Want Marketing Success? Use The Six Minute Webinar with Don McGrath 

 

Are you aiming for marketing success? In today’s episode, Robin’s guest, Don McGrath, creator of the 6- Minute Webinar, shares his secret for how to create powerful, effective messages that move people to action. The 6-Minute Webinar is a technology that generates a webinar script just for you, coupled with an online course to help you implement. With an easy-to-use template that includes an introduction, future pacing, problem, and struggle story, all you have to do is to tweak it a little bit to make it your own. Tune in and learn more about this tool that will change how you approach marketing!

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Want Marketing Success? Use The Six Minute Webinar with Don McGrath 

I’m very excited to share with you my guest, Dr. Don McGrath. Don is a retired engineer, a corporate consultant, and an avid rock climber and who is super into fitness. If you met Don in person, you’d be amazed at how trim and muscular he is for a fellow of his age. Don also shows coaches, consultants, and experts how to define, create, and effectively market their products and programs so that they can make more money and help more people. We love that. I’ve known Don for a number of years. I’ve even helped him write a book. I asked him to be on the show because he shared with me, and I want you to hear about this, about his brilliant new program that he’s created to help you create a six-minute webinar.

I think this is a brilliant technology. I don’t know about you, but personally, one of my least favorite things about webinars is how long they are. I don’t need to listen to you for 45 minutes to make up my mind all the time about whether I want to buy something from somebody. Don has come up with the Six Minute Webinar, and it’s a really brilliant technology. It actually includes an app with it that has some features that I’m going to save for the interview. It’s a brilliant technology that’s helping hundreds of entrepreneurs already to create powerful and effective marketing messages that speak directly to their perfect clients, rapidly moving them to action.

I think this is a super exciting idea. The reason Don came up with it is because he seen too many coaches, consultants, and experts struggle with their marketing. He became committed as a result to creating a world where they find marketing simple, easy and fun so they can have the lifestyle that they desire and deserve. This is going to be a super episode, chock-full of information. Let’s go talk to Don.

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Don, welcome to The Author’s Corner.

Thank you so much for having me on. I’m just so excited. It has been so great to reconnect with you.

Me too. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations, and I was even thinking about it. I’m trying to remember because we met so many years ago, and I’m trying to remember. Did someone else connect us, or how did we initially meet? I think it was somebody.

I wrote my first book. It was on 50 Athletes Over 50. It was a 50 interview series that Brian Schwartz was orchestrating. He had you come and be a guest speaker at one of our training or something. I think that’s how we first connected.

That makes perfect sense. I’m sure that’s true. For the benefit of our readers, we actually went on to work on a book together where you, Don McGrath, the engineer, authored a novel, a fable. That was an interesting adventure.

At that point, I had written five books, and they were all nonfiction. I’m a linear thinker. I wanted to do a leadership fable. At the time, I was doing some leadership coaching. I thought, “How cool would it be to have my own leadership fable?” I was like, “Who can help me with this?” I reached out to you, and it was quite interesting. My wife still jokes sometimes about how she would hear me in my office interviewing myself as if I was one of the characters in the book, which was totally up to me and for her too.

You were a great student. I think you did a really good job. It was a big stretch for you into that other mode.

I’m comfortable. I try to be the woman in the head of engineering and then try to be the Carl was the head of manufacturing and the CEO, getting into their heads. I remember you challenging me, “Don, she would never say it that way.” I got some fun.

Now, as you are ever the guy with new ventures, and the reason why I invited you here is that you started telling me about this new approach to the webinar that speaks to my heart preferences in many ways. Tell us about this amazing new avenue for people to share their information and generate revenue of the Six Minute Webinar. Tell us, how did you think of this?

Years ago, I had a company called Speakers Pathway, and we did a lot of speaker training, so we were doing a speaker training event in Phoenix. We expected quite a number of people to be there, and only twelve people showed up, and I knew that only the day before. I said, “How can we make this special for these twelve people who took the time and showed up?” Myself and Jim in the other corner, we’re like, “Maybe we can have everybody give a talk, not just have this be a training thing where 1 or 2 people get, but let’s have everybody.”

