This is the story of an entrepreneur just like you who knew she could make a HUGE difference for her target audience if she could just reach them. Names have been changed to protect her privacy.

Let me tell you about Mary and how she struggled to get people to sign up for her awesome mastermind. 

Mary knew that her mastermind would help SOOO many people — if she could get anyone to actually sign up and then show up. 

It was good! She knew it.

She put so much into her mastermind — worksheets, courses, group coaching, live training, discounts on 1-on-1 services, and so much more. It was power-packed and had something for everyone. It was a no-brainer.

She invited everyone…

• She posted on ALL her social channels.
• She emailed everyone on her list.
• She even offered a free trial — seeing is believing… right?!

Nothing worked.

Even worse… she was watching people she knew she could help wasting their time and money on other programs that would never work for them.

Mary was frustrated, to say the least. 

While the other guys were offering good things, she knew she was better at helping the specific group of people she was looking for. 

So she started asking around for advice.

This is when I met Mary.

I started by congratulating her for taking this step and asking for advice. You don’t know what you don’t know and simply asking for advice can make a HUGE difference.

One of my first suggestions was a Quiz Funnel… for a few reasons.

1. She only needed 20 people in her mastermind group to meet her immediate goals.
2. She was able to scale the mastermind if the Quiz Funnel worked for her.
3. She was targeting a specific group of people with a unique version of a mastermind that was — let’s say — just a tad bit tricky to really understand at first.

Let me show you how that worked out for Mary.

First, I think it's important to understand what a quiz funnel is because quiz funnels can be deceptively simple.

What Is a Quiz Funnel?

Quizzes are simply a series of questions someone answers with a promise from a business to deliver some form of helpful information. The information given at the end is based on the answers quiz takers provide. 

A quiz becomes a funnel when you add a next step for someone to take — such as inviting them to your mastermind, to book a call, or join your free community.

The most popular example of a quiz funnel is a personality quiz. This is a “Type” quiz — i.e. “What type of ___ are you?” You answer some questions, and then at the end, the creator tells you what type you are and shares some insights into how knowing your type can help you in a variety of ways.

Type of Quizzes

According to Ryan Levesque, there are three types of quiz that you can create.

1. A “Type” Quiz — such as a personality quiz or my Quiz, “What type of expert are you as an entrepreneur?” — feel free to go test it out and see how it works.
2. A “Killer” Quiz — such as “What is your #1 golf swing killer?” or “What’s the #1 thing preventing you from learning the guitar?”
3. A “Score” Quiz — such as “What’s your reading level?” or “On a scale from 1 to 7, what’s your scalability rating?” This is considered the hardest type of quiz to create and not one that I’d recommend for beginners.

I suggested a “Killer” quiz for Mary because her target clients were business owners who had trouble keeping their employees. Her mastermind included group coaching and a library of resources to help them do all sorts of things that would improve employee retention.

We brainstormed and came up with the perfect idea — “What’s the #1 reason your employees are quitting?”

Mary was really excited about everything. She thanked me and other people in the group and set off to start building her quiz.

Mary Ran Into a Few Problems

Every week Mary came to the same networking meetings and I asked about her progress. She said she was still hard at work on her quiz and hoped to get it done soon. 

After a couple of months, she was still not ready to launch it and I was starting to get concerned.

Learn From My Mistakes — I should have set a reminder to check in with Mary privately after a couple of weeks because I’ve seen this happen so many times. 

It’s hard to be vulnerable in these groups and admit that you’re really struggling with something… especially if you think it makes you look stupid to struggle with it so hard.

While a few people ask for advice and run with ideas and have success, most of the time it happens more like…

• Someone has a problem
• They ask for advice, and 
• A well-meaning expert like myself gives them a great idea, but
• They lack the experience and skills to execute on it, so
• They end up frustrated, wasting time, and still stuck with the same problem.

Problem #1: Quiz Technology

Mary thought building a quiz would be easy. 

• You just ask some questions — she’d done that with forms before on her website. 
• And then you provide some answers — that’s just a link to a page on her site or a PDF or something.

How hard could that really be?!

Much harder than she realized — but I was able to solve this problem for her in 2 minutes.

The tricky bit about quizzes vs normal website forms is that they need to be smarter. You aren’t just asking questions and collecting answers, you have to be able to give them custom advice based on their answers.

This requires special software that’s designed for building quizzes.

An Example of Quiz Tech

Let me explain using my own quiz as an example.

• I invite people to learn which type of expert they are as an entrepreneur.
• At the end, I will tell them they are either HEE, REE, HTE, or RTE.
• So I need to use the questions I ask to help me figure out where they fit.

