How to Build High-Converting Summits and Generate Thousands of Leads: Expert Tips from Jennie Wright

0:00Summits can feel very transactional. you need to really work hard to make it non-transactional. You don't get on with a speaker and just say, hey, I'm hosting a summit. What can you give me? Here's what I'll give you. All right, great. See you on the interview. Like that's not building a relationship. That is incredibly transactional. Jenny Wright, building summits. Over 420 summits she's run. Literally millions in sponsorship money raised. That's what we're going to talk about. Don't dismiss the importance of gamification. We still love game shows. We still love bingo. We still love all that stuff that, you know, we got to sit at home when we were sick, when we were kids and watch like Price is Right.

0:34Do that stuff. Put a little bit of kitsch in your event and people will remember it. She's amazing at building lists, acquiring leads, running summits. Let's take a learn with Jenny Wright. So, Jenny, let's start then with success. What's your thoughts or what's your definition of success for you? It's a complex question for me. I don't want to give a canned answer, but I think the best definition is whatever life or whatever sort of outcome you want to have, whether it's to have the little cottage and the cup of tea and everything, or if it's you want to have the big condo downtown and all that, those are really huge sways in what success might look like.

1:18Or it might just be that you're able to pick up your kids every day after school. For me, for me, success means that I can make my own schedule because I work really well at different times of the day. And so having that ability is fantastic. Spending time with my my partner, my family and basically just being able to explore myself. I mean, I've my growth journey as being an entrepreneur has changed so much since I first started 12 years ago to now to be able to mold the business around that. and create success around that is amazing, as opposed to being pigeonholed in some position in a corporate job.

1:53Yeah. Where do you think you sort of started to choose your own version of success? You know, I'd have to say that I think the first time I could think that that happened was probably in about 2017, even though it feels like it was really convoluted and I wasn't on the right path. I will have to say that it was, I feel like I really developed what it looked like for me probably in about 2022, if I'm quite honest. And that's saying something because that means I've been in a decade. So what the heck was I doing for 10 years? But I just think that success, what that means has changed. And also, I really didn't have a clear understanding as to what that felt like for me until about that point, truly.

2:35I think it's tough because you start out in life and you're given a version of success, whether it's by friends, family, parents, society, and gradually, and that's one of the big things about this podcast, is we're helping people define for themselves what is success and then learn how to get there sort of thing. So do you have like a formula that says these are the components of when I'm successful, these things are happening? Sort of, yes. I think the formula for me is based on what's happening around me. I think I'm, you know, as a, as a reformed people pleaser, uh, and as somebody who has always struggled with making sure that everybody else feels wonderful around me.

3:18I think my formula is making sure that I do my own self-care, making sure that I am, you know, clients are happy. I'm happy. My family's happy. Um, but for me, it always starts if I can be really simplistic, It honestly starts from things at home. It's getting good rest. It's reading the books that make me happy. It's going for the walks and having tea outside. It's those little things that build up my reservoir. And then I'm able to put all of my focus into doing the things that make the clients really successful. And if my clients are happy, then I feel really good. Excellent. I love that. In your mind, what's the relationship between success and failures?

4:02they're symbiotic they go together I mean you can't have one without the other and I love failure I think failure is fantastic the amount of times I've failed in the past 12 years is astonishing but every time that I do I have been able to pick myself up the ground a little bit faster and not have like the big dips and falls it's a little bit more steady now obviously as you you know you you kind of get used to it nothing phases me really anymore you're like oh okay so that happened okay let well tomorrow we're gonna do this uh as opposed to oh my god that happened this is life-changing the world is over uh you know my business is over and everybody hates me i just remember that first year of entrepreneurship where everything was like oh my god wow oh my god what like the emotional swings i swear i put my poor husband through it like left right and center because it was just look at it as a marketer the vast majority of marketing fails, you test and measure and test and measure and you, you know, it's all experimental.

