Well hello everyone and welcome back to an episode that was going to be all about Summit Funnels, but it turned out to be more of an episode on how our businesses have evolved since the Covid era and what we're doing now to ensure that they continue to grow in a landscape that's quite different. Now. In this episode, I'm joined by the amazing Krista Miller of Summit in a Box and we've been connected back since about 2020,
I would say. She is one of my wonderful collaborators and she teaches people how to get virtual summits up and running in their business. She's sharing exactly how she scaled her summit offerings over the last three years and what she finds to be working best in her business right now. Now don't worry, I tied in some questions on Summit Funnels too. Hello,
lovely Krista. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, I'm excited to have you on. It's been years since we caught up, which is way too long. Seriously, and it's wild to think that we have been around that long to be able to say that, but it's the truth. So I know, I know it's a,
it's like, I don't know how many years is five years in, it's like what's the equivalent dog years? I'm not sure, but it feels like a really, really long time. Now, obviously you are from Summit in a Box, which kind of gives it away a little bit. But for anybody who is brand new to you, what would you say it is that you do in your online business?
Yeah, so my primary goal is to help make hosting a virtual summit more doable and more profitable for all online business owners. So it used to be that really only the big name influencers could or would put on a summit. They were the only ones that thought they could do it. They were the only ones that could afford the team to do it.
My mission is to make it way, way easier for all levels of business owners. So we help people just getting started in their business. We help people who are earning seven figures and beyond launch with Summit. So it's really a strategy that scales to all levels and my goal is just to make it really easy and doable for everybody. Got it. Now,
when I first connected with you years ago, I'm pretty sure you had the Summit in a Box program, which is like that signature introductory I guess program. Now when I have a look at your website, there's other things, there's like the accelerator and I'm guessing there might be a membership. So can you talk to us a little bit about how your product suite has evolved over the years and what caused it to evolve?
Yeah, absolutely. So I actually started with just a 1 97 offer and all it was was my summit hosting like Asana project because I had people just after I had hosted a summit, just continuously asking me, oh my gosh, teach me how to do this, teach me how to do this. And I'm like, I don't think anyone's gonna pay for this,
but put your money where your mouth is. Here's an offer. And they bought it and kept asking for more. So I was like, oh, okay, maybe this will work. So I actually moved to a membership model from there and every month at a release a suite of resources that started at $12 a month. So I'd release three new resources and then increase the price by a couple dollars per month.
And eventually throughout a year we had built the foundation of what is now our summit in a Box program and it was up to $97 a month. I switched it over to a course or like you know, a big signature program. So that was my way of motivating myself to make literally hundreds over a thousand at this point resources. 'cause I couldn't just like do that without getting paid my way to like fund that and my way for people to prove to me every step of the way,
yes, we will keep paying for this, we want this. So that was kind of how I proved that this whole thing was gonna work. Then we launched it as a course in 2020. Great timing with Covid hitting and then in 2022 that's when we launched our launch with the Summit Accelerator program. So that's a group coaching program that teaches people to launch with the summit specifically.
And those are really our core offers. We do have kind of like a membership type model that goes on for people after they go through the accelerator, but nothing like front facing like that. So Summit in a Box and the accelerator are our core offers. Gotcha. I'm curious to know like what did you do in your life before Summits? 'cause you know,
obviously I think Krista and I think everything Summits, but they must have been a a pre-summit life for Krista pre 2020. Yeah, I did web development. So I did WordPress development specifically for brand and web designers. So they'd make the pretty thing and I would look at the picture and make it into a website and that's where I started hosting summits. That's where I got my footing and I was like,
oh this actually works really well. And then that is no longer in existence because Summit in a Box has taken over my entire life. Oh my goodness. It's amazing. Now you guys have like a bit of a hybrid model. You sort of, you run your live launches, I think you still do that a couple of times a year, but then you've also got these amazing evergreen funnels in place.
When you do live launch, do you lead into your summit in a box program or do you lead into the accelerator or do people get like choice of both? You know how, how do you work this? Yeah, we actually do all of the above. So we tend to alternate for the most part. We'll do a launch for the accelerator with kind of more elevated messaging that's like targeted to more advanced business owners who have been around a while.
Then we'll, you know, the next time we'll do a launch. Like we have a, a signature challenge. We usually run once or twice a year. That's more for Summit in a Box. But then sometimes we do something that's both, like if we do a summit or a conference, a lot of times that's kind of like a true hybrid for these.
