149: Scale from the Stage with a Digital Product Shop (ft. Christina Scalera)
As a service provider, you’re limited by time, which obviously caps the income you can generate as a service provider. In this episode of Speak to Scale, we’re always exploring opportunities to scale your impact and your income—so we’ve brought on Christina Scalera, owner of The Contract Shop®, to share all about building a digital product shop!
If you had a digital product shop to accompany your business, what kind of impact could it make? Listen in as we discuss how quickly you can launch and scale your product shop, generate an income, and serve your customers! Plus, Christina is even sharing how she offers discounted pre-sales while she developing her products so she’s getting paid to create each item!
If you loved this episode and it motivated you to work on more polished presentations, I’d love for you to leave a review on iTunes and tell me about your biggest takeaway. Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, post it to your Instagram Stories, and tag me @jessicarasdall.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Meet Christina Scalera
Christina Scalera is the attorney and founder behind The Contract Shop®, a contract template store for creative entrepreneurs, wedding professionals, and coaches.
In 2014, Christina found herself dreaming of pursuing a more creative path, and she started to look for alternatives to her in-house legal job. She explored everything from teaching yoga to becoming a freelance graphic designer to opening an Etsy shop.
In the process, she ended up coming full circle by creating a business that brought the benefit of her legal training to help her fellow creatives. She's now teaching others how they too can create an online shop phenomenon, create daily income, and get out of the client-getting hustle with her course, Products on Tap®.
When she isn't working, you can find her in the woods doing things that are sometimes dangerous but always fun, like riding horses, skiing and reluctantly camping.
Offering Digital Products to Scale Your Business
As we consistently share ways to scale your business off the stage, it’s important to look for ways to serve your potential clients or customers in a ways that makes an impact, but doesn’t require as much time as your services may require. A digital product shop is a perfect solution if you’re able to build out products that meet the needs of those customers you can’t necessarily work one-on-one with.
Utilizing digital products to scale your business allows you to increase the number of people you serve without impeaching on your own time, while also increasing your profits. Let’s explore what products you could offer in a digital shop, how you can serve your audience, and what the impact could look like in opening a digital product shop.
Building Successful in Digital Products
Successful products derive from successful service offerings—the better defined your processes and grasp on the product knowledge, the easier it will be to create a successful and impactful digital product. When you’re motivated to productize your services, the more defined and detailed you’ve made your services, the easier it will be to productize your services.
Before you begin to take the steps to build out digital products to supplement your services, take a step back and look at your workflows, processes, and client experience to ensure you’re building a product that will serve those who purchase it.
Scaling Your Services to Passive Income
When we begin to talk about passive income, there are a few misconceptions about what passive truly means. While you can scale your business in a variety of ways, not all will translate to passive revenue. Traditionally, there are three paths to take with scaling your services:
Courses
Coaching
Product Shop
A product shop will be the best route to take from these traditional opportunities to generate the most hands-off passive income. Outside of developing content and promoting the products, you’re not having to do any one-on-one work with your customers.
Creating a Digital Product Shop
While developing a digital product shop may feel a little daunting, if you’re motivated to create and launch one, you could have it up and running in less than a week. Consider what products would serve your audience and solve an issue they face, outline those products, develop them, then create an online shop on a simple e-commerce platform.
Those who are dedicated to creating a powerful shop that serves their audience well could replace their service based income within a year!
If you’re struggling to either find the motivation or dedicate your time to building out a shop that you truly want, you should treat it like a client of yours. Oftentimes, service based business spend all of their time working on client work, that they push aside their own work. In treating your shop like a client, creating deadlines, and putting time on your calendar to complete it, you’ll find just how quickly you can launch something for you!
Defining Digital Products for Your Services
If you’re thinking that launching a digital product shop might be an avenue you want to explore, but you’re not sure what types of products to sell, consider what your clients need or request for quick fixes from you. Many digital products will serve as a fast solution to a problem that your customer faces.
A few examples of this are contract templates, prompt templates, project management tool templates, and organizational solutions.
It’s important to also take a look at the solution you’re hoping to provide and ensure that it fits into a digital product format. Let’s look at what you’d consider putting into a course versus a digital product. These two scaling solutions will serve your clients very differently. A course is going to take time and effort on the customer’s end, while a digital product will be a fast solution to an immediate problem they want to solve.
