How to run a million dollar sales bootcamp?

Nowadays, it is not uncommon for us to achieve user retention and conversion through various training camps. Despite many successful cases, it is not easy to run a good training camp.

Due to work reasons and the fact that the company was short of staff, I was transferred to the online training camp for a period of time.

Special note: This sharing is based on the 5th training camp. The 5th camp was mainly led by other partners. I was more responsible for coordination and suggestions. Many methods, techniques and inspirations came from them, and they were of great help to this article.

By the 6th period, in addition to being the overall person in charge of this project, I also participated in and executed the entire project, while managing the core work of the teaching assistants. Therefore, I have accumulated some methods and principles to share with you. What I say may not be entirely correct, but I hope it can serve as a reference for you and give you some inspiration.

Let’s talk about the 6th phase of this project first: the average customer price is an external price of 2,999 yuan, the number of registered people accounts for more than 75%, the internal average customer price is 1,999 yuan, the total number of paying people is 418, and the cumulative sales exceed one million.

Unlike regular training camps, the regular high-priced training camp model adopts a low-to-high model, which is also the most popular form at present, that is, a low-priced experience camp to a high-priced training camp. However, these two training camps do not have a low-priced experience camp segment, and they directly register with a high unit price.

You may ask, why can we directly convert high average order value?

This actually involves many factors, not just one single factor. For example: user stickiness, user accuracy, user group characteristics, user payment ability, IP shaping value, brand premium, user trust, etc.

In addition, information in different circles is largely unconnected. For example, the low-to-high model is already very popular in the K12 circle, but it is not so popular in the cross-border e-commerce circle. Because information and circle barriers will always exist and may be penetrated in the future, this is why a gameplay that is very popular in the education circle will most likely be popular in the social circle in the future.

Therefore, I will not explain in detail how to achieve a million in sales (I will briefly mention the process and operational details later), but will share more about: how to better complete the service delivery of 418 people, let users actively spread word of mouth, and how to increase the probability of maintaining a long-term training camp.

Without further ado, here is the sharing directory:

• How can we run paid knowledge training camps and do them well in the long term? Summarize 2 key points.
• How did we run the 6th training camp? Restore 9 major operation steps.
• 6 reference points for experience in running a training camp.

Okay, let’s move on to the first part which is more theoretical, but I will also try to include case diagrams for additional explanations.

1. How can paid training camps be run for a long time and done better? Summarize 2 core points and 1 principle

We know that it is actually difficult for many paid knowledge training camps to hold multiple training camps in succession because they have to continue to consume traffic, unless they continuously attract traffic from outside. Although it is possible to attract traffic from the outside through advertising or other means, it is still relatively difficult to convert it immediately. Why do I say that?

Because external traffic does not have trust in you, and without trust there will be no transactions, so how can external traffic build trust?

Yes, you guessed it! This is the low-cost experience camp model that is very popular now. After building trust through the experience camp, it will be converted into a high-cost training camp. For example, a 7-day financial management experience camp costs 9.9 yuan, which can then be converted into a formal course that costs more than 3,000 yuan.

1. Two core points: product + operation

Back to the training camp, we can actually break it down into: training camp = product (course) + operation (service). When it comes to how to run a good training camp continuously, many people overlook one aspect: the circle. Of course, this circle includes the operational aspects. In other words, the key to running a good training camp is to do a good job in product and operation.

Then the question is, how to make a good product and how to operate it? How to run the circle?

2. Course quality depends on teaching content + teaching skills

Let’s talk about product courses first. The course is equivalent to 1, and the operation or circle is the 0 behind it, so there is no need to say much about the importance of the course.

The common delivery formats of courses on the market are:

• Voice + Picture
• Text + Voice + Picture
• Recording video
• Live Video
• Offline teaching

Offline teaching is the best in terms of effect, but the delivery is heavy and there is still a large limit on the number of students who can attend the class. In terms of online effects, live teaching is more effective because students can interact with teachers and increase the trust between students and teachers, which is also good for subsequent courses and the teacher's reputation.

It is good to adopt the form of live teaching, but this will also lead to a bottleneck. What is the bottleneck? That is: the scale cannot be expanded and a ceiling has appeared. When will this ceiling appear? That is, a person's time and energy are limited, but for people as products themselves, a ceiling appears.