So we tend to lead with the accelerator and we do an application model and when if someone applies and we're like they're not the best fit for the accelerator, we offer them some in a box. So like on the day we launch, we'll have two sessions going on and people get invited to the appropriate session. If someone doesn't apply for the accelerator, we typically invite them to the summit in a box session instead.
So we combine the two launches, which has worked really well for us. Cool. And you know, I hear you mentioning the word challenge quite a bit that you live launch with a challenge. Do you prefer, even though your, your business is around summits, do you prefer a challenge launch for your own programs? Ooh, that's a good question.
Prefer I do challenges more often because they are easier and because I don't feel like my business positioning works great with a summit. Mm. Like we do it, we do a summit about every two years 'cause I wanna walk my talk, but if anyone came to me with this business model, this audience and was like, I'm gonna host a summit, I'm like,
not about that. You're not like, let's see how we can kind of tweak this. Or I'd say okay cool, let's do it. This is gonna work, it's gonna grow your list, it's gonna do this and this, but it's not gonna, it's not gonna be anything wild. You know, and I want wild launches. So the fact that I can pull off a challenge in a couple weeks,
I tend to just go for that. It works really well for Summit in a Box and and they're just lower lift. I do love the summits because they do everything. Like when I run a challenge I don't expect to build my email list. That's not the goal. When I host a summit, I expect list growth, I expect revenue from the summit,
I expect launch revenue, I expect connections and visibility and all of those things, but I don't always need all of that. So a summit or a challenge is a easy rinse and repeat thing for us to do. That makes sense. Now I've spoken to a few people on the podcast recently who have said that, you know, post Covid now that we're sort of in this post covid normal business revenues have dropped off a bit in their online business and un launched Summit in a Box in 2020.
Now you've added the accelerator in 2022. Is that because you saw like the landscape shifting? Like how has it affected your business or are summits like as good as they ever were? Yeah, so the biggest summits we ever saw and my biggest year in revenue were 2020 mm Or was it 2021 actually I think it was 2021. Everything we did was just absolutely out of this world.
I'm like what is happening? And things have dropped a bit since then and like nothing that has me sitting in my office crying but the number, the numbers aren't the same. Yeah. So I do tend to see lower revenue for my own events. Our overall business revenue has been down as well. Again, nothing terrible but I mean I was running a business on how to host virtual conferences during Covid.
Mm. That worked pretty well. You know, so I can't match that without a, you know, big huge disaster like that going on. I think it's refreshing for people to hear it though, you know, because people who are not, I guess as much in our space as we are, they're just looking at their businesses thinking, geez, what am I doing wrong?
Like my business revenues are really like tapering off so you know, what did I do? And I think it really is just the state of the nation really. You know, it's just the way that it is and it's not anything that anybody's done wrong, it's just we all got so swept up in that online amazing Covid era, which obviously was terrible in a lot of ways,
but for online business owners it was like, whoa, look at my business. Explode now it's a bit of a reality check I think. Yeah, exactly. It definitely is. Yes. It makes your work a little harder and I, part of your question was about the accelerator and yeah that is part of why we launched the accelerator last year is Summit in a Box just was not bringing in the evergreen sales we needed on a monthly basis.
And I was in the mode we were always launching because I had to and the accelerator was kind of part of my solution for that. And luckily it has fit the bill, we've been able to adjust other strategies. But yeah, the accelerator partially came because of that, but it's just been like a very nice addition overall. So it'll be here to stay.
Oh that's good. And then as far as ad spend goes, 'cause you guys do run like quite a lot of ads in your business both for your live launches and your evergreen funnels. Like where do you find the most bang for Buck is with ad spend these days? Hmm. So I love running ads to our live launches just because you can see the immediate benefit of that.
We do like we wouldn't be running ads if we weren't seeing results overall, but I love what the live launches, you see people who came in through ads months ago convert. You see people who came in through ads right away convert. I would say that's where we're seeing the biggest bang for our buck. I also really am obsessed with running ads to our summits because we turn an immediate profit with those.