An example of this is to consider the new photographer who is wanting to start booking clients today. If they’re wanting to invest in a long-term solution, they may consider a course to improve on their skills, but if they’re wanting to know how to better convert a lead into a customer today, they’d be more interested in purchasing a script to guide them through the inquiry phone call.
These two product types serve the same audience, but provide very different solutions for different problems.
Pre-Selling Your Digital Products While You’re Creating Them
Now as you’re developing your products, you have a few options to supplement your income during this time through pre-sales. Pre-selling is where you begin selling a product prior to it’s creation. Customers can get a pre-sale discount, which encourages them to buy, all while you’re going through the process of building out your product.
What are the logistics of pre-selling digital products?
Come up with a product concept
Create a name, description, promotional graphic, and delivery timeline
List it as available for pre-sale in your online shop
Begin promoting it (prior to ever developing the product out)
Doing this allows you to generate an income for the time you’re putting into developing this product, but it’s also important to note that you have to follow through on the delivery of this product on time!
If you're not already a member of the academy, we'd love to invite you to apply to join The Speaking Strategy Academy. You'll get instant access to our A-Z speaking training system with video lessons, transcripts, scripts, templates, and more.... access to our live group coaching calls, personalized 1:1 feedback on your work from me, and an opportunity to present your work live in front of our community for hot seat coaching and feedback. What are you waiting for, friend? Apply today!
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Transcript for Episode 149: Scale from The Stage with a Digital Product Shop
Jessica Rasdall 0:00
How do you feel about your business's digital offers? When you speak in front of a group, whether it's on a podcast webinar and in person conference? Do you feel confident being able to serve all of the audience members when you step off the stage? If your offers are not scalable right now, do not fret friend. Today's episode is going to show you exactly how you can put up a digital product shop quickly so that you can start scaling your impact from the stage.
Jessica Rasdall 0:39
Welcome back to another episode of The speak to scale Podcast, where we're helping small business owners just like you grow and scale their impact and their income by speaking on stages, podcasts, webinars, live streams and more. I'm your host, Jessica Rossville. And I am so grateful that you're here. Now I know you have put in a lot of time, blood, sweat and tears into building a business that you're proud of. And as you're stepping out to be the face of your company on more of these platforms, you want to be sure that you are able to consistently convert, and in a way that is scalable. So my goal is to continue bringing more episodes here to the podcast that show you different ways you can scale that revenue. Because I know you obviously want to make an impact when you speak and help your audience take action. But if you're a one on one provider or a done for you service provider, there's going to be a point where you reach a limit of how many audience members you can help. And that obviously caps your income. But it also prevents you from creating real, sustainable, long lasting change for your audience. When we can start to look at digital products digital offers more scalable offers from a place of service, and serving our audience really well. It can help light a little fire underneath us. That makes us want to create that product and get it into the hands of our audience. So on today's episode, I've brought in my good friend Christina Scalera. He don't know Christina, I'm not really sure why. I mean, her and I have been around in business together for a long time. But she is the genius behind the contract shop where you may have even purchase some of your favorite legal templates from an after seeing such wild success with the contract shop. She now helps other small business owners set up their own shops, you know, create that daily income and get out of the client hustle through her training products on tap. In today's episode, Christina is not only explaining to us what a digital product shop is, why it's something we should consider and how to get started. But she's paving a path for us to get started quickly so that you can get this thing up and have it ready before you deliver your next presentation. So if you've been getting in your way a little bit overthinking all the different things you could be doing. Today, I want you to focus on what kind of impact could you make for your audience if you had a digital product shop ready for them. If you're serious about scaling your business with speaking this year, you're going to want a plan of action and some incredible resources in your back pocket. I've got just the thing. We have compiled all of our best resources like how to select your speaking topics, what goes into your talk, how to identify your ideal audience. And we've put it all together inside of the speak to scale vault. in sequential order, you'll know exactly what to do and when to do it. to scale your business with speaking the best part, you can unlock the entire vault of resources for less than $50. And because you're listener of the podcast, I want to give you a special discount code to get some extra savings. So head on over to speak to scale vault calm, or click the link in our show notes. And be sure to use the word podcast at checkout for an extra special discount.
Jessica Rasdall 4:26
Okay, before we get into all the nitty gritty stuff, give us a quick little rundown. I mean, everybody knows who you are, but just just in case you don't know of who you are and what you do.
