day helping out and serving.

Kay Peacey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Shifting gears, the number one or one of the top questions we get from people building membership sites, courses, coaching programs. So how do I get clients? How do I get customers?

You re recently did a masterclass that grew your community by 60%. Can you tell us first what the masterclass is?

Kay Peacey: The masterclass was called be your own, how to be your own active campaign superhero. So the kernel of the idea is something again, that I feel very passionate and very certain about, which is that any person can.

Be the master of their own tech and learn to drive the active campaign Ferrari. You do need some teaching. You need someone to point you in the right direction and tell you what’s possible. The biggest thing I always hear is you don’t even know what you don’t know about active campaign until someone unlocks it for you.

So I wanted to showcase in a very powerful way, but in a short space of time, and I wanted to establish Us as the, accepted leadership, the voice in active campaign education. So the masterclass came out of a desire to do that. And what we did was we cherry picked four things that could be done on any active campaign plan from light all the way up to enterprise that would make you more money in a very short space of time, because that’s what every single business needs, including mine.

We also need to make money. The passion is great, loving it. That’s great, but it also needs to make revenue. So we focused it in very tightly on make more money in less time. And we chose an item from each of the four stages of the customer journey from brand new customer to a hot lead. Now they’re a customer.

And then what happens at the end of the journey when they’re just moving on from your world as well. And pulled out four processes and what I did in the masterclass, we delivered it three times across different time zones. We called in all our partners to help us promote the masterclass. That was the first time we’d done that.

It was the first time we’d really had the confidence to say we’re doing this. It is going to be killer good. Get your people here. And here’s our affiliate link that you can share with them as well. So we really called in that support and community around us as a business and, me as a business person.

And the show up rate was incredible when we did the webinar, it was like a 55%. Show up right to the master classes. And I was just so happy with that. We got a huge reaction to it and people were very excited just to hear. There are these very simple ways that you can explain in 10 minutes that you can use active campaign to make more money in less time.

So that was the class. We showcased those four things.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And can you give us any like metrics or just quantitative data about like how the masterclass went? You said 60% like anything else you can, you’d feel like sharing?

Kay Peacey: Yeah we had, I think we had a target of registering 300 people for it.

So we looked at the statistics from when we launched. Originally with a much smaller audience overall, and extrapolated that into our audience as it is now and the reach that we have now through our partnership. So we were aiming for 300 people to register and we got, I think, almost 400 registered. So we were exceeding that target.

Our target overall, the big goal was to increase revenue into the membership. And we needed that so that we could focus on doing more growth activity and serve more people because we’re not reaching everyone out there who needs active campaigning help that would benefit from us So we need to be more visible to do that.

We need more revenue. So the target was to boost the revenue I think by 50 We then worked really hard on getting the people who registered to show up to the webinar And for that we leaned heavily on a very You Coherent combination of social channels, posting and emails that were going out with a countdown timer, really creating that you are going to show up to this and here is what you’re going to get from it.

I am going to be teaching these things live. We were sharing testimonials. We just threw everything at it, but in a really coherent way where we hit up all of the problem points that we know that people have in active campaign, our messaging, Was very clear. Everyone can learn to do these things in active campaign.

Come along to the masterclass. We’re going to show you how to do four of them to make more money in less time at the four stages of the customer journey. Come along and see what the conversion rate off of the back, off of the back of that was just ridiculous. 16%, 16 percent of people who attended that masterclass immediately bought.

Bought a membership and we typically keep them as members for around six months. Many of them stay for upwards of two years. We’ve still got some of our founder and beta members are still with us so that turns into quite a lot of revenue and more importantly than that, it turns into helping an awful lot of people.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s amazing. Tell us a little bit more about how you prepared for the masterclass and how long did that take and what did you put together and how’d you keep figuring out all your partners and all that stuff?

Kay Peacey: Okay, that’s a great question. I had a lot of help from Melissa Love, who I know you’re familiar with already.

Because she’s a close business friend of mine and she lives just down the hill. So we can literally go sit on the bench down by the Harbor and she can calm my fears. And actually Melissa was the one who made me set the date because left to my own devices, I would probably have been here thinking I really should do a masterclass and get some more members in because we’re really good at this, but I might not have done it.

