You may think that you need to take the time to study your niche, start a blog, write a book, make a class, and become renown in your industry.
This simply isn’t the case.
While it can still be a lot of work, hosting a summit can be a great way to utilize the notoriety of others in your niche to give yourself quick expert status and generate a ton of leads for your business.
Ready to learn what a summit funnel is and how it can help your business?
Let’s dive in.
Introduction to the Summit Funnel
The idea of a summit funnel is to get people to sign up to a free or paid event that houses speeches from a number of industry leaders on various topics within your niche.
The summit can be live the first time through, and then once you record it you have a powerful asset that you can use as a replay to show countless people in the future.
For the summit funnel itself, there aren’t too many pages involved.
You need a signup page and a thank you page.
After that people are notified each day when the new set of videos “drops”.
You send them an email each day of the summit with their link to the new page full of speakers.
People will then watch the videos each day and get their value.
If you are running a live summit based on timed sessions you will need to get a little more sophisticated with your technology.
Once the summit is over, it’s good to have a member’s area set up for people so they can view and rewatch any of the summit videos from this page.
You will likely have an offer within the members area to related, paid products and the start to other funnels that offer higher-ticket products and services.
How Do I Make A Virtual Summit Funnel?
The main deliverable you need during your summit funnel is the expert interviews.
These can be obtained live via programs like Hopin or something more universal like Zoom.
If having the summit live isn’t important to you, simply have your guests record their session using their webcam and send you the video.
Once you have gathered all your expert advice sessions, you will need some way to be able to get people to sign up, and then view them.
This can be strung together using a website builder like WordPress, or you can take the non-techy route and use pre-built summit funnels within a funnel builder program like ClickFunnels.
If you have your summit videos ready beforehand, you could even signup for your ClickFunnels 14-day trial and get your summit up quick during the trial period.
This would give you the opportunity to start getting results before you actually start paying for anything.
Any way that you do it, make sure it is user friendly and actually works when people access it. Non-working summits will leave a bad taste in your visitors’ mouths and they may be weary to work with you in the future.
How Many Days Your Summit Should Be
Another questions you have to answer is how many days your summit should be.
The answer really depends on the objective of the summit and the number of guests.
If you only have 5 or 6 guests, then a quick, 1-day summit would probably suffice.
If your summit is meant to teach 3 major lessons through multiple sessions from various experts, then you will likely want to divide the videos by major topic and have a 3 day summit.
Don’t drag your summit out too long or people will tune out before they get to your high-ticket offer at the end.
Give a clear objective of what people will learn over the course of your summit and let them know how many days it is from the start.
Set expectations and you can’t go wrong.
How Many Speakers Should Be At My Event?
How many experts you want speaking at your event is also a big variable you will need to figure out.
You can’t have multiple speakers talking about the exact same topic, so make sure everyone involved has unique value to bring to the table.
Make sure you, or someone from your company, also has a headlining event on one of the days. Even if you are virtually unknown you will be seen as one of the major experts by putting yourself in the same group as other experts.
I’ve seen 1 day summits with six speakers and a very narrow topic.
I’ve seen 3 and 4 days summits with 20-30 speakers.
Again, make sure it fits your objective and you can’t go wrong.
Vetting Speakers
When looking for experts to speak at your event, you have to make sure you are getting the right people that will help you make an impact.
You also have to consider your level of popularity.
You can shoot for the stars when it comes to finding speakers, but if you don’t have the capability to draw a large audience, you likely won’t get top-notch presenters.
If you go to people with a plan on how you are going to market the event and draw an audience, you will be more likely to draw heavy hitters.
As for the speakers themselves, you want people who have a good track record in your field, but you also want people with their own audience.
If someone is invited as an expert to speak at an event, you can bet they will promote the summit to their own audience to boost their credibility. They will be grouped in with these other experts as well, which really helps their reputation.
Part of your marketing plan will hinge on getting speakers with large followings, so you can use that as leverage to get other speakers with large followings. People will be happy when other speakers share the summit with their audience because they will get access to this new audience also.