Like we'll turn a profit through the all access pass on its own and then we launch on the backend. So that's even more so that is where like we get the biggest bang for our buck. But like I said, we don't do Summit, it's a ton in our own business. So overall live launches have been great. Okay. And then for your evergreen funnels,
like when you are running ads in between the launches, are you running them to that free training series that you've got going? Yeah, We experiment with all kinds of different things. The free training series has been the newest thing we've been ramping up and it's been, it's been going well. We've been getting like 1200, 1400 leads per month running ads to that,
which has been great And you know, our spend matches that but we, we've been seeing it work. Do you know how much it costs per signup for the free training? Our goal is seven to $9 per lead right now. Okay. And I remember back in the day, man we could, we could get leads for like two bucks but like seven to $9 is where our goal is right now.
And we have been able to track it through our funnel. It's like, okay, this is worth it, let's keep doing this. We don't love these numbers but it's working. I have someone else do it. So for me it's easy. We just gotta trust the process kind of. But it's a lot. I hear you. Ad spend is like super painful these days.
It's like that's costing me what $10 like, so yes. I feel you Krista. Alright so after somebody opts in for that free training and and I opted in for it yesterday, like what happens to me next because I noticed there wasn't like a, a tripwire or a do this now. So how do you nurture people from that free training into the bigger programs?
Yeah, so we definitely have the goal of that. My big vision when we launch this free training series is I wanna give people who are new to me an idea of what they can expect in our world. So I throw a ton of value in this training series. I don't hold anything back. We are encouraging people to like reach out to us,
dmm us, ask us your questions. Like we have prizes we give out for people who do that. We give like little bits and pieces of feedback. So like that's our primary goal. That's why we don't have a tripwire or anything like that. I want people to feel very like taken care of and I don't have a problem with tripwires or anything,
it's just the vibe I wanted to get out, give off at least to start with. So yeah, someone goes in and we have, oh goodness is it a 10 or 14 day process that they go through? It's a 10 part training series. So I think we give 'em 14 days and they're, they're getting an email from us every day with reminders,
Hey here's today's training, here's today's training. And they can also binge it all if they want to. So for the trainings they can read it, they can watch it. We have, there's a podcast feed, there's a workbook, we pull out all the stops. But underlying all of that is the call to action. Apply for the accelerator. Apply for the accelerator,
and then once I think their final piece of homework is to apply, which they get prize entries for and then there's like a follow-up sequence they go into after that, that's a pretty hard push to get them to apply. Got it. And then I did have a look at that application page and I love that you're using an application funnel because you don't see it that much and it's an amazing application page.
I think your background as a web designer has definitely paid off. I was on that page and it's like I don't even wanna, like I don't wanna host a summit but who can resist applying when the page looked like This? It was amazing. Now do you ever run traffic, like paid traffic straight to that application page for the accelerator or everybody comes into your world either via like the free training or some low priced workshop challenge or something?
Yeah, we've never done cold traffic ads right to that page. We will do retargeting ads for like our warm audience to get there but honestly we haven't had much luck with it 'cause our audience just isn't big enough for it to be overly effective. So most of it is, you know, our email list, social media accounts. Yeah, organic traffic landing there.
Okay, Cool. And then once somebody does apply for the accelerator, can you talk us through what happens behind the scenes? Like does somebody like a a worker bee out the back have to manually look at every application or have you got automations in place based on how they respond, how automated and hands-off is this process? Yeah, it is not at all hands-off either my client success coach or I go through every single application and we read them in detail and you know,
sometimes it's easier than others if they fill out one sentence answers it's like nope. And we have a tag that we'll add and that will assign a task to my assistant who just goes and does the rest. And so like a rejection email, like it's a very nice rejection email but a no thanks email kind of thing. But we go through all of them,
we end up accepting about 40% of people who apply. And so, and we actually record custom videos or voice messages for everybody who at least like tries, you know, whether they're accepted or not. We record something custom so it's very manual. But again we want people to know how much we care either way. Even if they're not a good fit for the accelerator,
we want them to know that like we're still in their corner still cheering for them, still think they can do it and someone in a box is still a great option. So we present that to them also. So we do that, we have canned emails that we tweak and customize and send out and then the rest of the process is automated. So there's like a tag we add in Airtable accept or redirect and then the rest from there is automated unless they reach out to us.