I needed a push and Melissa gave me the push. So we set a deadline and then it was a countdown from there. I think I had a six week run in from deciding the date and we published the dates to figure it out. Sorry. Say that again.

Chris Badgett: Six weeks to figure it out and yeah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s not too long or too short.

That’s. It was

Kay Peacey: enough. And for me, it was based on knowing myself better than when we first launched. I know the amount of pressure that I can cope with, the amount of time and space I need in which to be able to do my best work. But also I know that I do need a time pressure. Because otherwise it won’t get done.

So as soon as we’d set the date, we put it out there. And once people have put their name down and said, I want to come to this, which they did very, quickly, we had a wait list or, a show a hand razor, list, and that just got piled on very, quickly. And I, need that in my world to fuel me up to be like, okay, I’ve said, I’m going to do this and all these people have said they would like that.

Okay, now we’re going to do it and we’re going to deliver. And once I’m on the path, I deliver. I, my execution’s really good. So we had an air table. I don’t know if you’re an air table user, Chris, I’m a huge fan of it. Yeah. So I use that to organize everything that’s in my head. So we planned out the stages from belief, believing that you can work active campaign evidence that we’ve already taught people how to use active campaign, helping people desire the things that we wanted to deliver in the masterclass.

Doing the countdown, showing the testimonials, lots of evidence and proof that we are the masters at this. And usually you don’t want to miss this masterclass. And then, yeah, I think prepping the, content of the masterclass itself, that was amazing. That was one of those opportunities as a teacher, as an educator that you just, you can dive into it like whole body.

I am all in on this one. It was a great piece of work, very carefully crafted to 10 minutes. And it was leaning into teaching the what, are we doing? Why are we doing it? But of course it was missing the element of exactly how would you do that? Like exactly. So we talked about active campaign features that were necessary to put together for it.

So we would say something like, Oh, and we would use a saved response. We would use a form and a pre fill throwing in all these words. That’s the driver then to get the conversion is, and we are going to teach this in the academy coming up in the next few weeks. And that was the real conversion moment, I think, was we showed that it is possible to use Active Campaign to make more money in less time, right across your customer journey in these four very specific ways.

We talked about the elements that you would need to put together to do that. And then we invited people to join the Active Campaign Academy to come and do that with us right away, immediately. And then in the Academy, the course is there. We have four courses teaching those four things and the results we get from those are extraordinary, really impressive.

Chris Badgett: So did you have those courses already ready before you did the training or they came after like you taught them

Kay Peacey: live? They came a little bit after. I I, it was a balance because I would have loved to get them taught. I would have loved to get them ready before the masterclass, but it just wasn’t possible in that timeframe.

And what I’ve learned as an educator is that. The teaching is better if I can talk about it first with people, see their response to it, listen to the questions that they ask, and then the job of the training, the specific course, needs to have all of those elements in it. So I often find that if I talk about something and have a bit of a delay while we chew it over and then make the training is better.

Yeah, that’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. So we did

Kay Peacey: some swift tutorials to get people who really wanted to just crack on and who already had the skills. We were like, okay, this is how you would put it together. Here’s the map. But then the courses with all the step by step detail took a little longer.

Chris Badgett: Can you share just high level, even if somebody’s not using active campaign, just the concept of one of the stages of the customer journey?

What’s an example, one of those?

Kay Peacey: Yeah, sure. One of the ones that landed really beautifully with so many people. And it’s based on a strategy that we developed for ourselves. I call it first look fandom because I like a bit of alliteration you’ve got to give it a good, give it a cool name.

So first look fandom is for the very first step of the customer journey. Someone has just found you and Oh my God, here’s Chris Badgett. He knows all about lifter. I love him. I’m going to fill out the opt in form. And get on the mailing list here for Lyft at LMS. And there’s always a burning reason.

Someone does that. They always have some question that’s in their mind, some problem that they want solving that they think you have the answer to. So here’s the sneaky move for first look fandom. And this, by the way, converts 10 percent of those brand new first look leads into buyers with one click. 10 percent of them convert to buyers with one email in the space of a week.