Christina Scalera 4:38
You're sweet. Yeah, I'm Christina sclera. So I founded a little online template shop called the contract shop in 2015. And we sell legal templates for creative entrepreneurs. But the I think the main reason I'm here today is because one of the things that we've done or I've done in the past year is shifted Because my shop is so passive, and I'm excited to talk a little bit about that, like last month, I think I spent maybe five hours working on my shop, you know, netted a little under like maybe $500 under 40k last month, with about 10k and expenses. So that's pretty good, you know, just sitting on 30k profit, right off the bat, from something that literally took me almost no time to manage or run. And I love having that shop, because it's allowed me to start my coaching business, which is just my personal name, Christina sclera. And as you might have guessed, I teach people how to do what I did and what I do in my shop, I actually walk the walk, I don't just like go off of theory or anything, I'm constantly testing things and bringing them back to my clients in terms of real time in real life. And so that's, that's what I do. So I was an attorney, I founded the contract shop in 2015, that has really grown and evolved over the years, we try to be as irreverent and funny as possible, while maintaining professionalism and making sure that you guys all have legally legit templates to get your business up and running and taking care of you along the way. Making sure that you have great clients that you're always working with solid boundaries, great relationships. And now you know, with your online courses, making sure that you're you're legit there as well, your privacy policies are all in place. So that's the contract shop. And then the second business that I have now is the coaching business. And that's where I just teach you the back end of how to run the shop, no matter what your service is. And that really is the key. So if you are listening, you don't have a service yet today, you might want to apply some of these concepts to your content, turning your content into a product. And if you do have a service, and you're burnt out, which is probably why you're here listening to the show, this is going to be a great episode about the things that you can do to really quickly and easily turn that service into a product just like I did with my online store, going I'm just gonna cosign all that
Jessica Rasdall 6:59
it's been incredible to watch over the years to your life just free up as the shop has grown and to see you create this much space in your business for yourself. So as you're working with clients, and they're starting to make this shift and creating their shop and these products, how long does it typically, and I know this is you can't give me a blanket statement on this. Some people wouldn't do the work some people aren't for how long is it typically before you're starting to see a shop really work for somebody is this something that takes, you know, 5-10 years or at something that can happen in a matter of months,
Christina Scalera 7:38
definitely not 5-10 years, I'm only, you know, five years into this myself. So you can start to see six figure years, you know, as quickly as I would say within the first year now, like I was slower to get started. And we can talk about this a little bit. But like, I was one of the first if not the first person to sell my templates in a shop format. Previously, people were selling them as courses and memberships. And I think a lot of people still do that. But those things were just like really kind of restrictive for me, like people just needed this, they needed it. Now they needed to send it to a client. Just like, you know, if you're a copywriter and or, you know, your area of expertise is some kind of service based thing like that. People need your services today, right? Like how many inquiries Have you gotten where people are like, Can Can you come and you know, speak for me like next week, and we had someone cancel and we need someone that's going to fill in like at the last minute. So I would say that if you want to get this started, it doesn't take that long to get a shop up and running. In fact, that will take you a day. I mean, with Squarespace and Shopify and all the different great platforms out there. It's so easy and user friendly. So technologically speaking, that takes about a day to start making money that would take you if you already have an existing audience, you can start seeing sales this month. And then as far as like replacing a service based business, it took me about two and a half years to realize, Oh, the shop could replace it. And then it took me another like year and a half to mentally like make that shift. Because I was really scared. I think that anybody who is motivated to start productizing their services, especially if they already have a service. So it doesn't really matter about the size of your audience so much it matters how well developed your services are and the better developed your services are, the better developed your client process. And you know how far into that game you are, the easier it will be for you to develop products. That doesn't mean it's impossible. Or you know, you can't do it. If you don't have services yet. It just means that if you already have services, it's going to be the easiest, fastest route, which is also where a lot of people I think go because services are so low overhead to get started and then they burn out and then they want this other form of income. So there's traditionally three paths to take those courses, there's coaching, and now there's an online store. And I really believe that if you want something truly passive It might not be you know, as big as like a mastermind that you can sell for $25,000.10 times a year. But if you want something a lot more passive, right, the $25,000 mastermind is not going to be passive, it's gonna be very high touch, a lot of your time is going to be taken up the shop is the the only way to go, that is going to be completely hands off, where you just have to have fun and create some content and put that out on a regular basis. And you'll be making sales 24 seven, I guess in summary, I would say that someone who is motivated realistically not like marketing, you know, like you could have this tomorrow. But someone realistic could have a shop up within the week, they could have products out there on pre sale selling within the month, and then have it replace their service base income within a year. If they're really diligent about promoting their shop and creating content that promotes their products in that shop
Jessica Rasdall 10:54
That's incredible. Because I just think about the amount of time that is spent, when we're talking about the other size, the course the coaching, these other offers, the amount of time spent launching the amount of time coaching your clients or whatever route, you're choosing that if you're willing to just buckle down and do the work, you can have the space within this.