5:03Yeah. I mean, and that's one of the reasons that when you're working, like I find with marketing, the wrong client thinks you're going to come in with a strategy that's going to be a hundred percent successful right out of the gate. And, and it's not. And as soon as you have a failure as a marketer on a new team or with a new client and that client's like, you know, oh, this isn't working. Like, come on, this is the long game. Marketing is a long game, right? So what doesn't work in the short term, there's always something that you can do. And I love that about marketing. It means it's ever changing.

5:36Again, I hate being put into like a box, like a role. So it allows me to evolve and change. And I mean, the marketing we were doing back in 2013 is completely different than the marketing in 2024 or even 2025. Dang, I think the marketing I'm doing this month is different to the marketing I did last month. It feels like, you know, I know the social media team keep telling me and they're young guys, like they're very young and they're like, but this is what works now. This is the thing. It's like, um, thinking back to lead generation, cause that's really where we're going to focus in a lot today is to how do we create lists, build leads.

6:16How did that become your thing? How did you get to be? That's my thing. That's what I'm going to do. And that's what I'm great at. Okay. So this actually goes back to the job I had before I was even an entrepreneur. I was working in a big box retailer and I got injured really badly. And so I couldn't perform my job and they put me on modified duties and they stuck me in a little office in the back where the trucks were dropping off, you know, produce and stuff. It's called receiving. And they gave me a list like on a printout, like a dolly printer printout of all of the members of this big box store.

6:50And they said, call them and renew them, get them to renew their memberships. And what I started seeing in this database of leads was repetition. I kept seeing the same names over and over and over again. And my brain does that naturally. I noticed patterns. And I was like, oh my God, like Joe Blow has six accounts. Why does he have six accounts? That means that our numbers are inflated. And this particular company, your marketing budget was allocated to you by how many leads you had in the system. Okay. And so if you had one, if you had a hundred thousand people in your system as your leads, this was your budget and you only had like, you know, 31 cents per lead or something.

7:27But if you had 60 ,000 in your system, then, you know, you had a different marketing budget. And so I spent the actual, the next two or three years cleaning up that system completely for that particular warehouse. And then the company took my system and rolled it out company-wide. Okay. So that was the first like, wow. Okay. Databases, you know, leads, people, all this kind of stuff. And when I left corporate or left that job and then left corporate, I actually became a VA on Fiverr. So I had this big, I was up here and then I, I had this big fall and, uh, cause you know, trying out to be, being an entrepreneur, you're going to do anything.

8:04I would have cleaned toilets with a toothbrush. Didn't matter what it took. And I became a VA on Fiverr, I was making$4.33 a gig. And somebody hired me and said, hey, I work for a big time coach in the States who teaches summits and lead gen. Can you do some research on some potential speakers? And I said, I need to know more. She showed me everything about summits and lead gen. And I quickly caught on to it, saw a huge amount of opportunities and like, okay, you guys are doing it about 60 % right, but the rest of it is completely wrong. And I'm going to develop my own system on how to do it. And that's how it all started.

8:36All right. So let's start then. List injection method. Explain it. Then we'll get into some detail around how people can learn from what you've done and get much better results. Absolutely. Think about your lead magnets, right? So your PDFs, your courses, your downloads. Those are your onesies and twosies for most people. Every day you might get a couple of people downloading it and adding to your list, right? So for 365 days, if you get a couple of onesies and twosies, that means you get maybe 400 or 500 people from the lead magnet. Maybe. When you do a list injection, you're compressing the amount of time that you're actually attracting leads.

9:15And therefore, you're creating a bigger impact. So you're getting 2 ,000, 3 ,000 leads in a 90 or 120-day period, which benefits you if you're doing a launch. So imagine that your PDF got you somebody in January, but you didn't launch until April. That's a big swath of time that they're not connecting with you if you don't have that done properly. Whereas with the list injection method, from the inception of the idea to the completion of the idea is usually 120 days. And you're getting people on your list within about a 30 to 40 day span. You're creating a ton of interest and trust and understanding of you.