In order to do that, the talks had to be six minutes. I went back, and I revamped the whole training, and I pulled out. Walk and go, walk and go, and I came up with a process that I train people through, and at the end of two days, they had their six-minute talk. They gave their six-minute talk, and then we voted on who was the best in these talks to move people to action. These are not educated. These are not lectures. These are to move people to action.

They got voted for if they moved people to action, and the audience and people love that so much. One of the people who’s a clinical hypnotist, began using that six-minute talk at networking events and started getting clients. She came up to me, and not only that, but they want to know who my coach is. She was bugging me over and over again, like, “What are we going to do with that training?” We were doing other things then the pandemic hit, and we were trying to figure out if we’re not going to do our next event, what are we going to do? One of the members of my team, Bill Heinrich, said, “That six-minutes speaker training, what if we turned that into a webinar?” Immediately, it was like a six-minute webinar. That was the birth of it, so we’ve taken that. We’ve created an app that makes it really easy. You answer 40 questions, it writes a six-minute webinar script.

You provide 40 questions and an author who maybe wants to sell a course along with their book or something, they could just answer those questions and the app writes the webinar?

It writes to the webinar script with twelve steps that we’ve come up with. There’s introduction, there’s future pacing, there’s problem, there’s your struggle story, there’s the secret. We’ve got twelve steps that are the basis for moving people to action. We have word count limits that gets you to 800 words and writes a script, then you go in and tweak it a little bit and make some language your own.

Does it involve generating slides?

We have a template that we suggest, and it’s around 14 or 15 slides max. We have a template, hardly any words on the slides. One image per slide per section about, and the slides are there to support the emotion you’re trying to evoke with your words. The script is primary, slides are secondary, and sometimes people get all hung up around the slides, and here’s the thing. The Six Minute Webinar is great, but what we find is this process gives people such incredible clarity is they’re using that same language in the email copy. They’re using it on landing pages. They’re using it in live videos. They’re using it everywhere.

I love what you said about using the slides to evoke the emotional response. That’s brilliant. I’ve never heard that one before. The words for the information, but the slides, like adding that visual aspect to get them into the feeling because people buy based on emotion.

You want to connect emotionally, so the script is primary, and you’ll tweak it and come up with your language. You then marry it with the slides, and we’ve got a process for how do you know how to advance, and then how to record and get all that in the training and everything. It’s what you want, and we give examples. Here’s an image that evokes this kind of emotion. What’s interesting, Robin, is you can almost take the slides that we have in our template and almost use them because there’s the promise, there’s the problem, there’s suffering, there’s a pain, there’s a solution. There are the three keys. People don’t have to change things very much.

One of the conventional wisdom things I’ve heard about webinars is the higher the ticket, the longer the webinar has to be. Do you still subscribe to that? If so, what is the Six Minute Webinar perfect for selling?

Yes. I refer to the trust bucket. If you’re new to me, I can only fill your trust buckets just so far in six minutes, no matter how good I am. The offers that we like people to use and that we suggest people use are some strategy sessions, a discovery call, a free trial for something, a lead magnet or selling something under $200. Sell things in the $200 range. Once you have raving fans, and they’ll buy anything you have, your trust buckets are at the brim already. If I come out with a six-minute webinar about a new program, it can be a high ticket item because my trust bucket, I built it over months or maybe years with you.

Do you have a lot of people who’ve taken this program who are authors?

Quite a few. Some consider themselves an author, and many of them don’t consider themselves an author, but they have books.

That’s more like the coach consultant who has that authority piece book. That’s a lot of our readers. Say more about that, and how have you seen people like that use the Six Minute Webinar idea. Tell us about some of the experiences that people have had.