Many products that want to expand their scale will mostly adopt the form of recorded videos in the later stage. One of the most common forms is uploading to knowledge payment platforms, such as Xiaoetong and so on. Therefore, for orders with a unit price of more than 3,000 to 4,000 yuan, most of them adopt the method of live lectures, because the delivery will be better in this way.

Back to the product, in addition to the need for solid course content, another particularly important point is the teacher's teaching style and the atmosphere of the classroom. In other words, teaching skills are also particularly important.

A good teacher will mobilize the atmosphere of the students and find ways to mobilize the atmosphere so that the students can go through the class like they are on a slide and cannot stop at all. As for how to make a good course and how to teach the course, that is not the focus of this talk.

There are many teaching materials and books on the market on how to give good lectures, so I won’t go into details here. However, the lectures usually revolve around these three sections: Why, What, and How, and then interspersed among these sections are pain points, trust points, desire points, trust points, etc., so that the course can continue to attract students to study the course and trigger more thinking.

3. Operate a core principle

Next, I will focus on operations, after all, this is also a very important section. Before talking about the specific operation methods, let me first share a core principle of training camp operation . This sentence is actually very applicable to any marketing scenario or delivery course: provide stimulation to the outside and hope to the inside.

If this principle is implemented, the effect of the training camp will not be bad, and it may even produce a word-of-mouth effect, allowing the training camp to be carried out continuously. Okay, now that we know this principle, how do we put it into practice?

The normal operation of a training camp is to enable students to participate in the training camp courses through continuous service to students, student motivation, group PK and other forms. However, to a large extent, one thing is missing: building a circle, that is, the accumulation and infection of content.

Therefore, the operating model adopted in these training camps is: good operation = user service sense + circle content ritual sense. I have participated in some training camps before, and found that many training camps have no content accumulation. Without content accumulation, it is difficult to have an atmosphere. We know that atmosphere is particularly important to the community.

4. How to set up a circle?

Let’s first talk about the sense of ritual of circle content. How should we understand this?

Let me give you an example. When you go to a temple to make offerings, do you feel a sense of ritual as soon as you enter the temple, making you unable to help but follow everyone else in making offerings and worshipping? Why is this?

In fact, to a large extent, it is because many people have placed incense in the temple before. The prosperity of incense creates a pious atmosphere. So how do you apply it in training camp?

A very good way is to build a content circle. One of the ways to judge a good circle is that when users join, they will be shocked, even so excited that they can’t sleep, and feel from the bottom of their hearts that this circle is awesome. The main tools currently used to build circles are: Knowledge Planet and DingTalk Circle.

The tool used for organizing the training camp circles in these sessions is: DingTalk Circle. Why use DingTalk Circle? On the one hand, lectures are broadcast live in DingTalk groups, and on the other hand, one DingTalk circle can be bound to multiple DingTalk groups, which means that the content of the DingTalk circle can be settled.

Directly on the picture:

Through DingTalk Circle, the content left by the previous training camp students can be accumulated. In this way, the students who join later can see the accumulation of the previous students' content, see the efforts they have made to achieve their goals, and see the efforts made by the teaching assistants to help everyone...

In this way, there will be a sense of anticipation before the training camp starts. At the same time, during the training camp, when students lack confidence and motivation, they can ignite their inner strength and keep moving forward by looking at the encouragement and methods of previous students.

So, the question is, what kind of content in the circle will make people sigh in admiration?

In fact, the circle is centered around three user needs:

• Can I find the content of the course?
• Can I find content sharing on the training camp goals?
• How do past students evaluate you?

Based on these three user needs, the content of the section will come out:

• Practical content section: relevant content can be provided by teaching assistants or official personnel (PGC)
• Landing section (or order section): Students who have achieved their goals can share their experience and review (UGC)
• Evaluation section: This section can collect users’ public evaluation and gains from the training camp (UGC)

Among them, what are more important to users are: the landing section and the evaluation section. Because only students can understand students better, and novices can understand novices better, and the content they write will be more likely to impress them. I'll just put a few pictures, you can feel it~

For example: #上岸复盘# section

Because these texts emphasize authenticity, they are actually very easy for students to relate to and create that kind of atmosphere.

For example: Evaluation section (#I want to say to you#)

It also allows students who participate in the training camp to share their thoughts, so that the next batch of students can feel the atmosphere of the circle in advance after reading the content. Earlier we shared about the creation of circles, and later we will focus on the creation of operational services, which is also a very critical link. So how do we do it specifically?