It’s, extraordinary. So here’s the trick. They’ve just filled out your opt in form for this person. They’ve just coming into your world on the thank you page where normally you might say, thank you for submitting the form, or maybe you’ve gone a little bit further and you’ve got some links and a picture of you great instead of that, or as well as that you put in an open question field.

They don’t have to fill in their email again. You just ask them a question, say, Oh, while you’re here, tell me what, is your most burning question about XYZ right now? And you don’t have to promise to answer it. Just ask the question. 80 percent of people who fill out the opt in form will likely fill out that burning question.

And hit submit. So immediately you have got gold on your hands because now what their burning question is for 80 percent of your people, the second they land into your world, every marketer’s dream, right? And then it gets better. What you do is you stash that stuff wherever you. Keep it, you can stash it somewhere, get it to pass in front of your eyeballs so that you notice what people are saying.

So you’re learning all the time. You have to learn from your, potential customers, and then you cherry pick the ones that you have the answer to in your existing services and you give them a personal reply very quickly. And there are tools in active campaign. There are features of active campaign that make this extremely fast and fluent to do.

That’s the bit I teach in the academy, right? I, we can talk about the strategy, the actual mechanics of putting that together so that it works really fluently and fast for you in active campaign. There’s some subtle stuff going on there, but once it’s built, you have a system where every single lead is invited to ask you their burning question, open text, and boy, oh boy, they tell you stuff in there.

It is enlightening. Then they, you have them pass in front of your eyeballs. You pick a few of them every week. It takes two minutes maximum to answer one of those burning questions. If you have your tech set up properly, you dispatch the answer and 10 percent of them will convert to a buy within a week.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And now that you’re saying that, I remember that from your presentation and that’s it’s pure gold. I remember. Your presentation, let’s talk about the actual masterclass. I’m remembering like a vertical slide thing that was scrolling or something. Can you tell us a little bit, and it was very well designed and your, presentation was just tight, but what, was that tool you were using and tell us about how you structured the actual

Kay Peacey: presentation.

I love that you asked that because that, so that tool, it’s a, it’s actually like a whiteboarding tool and it’s called miller note.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kay Peacey: Millernote. And the original story of Millernote for me is I hate slides. Yeah. I loathe them. My design eye is just shockingly bad. It’s awful. And I’m, just chuckling at the fact that he just said it was really well presented because it’s incredibly difficult to put together visuals that don’t look like a 10 year old child.

On a bad day did them. So Miller notes is my solution to that. It has a nice soothing color background in our brand colors. And the actual items that I put on there, there’s very little formatting choice on there. So I can’t wreck it. I just need to make sure it all lines up vertically. And then while I’m on, while I’m doing my presentation, I use e cam, which is a wonderful bit of tech e cam films me and puts me in front of Half of the presentation.

So I’m right there on screen. It’s like putting yourself into your presentation, which I really love because I talk with my hands. You may have noticed that there’s a lot of hand waving and expression going on, and that’s really important. And with the, by having Milanote beside me and I’ve got my scroll wheel, so I can scroll through it exactly the pace I want to, I can literally point at the things that I’m talking about and it just works for me.

So I developed it purely because I am terrible at slides and I hate them. So it was an avoidance strategy that somehow turned into something that actually looks really nice and a lot of people ask about.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I remember too, from your masterclass, there was a lot of engagement in the chat. Like how, would you advise somebody who’s doing a masterclass to really make it interactive and immersive and get people, get the community talking?

Kay Peacey: Great question. First of all, I had a head start because we have a very engaged community already. And that comes back to our earlier, your earlier question around the Facebook groups. We have fostered that for years. We go out of our way to connect personally with people that first look fandom thing that involves me personally, emailing people who’ve just signed up to my email list.

So we have a very connected community already, and you can’t magic that up. Just for a one off masterclass. That’s not going to happen. What we did was we primed the pump by specifically asking our, existing academy members to come to the live webinar and to support us. And I was completely honest about it.

I was like, I’m going to be absolutely petrified. I would love to see some friendly faces in there to make me feel better. can you come and give me a wave in the chat? And that’s true. Seeing those familiar names in the chat was for my benefit, really. And we also had a couple of team members who were entirely dedicated to watching the chat, grabbing screenshots of great things that were people were saying that was a smart move, by the way, have someone in your team ready to grab.