We had one woman who, when she first started working, was doing a million things. Here’s the beauty of the Six Minute Webinar. It’s one thing, one promotion. That’s it. You can’t do like, “I do this, and I do this.” She decided what she wanted to promote was a podcast launch course that she had put together. She was in our pilot group, actually, so we were still early in the development of Six Minute Webinars. She went through the pilot. She created a six-minute webinar. She posted it on Facebook and her social media with the call to action. She was selling it for $200 or $197, or something like that. She sold four of them within an hour. People are using these in their social media. They’re using them on their web pages. Some people don’t even do the webinar. They use the copy they get in talks and in other ways.

That’s another thing that occurs to me because with a full-blown webinar, you have to have some extra supporting software, maybe GoToWebinar, and there’s a big file with a lot of memory. A six-minute webinar, somebody might come across that and sit there and watch it on Facebook, just right there.

Right there, and then they all begin, “Welcome to my six-minute webinar. I’ll give you the three keys.” What we find is that’s just magic. You’re going to teach me the three keys to weight loss. I’m either in or I’m out, and repelling all the wrong people as quickly as I can at first ten seconds is magic. Get rid of them. You then get the people who want to go, “Tell me more,” and then this next part is the future pacing, where you lead them down this trail of moving action if they’re the right fit.

I love that because it’s so true. You’re almost afraid to click on a video because you think it’s going to be maybe a short video, and then you realize you’re going to have to watch 30 minutes before you get the answer to the one question you’re just curious about. That’s really smart.

I know that we see a lot in the coach and consultant expert space, we love to give. We want to help, and we give a lot for free, and we do free web classes and free this and free that. Free webinars, and we give a lot, probably more than we should wait in those. The thing is, who do you think you attract when you do a lot of that?

People who don’t want to pay.

People who want stuff for free. Successful people, what do they value more, time or money? Time. If in six minutes, they learn your credibility story, they will know your struggle story, they know you understand the problem, and you make them an offer, done.

It’s also true the more successful people tend to make decisions faster. There’s not a lot of hemming and hawing and, “I don’t know. I got to think about it.” Also, you’re so right because you come in and that under the $200 range, and it’s not a big ask.

It’s like, “$200? I’m curious. If I learned one thing that helps me in business, I’ll turn that $200 into the $2,000, by that one thing.”

Have you seen people use this? I could imagine this also could be good for fitness coaches. You’ve had a lot of work in the fitness space. Have you found that this translates over that direction as well?

People who work in wellness, people who work in dentistry, somebody like an oral surgeon. We’ve got such a broad range. If you solve a problem for someone, if you’re an expert in something and you have a solution to a problem that you figured out, that’s the criteria.

It could be anything. The oral surgery I hadn’t thought of, but it makes sense. A little bit about the philosophy, understanding some of the problems people come in with, and come in for a consultation, let us take a look.

His special sauce is that he has special anesthesia, like a concoction, and a special way to reduce the pain during the surgery and then afterward, and so he’s got the special system that if you care about saving your kid on some pain and suffering, it’s perfect.

I’m just thinking it reminds me of we have a program to help people write and publish a booklet. It’s like that quick turnaround authority piece, low commitment ask. You’re not asking for 6 or 7 hours of their time. You’re asking for maybe 30 minutes, and it’s very cool. I’m done. My wheels are turning on. We should package them together somehow, the booklet and the Six Minute Webinar package.

We have another publisher that we made her special offer of buying things in bulk, but she has every one of her authors go through the Six Minute Webinar.

It’s such a great tool to connect with your audience.

What we find is the process of answering those questions, and those questions are not answered in the same order with which the webinar proceeds. Begin with the end in mind. We started off with easy questions like, what’s your name? What problem do you solve? For whom? What can they do after? There’s the call to action, then we start building on the problem, and the promise. ScriptPal is what we call our app.

Say a little bit more because the thing I heard is one of the biggest content pieces that you’re asking them about first is what’s the call to action. Tell our readers a little bit about your thinking behind that because I can tell that’s a pretty genius move there.