Christina Scalera 11:18
Yes, yeah, and the best thing about shops, and this is how I really encourage a lot of my clients to get started is to treat their shop like a client, if you some tough love, but if you have a really well run service based business, you have at least an idea of the kind of client capacity that is on your your calendar every month. That means that you know that you can't work with like more than three private clients and you know, 12 group coaching clients, something like that, like you know, that there's only a certain amount of people that you can work with per month. And you've got to treat your shop, like it's one or two of those clients, you know, if you're only doing group coaching, or it's like a, you know, group type of service, that might be to client spots, if you're only doing private stuff, you know, one on one, funnel builds or copywriting or something like that, that shop is one of your clients. And it needs to be not just given the space for that. But you need to a lot the time just like you would for a client project to building your shop.
Jessica Rasdall 12:19
So your shop is for contract templates. But if somebody is listening in, they're like, Well, my service could never be a shop. What are what are some other examples? What are other shops that your students are making crazy?
Christina Scalera 12:31
Yeah, for sure. Anything that someone needs a result quickly, would be a great service to turn into products and have an online store. We most often see it with templates. But I also have some people in my programs that sell operational organizational and productivity tools, those are getting really popular. I have Brittany Wiseman, she does click up templates. So she has a click up shop. That helps you if you're getting started on that platform and you need some boards, you need maybe a way to organize your business and grow it in a systematized way. But you can't maybe afford her one on one services or you know, hopefully, you know she her shop goes so well that she can't even offer you one on one because she's focused on her shop. So those are the types of things that you need to turn into things that are easy for people to grab and use right away. So a good example of this is if you're thinking about creating like a 101 type, of course, you'll have a cuter name than that, I get it. But people are coming to you for some sort of advice, guidance, coaching. And instead of turning that into a course, so for example, with your speaking course, there might be a faster result for people to achieve through some sort of digital download product versus a course, a course and a product are going to serve different needs. So for example, if somebody needs to book a speaking engagement like today, maybe they just need some pitch scripts to start putting themselves out in front of a different audience. And then they'll realize that they need your course or that they need to hire you the to uplevel in that way that happens a lot with products. But to get started, they just need that one little tiny band aid to rip off, which could be you know, some sort of pitch scripts. So those are really good ways to start thinking of products to be selling in your shop. It's just these quick wins that people can walk away with today. And the best part about products over a course or something. Courses are great for that long term guidance and that really deep understanding. But in a lot of situations, we just need a result and we need it quickly. So for example, my template shop does so well because people just need to book a client and they need to do it in the next 10 minutes before the client changes their mind. So they download it they don't have to take like contracts one on one and spend all weekend learning about contracts and then maybe kind of sort of know about this really boring topic. They just get the contract. They download it They fill it out, they send it off to someone. So anything that someone can have that sort of quick results, quick win. Same thing with the click up templates, or, you know, if you had a pitch script, something like that, it's a really quick win that someone can download, modify and edit in the next, you know, 30 to 40 minutes, send it off to wherever it needs to go and start to see results. I think where people get stuck with products is they start to think of it like an online course. And they start to throw in more and more and more stuff. But at the end of the day, it actually helps to have less things in your products, so that people can feel like they are getting that result. So a good example of this is my COO, she bought copywriting templates for a series of onboarding emails, and they were like $19, or something it was, it was not that much. It was like a series of three emails, pretty fairly priced for a product, I would say even a little low for what she got. But the thing is, it was a great deal until she realized it had this whole other course aspect that came with it. And the templates were buried in the course, they weren't just like delivered as like a separate file. And so then it ate into the time that she could have taken to just write the emails herself. So if you are going to do a product, it needs to be delivered in a way that not just get someone a result, but like it's also delivered in a way that they can achieve that result quickly. Don't make them like go on an Easter egg hunt to try to find that product.