In my quiz, that meant I needed to categorize each answer for which type of expert it indicated.

For example, one of the questions I ask is “Are people constantly trying to ‘pick your brain’?”

So each answer is categorized as:

• HEE = “Not really. I do get people wanting to connect with me on social media after we meet, but that’s the end of the line with that usually.”
• REE = “Yes, when I’m in networking events or group trainings, people call on me to help provide advice.”
• HTE = “Yes, people will usually see me out for advice - emailing, texting, calling, or wanting to book time on my calendar.”
• RTE = “Oh yes - all the time. I’ve had to be stingy with my calendar and start charging for my time as a coach/consultant instead of letting someone ask me something ‘real quick’.”

Each one of those result pages is customized to deliver advice to each type of entrepreneur based on their responses. I did this by creating an individual page on my website for each type and then telling my quiz software where to send them if they get a specific result.

Now that Mary knew which software to use, it was time to move to the next problem.

Recommended Technology — I use Thrive Quiz Builder for my quizzes as well as the quizzes we build for our clients 99% of the time. I will occasionally use other tools, but only if I REALLY like the client, REALLY like the idea of the quiz, and they refuse to let me build it in Thrive.

Problem #2: The Quiz Results

Remember, Mary already knew…

1. Her quiz was going to be called “What’s the #1 reason your employees are quitting?”
2. She was targeting business owners that had a high rate of employees quitting and didn’t know why.
3. And she wanted to sell her hard-to-explain-the-value mastermind to them.

It was my fault that Mary did what I usually tell people not to do — she started with the topic/title of the quiz and then was trying to build out the rest of it.

No wonder she was having trouble figuring out questions to ask and results to present.

Can I share a not-so-secret with you… as experts we are cursed. Cursed with the knowledge and experience to visualize the big picture.

In my head, I had already done the hard work of reverse engineering Mary’s goal of selling her mastermind to her target clients and I gave her a topic. Mary had no idea what was going on behind the scenes in my brain that got me there so she was trying to recreate it but without me and my experience to help her.

I knew as soon as I talked to Mary that this was my fault, so I started explaining the details.

A Quick Bucketing Exercise

Mary needed to start by thinking about the results pages that we needed to get them to. 

I walked Mary through a quick exercise…

1. Think about the reasons that employees typically quit — what are 3 to 5 of the top ones?
2. For each of those reasons, what is something actionable that they can do to start fixing the problem?
3. How is your mastermind going to help them do more to fix that problem and the other problems too?

I could tell that it was starting to come together for Mary now — she could see how this quiz thing works.

We chose 3 main reasons that employees quit.

• Bad Fit — The company was hiring employees that were a bad fit for the company. This could be skill level or that they weren’t compatible with the company culture.
• Bad Leadership — The company was promoting leaders from within, but not giving them the training they needed to learn how to manage other employees.
• Bad Vision — They were a great fit, had good leaders, but the employees didn’t understand the company’s goals and how they could fit into the bigger picture.

Now that we had those 3 buckets to put people into, it was pretty easy to figure out a quick win should give each one so the quiz-takers would get value in exchange for the time they invested in taking the quiz.

That’s Important… so don’t miss what I just said. The quiz-takers made an investment with you and you need to reward that investment. Sure, it might have just been a few minutes of their time, but they gave it to you, so honor that.

Mary was able to quickly point out some quick wins for them on each bucket — and even started to realize that she had some resources in her mastermind group that would help them after they joined.

For Bad Fit — The company could immediately audit or build an interview process and could give them a quick overview of the main points of that on the result page. 

Then, if they join her mastermind, she has a walkthrough video and worksheet to help them with every step from creating a job post to making a job offer. AND it talked about ensuring that someone was a good fit skillswise and culturally.

For Bad Leadership — The company could immediately do a leadership audit and she could explain what that is and a few main things to include on the result page of the quiz. 

Then, if they join the mastermind, she has a leadership training course that they can go through self-paced or she offers her members a discount on an in-person leadership training program.

For Bad Vision — The company could immediately set a 3-month and 3-year goal. She could explain on the quiz result page how to do that easily.

Then, if they join the mastermind, they have access to a training course on building your company’s mission and vision statements as well as resources for holding team meetings to communicate vision and mission. She also has a worksheet for creating an employee development plan so they know how they can grow within the company.

Problem #3: The Quiz Questions

At this point, Mary was feeling pretty confident in her Quiz Funnel. She could really see how someone that took the quiz would get a lot of value from her and she could sell her mastermind.

Mary especially liked that even if they didn’t buy anything from her, someone taking the quiz would get something that would help them in some way. It might just be a tiny action-step forward for them, but it was a step in the right direction and she knew it would help them.