9:56so when you go to make your offer, not only do you have 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 4 ,000, God knows whatever amount of new people on your list, but you've built that trust so that when you make your offer, you close more. Yeah. Jay, I was chatting with some of my team recently, and we've almost gone to this whole seasonal offers sort of thing rather than a standing offer and marketing all day, every day. It's like, why don't we just market twice a year and get enough people in twice a year, and then we don't have to worry about it the rest of the year type thing. is that something that you stumbled upon created how did you get to that thinking what led to it so it it came from actually again processing data i i've done about 420 summits produced created my own run strategized that many and so when i got to about 180 to 200 summits i noticed these trends and so what i was seeing is that we had to compress the amount of time that a summit was taking place instead of a 21-day summit, which was the norm.

10:58We had to cut it down to about three or four days because people were losing interest. And then I was also seeing this data that they were seasonal. So depending on where you are in the world, whatever hemisphere, spring and fall seem to work, right? It coincides with different holidays. It coincides with different things with kids being in school or summer vacation and so on. So if you do a list build and bookend it spring and fall, it seems to work a lot better than if you do it over like Christmas time or if you do it during a North American summer, right? And that's just kind of how it works.

11:32It's very cyclical and it seems to be quite natural. So we have to kind of follow those rhythms versus trying to fit in or create a new one where nobody's going to show up. So let's take a look at the 120 days then. What are we doing in that first 30 days of that process? What is it that's happening? That's the runway. Okay, so I call that part the runway. And so there's two different things that are happening. We're building the strategy and I'm figuring out what it is that you're trying to accomplish at the end of it. So we're always looking at the end goal and we're working away backwards. And so we're looking at what that end goal is and we're starting to build a strategy that feels really cohesive.

12:09Additionally, because it's the runway, you're not ignoring your social media. You're actually talking about the process. you're letting people behind the curtain and showing them what building a summit is really like. What is it meaning for you? How is it impacting you or your team? What does it mean when you're traveling and you're on the road and you have to do interviews, right? So not only are you engaging with your social media, but you're also creating connections with them and also your potential speakers. So summits can feel very transactional and we have to remove that transactional feeling.

12:42If you have connection to your speakers, if you have connection to your audience, then when it comes time for you to actually promote the summit, your speakers will be more willing to promote and your potential leads are more likely to sign up. So we really use that runway, that 30-day period, really, really well. Yeah. So from runway, we step into what's next? So runway, then we go into actual building, right? So in the next 30 days, we're building out the funnels, we're building out all of the ancillary and background details that'll actually fuel the fire of this whole event, right? And so everything I usually love to have done about 45 days to 50 days before the summit launches.

13:24And so I do give myself like a five or seven day breathing window just to test everything, make sure there's no big boo-boos and everything. And we're making sure that no stone is left unturned. I always think If we can get somebody into your ecosystem by registering for a summit or even looking at an ad, then I can retarget. And once they're in, then I can keep them within the ecosystem and I make sure that there's no leaks. Right. Because people leak out everywhere. I try and get the leaks down to like under 20 percent. And so the summits that I like to host, the conversion rate or the registration rate is usually between 60 and 80 percent.

14:03And then the conversion to a VIP, I like to get it over 35%. And that takes a lot of work. So that's what that time period is. It's making sure that nobody leaks out. Can we just define for everyone how you see the VIP status? Because we're getting into the monetization side of it now. Absolutely. So, and these words are interchangeable. The VIP and all access pass. Okay. So 99 % of summits are completely free to register and they should, and they should be. In my opinion, they should be completely free to register if your goal is lead gen. Okay. If your goal is lead generation, the summit is free.

14:39And then when they register, there's an opportunity for upgrading into a VIP or Alexis pass. But that VIP Alexis pass is a make or break because if you just cobble a whole bunch of gobbledygook together, it's really not going to, it's not going to speak to your audience and it's not helpful. And so you've really got to craft something that feels incredibly helpful. And depending on your end goal in mind, if it's a$25 ,000 mastermind, it's a completely different VIP than if it's a$500 course, right? And so all of that is crafted ahead of time. And then it becomes a no brainer, the price needs to be a no brainer.