5. How to improve service sense?

In fact, the core principles mentioned earlier are applied here, remember? Give hope internally and provide stimulation externally. How to implement giving hope internally? Giving hope internally means encouraging students to complete their course assignments and to find hope and motivation when encountering problems. To achieve this goal, we adopted the following methods:

• Invite students who have achieved results to share their achievements;
• Repeat the good news in the community every day to let students feel that they have achieved their goals;
• Sharing useful information within the group provides students with a continuous source of useful information, making them feel that we are helping them with all our heart.

I will share the specific case pictures in the case review later.

How to implement external incentives?

What does it mean to provide external stimulation? Needless to say, it means continuous external stimulation so that those users who have not signed up can understand the atmosphere of the training camp and what results have been achieved. Through this behavior, it is more likely that users who want to sign up for the next period will be locked in in advance, so that potential and energy can be reserved for the next period.

So, through what channels? Mainly through:

• Moments (showing off achievements, landing experiences, and learning process);
• Official account (camp closing article);
• By designing beautiful posters, students can spontaneously promote the product on their WeChat Moments (by referring others).

External publicity materials

2. How do we operate the 6th training camp? 9 steps to restore the operation

We generally classify training camps according to section types, firstly for the overall section structure of the training camp, and secondly to make it easier for colleagues to get started quickly. We generally divide the training camp into several sections, namely:

1. Teaching Assistant Recruitment Section
2. Student registration section
3. Course Section
4. Opening section
5. Student Operation Section
6. Teaching Assistant Operation Section
7. Camp Closing Section
8. Activity review section

In this way, when we have sorted things out, there will be no confusion when we do things, and we can also recommend things in an orderly manner. It should be noted that what is shared below is the main content of the training camp, and some content that is too detailed is not posted.

1. Streamline the overall process of the training camp

In fact, before the 6th training camp, we summarized the training camp sections and made SOPs according to the different types of sections. This will also make it convenient for different people to get started quickly if they want to participate in the collaboration. So the overall process is actually linked together according to the sections.

2. Recruitment of teaching assistants

There is no need to explain how important the screening and selection of teaching assistants are to a training camp. Since there are relatively many students, the operation of the camp will definitely require the assistance of teaching assistants. It can be said that if the assistant coaches are chosen well, the success of the training camp is halfway achieved.

So how do you choose a teaching assistant? There are 2 big core steps.

1) Determine the teaching assistant reward mechanism

This is easy to understand. If there is no teaching assistant mechanism, the teaching assistants will not know what to do, or if the teaching assistant incentive system is not attractive, then the teaching assistants will not have enough motivation to guide students.

2) Screening teaching assistants

This step is also critical and involves the entire service delivery. So from which angles will we make our selection? Mainly from the following aspects:

• Is this a former teaching assistant?
• Are you a former student?
• Is there enough fixed time to serve students?
• Are there any cases with relevant skills?
• Do you have enough patience?
• Other supplementary reasons

3) Teaching assistant training

Why do we need teaching assistant training?

It's very simple, because although the teaching assistants have strong professional abilities, they are largely lacking in how to manage and guide students. Therefore, we need to provide preliminary training to the teaching assistants. It is best to provide them with scripts, templates, checklists, etc., so that the teaching assistants can execute without much thinking.

3. Student registration

The registration of students is actually somewhat similar to the conventional promotional methods. It is nothing more than sorting out what channels are currently available, what the channel promotion content is, how the channel schedule is arranged, what the promotion rhythm is, etc. Common promotional channels are in private domain traffic, such as official accounts, Moments, personal accounts, WeChat groups, etc.

Each training camp is carried out in a more refined manner. For example, on WeChat, promotion is generally carried out in the form of a circle of friends script.

The advantage of promoting a script on WeChat Moments is that you can prepare the content you need to post on WeChat Moments a few days in advance, and then post it on time according to the schedule, and be prepared to receive the traffic.

4. Opening Ceremony

It is similar to the gameplay of a regular training camp, and also to give the students a sense of ceremony, so there is the opening ceremony. So, what should be discussed at the opening ceremony?

According to the actual situation, it mainly focuses on the following aspects:

• The host introduces
• Introducing the results of previous training camps
• Training camp course schedule
• Course study arrangements and assignment submission forms
• Introduction to the student incentive system
• Teaching assistant self-introduction and group introduction
• Host Closing
• Course starts

5. Teaching Assistant Operation

Once the formal course starts, the normal teaching assistant operations will follow. This part is the core point and the focus of the training camp.