We do also do follow up throughout like a week after they apply. So we'll you know, keep an eye out for emails and if they're not reaching out to us or joining we will reach out to them and just see if they have any questions. We're not like pressy or salesy or anything like that, but we genuinely like it's a big decision. We want to make sure people,
people know that we're there to help them. And I know some people kind of need to be invited to ask questions that they have so we make sure that they know they can do that. Oh I love that. And then if you do accept them, do you give them, you know, a certain amount of time? Like is there any pressure applied to get them to make a decision and and pay the money?
Yeah, so typically they have six days to decide to get a couple bonuses. So there's a bonus where they can get two extra months if they join within the first six days. Unless their deadline is is gonna expire on a Sunday, then they get seven days. 'cause we don't want their deadline to expire when we're not paying attention. I feel like there's one other bonus but I can't even remember.
That's okay. But anyways, so that first six days is when we're really following up asking questions and most people know in that time if it's a good decision or not. After that someone could still join. They just wouldn't get the extra two month bonus which makes it eight months total. I love it and I love that it's high touch and personalized and you know that you guys actually have some manual intervention because I think,
you know, it's so common for people just wanting their entire online business to be on autopilot and them not having to lift a finger for all the wonderful revenue that's gonna come their way. So you know, a good reality check I think for how you guys are doing it. Yeah, we really wanted to balance out the experience they can expect in the accelerator and I think just an all automated process would not give off the right feel at all.
So this is our way to kind of balance that even though it is extra work for sure. Yeah. Alright, well for those who are considering tackling a summit, I mean would you consider it to be a more advanced strategy? I mean if they've never done like a webinar or a challenge, would you normally suggest start there and do summits next? Or can somebody who is brand new to this online space just jump straight in and run a summit?
Yeah, I mean anyone can we, I just had someone on my podcast actually the episode hasn't aired yet, but she had no business, no brand, no email, she had an idea for a summit, she ran the summit and it was like a 20 or $30,000 events. Thousands and thousands of people signed up and now she's building a business off of that idea.
So you definitely don't need a business or experience dose of some. I think the deciding factor should really be around goals. Like if you're brand new, I, I'd be interested to hear your take, but I feel like if you're brand new hosting webinars isn't gonna do you much good 'cause you don't have an audience to host the webinar to. And same with a challenge.
A challenge can can bring in a little bit of an audience, but really it's only going to, if you already have a platform to promote on or affiliates or you're running money, money to ads a summit is one of the few strategies where you can have no audience and see really incredible results. We've had students and clients host summits with 10,000 attendees where they had nothing to start with and you can't say that about many other strategies or any other strategies out there.
So they really are great. What I consider more advanced is launching through a summit. So if you wanna launch a course, a membership, a group program on the backend of your summit, that's where I would say okay, let's test this with a webinar first. Let's make sure you have an email so you can, that converts first before you go through the work of hosting a summit.
Try to figure out all these launch pieces when the launch is a whole other beast on its own and like test it on the backend and the launch like wasn't set up to work in the first place, let's not do that. So that's why I like to see people have a little experience beforehand. I like that. And do you think that a summit can work regardless of whether or not,
you know, you want to sell backend a course or a membership or coaching or services? Like could it work for everything? Absolutely and we have done all of the things. So my first, oh goodness, for three or four summits I had services. I did not like straight up launch them on the backend of the summit, but they booked out because of the summit because I positioned it the right way.
All I did was like send an email after the fact being like, here's how you can hire me, here are some free things that I have that you might wanna check out. You know, thumbs up, pull, be in touch. And like oddly enough that worked. That's not how I would recommend someone does it, but it did the trick after that for that that's,
that was my development business. I stopped offering services, we just hosted the summits and even without selling anything one year we brought in 121,000 just in Summit revenue. I was good with that. I didn't have to launch anything. Now that was 2021 by the way, that was the good summit year. But that worked. We have also launched our summit in a box course through a summit.
That was our first time launching with a summit that brought in 63,000. That worked wonderfully. So that's a higher priced course. I think at the time it was 2000. But of course we have clients and students who launched 97 $200 courses as well. And we've also launched our group coaching program, the accelerator through a summit. That was just in December, 2022 and that went great as well.
That was another 60 some thousand dollars launch. So that went great. We have several clients who launched memberships with their summit. We worked one-on-one with the client to help them launch the membership with a summit. They're bringing in 300, 500 new members every time they do this, which is absolutely wild point being when you have it set up right, you can launch pretty much anything through a summit.
