One DM almost convinced Kendra to completely change a webinar that was already working.
After someone told her they were disappointed that she didn’t teach more about HTMA interpretation, Kendra second-guessed her instincts and added even more teaching to her webinar. The result? Her live sales dropped from six to just two.
So she went back to what she already knew: a webinar isn’t meant to teach people everything. It’s meant to shift their perspective, challenge what they believe to be true, and help them see a problem or solution differently.
When she removed the extra teaching and focused on those “micro shifts,” the results were dramatically different: eight sales from just 68 live attendees.
In this episode, Kendra breaks down what went wrong, why teaching too much can hurt webinar conversions, and why you need to be careful about letting feedback from non-buyers influence how you market and sell.
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In This Episode:
- Why teaching too much on a webinar can actually hurt your conversions
- The difference between teaching and creating belief and perspective shifts
- How one piece of feedback from a non-buyer completely got into Kendra’s head
- The webinar mistake that took her from six sales to two
- Why the pitch is about giving people a reason to buy now, not convincing them that your offer is valuable
- How “micro shifts” can be more powerful than giving people a step-by-step solution
- Why your webinar content should sometimes make you feel uncomfortable
- The danger of empowering potential clients to DIY something they actually need support with
- Why feedback from actual buyers and clients can be more valuable than opinions from people who haven’t purchased
- Why you don’t need to make everyone your buyer
RESOURCES:
- Grab the niche statement workbook: DM the words “niche workbook” to me on Instagram @kendraperryinc
- Health Coach Accelerator, my six month business mentorship for health coaches and practitioners: go.kendraperry.net/hca
- Find me on Instagram: @kendraperryinc
- Website: kendraperry.net
The DM Message That Tanked My Webinar
I’ve been running live webinars for over a decade, and I know the rule cold: the more you teach in a webinar, the more you kill your conversion. I’ve taught this to my own students inside HCA more times than I can count. I know exactly why it happens, I know exactly what it looks like when it goes wrong, and I still broke the rule myself a few weeks ago, against my own better judgment, because of one kind, well-meaning DM.
It cost me two thirds of my sales on the next webinar I ran. Here’s exactly what happened, why a single message from someone who was never going to buy from me was able to do that much damage, and the two lessons I’m taking into every webinar I run from here on.
The Webinar I Thought Was Already Good
For the past year and a half, I’ve been selling HTMA Expert, my practitioner training program in Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis, primarily through an automated webinar. For years it converted like gangbusters. Then, slowly, it stopped. The numbers upstream of the sale were still good: retention was good, signups were good, open rates were good. But the sales weren’t coming.
I didn’t have the luxury of time to sit and diagnose an automated funnel piece by piece. I’m the sole breadwinner for my family, and this program is a major part of my income, so I made a call: I’d go live instead. Live webinars convert better than automated ones when you test and refine them properly, and I’ve always believed a live webinar is one of the best sales assets an online business owner can have.
Rather than reinvent the whole thing from scratch, I’d recently started working with a coach on a new webinar format, one that’s close to what I teach inside HCA, but not identical. My HCA students are typically driving toward an application or a sales call. HTMA Expert sells through a straight buy-now order form, so the structure has to work a little differently to get someone to convert without ever talking to me first.
The first time I ran this new webinar, live, I made six sales before the webinar had even ended. That’s a strong number for a cold traffic webinar, one built almost entirely from paid ads to people who have never heard of me. I was genuinely happy with it.
But I already knew something was off. The webinar has three content sections, and while the first two felt tight, I knew the third one was carrying too much teaching. I submitted it to my coach for feedback, and she confirmed it plainly: this was more teaching packed into one section than she’d ever seen anyone try to cram into a webinar. She told me it was almost certainly what was holding my conversion back, and she was right. I took her advice and set out to fix it.
The DM That Changed My Mind
Before I got the chance to rework the section the way I knew I needed to, something else happened. Someone who’d attended the webinar sent me a DM. I always like to check in and ask people what they found most valuable, so I asked. Their answer: it was great, but they were a little disappointed I hadn’t gone deeper into the HTMA interpretation piece.
That was it. One sentence. Not rude, not aggressive, not even really critical. If anything it was a compliment wrapped around a small ask.
