How can you accurately predict your course launch results?

How do you accurately predict the sales from your online course launch?

Whether it’s this month, next month, the following month, this launch or the next launch, we’re going to talk about three numbers that you can look at that can help you accurately predict what your online course or program sales are going be.

This whole topic was prompted by one of our clients who was launching this past week. Our team built her launch funnel for her course launch. She asked what we thought her launch revenue would be.

When we are managing a client launch or leading the launch of one of our programs, our team always predicts the total revenue from the launch before we get to the finish line. In this launch, we reviewed the numbers and predicted the final sales would be $42,517 over 16 days.

That’s a very specific number, right? Do you know what the actual sales came in at?

Predicted sales: $42,517

Actual sales: $43,214

How did we predict the sales so accurately?

3 Numbers to Watch to Accurately Predict Your Online Course Sales

If you’re paying attention to the numbers in your sales funnels, you can start to see what’s happening in the client experiences that you’re creating in your business. There are three key numbers that you can look at right now to predict your sales.

In our company, we track a comprehensive dashboard of numbers that help us get a full picture of what is going on all the funnels in our business. While having a full dashboard of statistics to see what is working and what is not is great to have, there are really three key numbers you can start to focus on now:

1) How many people opt-in for your launch

The first number to look at in your online course funnel is your number of opt-ins. Opt-ins are the number of people that you have coming into the conversation (or campaign) with you.

I grew up in sales and my mentor always said “At the end of the day, sales is a numbers game”. I’m sure most of you have heard this phrase before. When you think of sales as a numbers game, you may assume that you have to have lots of people or a large quantity of prospects.

In reality, it is a numbers game but only because the numbers are very predictive of what the results are going to be.

If you are selling one-to-one in discovery calls, your opt-ins number would be the number of people that opt to get on the phone with you.

If you selling one to many through a webinar, the opt-ins would be the number of people that opt in and sign up for your webinar.

2) How many people see your sales message

The second key number to focus on is the amount of people that see your sales message. We can call this number “sales message views”.

If you’re selling one-to-one, the people that get on the phone with you, talk to you, and then get to see what you are offering are your sales message viewers. You might show them what you offer by sending a proposal or pulling up your package to review on a shared screen. The number of people who see your offer equals your sales message views.

If you’re selling one to many through an online funnel leading to a webinar, the number of sales message views equals the number of people that go to your sales page after the webinar to see your offer.  

3) How many people buy

Once people actually see your sales message, the third number that we need to look at is your sales conversion.

How many people that saw your sales message actually bought?

When you start to look at these numbers, you can get really clear on how to predict what your revenue is going to be.

So let’s work through an example and put all the numbers together:

Let’s say you’re selling one-to-one and you get 10 people to schedule a discovery call with you. Of the 10 calls you have with prospective clients, 5 of them seem to be viable prospects. You send those 5 prospects a proposal detailing your offer for a coaching program or workshop.

If you send 5 prospects a proposal and 20% buy, you generate 1 sale.

If that one sale is a $997 coaching package, you’ve landed $997 in revenue.

Knowing the numbers creates a predictable formula that lets you know how many people you need to have calls with in order to get the number of sales that you want.

You can use these same numbers when you start looking at your online course funnel.

You can also work with these numbers on a larger scale when you serve one-many in an online experience funnel.

If you have one thousand people sign up for your webinar and half show up, you have 500 people who view your sales message. Even if you close 10 percent, you’ve got 50 enrollments in your offer and if it’s the same $997 price point as earlier, you’ve got $50,000 of revenue on those thousand people coming into your experience.

1,000 register for your webinar

500 people show up for the webinar and see the offer

50 buy (10% conversion)

At $997 tuition, this is close to $50,000 in revenue.

This is a predictable way to estimate what your revenue will be. As you can guess, this is what we did when our client asked us what we thought the sales would be for her launch. We looked at these exact numbers and we were able to accurately predict revenue for her.

Accurately predicting consistent revenue in your business is a game-changer. Click To Tweet

It allows you to invest in support and make decisions about the growth in your business with confidence.

I’d love for you to think about this because if you start to pay attention to how many people opt-in to your launch, how many people see what it is that you’re marketing, and how many people say yes, you’re going to be able to predict your revenue.  

What questions do you have about tracking this? Having a dashboard in your business that helps you predict not only what this month’s sales are going to be, but next month, three months from now, for the whole year is how you create real predictability and real value in your business.