Now, of course, Mary was faced with the challenge of figuring out what questions she could ask that would help some software determine — correctly! — which bucket they should be in.

I could tell that Mary was feeling a little overwhelmed at this point.

Remember… we’re helping someone discover why they have a lot of employees quitting and we’re telling them that we’re pretty certain that it’s one of 3 reasons.

A Quick Question Exercise

So I asked Mary one really good question that made this step less intimidating…

“Imagine you’re talking to me. I mentioned that my husband had a problem keeping my best employees and I ask you if I can pick your brain real quick and get some advice. What questions would you want to ask me before giving me advice that I can share with him?”

That unlocked the vault in her mind and her expertise surged.

She immediately fired away at me with a series of carefully thought-out questions.

And the really cool thing is that her first 5 to 8 questions were exactly what I was expecting — they were what I call “groundwork questions.”

Mary knew me — that’s why I changed it up and asked about my husband’s business. She didn’t have any background info on him, so she was forced to gather some basic info first.

These groundwork questions become the basis of the quiz questions.

For example, she asked me questions like — 

1. How many employees did he have?
2. Did he have internal managers between him and the employees? — How did he prefer to hire his managers, from within the company or from outside? And was he providing them with any training on how to lead teams?
3. Did he have a formal company vision and mission statement? — Did his employees know what it was?
4. Did he provide development pathways to employees so they knew how they could advance within the company?

I wrote down the answers as she fired them off one after the other.

When I could tell that she had already started to bucket him into one of her buckets and was asking more specific questions, I stopped her.

I had her look at the questions she’d asked me and I could see that lightbulb moment in her eyes.

She saw how easily she could turn those questions into ones that would work for almost anyone taking the test. 

I confirmed that Thrive Quiz Builder could handle the branching questions — the ones where you ask a couple more questions based on their answers. For example, if someone said they did have a formal vision and mission statement, we could ask an additional question to see if their employees knew what it was.

Mary Launched Her Quiz Funnel

Finally, Mary was ready. While Mary ended up ultimately hiring my team to do the technical work to bring it to life, she’d done the hard work herself.

• She had her quiz title.
• She was clear on why someone should invest time into taking the quiz and could communicate that on the sign-up page for the quiz.
• She knew what questions to ask in order to make the right recommendation for them.
• She was confident that the advice she was giving to each bucket would help them.
• She was able to communicate which part of the mastermind was going to benefit them.

All of the things that made this quiz awesome came from Mary’s expertise and experience helping her clients solve the unsolvable problems that kept them up at night.

The Quiz Funnel Worked to Sell the Mastermind

This whole crazy ride started because Mary had a mastermind group that was really valuable — but it was also really hard to explain why it was valuable. 

Having such a robust mastermind group actually created two problems that Mary didn’t realize at first.

Problem #1: Her Mastermind Was Too Confusing

She had packed soooo much into that thing. It had live group coaching, her whole library of courses, all the worksheets and workbooks she’d ever created, and a discount on her one-on-one services.

This thing was beyond valuable.

But all that value actually made it harder to sell, not easier.

Problem #2: The Mastermind Was Too Overwhelming

She also had an issue where people that bought it didn’t show up to the live calls, didn’t seem to be using the courses, and typically wanted to cancel after a few months.

It took too many mental calories for them to figure out what they needed out of the massive toy box of goodies.

The one toy they needed and wanted the most was forever lost at the bottom of the box, out of sight.

The Quiz Funnel Solved Both Problems

The quiz funnel actually solved both problems for her. 

Remember how we put each person into buckets at the end of the quiz?

That allowed us to focus on the exact value the mastermind would provide for their specific situation.

• Instead of this: “Buy this mastermind, it has all of this, and this, and that, and a bunch of other stuff!”
• We could say: “Because it seems like you’re struggling to hire the right fit employees, we recommend joining the mastermind. It includes a walkthrough video and worksheet to help you with every step from creating a job post to making a job offer. Plus it teaches you how to make sure someone is a good fit skillswise and culturally before you hire them. And if you get stuck, you can always come to our weekly call where we solve specific problems you’re facing.”

See the difference? 

It’s so easy for someone to see the value of the mastermind when we highlight the pieces that are relevant to them in this exact moment — and the Quiz was the perfect way to figure out what was relevant right now.

What Would You Do Differently? Drop a Comment Below

I showed you my process and why I made the recommendations that I did to Mary — but what would you have done differently?

What advice would you give Mary to help her sell more of her mastermind?

I’m excited to see what you come up with!

Drop a comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or even success stories of things you’ve done that worked to help you sell a mastermind.