Jessica Rasdall 16:27
I've done that I've purchased something in the past that I thought was I was like, cool. I'm getting this I think it was like some PR thing or whatever it was getting some kind of script that I thought was a quick, let me fill the thing out, it was like a log into a course platform. No, not doing that. I don't think I've ever even logged in and looked at it. Definitely never bought anything else from there. Because it just felt like there were so many barriers to get to the answer I was looking for. So I want just love used, of course, I wanted to bring in show. But I wanted to bring you on because I know that so many of our students are wanting to scale with speaking and they are already a place when they're their client load is full. And they're worried that as they're getting on these podcasts, and they're going to events and speaking on stages that they can't keep offering up their services anymore. They don't have any space or capacity. So you mentioned pre selling earlier and getting those products up into your shop within a week. Can we talk a little bit about what that would look like? Because I know that as things are starting to open up and people are getting these requests, that they're getting a little bit more serious about what's going to happen after the speaking engagement? And how are they going to move these people back into their business?
Christina Scalera 17:48
Yeah, totally. And you don't want to just send out a freebie, where you have a whole list of freebie seekers who are never going to buy from you. I love the idea of a shop. Especially because it can make you seem really generous when you're a speaker and you offer a discount to your shop instead of a freebie. Maybe you do both I've done I've done both. And I think the best is like giving them a freebie that also gives them a coupon. So at the end of you know, my speaking, I will say and you know, text, this code to get this free thing and that that's really effective, right? Because everybody in the audience has their phone usually out even if they don't have a laptop, and then they'll get the free thing. And then usually I'll surprise them with a discount code. So I don't tell them from stage that they're going to get a discount. But I'm like, hey, for the next 24 hours get this, you know, 20-30-40% off code, that's kind of critical. Because you also want to make sure that the the discount for your shop is significant enough that it's sexy. Like you don't want to give out like a 2% or a 5% discount that just seems stingy. So that's kind of the mechanics of it. But then what do you do, if you only have services, you're booked out, you're tired, like this is already extra work on your plate you're traveling, this is my solution. So the first time I ever sold my products, none of them were created none, not a single one. I had what I'd worked with in terms of client work, and that became the basis for my product. So that's why I'm saying like your service is really critical to making sure that that you're developed well with your clients, because you're gonna turn the things that you do with your clients into products. And so
Jessica Rasdall 19:23
you're not telling them they're gonna sell something and make it up.
Christina Scalera 19:27
Right. So I don't want you to make anything just yet. I want you to have a lot of fun and start to brainstorm the types of things that your clients need are not clients necessarily, but those customers who could turn into clients, when you have more room on your calendar. I want you to have fun, I want you to dream about these products. I mean, everybody loves those lists the planning, this is the fun part. So have fun with it. Think of the things that you could do the types of results that you could get for people, and a lot of times people get stuck in this step. So one of the hack I like to use is like think of the like if you had a product tested You're on a product page, what would that testimonial say? What was the result that that person achieved that they were super happy? You know, I downloaded Jessica's pitch scripts. And I was able to book three speaking engagements, setting out just 10 emails, like, that's a great testimonial. Great. So what is the product that's going to get them there? Let's start with the result in mind, not the container. So the container is like the template, the script, you know how it's delivered a PDF, you know, those are just mechanics, we don't need to worry about that just yet. So start with the result in mind. And that's going to become the title of the product, you can make a cute little thumbnail in Canva, or whatever, to emphasize the title of the product. And then you can write, you know, a three, maybe four sentence blurb about what the product is, what it's going to do for them. And the kinds of results that they can expect to achieve realistically, with this, you know, $49-$59-$100, maybe $200 product. With that in mind, we put like big letters pre sale, and so we actually have some on our shop right now. We we still do this to this day. This is why I know it works. We put presale and big letters usually in either the thumbnail or the title or both sometimes in the description, too. So people know that it's on presale, that it's not available yet. And then we'll tell them the exact time that it's going to be delivered within. So that that X factor of like, am I buying something from a stranger on the internet Did I just lose all my money that's gone, because they know it's going to be delivered within you know, 14 days, 30 days, whatever that realistic deadline is. And as a reward for getting them to pre purchase it before you even make this thing, we're also going to throw in a discount for them. So we always give them like 100 Our products are fairly like we have a really healthy average order value. So we're able to give them