One of the books that changed my life is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In there, if you’re reading this and you haven’t read that book, read it. You could probably get it out of the library. One of the things that Stephen Covey talks about is begin with the end in mind. A lot of people, when they go to create a course or a webinar, they’ll create all the content pieces, all the learnings and all about themselves then, at the end, it’s like, “What am I going to offer?” You’ve constructed the wrong webinar. The thing to do is like, “What am I going to offer? What am I going to offer them?” What’s the value in that? What are people going to get from this? What are they finally going to understand? What tool are they going to receive? What are they going to be empowered to do? Begin with the end in mind, which is the call to action. Actually, the first question we ask is your name.

You got to ask an easy one first. If they don’t know their name, it’s probably not going to work.

I’d get them interacting with the tool then the call to action.

That’s why I said the first content question like you’re getting the foundations out of the way. You developed this app. Is this where your engineering skills came into play? What’s all this about? This is fascinating.

We did these bootcamps. We’ve been doing them about once a month since August 2020. I think it was the 2nd or 3rd one. We realized we had a hard time teaching to different elements within the three hours of the bootcamp. There’s the framework piece, which is the twelve sections, the right order, and then there was the content. What is the content? How do you polish up the words they have maximum impact? We just couldn’t teach it all in three hours. Bill Heinrich, who’s the co-creator, I got him on the phone, and we were like, “How do we crack this nut?” I woke up at 4:00 AM the next morning, I got it. I said, “I know how to do this.” I sat down, and I created an Excel worksheet that asks questions. I went back to our Six Minute Webinars. I reverse-engineered it, came up with the 40 questions that, when asked, then populate the script. That was the beginning. We then had an actually somebody turn it into a Google app, so it’s a lot nicer to use.

How about the actual phrasing? Is that an AI editor? What is that?

No, it’s pretty simple. We have the framework, which are probably about half of the words. They’re just set up. They’re like, “What would it feel like to?”

It’s like mad libs.

Yeah. Go back, and you can edit the script. If you don’t like the words that we’re using in the framework, you can change those. I’d rather focus on the answers that you give, make sure that those are right. They’re like, “This six-minute webinar, I heard another one. Mine sounds like it.” It’s going to. The framework is there. The thing is, who’s going to sit and listen to six women in a row? Nobody. They are not going to know that some of these setup words in the framework are the same in yours.

The framework that you’re describing is pretty standard when it comes to an effective webinar. I’ve taken a lot of webinar classes, and the elements that you’re sharing about are the same elements I’ve learned about from Frank Kern and a lot of these big webinar people who has a great track record. You’re definitely operating on really sound principles of what an effective webinar contains.

I learned a lot from a lot of the speaker training, a lot of the webinars I’ve gone through, I’ve taken all the things that I’ve learned. I put my spin on the things that I’ve found through my own experience and working with clients, what’s worked for them in their speaking, things I’ve done with TED speakers and then created this unique product.

Where do people go to check this out?

SixMinuteWebinar.com. Go check it out. We do boot camps about every month. We’ve got an online course. It’s so fun. I got the app bug. Once, we had a ScriptPal, but the thing is like in a workshop, we can only teach one kind of offer, so we teach the strategy call, and not everybody does strategy calls. We were like, “How do we crack this nut?” I woke up at 4:00 AM one day, and I said, “I got it. I’m going to create OfferPal.” What it does is it supports creating five types of offers, and you answer like 10 or 12 questions, then it comes back with a structure to offers. There’s a structure to offers that work. I did the same thing I did for ScriptPal. That’s a lot easier than ScriptPal. It can create an offer that you can bolt on to your six-minute webinar for a strategy session, a free trial, a lead magnet, a low-value offer, like under $200. I took the offers that I use on my long-form webinars and from the stage, and I created one that’s for high ticket sales too.