This is your leverage to keep getting better and better presenters.
If you have a paid summit, or a back-end offer you are selling, you should also add the extra incentive off affiliate links to your summit.
Give each speaker a link and tell them that you will give them a percentage of tickets and back-end sales that you make from people they bring to the summit.
This will give them more incentive to share and possibly even pay to promote.
After Your Summit Is Over
When your live summit is over, or you have collected all the videos from your pre-recorded summit, the work has just begun.
You now possess a powerful marketing tool full of value that your audience will love.
You have to make sure you are using it to it’s full advantage.
How to Create an Evergreen Virtual Summit
The goal of your summit should be to create an asset for your business that you can use in an evergreen way moving forward.
This means that you need to include materials that will still be relevant for a long time to come.
Once your summit is over, make sure that you are packaging it in a way that removes specific dates from the equation.
As seen in the summit funnel graphic above, you will be delivering your summit via email and links to a new page each day after someone signs up.
This means that all timers are removed, all specific dates are removed, and you simply have a Day 1, Day 2, etc.
Create a different page for each day of your summit, add that day’s videos there with titles, summaries, and resources, and then include the link to this page in that day’s emails.
Email sequences should fire from an automated email marketing software that will space out the delivery of the emails automatically and deliver that day’s summit videos to the user.
Note that if it’s important that people only access 1 day at a time so they can properly consume the information, you may want to avoid sequential URLs such as “/super-cool-summit-day-1/” followed by “/super-cool-summit-day-2/”.
People will be able to guess the URL and move ahead.
I know. I’ve done this with evergreen summits I’ve attended.
Mix up the URLs in some way that they cannot be guessed and people will get the information in the time you deem necessary.
If timing doesn’t matter, ignore this step.
Repackaging Your Summit Materials
There is a lot of gold to be mined from the material presented in your summit.
You can get thousands of blog post and other content ideas from the material presented.
You can get extra nuggets from each presenter and include the bonus materials in an additional course or exclusive summit pass.
One of my favorite things you can do is repackage the lessons into a book that you can then make a book funnel from.
You have to have permission from the presenters, of course, but a book is a more physical and solid representation of expertise, so they will likely love to be included in the book form of the summit.
You can also sweeten the deal for them by offering them the list of leads generated from the book funnel (you will also need to make sure your user knows who will be getting their email when they sign up. Transparency is a must).
You can simply transcribe the lessons given by each presenter, or have each one write out a specific chapter for the book covering their section of the material.
A book is a powerful asset to have in your business, even if you didn’t write all of it. You will still have your own chapter and be grouped with the other experts.
You will also write the introduction to the book, which kind of makes you the expert of experts.
My favorite example of this is Russell Brunson’s 30 Days Summit.
The presenters gave their summit presentations and also took the time to write down their 30 Day plans to include in the book.
No matter how you decide to repackage your materials, just know that you can get a lot more mileage out of the materials given and the talent gathered from your summit than just video lessons.
The Summit Funnel Thank You Page
The thank you page is shown right after someone signs up for your summit.
It is your job here to let them know the next steps, how the summit will be delivered to them (live or over the next several days via email), and anything they should do to prepare.
If your summit is being used to sell something on your back end, why not make the first pitch for this offer on the thank you page after people sign up?
It takes many times of people seeing an offer before they are usually willing to buy, so getting them to see it early will be of benefit to you.
You may also collect some early sales. Just make sure the offer aligns with the subject of the summit, and that you are giving some sort of exclusive discount to make it worth their while.
Learn More About Lead Funnels
The summit funnel is an awesome way to get leads into your business while providing them with amazing value up-front, but it’s not the only way to get leads.
If you are looking to build your list of business leads, I always recommend that people check out the Lead Funnels Swipe File.
Not only do you get an overview of how lead funnels work and the different parts that make up these funnels, but you will also have access to 106 world-class lead funnels that have brought in millions of leads to top-of-the-line businesses across the country.
It’s a great read and must-have knowledge for your business.