15:18And what's in it needs to be a no brainer to support the person. What's the current no brainer price in your mind? That depends on the client. Again, if we use the model that I've been talking about, if it's a$25 ,000 mastermind, then the no-brainer price can be something like$297 to up to$497, right? Because you're looking at a higher revenue per potential client. If you have a$500 course, the no-brainer price is anywhere between$47 and$97. And so it really depends on your audience and you have to know that audience incredibly well. Yeah. So let's then take a look. We've done the runway. We've done the build.

15:57What are the key components in that runway segment that makes a great event? Is it picking the right speakers? How does that come together to pick a great event? And then we'll go into how do we pick great VIP stuff? Sure, no problem. The runway period, it's got multiple ways of making this better. One is building relationships with your potential speakers or your chosen speakers. Everybody has their little Rolodex of people they want on their event. And then you should always be looking outside of your current realm of people that you've never met before that should be a speaker, right? And so you have to develop those relationships.

16:39And if you remember a little bit earlier, I said summits can feel very transactional. You need to really work hard to make it non-transactional. You don't get on with a speaker and just say, hey, I'm hosting a summit. I kind of want you on. What can you give me? Here's what I'll give you. All right, great. See you on the interview. Like that's not building a relationship. That is incredibly transactional. I've never been asked that. Yes, I have. And no, I didn't do it. I had a client. I got to tell you this, Brad. I had a client once years ago that brought me on board. They were already past the runway period.

17:12They were already in the building stage. and I realized that they weren't interviewing their speakers. They were saying hey and doing an onboarding call. And then they had hired a professional interviewer to do the interview for them. They'd hired a podcast speaker to do the interviews. So when the speaker came on to actually do their interview, they're like, whoa, where's the host? And they're like, no, no, no, it's me. And it just killed all the relationship. And when we went to promote it, none of the speakers promoted because they felt like the speaker or the host didn't care enough to show up for the interview.

17:47Yeah, it's important. How many speakers? What's the current range? What works best now? Anywhere between 32 to 40 is really where it's at right now. It used to be 21 speakers, but I'll give you my reasoning behind it. If you have 31 and say three or four don't promote, which by the way is really, really normal and you almost can't have, you know, you just can't get away from it, then you're in your high 20s. If you have 21 speakers and four people decide not to promote, now you're in the high teams and you're killing your lead gen. So there is a diminishing returns if you go over 40, because then it's just a ton of work for your team and you do not get the amount of people out of it that you think you will.

18:31So don't do it. And additionally, if I can pop this in here, don't go for the huge big speakers with the massive, incredible lists. You can have a couple of those, but don't fill your whole summit with it because the data says, and I accumulate all this after 420 summits, that you actually get more leads and really good, warm leads from people who have a list range between, honestly, like 400 up to like 9 ,000. Yeah. They're the people that haven't used marketing to build their list. Their list has been built organically in most cases for that group. They've not done advertising type thing. So, okay, 32 odd people, three days.

19:16Is there a naming thing? Should you name it a certain way? How do you put it together in the mind of the customer type thing? I always tell the client to imagine this as a reoccurring opportunity, like a reoccurring summit. And so I never say to create a one-off title. So as an example, one of my clients is running a summit in February of 2025, and it's the podcasting profit summit, which means every year we can run another podcasting profit summit, right? My good friend, Katie Brinkley has a summit called the, um, the social profit lab. Okay. And so that's a reoccurring summit that we can run because the title is, and then you have your tagline.

19:56So create like a, a title for the summit that people will remember and you can repurpose. And then you can always change the tagline every year or twice a year. Love it. Love it. So for me, like you're convincing me very much, I should do the big success summit. You know, it'll be the annual event of success. I'm doing my darndest. I hope it's working. So, okay. Any other things about packaging the product that we should be thinking about in that early runway stage? Yeah. You should be looking at sponsorships. So there's a big difference between the summits that can have sponsorships and the summits that are just not at that level yet.

20:38And there's nothing wrong with that. If you have an established business where you have a podcast, where you have things that you can leverage, like a mastermind, or you have courses and all this kind of stuff, then you can actually look at getting sponsors. And sponsors are potential speakers, they're companies, they're relationships that you currently have. one of the summits that I did for a client of mine last year, we had$40 ,000 in sponsorships. And I just participated in a summit, and you're not going to believe this, but we had a million dollars in sponsorships. I can believe that. I can understand it because there's companies with a lot of money and they need to reach a target audience.