So how to operate a teaching assistant? There are five main parts:

• Guide interaction within the WeChat group and guide teaching assistants to communicate with each other
• WeChat group daily task arrangement (Todolist)
• Teaching assistant assessment and one-on-one communication
• Teaching assistant weekly review
• Teaching Assistant Points Assessment

The above table is made from our operation perspective. In order to make the teaching assistant operation more refined, the best way is to plan the content table in advance and then publish it on time according to the time nodes.

The purpose is to:

• No need to write scripts on the spot, wasting too much time;
• It is planned and can be executed directly. If colleagues need to come over for assistance, they know clearly what to do.

Of course, we also created a student follow-up form for two purposes:

• Understanding the students' situation facilitates obtaining iterative courses and management methods
• Follow up with the teaching assistants so as to communicate with them one-on-one

Of course, there are some actions that need to be done in the daily process, but the core purpose is to mobilize the initiative of the teaching assistants.

For example: if we see very good material sharing or useful information sharing in other teaching assistant groups, we can share their materials in the group and guide other teaching assistants to adopt this method; if we see a teaching assistant doing very well in other group groups, we can praise him/her in the teaching assistant group in a timely manner, stimulate other teaching assistants to imitate this behavior, and also bring great positive feedback to the teaching assistant.

At the same time, in order to better assist the teaching assistants and provide better services to the students, we also need to review with the teaching assistants every week, record the problems the teaching assistants are encountering and what kind of help they need from us. In order to hold meetings efficiently, there will be a fixed process before the meeting, so that everyone’s speech summary will have a process and there will be no situation of going off topic. At the same time, we can also obtain the information and data we want.

A little tip: When counting students, they can be managed in layers according to the path to achieving the goal. This makes it easier to manage teaching assistants and is also very helpful for reviewing subsequent activities .

6. Student Operation

How should students operate? In addition to each teaching assistant managing different students, as the organizer, we also need to guide the students to learn the courses and complete the practical course assignments. Therefore, it is necessary to create a community with a strong atmosphere that can constantly stimulate students to complete their assignments and learn from classmates who have achieved their goals, ultimately improving the overall reputation of the courses and services.

Around the above purpose, the following actions were taken:

• Daily useful information sharing
• Good news from students who have landed
• "Landing" students live broadcast to share their meals
• Live course reminder
• The general group shared the stories behind the students’ landing
• …

The picture above shows the good news shared by the students who have landed on the shore every day

The most core principle of student operations: attentive service .

For example, when students raise questions, can we solve the problems immediately? When students are feeling depressed, can we provide them with "mental massage"? When students encounter problems in practical operations, can we give them professional guidance and suggestions, or even provide operational guides?

Students can feel our sincerity, altruism and reliability through our behavior.

7. Sprint to shore

This step is when the camp is almost over. For example, 1.5 weeks in advance, some trainees still haven’t reached the camp goal (landing goal). So in order to better help them reach the landing goal, we did the following:

• The teaching assistants will combine the characteristics of the current students and organize a sprint group for students who are particularly likely to achieve their goals;
• Continue to invite students who have achieved their goals to share live.

The main purpose of this step is the same as before, to let the students feel our sincerity. The training camp has not ended yet, and we will not give up any student who wants to get ashore. Of course, this stage is also when there are more students landing, and it is also a very critical link.

8. Closing Ceremony

There is no need to explain too much at this step. This major link is mainly for finishing, that is, to review and summarize the entire training camp process, with the aim of making students feel that they have gained a lot. Why is there this link?

In fact, the peak-end rule is applied.

The Peak-End Principle was proposed by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, which means that people will only remember the feelings at the peak and the end of an experience, that is, the "peak value" and "terminal value" experiences.

Therefore, the purpose of ending the camp is to provide an “end value” experience.

So what does the general camp closing ceremony include?

Common contents include:

• Overall training camp results
• Training camp review
• What the teaching assistant wants to say to the students
• What outstanding students want to say
• Training camp arrangements
• …

Of course, the closing ceremony will be different depending on the gameplay.