Oh you've got me rethinking it now Krista, I didn't running a summit but now magical. My mind is sticking. I'm like, oh I suppose I could, if somebody is going to put a summit together, like how long do they need to do that? Oh my gosh. Please give yourself time if you are not launching through your summit. I would say 90 days is a good amount of time.
There are gonna be parts of that 90 days that feel quite busy. If you're someone who wants more time, lengthen it. If you're going to launch through your summit again, assuming that this is a launch you've done before, I still like to give yourself like 120 days to get all your launch stuff ready to go first, tweak your webinar if you need to get your emails up and running and scheduled,
do all of that, get your tech ready for your webinar or whatever. Then move into your summit planning after that. Mm. We have a client who just joined the accelerator last week who's doing her summit in five weeks and like, yes, come in, we have all the templates, we will help you. Like, I mean it's better to do it with us than without us in that case.
Right? But it's going to be stressful for her. And I was very upfront about that. I did not hide that. So yeah, we have people come in and try to do it in five, six weeks, but they will be the first ones to sit alongside me and be like, it was good but it was a lot. Please give yourself more time.
Hmm. In your experience, does B two B work better than B two C? Or you know, B two B two C is like, I don't know, does that make sense? Like If actually As far as getting the summit registrants, you know like am I gonna have more luck working with moms and dads, getting them to register for a summit or getting businesses involved?
It is actually much easier to get B two C audiences to engage and sign up with a summit. So these are our B two C clients are the ones hosting six figure, multiple six figure summits. It just explodes. Mm. And you know, I think it's because people targeting, business owners tend to have messaging that all of us business owners have seen a million times before.
Like that's part of why I don't get as excited for my own events because I see my B two C clients hosting like $200,000 events and I'm like, hmm, okay. Like again, not that it doesn't work with B two C, we just had a B two C client last week host a summit that so far has brought in $140,000 and and climbing and that does not include a launch on the backend.
So like it's possible to do amazing things with both, but we see the B two C clients having an easier time just kind of blowing their expectations out of the water. Mm. Got it. Okay. I might rethink my summit strategy in that case. Outta curiosity, like what is the, the craziest like niche or topic that you've seen a summit held on?
Can is anything like spring to mind where you're like, yeah that was crazy but it worked? Yeah, we had an accelerator client who hosted a beginner pole dancing summit, which at first we were like, oh my gosh, I don't know, this is a little outside our comfort zone, but like it was awesome. It was so cool. Her goal was like just to empower women and it was a huge hit.
She blew all of her goals away. Something else that's not as crazy anymore. But at first I was like, hmm, I don't know how this is gonna go. Was crafting summits. We had someone come in a couple years ago to host a crafting summit and now they're everywhere. These are the ones that are six figure multi-six figure nearly every time they happen.
At first I didn't see how it was gonna work, but they all proved me wrong and it's wonderful. I'm off to learn how to craft Krista, I know I need to knit or something and then it's, yeah, it's gonna be an easy road if I can figure out how so Seriously. Alright, well for those people who would love to learn more about hosting a summit,
what is the number one best entry point into the summit in a box world? Yeah, so free training series we talked about earlier is definitely where I'd recommend you go. And it's a training series, 10 part training series. It's free that leads you through really the entire beginning stages of planning your summit. And you will actually start during this time because like we give you homework,
we tell you what to do, we give you prize entries when you do your homework. Part of it is catered towards people who plan to launch. But if you're not in at that place yet, you just like skip that lesson, right? It's no big deal. So that is definitely the best place. I did not hold anything back. I created that series because I looked at all my other freebies and I was like,
these are garbage. Nobody can take a five page P d F and go host a summit from that. I need to give them something awesome. This is what I came up with. So our summit to sales training series is a great place to start. Awesome. Well I will be absolutely linking to it below, but I'm also about to go off and tell all of my students and clients about it as well.
So expect a lot of free training signups in your next 24 hours. 'cause it sounds fabulous. I appreciate that. But thank you so much Christopher coming in and sharing a little bit with us about what's happening behind the scenes at Summit in a box, and you know, just giving us a little bit more of an insight into what it's like to get a summit up and running.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I hope you enjoyed listening in to my chat with Krista. If you'd like to reverse engineer one of her amazing funnels or apply to join her Summit Accelerator program, start with her brand new free training series, which I will absolutely link up below. I'll see you soon for our next episode of the Kajabi verse.