One webinar beat $100,000 in ad spend — BLOCKERS Episode 7
One webinar beat $100,000 in ad spend. What one practitioner found in the math.
BLOCKERS, Episode 7 — Podcast with Dr. Iris Crawford, naturopathic physician.
I started this series because I’ve watched a lot of practices fail at something that wasn’t the thing they thought they were failing at.
So for the first episode I asked Dr. Iris Crawford to do something almost nobody is willing to do. Come on camera, unrehearsed, and let me dig into what’s actually in the way.
Iris is a naturopathic physician who works with midlife women on hormone health, entirely virtually, from Tucson. Twenty years in. Great outcomes. A real team. And a frustration she named in the first two minutes: no predictable, consistent way to acquire clients.
The number
Early on she told me she’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve it. Roughly half on coaching and masterminds, half on Meta ads.
So I asked what the ad spend produced.
John: How much would you say you’ve netted in terms of customers and revenue from the hundred thousand dollars you’ve spent on Meta?
Iris: I’m negative. … Yeah. So there’s no net.
Later I asked how many of those ad dollars had produced a client at her actual price points — programs that run from $2,000 to $15,000.
“None of recent.”
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a story about someone being careless. Iris has been more disciplined than most. She now refuses to work with an agency unless they have skin in the game, after one took $20,000 up front on an 18-month profit-share deal and quit after three and a half months.
That’s not a woman who doesn’t try. That’s a woman who has tried very hard, for a long time, in one direction.
Then we found the other thing
Over a year ago, Iris ran a webinar. Not for an agency funnel, not for a program launch — a webinar she made herself, to bring women into her own paid membership.
When she looked at her numbers, she saw that two people recently signed up from that webinar she did over a year ago.
“Only” two felt like failure to her. In her words, it “knocked the wind out of my sails.” She didn’t run another one because she didn’t see the return.
But on the podcast with me, she tracked those two people forward out loud.
One is still paying $97 a month, more than a year later. The other took the free lab review that came with the membership, then bought one of her programs — three or four thousand dollars — and then, the same week we recorded, extended for another twelve months at another two thousand.
So as it turns out: that one webinar has yielded five to ten thousand dollars in lifetime value, and is still paying.
Versus one hundred thousand dollars in ad spend with zero visible return.
Iris: Now just like you said, with hindsight you look and see, well, how much money did I actually make from that one run? And what did I learn from it?
She had already said the thing that explains it, a few minutes earlier, without realizing she was diagnosing herself:
Iris: How long does someone need to be in your ecosystem before they finally buy? Knowing how long your sales cycle is, is important. And you don’t give up too soon.
What I think actually happened
She judged the thing she could offer at no cost to her based on immediate volume, and the expensive thing by hope.
Two signups looked like a failure on the day. A hundred thousand dollars of ad spend kept looking like it was almost working, because someone kept telling her it was almost working — the messaging, the offer, the creative.
Unlike the ad agency telling her “just five to eight more weeks,” the webinar had no one selling it to her, while it quietly worked in the background. So it got measured honestly, on the day it happened, at its worst moment, before it had time to blossom into something.
And it got shut down.
It’s not a marketing problem. It’s a measurement window problem. And I’ve done exactly the same thing in my own business more times than I’d like to put in writing.
The one she nearly did twice
There’s a second version of this in the episode and it’s still live.
Iris was about to stop sending her newsletter, because it wasn’t producing revenue. Days before we recorded, she looked at the numbers and found an 80% open rate on a list of fifteen thousand.
She almost killed it for the same reason she killed the webinar. No visible revenue, measured on a short window.
By the end of the call she was talking about using the newsletter to promote a webinar, which promotes the membership, which produces the lab review, which is where her programs get sold. That chain already worked once. It just never got run a second time.
The blocker she named
When I asked her what’s actually in the way, she didn’t say ads or messaging or the market.
Iris: I think the biggest thing that’s holding me back is that there’s just one of me. That’s my biggest bottleneck. Me.
I hear that one a lot, and it’s usually true. But it turns a strategy question into a subtraction question, and that’s a different conversation than the one most people have with themselves.
We’re going to pick it up again in thirty days.
Why this matters if you’re not Iris
Almost everyone reading this sees a version of themself in the webinar story.
Something you tried once, that produced a small and disappointing number, that you stopped doing — and that, if you traced it forward honestly, actually made you money while you weren’t looking.
You don’t need a new channel. You need to go count what the old one was worth.
And the next time you hit a wall after that? That’s not failure. That’s the next blocker, and it only became visible because you removed the first one.
Thank you to Dr. Iris Crawford for going first, and for being more candid on camera than most people are in private. You can find her work at [Iris’s link].
If you want to be on an episode — you don’t have to have it figured out. That’s the point. Email me and say blocked.
John Cummings
Founder, BodySite.com
BLOCKERS — a weekly series on removing obstacles to success in your practice. Start here.