21:17It's their marketing budget. And it's easier for them to sponsor your summit than run one for themselves. It is actually. And because the leads in a summit are so warm, then your chances like your marketing dollars go further by sponsoring in a summit. And it's really vastly untouched at this point still. And so with some of my clients, we are doing sponsorships. And we are seeing great success with it. We're also doing sponsorships with, with a lot of SaaS companies. so that the SaaS company can be like, oh, by the way, we're providing all the software for the summit. We're providing all of the, you know, we're providing the microphone that the host is using to interview the guests.

21:58We're providing, you know, all this kind of stuff. And we even have like giveaways, like, you know, sure, Mike is going to give us three mics to give away or, you know, so on and so forth. And it's really limitless what you can do and who can be a sponsor. And it's fantastic. I love that part. So that's really built into the runway piece. And then the other thing to consider, again, end goal in mind, product that you're trying to sell, what does it take to sell that product? So I'm going to use my same example,$25 ,000 mastermind, it takes a sales call, right? $500 course most likely just needs a sales page.

22:34So to sell a$25 ,000 mastermind, you need to have a sales call. You can build that into your VIP, right? You can offer a VIP sales call and that'll get you more potential people to speak to, to sell. Fantastic. Right. And with the course, oh, sorry, pardon me. No, no, go keep going. I was going to say with the course, what you can do is if your summit's a three-day summit on day four, you host an interactive workshop that speaks to the one or two things that your course can fix. And you sell from that. It's like a, it's like a live webinar interactive. And that's how I can sell a$500 course. Brilliant.

23:10Brilliant. VIP, what's some of the key things to put in a VIP? And what are some of the things I should leave out of VIP? Leave out the kitchen sink and everything that goes with it. So don't have the really ridiculous PDFs that will do nothing except sit on somebody's desktop. Make sure that everything in there is curated and specifically meant to support. So some of the summits I've done in the past, we've had a sort of like a VIP bundle curated from the other speakers that are on the event, and they'll give a gift. It's almost like infusing a bundle giveaway within a summit, which is a cool idea, by the way.

23:47And that sometimes works, but it depends on the audience. Some audiences only want specific things. They'll want 30 days access to your membership. right so that's a really great way of selling like a nine dollar membership is giving people 30 days access again it is so bespoke depending on what it is that you're selling off the back end and each vip needs to be different but everybody should avoid just throwing crap in there for the sake of putting crap in there you know there was a great book called the retention point and he said you know what when people are thirsty a glass or a bottle of water is is really important but they don't need an ocean.

24:28You can overwhelm people with just too much stuff and then they feel bad because they haven't read those PDFs or read the eBooks you sent them type thing. So yeah, it's got to be enough that they use it and that sort of thing. So when it comes to marketing, we want our other speakers promoting. Any keys to getting them to promote, to get your other speakers promoting the event?

24:53hmm okay so we want to talk about how to get them to promote how to make them promote yeah yeah i mean the answer is you can't building a relationship is one part of it but i imagine you've got to make it super easy for them give them all of the tools and i do and i actually have a i have a little secret weapon and that is the speaker kickoff call so i was noticing with my with my clients that these speakers were not promoting we were actually seeing something in the range of about 15 % of all speakers weren't promoting. To me, that's completely unacceptable. And again, that was that feeling of transactional.

25:27So we created the speaker kickoff call. And then I infused a networking piece into it. And so all of the speakers attend a call as many as possible. And you really create a networking piece so people can get, you know, hey, Brad's a speaker, I'm a speaker, I want to get on Brad's podcast, Brad's looking for speakers to be on his podcast. Awesome exchange and things like that. So I actually have everybody fill out a spreadsheet of who they are, what they do and what do they want. And then everybody just kind of like starts trading. And yeah, so that's really, really cool. And that gets people to promote oddly.