But it got into my head like a parasite. I started spiraling almost immediately: maybe I wasn’t giving enough. Maybe people thought this was just a pitch session dressed up as training. I’ve watched this exact pattern play out with my own students more times than I can count, and I still fell into it myself. I knew, even as it was happening, that I was making a mistake. And I made it anyway, because I am human, and one well-meaning message from a stranger can still get past years of knowing better.
Instead of stripping teaching out of that third section the way my coach and I had already agreed I needed to, I added more. Not a little more. Significantly more, and more detailed, directly against the advice I’d just been given and against what I already knew to be true about how webinars convert.
What One DM Actually Cost Me
The next time I ran the webinar, with all of that additional teaching in place, I made two sales.
Six sales down to two. Not a dip. A collapse.
To put that in context: this isn’t a webinar I promote to my email list every couple of weeks. It runs off cold traffic from ads roughly every eight weeks, to people who don’t know me yet and haven’t built any trust with me. Almost all of my sales on this format come live, during the webinar itself, not on the replay. So a drop from six sales to two on the exact same offer, the exact same traffic source, and the exact same presenter wasn’t a fluke. It was the direct, measurable cost of one decision.
Financially, those two sales barely covered the ad spend for that run. I probably made a few hundred dollars of profit once everything was accounted for, after running a webinar I’d worked hours to build and promote.
And the frustrating part is I knew exactly why it happened. I’d let the opinion of one person, someone who was very likely never going to be my buyer in the first place, steer a decision that should only ever be made with my actual buyer in mind. If someone genuinely wants to learn HTMA interpretation from a free webinar, they were never going to buy a certification program. HTMA has real nuance and real complexity, the kind you need a structured course to responsibly apply with clients. Someone hoping to absorb that from forty-five minutes of free content is, more likely than not, a DIYer, and that’s a completely valid thing to be. It just means they were never my buyer to begin with.
I’d let a non-buyer influence my buying process. And once I said that sentence out loud to myself, the fix became obvious.
Rebuilding The Section I Already Knew Was Wrong
I didn’t even bother resubmitting the reworked section to my coach before running it again. I already knew exactly what she’d say, because it was the same thing she’d told me the first time. So I rebuilt the third content piece myself, and this time I didn’t just trim it. I stripped it down, moving almost entirely away from teaching and toward what I actually train inside HCA: micro-shifts. Small, deliberate moves in perspective and belief, rather than instruction in mechanics.
I cut so much that it genuinely made me uncomfortable. While I was live, delivering that section for the first time in its new form, I remember thinking, in real time, that it felt thin. That it wasn’t giving people enough. That this couldn’t possibly be enough value to justify someone buying anything.
The chat told a different story. People were engaged, responding, clearly tracking with it. And by the time I got to the offer, I made eight sales, live, with only 68 people on the webinar. That’s a 12% live conversion, more than double what I made on the very first run of this webinar, and the best result I’ve ever had on this particular format.
The version that felt the most uncomfortable to deliver was the version that worked.
Why Teaching Kills Webinar Conversion
This isn’t a new discovery for me. It’s something I’ve taught for years, both on this podcast and inside HCA, but living through it again, in real time, made the mechanism painfully clear.
When you teach the how-to on a webinar, mechanics, steps, the detailed nitty-gritty of a process, you do two things at once, and neither one helps you.
First, you empower people to try to DIY the result themselves. That sounds generous on the surface, but for most people, in most transformation-based spaces, it isn’t actually a kindness. Most of what we teach isn’t genuinely a DIY problem. It requires context, feedback, troubleshooting, and support to apply correctly, especially in a field like HTMA where misreading a single marker can send someone down the wrong path entirely. When you teach the mechanics instead of the shift, you send people off to try something difficult, alone, without the structure that would actually help them succeed.
Second, and more directly relevant to your business, you remove your own reason to be hired. If someone walks away from your webinar feeling like they now have the how-to, why would they need to pay you? You’ve quietly convinced them, in the process of trying to prove your value, that they don’t need you.
The alternative isn’t withholding value. It’s changing what kind of value you’re delivering. A webinar’s job isn’t to transfer a skill. It’s to shift a belief. Inside HCA, this is exactly what we teach: your webinar content sections shouldn’t walk someone through the how-to of your method. They should help someone see their problem differently, at a level just above the mechanics, so that by the time you make the offer, the belief shift has already done the heavy lifting the pitch would otherwise have to do.