like $100 off on pre sale pricing, that means that they're going to get the same thing as everybody else, they're going to get those lifetime updates, all that kind of stuff. But they're going to spend $100 less than everybody else for being that first mover and for putting their faith in us for giving them that product before anybody else. So that being said, that's all you need for a pre sale. If you have a Squarespace site or if you have like show it or WordPress you can throw on Shopify lite, you can get your products up, it takes, you know, maybe 20 minutes per product to get a Canva image, the title The presale and put a price on there. mentioned the discount, write a little blurb about what it is. So that's as simple as it gets. You do your speaking engagement, go through have the text code, the email, the QR code, like whatever it is that people are doing, to get onto your email list, surprise them with the code to you know, 30 40% off your shop for a certain limited time this code is it's really especially helpful for speaking engagements because you don't have to be like super techie, you can just say like, through the end of this conference, or through the end of this, this retreat, everything in my shop is going to be you know, 40% off, and then you can turn that coupon code off after that time. So you don't even have to be techie. And now they're getting to your shop, they're purchasing you're getting to see what they buy. And I think the results will surprise you. It's the things that usually I'm least expecting to sell that become the bestsellers. And then the things that don't sell at all, we just hide those, and we won't revisit them in the future, maybe re invite our new audience at the next speaking engagement to purchase there and see if anybody's interested, it's a little different crowd maybe. Or we just go full throttle with the products that are selling, because we always want to focus on the things that are doing well and put more energy and time and money behind promoting those. And now we've got a shop and we're known for a certain thing. So that's I mean, it's really simple mechanics. But people make it very difficult. And they like really psych themselves up like, Oh, I can't do pre sales. Because you know, I'm a graphic designer and my things are so visual, like how can I put something on presale, but you have to remember, we're talking about the result here. So what is the result that you get for people. And if you can't name something more tangible than like, I make pretty websites for people, then you're gonna have a hard time selling anything. So think about what it is how you're going to change that person's life, even in this very tiny, tiny bit. That's all products do. They take you from A to B, B to C, C to D, we're not trying to go from like a to z like a mastermind or, you know, a to M like a course. So just think about that little result, whatever that is, and those become your presale products.
Jessica Rasdall 24:28
I love that question of not, you know, is this going to be a template? Is this going to be you know, whatever it is a checklist or a resource, but what's the transformation that it gets you to think completely differently? Yeah, what about the person who says, but I'm scared of presenting something that I haven't made yet. Like I'm afraid of feeling like a phony or fraud or out of integrity or whatever garbage we're telling ourselves to get in our way. What do you say to that?
Christina Scalera 25:03
That's a really good question. That's the number one thing that comes up. So right after we get over, like, I'm a graphic designer, I can't do this. Right, the logistical type of things. That's the first thing that comes up for my clients. And the the solution to this, the workaround is two things really. First, I like to have a 14 day any reason, refund policy, and you have to remember that refunds are not there to serve you as the business owner. They're there as a sales tool to help your customer overcome any objections that they might have. It's a really nice catch all that just says, no matter what I forgot to cover here on this product description page, or you forgot to ask me in the customer support inbox, we've got you like you can get in there, you can check this out. And the method that I use ensures that even though it's a digital product, they're actually going to not be using it. So that's something that we like, we really started. And we've taught a couple different business owners how to use and then I have like a whole training on it. But I'm not going to go into that because it's a little beyond the scope of this question. But what I would say is have that refund policy, because anybody that chooses to stay after that 14 day period, which is going to be everybody, you might have one or two people that say oh, you know, that wasn't the right thing, whatever, I ran out of money on my credit card, whatever. But most people are gonna stick around. And we have to, I've noticed with women, especially women clients, we have a hard time honoring that boundary that that person has given us, when you don't honor the fact that someone has chosen to stick with you, even though you've given them every chance to leave, they didn't have to purchase from your site, they didn't have to keep the product, they could have refunded it, even after that period, we still have a lot of imposter syndrome. And I think that's just a mindset shift where you have to understand that you have to respect that that was the decision that your customer made. And that's the journey that they're on. And if you take that away from them by saying, oh, no one's gonna want this. And you have all these like stopgaps in place to make sure that they have an out. And they still want it after that time. And you're still thinking, Oh, they still don't want it. You're disrespecting your