These are also apps where you just fill-in? Are these separate things that you said or is this all part of the Six Minute Webinar package? You can see I’m going to the source and doing my shopping here.

When you come to our bootcamp or when you get our online course, you get access to ScriptPal. What we’re currently offering is you can access it for 30 days. You should go in. You can have it for 30 days. We offer something if you wanted to get whole annual access to that app because some people are like, “I want to use this in everything I do.” OfferPal right now, we have that for our VIP club, which are the people that embraced Six Minute Webinar. We’re in discussion about possibly including that in some of the other courses we do.

You haven’t been doing this for very long, then. When did you say you first launched this?

It was in 2020 when Bill said, “What if we took that six-minute talk training and a six-minute webinar?” The first time he uttered six-minute webinars in 2020. We worked on what this would look like. We toyed around with it for a couple of months and figured out where we’re going to go with it. We did our first bootcamp in August 2020.

Where do you envision this going?

I was just talking with Bill about this. What we would do is arm every solopreneur with this capability in the world, in other languages and that kind of thing.

You’re going to create other language versions. That’s exciting. What are you doing first? 

Probably Spanish because not everybody speaks English.

There’s a huge Spanish-speaking market, even in the US.

I think our biggest challenge is it can be used for so many things where we need to focus. We are picking out the first thing. The first people that we’re looking to work most with it is those people in the expert space, solopreneurs, coaches, experts.

The same expert who would be writing like nonfiction, big idea book who has the decent experience, they’re wanting to grow their brand. They want to grow their business. Maybe it’s their first foray into webinars. Maybe they’ve done webinars in the other way, and that’s exhausting.

That’s what we see. We see the people who appreciate this most are the people who have the scars on their backs.

Even if you say to me, “I think you need to make a webinar to promote that,” I feel physical pain.

Here’s the fact about webinars. I’ll ask you the same question I ask a lot of people. How long does it take you to put together a good webinar and launch that first one in good confidence?

Months.

To scale it from 1 to 10, that first one you do, how does it convert?

Terribly.

You need to do them over and over again, multiple iterations. Often you get the wrong people there. You try to invite on everybody. That’s the problem. The people have been down that road, they go through Six Minute Webinar. They’re like, “This is the coolest thing in the world is going to save me so much time. I don’t have to become a copywriter. I don’t have to hire a copywriter. I don’t have to do any of that business. I’ve got to create a long slide deck. I don’t have to schedule a time. I can send this out in an email.” It is people who’ve been down the road and have the scars who see the most value in it. I will say this. Those people who are getting started, they don’t know what they don’t know.

They don’t even know how bad it can be, and how awfully and painful it can be. It’s so frustrating because if you’re trying to sell high ticket, and the first webinar you make is fricking 1 hour and 90 minutes, it’s really exhausting. When it doesn’t convert, it’s horrifically painful. I don’t know how many of our readers can relate, but I bet you quite a few. The hard thing is no matter how you do it, there’s always that iterative process to really get it dialed in to the point where you could do have an evergreen reliably selling webinar. How many iterations are you going to be willing to do?

People say, “You start doing internet marketing. It’s like an online ATM machine. You’re like printing money.” Not until you’ve put in some serious effort, this idea that being a get rich quick idea is completely upside down. Imagine having to redo a 90-minute webinar over and over again and keep getting lousy results, there are very few people who are really willing. I certainly wasn’t willing to keep going. I’m like, “I’m just going to go back to sales conversations because I can do those.”

I call it soul-crushing. Six Minute Webinar eliminates a lot of those barriers. You can send somebody a link to a YouTube of your six-minute webinar. You could do a live video with you doing your six-minute webinar. You can use it for email. It saves so much time. We are all experiencing some form of online fatigue. Before 2020, I would be more willing to attend educational things like that weren’t business-critical than I am now. I spend so much time in front of the tube that I think there’s an element to that. That curiosity factor around six-minute webinars are incredible people.