It is worth mentioning that when issuing certificates to students and teaching assistants, try to make the honorary certificates exquisite. In this way, when we issue electronic certificates to outstanding teaching assistants and outstanding students, and at the same time issue physical rewards or cash rewards, they are very likely to post them on WeChat Moments, which can also achieve the purpose of brand exposure and referrals.

If users actively promote and say good things about it, the effect of this kind of promotion will be better. After all, it is better for users to say once that the product is good than for us to say it 100 times.

For example, as shown below:

Screenshot of user-initiated promotion

9. Review summary

As for the review and summary, this step does not need much explanation. Without review, there will be no further optimization and improvement actions. There is no need to introduce in detail how to review. What I want to share is: first review the overall situation, then the details, and then the details. The core is to review the two core areas: products and operations.

The common process is:

• First check whether there is any problem with the overall process. If there is a problem, which process needs to be put in front;
• Secondly, split the process into different sections;
• Furthermore, the content of the section is further divided into: problems that have occurred and the solutions and measures to be adopted;
• Finally, we will improve it based on other people’s additional opinions and sort out and summarize the feasible methods and operations.

For example, in this training camp, several problems arose:

• The warm-up phase of the opening ceremony needs to increase the sense of ceremony. You can consider adding a video introduction session of the teaching assistant to the opening ceremony.
• After the live class, no course questionnaire feedback was given, and the course feedback was not obtained in a timely and refined manner. The course feedback form will be issued in the next period;
• …

3. 6 lessons learned from training camps

1. The training camp pays great attention to the sense of rhythm. If the lively rhythm is not brought up in the early stage, it will be more difficult to drive it up in the later stage.

I have some experience with this. Some teaching assistant groups failed to set the pace at the beginning, that is, they failed to motivate the students in the early stage, and it became difficult to find ways to mobilize the students in the later stage.

Therefore, this requires us to provide training to teaching assistants in the early stages and share some specific and practical methods. It is best to provide them with checklist templates, scripts and materials so that they can mobilize the atmosphere of the group without having to think too much.

2. When doing things, you must first sort them out.

Note: The point here is to sort it out, not to think it through. Thinking is always thinking, not action, but reasoning is different, it is listed one by one.

Because training camp actually involves a lot of details, in many cases, it is difficult to think through all the details at once. At this time, it is better to sort out each link clearly and write them out one by one, so that you can come up with ideas more quickly.

3. Exceeding expectations is the key to community activity and retention

In fact, running a training camp is a service. We should think about the problem from the perspective of providing value to students as much as possible, rather than just providing course training services.

For example, if you are a student in a training camp for learning how to attract and increase followers, you can link resources with students who need traffic on independent sites, which is valuable for the students. For another example, in addition to lectures by regular teachers, we also invite famous external teachers to give additional classes, which can give students an experience beyond their expectations.

The core is still: find ways to provide valuable content or services to students.

4. The herd effect is very obvious in the training camp. We must find ways to make the trainees feel a sense of ceremony, participation and achievement.

For example: if you find that a student in the group has achieved a certain result, you should @ him individually in the group and praise him at the same time.

For example: to award certificates of excellence to students selected as students, in addition to announcing them in the general group, they are also sent privately and preferably with red envelope rewards to give students a sense of ceremony.

For example: by having students write homework and pointing out their progress from the homework, they can find that they are continuously gaining value from the content. At the same time, at the end of the camp, students are encouraged to share their own reviews. These actions will further strengthen the students' sense of gain.

5. When operating a community, you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset and face all kinds of problems, because you may encounter all kinds of challenges, some of which you may not have encountered before, but you must be brave enough to try and fail.

Students can really feel whether we are serving with our heart. Once you start serving with your heart, you are bound to spend a lot of time and energy on it, and this is a necessary step. When we help students achieve their goals with our heart, we will also gain good word-of-mouth communication.

6. The training camp needs to set a specific and clear goal for all staff, and set several core indicators. Subsequent operations and incentive systems are based on these indicators and goals.

For example, the training camp assistant instructor incentive system and the trainee incentive system are all set around the core indicators of the core training camp. Every action has a purpose, so every action is meaningful.

Finally, I would like to thank my friends from the fifth period for sorting out the SOP, and I would like to thank my friends from the sixth period for staying up late with me and working hard, and finally achieving a relatively good result.

I hope the above can inspire you, and you are welcome to communicate with me about the specific operation details.

Author: Mr. Brick Operation Notes

Source: Mr. Brick's Operation Notes