customers, you're disrespecting yourself, but you're also disrespecting your customers, because you're honoring the decision that they made for themselves over and over and over again, that's a little bit of tough love again, but that's kind of my style, if you haven't picked up on that. So that's the first thing I would say is like, have that refund policy in place. And if people refund fine, goodbye, like, see you later. The other thing just to remember here is that this is a really normal thing. And I think that's why it's really helpful to have a mentor or coach who's been through this before, no matter what the context was. So it could have been with products courses, it could have been, you know, getting turned down for speaking, gigs, things like that, leaning on someone. and inviting that sense of normalcy in around the feelings that you're having can be really helpful. Not that they have to resolve it for you. But just recognizing that it exists is a huge step for you if you are feeling this way. And then I mean, major massive milestone is reaching out to someone to tell them, this is the way that you're feeling, especially if they're a coach or a mentor or a friend that can hold that space for you. And you know, they don't have to resolve that feeling for you, that's only for you to do. But just knowing that that's out there in the world, just speaking those words can really take the power away from the feelings that you're having, and can be really helpful. So even journaling, if you're afraid to talk to anybody could be helpful here.
Jessica Rasdall 28:36
That's all so helpful. I just, I'm thinking about so many of our students right now, when it comes to them speaking and I've, I've seen the hesitation once they get on the stage to actually, you know, shift into their conversion strategy of their talk without getting weird. Like the zero some of us just get weird when we get to this part of our job. Because there is this hesitation of, could I even take on another client, if they filled out my form? Like, could I even fulfill this needs, and I just could, I can already imagine the amount of space that's created. Once you know, it doesn't matter if nobody or all 500 people in this audience go and buy for my shop, like we're going to be able to meet their needs.
Christina Scalera 29:21
Yeah, I have a funny story. If there's time to tell it, of course, please. Okay. My first speaking, engagement was virtual. So it was the first it was actually the first webinar that the rising tide society ever did in 2016. And there were 1600s to say 1800 depending on you know, changed over the hour, but that there were that many people live because remember, this is like 2016 there's not that many webinars. Everybody showed up. And I mean, I think there were like 5000 people total that ended up seeing like the replay and all that kind of stuff. So it was a pretty big thing. That's my first ever speaking gigs. So I was scared out of my mind, but you know, I Done presentations before it was all online. So I think that helped a lot. Because I didn't have to look at an audience, it was just a screen. And that was where I pre sold my products. Again, I like threw up those pre sale offers onto a Squarespace page that day, it was literally an afterthought that I had that afternoon where I was like, I bet they'd probably want to buy something after the fact. So I spent four hours thinking of products, putting them online, and adding that to the back of my talk and the best thing that I ever did, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, but I really thought about what result people needed. And I said, if I can create something that people need, I don't have to be good at pitching them. And I wasn't, I mean, I hope that got deleted somewhere on the archives, because it was terrible. I did I stumbled my way through the pitch. It was just, you know, a powerful presentation literally called contracts 101, which is ironic, but it was a powerful presentation where I just went through. I was you know, it was it was a good presentation. But at the end I just was like, and I'm so contract, if you want, if you want contract templates, I have some I have a shop is my name. This the URLs on screen, like it was like that. It was like that, and I sold my first and they were way, way, way cheaper than they are now. But I sold my first 30 $700 of products that weekend. Because they were on presale. So then I had to and then I also did the very bad thing of I didn't understand how long it would take me to create these products. So I said they'd be delivered in like a week or two weeks. And all of a sudden I had all these orders, right. So that's why I say set realistic expectations, maybe like 14 days or 30 days based on your schedule. But anyway, I sold the 3700 bucks to this audience because it was just something that they needed. And I think that's the you know, if you're looking at what your competition is doing, if you're looking at what other people are selling, and you're not looking at what your customers need, you're never going to be able to get to that place where you could just tell people that your shop exists and people go there. So just create things people need
Jessica Rasdall 32:07
that like imagine if you hadn't thrown that paycheck, right? Like and you would have given this presentation. And now you've got 1500 people who are like, wow, crap, I've got, you know, honey books, handling my stuff. I don't have sound contracts in here. I'm not protected. And they're leaving your presentation, flustered overwhelmed, realizing they've got holes that need to be filled, and now they're all reaching out to you. You can't help them all right. But instead, you now had a bunch of people who were served well, who felt better, who went back into their business more confident, because you were ballsy enough to throw that page up.