I think that’s true. I have a perfect example. I was on Zoom on back-to-back calls from 11:00 AM until 7:30 PM. I barely had time to eat and stretch my legs. I barely had time to take care of the basic needs of the day. My dog was completely freaking out, but it’s the last thing that you want to do at the end of the day like that is sit in front of a 90-minute webinar.

That is soul-crushing. You just can’t do it.

Even if my best friend is like, “Would you come to my webinar?” I’d be like, “You know, I love you, but.”

“If you did it in six minutes, I would watch it.”

“If you did it for six minutes. I’ll be there.” I’m also thinking about you’re a big speaker. You’ve been doing speaking for years, and you worked with a lot of speakers. Tell me a little bit about what you have seen about how the pandemic has impacted speaking? Obviously, we’re not doing so many live events, and then I’d love to hear more about how this tool can help those people. A lot of our readers are authors, and that also means they’re speakers by default sometimes. Tell us a little bit from the speaker’s angle.

The pandemic killed a lot of speakers. People that had $40,000, $60,000 worth of speaking events queued up, gone overnight in an incident in March of 2020. That hasn’t changed. The people are starting to do some things, but a lot of people are still very hesitant. The other side of that is the online speaking world blew up. There are so many places for you to go speak now and read people you could have never, ever reached. When I say speaking, I use the broadest term. This could be a networking event. This could be an online event. Believe it or not, that’s a speaking event in my book because you’re looking to make meaningful connections and move someone to action, moving the right people to action. To me, that’s speaking. There’s so much opportunity out there and here is the typical thing that someone does when they come on, especially the authors and coaches. You get your one minute, you get your two minutes, whatever it is. “Hi, I’m Don McGrath. I’m a bestselling author. I’m a speaker. I’m some kind of coach.” You blew the seven seconds. You had to get everybody’s attention. I forbid you to ever say that again.

What should they be saying? You gave the canned speech that everybody gives.

Everybody’s glassed over. You’ve done your best to make you look like everybody else. If that’s what you want, then great, but I think what you want is you want to stand out, so it’s really funny. What I now use is I now say who I help and why I do it. I use my mission statement, and I use my vision statement. They’re buried in the six-minute webinar, who you help, what you do for them, and why you’re at it. It’s astonishing. It’s like crickets when I do that.

I’m feeling so good, Don, because that’s, I do what you do.

It works. People are going, “They’re in the thing. Let’s connect.” I know it’s about them.

That’s what people are interested in. It’s themselves.

It seems like a speaker or whatever, I go, “Hmm.” My eyes go to the back of my head. I put my camera off, and I go, “No.”

If we ever get back to cocktail parties, just walk around and ask everybody questions about themselves. Do your best not to say anything about yourself, and you will walk out of there, and people will be like, “Don is the best conversationalist.”

That’s like in a crowded room. If somebody says, “Don McGrath,” under their breath, I can hear them. My brain is like, “I’m searching for my existence in the universe.” For me, it’s about me, so for someone to get up and say, “It’s about them,” I go, “Whatever.”

That’s just how we’re wired because we’re in our world. In our world, it’s all revolving around our experience and our awareness.

In the Six Minute Webinar, you do get to say who you are and what your business is, but not until halfway through the webinar. You don’t even say, “I’m Don McGrath. I sell so and so.” You don’t have to say that. It’s all about the prospect.

We’re talking about them right away.

It’s all about them, and then you tell your struggle story before your credibility story. This is how it sucked when you had the problem that they now have. They’re empathizing with you. You were there before. You will get it.

Let me ask you about this because this is something I’ve always wrestled with. I’m going to tap this expertise now that I’ve got you sitting right here. I don’t have the struggle story of the typical wannabe author because my first job out of college was with the New York Times bestselling author who taught me how to write books. I was never in that space of, “I don’t know where to start,” or whatever. I would imagine not every expert is teaching what they know because they overcame the same problem that their listener has or that their potential client has. They overcame other problems, but not the same problem. I know I’m not alone here. What do you tell people who are in that situation?