Something brilliant that someone says about your presentation from the chat. We use that the next day on social posts, and that drove a whole ton more signups into the second and third runs of the same webinar. Very good strategy. So their job was to do engaging with people as well, because if you’re delivering the presentation, you can’t be talking in the chat.

You can’t even be looking at it.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s good stuff there. I know some people at the end of a master class or a webinar get a little bit of cold feet around transitioning to the pitch or making the sale. What did you do at the end to really position the offer? Maybe you did it not just at the end.

Like, how did you quote sell from the master class?

Kay Peacey: Good question. I’m trying to remember. We definitely had a spin to win.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kay Peacey: So that was, so our spin to win, I think came after the pitch. So the spin to win is something I love to roll out just because it’s really good fun. We do a spin to win, put everyone’s names on the wheel and one.

Two or three winners, whatever we’re doing, we’ll get a one to one session with me, which you literally cannot buy. I do not do those. So that’s an, that actually, now I come to think of it, that’s our incentive for getting members to turn up live. Cause we were like you, can join this draw as well. If you win that’s yours.

One to one for an hour with me. You can’t get that anywhere else. And that happens

Chris Badgett: at the very end. Yeah, we do that

Kay Peacey: at the very, we do it before the Q and A. So the structure was intro, Presentation, then into a pitch section, then the spin to win, then Q& A. And our sticker, our rate of people sticking around was really good.

We’re very happy with that. I think the pitch, I don’t find the pitching to be a problem anymore, because I think I finally got comfortable with that notion that if I don’t tell people what we do and how we can help them. They’re not going to buy it and then they’re not going to get the help and they’re not going to get the good things for their business.

And I don’t feel, I don’t feel bad about saying that anymore. I feel like something shifted in me this year to be absolutely fine with saying we are the best in the world. I am the best person in the world to teach you active campaign. This is where you can buy my services. This is how much it’s going to cost.

You can buy monthly so you don’t have to be committed for a long period of time. It doesn’t have to cost you a scary amount of money like a consultant and we see a lot of people spending crazy sums on consultancy and then coming out of it worse than they were before. This is an alternative.

Here is how you can try us out. We do a refund guarantee, so there’s no pressure selling. Yeah, I just, I feel very strongly that what we offer is really, good. And I’m happy to talk about that now.

Chris Badgett: I love that. The first sale you make is to yourself. And if you really believe in your product and your mission, selling gets really easy because you’re just, you almost feel obligated because you want to serve and help all these people.

So yeah,

Kay Peacey: absolutely. And Melissa used to call me about it all the time. She would call me on it and be like, what? Nobody’s buying that thing you never told them about. Go figure. I should probably talk about this more. And I think another tipping for me was the valid tipping point for me was the validation that I got from around this time last year when ActiveCampaign created their first customer advisory board.

And I was their first call to be on that. I, have stature and status within the ActiveCampaign community. I have the respect and value from ActiveCampaign themselves. Invite me into their world to help them with how to serve their customers better, how to make the platform better, how to engage better with users, how to teach active campaign.

If they’re asking me, then I need to get over myself and stop being weird about saying, this is what we do. Here’s where you can buy it. It will cost you this much. And it’s really good.

Chris Badgett: I just want to highlight that strategy of a customer advisory board. This is commonly known in software businesses where you have some of your users and customers that you meet with on an ongoing basis or kind of group in a little community where you.

Open mindedly listen to their feedback, ask for help and stuff like that. I think more course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs could do that strategy because you don’t have to figure everything else out by yourself on how to make your offer better. Or the customer experience better. And when you find those customers and users or students or members that you love working with, and you’d like to get more of them by talking to them, you remove a lot of friction and get a lot of good ideas.

It doesn’t mean you can act on everything they want or recommend or agree with everything, but it’s such a valuable resource to listen and get feedback in that way.

Kay Peacey: So much. So much. And hearing you say that takes me back to when we were in when we were in our beta phase for the Active Campaign Academy, which was about two and a half years ago, and I invited 13 people to come in as beta members.