Christina Scalera 32:46
Literally one slide. And yeah, one page on a Squarespace site with very, very minimal product descriptions. I wish I had a screenshot of it that I can show you guys. But it it was there was nothing on it. So there's not much to see really, really bad graphics that I created. Because this is like before Canva before Canva got fancy to Yeah, like terrible graphics. Very difficult to read graphics, by the way, not much text, price points that were way too low. And delivery times that were completely unreasonable. Unless I worked around the clock, which I ended up doing. To learn a lot, I learned a lot. So that's why I'm teaching you from experience, do some of what I did, but not all. change some things.
Jessica Rasdall 33:33
That's always me talking. I'm always like, Well, let me tell you what I did. So you can do what worked and skip over all the stuff that bah. Oh, it's just so incredible, because we can get so fixated on like, how will this look? What will they think of me? How will I appear if I sell this thing instead of thinking, I'm literally speaking in front of people and telling them how they have a problem. Like I'm helping them realize this thing they need to fix. And I'm not giving them a quick way. Like I'm serving them less by not having this product ready for them. Yeah, if our listeners are, well, I hope they are now at the edge of their seats. like okay, Christina, I'm ready. I'm going to do this shop, pre sale. I'm gonna get on all these stages and help everybody. How do they get started?
Christina Scalera 34:21
It's just my name dot come, Christinascalera.com, we make it really easy.
Jessica Rasdall 34:26
I bet there's a shop there
Christina Scalera 34:30
It's coming. Because again, you have to focus on the result. And so the result that I wanted people to achieve. It came in a little bit of a different container than a shop originally, so there will be a shop there. But yeah, so that's why we have lots of really awesome just free resources and videos and things like that that will help people get started. But no shop yet. But maybe by the time this releases,
Jessica Rasdall 34:54
I love that there's no shop yet actually, I think that's such a great example to be able to see that you're doing the work. You didn't just throw up a ship, because there's so many of us who have gotten a really good results as a service provider and want to turn that in to a product. But we haven't actually showed somebody else how to walk through it yet. And there's just a lot of holes. I think you're doing an incredible job by having this incredibly successful shop and now teaching people how to do the same. Because you're now getting to work intimately in hearing where they're at and uncovering their stories. And I just I love seeing you literally doing the work you're asking other people to do.
Christina Scalera 35:38
It's very fulfilling. So I'm very grateful to be in this position.
Jessica Rasdall 35:42
Oh, I'm so happy to have you here. I can't thank you enough for joining me. I know we have so many students who've been thinking about products, and I hope this is the push for them to just throw up that page, take some action and pre sell thing. I hope so too. Yeah. Okay. So where do we follow you? Because I know where because I stalk you online. But
Christina Scalera 36:03
yeah, I'm at Christina Scalera everywhere. And at the contract shop, if you want to actually see this thing in action. It's super simple. It that's another we didn't have time to get into that. But that's like, my other thing is like, how can I make this super simple for you guys? So there's a little there's a little lesson in that too, I'm sure somewhere. But the other thing I just want to mention really quickly is Jessica does a really good job with this podcast. And if you guys would leave her a rating and review. I'm sure she asked you for it. But I can't stress enough how much that would help. And yeah, I just I love you too. And I'm so glad that I got this chance to come on here. And I really hope that you guys will just take those four seconds out of your day to tap the five star button on iTunes or Spotify or wherever that lives, you are the best things.
Jessica Rasdall 36:57
Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of The speak to sale podcast. If you chat a little bit about today's episode, or connect with other business owners who are working to scale their business from the stage. I would love to invite you to join us inside of the speak to scale community. We're hanging out every week in addition about the podcast giving you some behind the scenes tips. And I know we'd love to have you there. Just head on over to your shownotes click the link join the group and while you are there, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes for the podcast. Your support allows us to continue creating content like this. And I appreciate it more than you know. Alright friend, as always. I'll be over here cheering you on and I'll see you next week for another episode of The speak to scale podcast.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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