Often, we can help people because of the struggles we’ve had. It may not be the exact struggle, but it’s the struggle that got you to where you are doing what you’re doing now. I learned this from the speaker training that I took from. It’s pretty much everybody. I don’t know if anybody used this term, but I think it’s very helpful when you tell a story about yourself and you paint the exceptional underdog story.

Everybody loves the underdog and the exceptional underdog. I got to hear this. Tell me more.

This is where you start off as the underdog. You start off not knowing very much. You started off sometimes wandering around or maybe going down some wrong roads, or maybe you haven’t done that. You’ve done it. You went down some wrong road. Maybe you had some preconceived things. Maybe you got over some internal battles that you’ve overcome, and that where you found success. When I tell about my struggles, people, we like that. It also is the arc of a story. Hero struggles, and when you can do that, people empathize with you, and you have their attention because they don’t want to feel like you’re up here and they’re down here. If you can say paint the picture, you were like the lower than they are or where they are, they’re like, “You understand my problem.” You wouldn’t be any help if you didn’t learn something. The arc has you become exceptional because, “I did this, because of these actions, I took them because I went and sought out this because I went and did this, this is what I discovered in my new-found knowledge. I can help you.” That’s the exception.

The story might not be about the exact same struggle, but I think what you said was key is it’s the struggle that led you to come up with the solution.

That’s the relevant struggle. It also is the reason that you’re passionate about helping these people that you’re helping now because we want to know the why. I want to know the why. Why is Robin so passionate about helping authors the way she does in her own very special way? Why? I want to work with the why as much as the what and the how. Maybe more so. I do some training around messaging in the marketing, and we need three things. We need your what story, your how story, and your why story. The strongest brands are the ones that have all three, and everybody has to have a what story. It’s what you do, but you never want to be your what, otherwise you compete on pricing and convenience alone. There’s a how. What makes you special? There’s a why. Why you do this? The strongest brands have all three of those.

I know this happens a lot with new authors or people who are working on their first book, especially experts. They get caught up in the how so much because they love talking about the how. If you go too deep into the how, before you’ve got that emotional buy-in from the reader or the listener, it’s not going to be effective. Do you find that same situation with webinar training?

Absolutely. If you start giving me all the, “I got this program,” and it tends to be the people who are early in their journey the people are proud of. We all are. It’s like our babies. I’ve sweat. It took me years to figure this out, and I unlocked it and I’ve got the twelve steps. I want to tell you all about it, but it’s like going on a date and expecting to go get married. We need a little courtship here. I want to know what do you even do.

The first date and you get the entire backstory of their last relationship.

Less is more in a lot of things. You don’t need to bring it. I got off a coaching call. We were talking about this. We all love to give, and we want to give, and we would paint the whole picture. The problem is the whole picture probably confuses people because there’s no context for it. All you need to focus on is the next step. What is the next step that I would like to take with this person I’m talking to? That’s it. I don’t have to worry about beyond that. What is that next step? If I can have the message around that, and it makes sense to them and appeals to them and then I make an offer or meet or whatever, whatever the offer is.

That’s so brilliant too because one saying that one of my business coaches used to use a lot is a confused mind says no, always says no. If you give them too many choices, if you try to explain your process in too much detail, like you said before, they don’t have any context for what you’re trying to teach, then they shut down because they can’t process it.

You get questions trying to clarify their mind. I call it the wall of yogurt effect. My wife sends me off for yogurt. She likes this zero-fat thing. “Go get yogurt.” I’ll go into yogurt. I know what I’m looking for, but I can’t find it because there are so many options. More often than not, I walk out without yogurt. Overwhelming someone’s mind does not move people to action. Yes or no questions. Offer yes or no, that’s it. It’s very simple, and I know we are like, “I want to offer this and that. I want to give options.” Studies show that you give more than a yes or no, your probability of somebody taking action goes down.