Here’s a simple example. I recently supported a client of mine who works in the gut health space. Most of her potential clients arrive already convinced that specific foods, gluten, dairy, certain grains, are the root of their problem, and that eliminating them permanently is the fix. One of the biggest shifts she makes inside her own webinar isn’t teaching a protocol. It’s reframing the belief: the food usually isn’t the actual problem. The microbiome is. That single reframe does more work than any step-by-step elimination guide ever could, because it changes how the audience sees their situation, not just what they know about it.
That’s the difference between teaching and shifting. Teaching gives someone a task. Shifting gives someone a new lens, and a reason to want your help applying it.
The content in your webinar, not the pitch at the end of it, is the actual reason people buy. The pitch is only the reason they buy today instead of putting it off. If the content hasn’t done the work of shifting belief, no amount of urgency in your close is going to save the conversion.
The Second Lesson: Not Every Piece of Feedback Gets a Vote
The teaching piece is the mechanism. But the deeper lesson from this whole experience is about whose feedback actually gets to influence your business decisions, and whose doesn’t.
It is incredibly easy to let one comment, from one person, reshape something you’ve built and tested, especially when that comment is kind, or comes from someone who clearly likes you. Hostile, obviously bad-faith feedback is easy to dismiss. It’s the well-meaning comment from someone who genuinely enjoyed your free content that gets past your defenses, because it doesn’t feel like criticism. It feels like a reasonable, generous suggestion.
But liking your content and being your buyer are two completely different things. Someone can love what you give away for free and have absolutely no intention, or ability, to buy what you sell. That’s not a flaw in them. It’s just not a match, and that’s allowed to be true without it meaning anything is wrong with your offer.
This doesn’t mean you ignore all feedback. Feedback from actual clients, people who bought, who are inside your program, who are living with the result of your work, is genuinely valuable and worth taking seriously. If a client tells you something in your program is confusing, that’s worth examining.
I’ve had that kind of useful, if painful, feedback before. On a sales call roughly a year ago, a prospective client told me my program sounded like just another module-based group coaching program. It stung, because it wasn’t how I saw what I’d built. But once I got past the sting, I realized she was pointing at something real: the way I was positioning the program made it look exactly like every other program in the space, even though what was actually inside it wasn’t like that at all. I changed how I talked about it, and it led directly to attracting a higher quality of client.
That’s the kind of feedback that’s worth listening to, even when it stings, because it’s coming from someone close enough to the work to see it clearly.
Compare that to feedback that arrives from people who were never going to be your client in the first place. I’ve had someone tell me my marketing felt “pushy,” while in the same breath telling me how much they loved consuming my free content. I’ve had someone reach out just to relay that “a lot of people” think my marketing is too much. Neither of those people had ever bought from me, and neither of them was ever going to. Their opinion doesn’t get a vote in how I run my business, and I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes the hard way, to let that kind of feedback pass through without landing.
The rule I’m holding onto now is simple: before you let any piece of feedback change something you’ve built, ask whether the person giving it is actually your buyer. If they’re not, their opinion is data about how one outsider perceives you, and nothing more. It doesn’t get to overwrite decisions that were built around the person who’s actually going to say yes.
What I’m Taking Into My Next Webinar
Six sales. Two sales. Eight sales. Same webinar, same offer, same me, on the exact same webinar format run three times in a row. The only variable that moved was how much I taught, and how much weight I gave to a comment from someone who was never going to buy.
If you’re building or refining a webinar right now, here’s what I’d ask you to sit with:
Every teaching section in your webinar should be doing one job: shifting a belief or a perspective, not transferring a skill. If someone could walk away from that section and DIY the result on their own, it’s working against you, not for you.
Before you change anything about your offer, your webinar, or your marketing because one person said something, ask whether that person is actually your buyer. If they’re not, their feedback doesn’t get to steer the ship.
And if a section of your webinar feels almost too thin to you while you’re delivering it, that discomfort isn’t proof that something’s wrong. For most of us, it’s proof that we’ve finally stepped out of the teaching mindset we’re most comfortable in, and into the one that actually converts.
You don’t need to teach your audience how to do the thing. You need to show them why they can’t do it alone, and who’s going to help them do it faster.
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