On their, contribution to the form that the academy takes is just enormous, absolutely enormous. It was the, structure that we have now of the calls, the community, whole courses, and specifically lots of little tutorials that are done in a fluent, fast fashion, that whole structure came from listening to what they needed and when they needed it and what, how they wanted to consume it.

It all came from them.

Chris Badgett: Pure gold right there.

Kay Peacey: Sorry, I’m just going to say one more thing, which is that you have to let go of your vanity as an educator. You have to let go of that feeling that you, know better than them about how to do this. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Great business isn’t built in a vacuum for sure.

Last question for you, Kay. So you ran your masterclass. What’s your plan for the future? And what would you advise people? Is this something that you do once a year, twice a year, four times a year? What do you think you’ll do going forward? And what would you recommend to people?

Kay Peacey: Okay. I think doing for me, it’s going to be annual at the moment.

I have some disability issues, I have family to raise, I have limited energy for me and I think once a year feels right. I’m certainly not going to leave it two years again. It’s going to be once a year because it rejuvenated the business and it establishes our place very publicly of we own this space.

You need to be here. I definitely want to be doing that once a year. I think probably we all should in terms of in between that, we are working towards sales cycles where we will have focus topics within the membership. We’re going to do that because it serves our existing members primarily.

But we’ll also act as a sales driver. So for example, right now we are having a very big member mission about deliverability, everybody’s favorite, sexy subject, email authentication, deliverability, engagement, and re engagement. And this is feeling really good for us because it drives things in three different places.

It drives our members to stay and to consume content because they can see exactly what they’re doing. And if everyone’s. Doing the same thing at the same time that builds your sense of community. That is a driver on sales because people who’ve been sitting on the fence or who left some time ago, this may now be the driver that gets them back in through the door because they can see us talking consistently about this thing, showing our expertise and giving them reasons to join the third one, which was my unexpected kicker was that it has made me.

Turn up and create the best courses I’ve created in a long time. Not that all my courses aren’t fabulous, but I just rocked one out on re engagement and it’s so good. I’m genuinely excited to get it out there. And if we hadn’t been doing this focus on deliverability and engagement, I don’t think I would have gotten around to doing it.

And I certainly don’t think it would have been as good as it is now. So it’s a push on all fronts, very healthy.

Chris Badgett: I think once a year makes sense, especially when you get partners involved, because the partner can only do so much and they have other things that have to do. But like once a year and you get a system and everybody’s happy, that’s becomes a, something you can just repeat in your business.

Kay Peacey: And we banked how we did it for that masterclass. We have stashed everything that we did. And I know that next time we’ve got the recipe there, we’re also going to turn that into a course. How do you automate a fantastic launch event or masterclass using ActiveCampaign? And then we’re going to evergreen a funnel that leads to that course.

Now, so there’s lots of repurposing you can do from that one event a year. I’m very confident that we will get a year’s worth of value from doing one big event. Cause it takes a lot out of me. I think I can only really do that full on once a year.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kay, this has been a masterclass and in marketing and sales and just doing great work as an education entrepreneur.

Thank you for coming on the show. I want to encourage you out there listening to go to slickbusiness. co check out active campaign Academy. If you’re looking to increase your automation capabilities and, really leverage a powerful CRM, check that out. If you don’t have a CRM yet, the what’s the quickest, what’s the free course called accelerated?

Accelerated action campaign. See, you did the alliteration, which I like to do too, because it’s Lifter LMS. So it helps people remember the name of your products and business. Any other ways for the people to connect with you or last parting words here, Kay?

Kay Peacey: I’m always delighted to, connect with people on LinkedIn, particularly fellow, fellow educators, people who are passionate about that learning experience and how we do better.

On that all the time as the technology moves, as we mature, how are we doing that? Anyone can come and connect with me on LinkedIn. And there’s also my Facebook group, which is called automate your business with active campaign. And that’s open to anyone, probably better if you’re a bit obsessed with active campaign.

But if you’re into email marketing, we talk a lot of that in there as well.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s KPC slick business. co. Thanks so much for coming on back on the show. I can’t wait to do it again in another couple of years.

Kay Peacey: Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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