Let me ask you this. What’s the question I should have asked you that I didn’t think of, or I didn’t ask you yet?

What’s special about six minutes?

Give me that answer, please.

It turns out to be it’s the minimum number of words where you can fit all those twelve steps are that are required to move someone to action. Actually, we find that when you first do ScriptPal, you answer all 40 questions, you end up with around 650 to 700 words. That’s it. That’s minimal. These are not long answered questions. These are very short answer questions, so around that 650 to 700 words is like that’s it. That turns out to be about five minutes or so, then you go, and usually, you’ll add some things to your story, and you add a little bit to get up to 800 words, but 800 words is six minutes.

I’m glad you said that because there was a point during the interview where I thought to myself, “Why not seven minutes?” I’m going to ask you that because is there something magical about six? Is there something particularly beneficial about 6 minutes versus 7? Is it that it happens to be the amount of time you need to hit all those points?

Here’s what I know. I know that when you answered the minimum questions, in order to get the information, you need to walk through the people doing the steps to move them to action, it turned out to be 650 to 700 words, which is probably around five minutes. I know that there are some good five-minute webinars. I know when you go beyond six minutes, it loses its energy. I can hear one, and you get lost in that story. We’re getting lost. Words have energy and when you get used to this and I’ve been doing a lot of these, I can feel the energy in the wave and the sequence of words and the context. I’ll tell you, when it gets to seven minutes, it starts losing energy. Usually, it gets pretty quick to go back and say, “There are some things in the story.” There are things in your struggle story that are irrelevant. They don’t help to move the process forward.

Six minutes is giving enough time to get the salient details and the details that matter in, without providing excess detail that bogs it down for all those points you have to hit.

Let’s look historically, but not everyone is exactly six minutes, nor should anyone try. It came from six-minutes speaker training, and that’s how it got its name. It’s interesting that the planets are aligning to be between that 5 and 6-minute range they appear to have. I always say words are like dynamite. Let’s say I have dynamite and I spread it in a field, and then I try to light it. What’s going to happen? Nothing. If I take that, I wrap it in some paper, less is more. I find this when I go through people’s six-minute webinar scripts, and I thrift out words. Often, they’re like, “That’s so much better.”

I did a blog post called A Picture’s Worth 1,000 Words and talking about how you can use words to create pictures in people’s minds so that you don’t have to use as many words. That’s really similar to what you’re saying because it’s true. You wear them out. Do you know Kenn Amdahl from Colorado Publishers Association? He was a big member permanent number of years.

That’s where I probably know the name from, but I haven’t really been involved with them very much.

He’s was a great guy and he wrote a book called Joy Writing, and one of the things that was in that book that I will never forget and I use this to this day in my everyday work, and I think we could apply to your webinar. Every word you ask someone to listen to takes energy from them to process it. It’s so important to be economical, so you don’t wear your reader out or your listener out.

In the end, you want to deliver them more value than the energy it took. You want the experience to be great, then be like the ROI if for my energy was wonderful.

That six minutes I invested that I can’t earn back, unlike money invested, but that time I just invested that I cannot get back, I feel like I got a good exchange for my energy.

You’re like, “I want more, I got more energy tomorrow. I’m going to pick up and read your blog posts because they tweaked my brain in such a pleasant way.”

Don, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing about this incredible resource. I can’t wait to go to SixMinuteWebinar.com, I know you’re already helping a lot of people, and I wish you all the best because I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t benefit from this. What a great resource you’ve created. Congratulations. Thanks.

Robin, it’s been a wonderful ride, and thanks for having me here and let me share some things that are going on with me with you and with your readers.

Thanks again for being here.

Important Links:

• Dr. Don McGrath
• Six Minute Webinar
• 50 Athletes Over 50
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• A Picture’s Worth 1,000 Words
• Joy Writing

About Dr. Don McGrath

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• https://robincolucci.com/

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