My 2025 Black Friday Sale (Work) Starts… Now

Every year, I run a Black Friday sale at BrentOzar.com on SQL Server training and apps.

It’s a genuinely big deal for me, almost half of our annual revenue. We brought in $885K last year (up from $847K in 2023, although down from well over $1M during the pandemic.) In addition, this is a release year for Microsoft, which means customers will be looking for training on the new version, SQL Server 2025.

To prep for that, I have to think about:

• What my deals will be for this year – because I need to walk the line between cheap (which brings all the boys to the yard), and profitable (which fuels the business for the rest of the year.)
• Who the target buyers will be for those deals
• How I’ll get those buyers into my mailing list to market to them
• What marketing message I’ll use once they’re in the mailing list

Every year, I take a planning retreat to think about this stuff, plus other stuff, and I just got back, so let’s brain dump out what we’re going to do.

Setting up the marketing calendar

I run my Black Friday sale all November long because a lot of my customers are businesses who need some time to make the accounting magic happen, get approvals, etc. That means the sale will start November 1, which means I need to work backwards from that date. One way to think about it is:

• November 1: sale goes live
• October: the prospect email content starts to shift into marketing the Black Friday sale, getting them ready to purchase.
• September: do marketing activities that will get customers to sign up for the email list. September’s emails should only provide free value, not ask for anything in return.
• August: write the material for the above emails, set up the marketing activities.

These activities don’t necessarily take me the whole month – I’m trying to balance my time between the work I put into Black Friday prep, plus servicing my regular consulting customers, plus have a personal life. (That’s particularly tricky this year because I have week-long trips to Cancun, LA, Boston, Miami, and Houston during this time.)

So that’s what the calendar looks like – but then I have to decide what I’m actually going to sell, and for how much.

Setting up the sale items & prices

I try to keep the menu extremely simple and just offer 3-4 things for people to choose from: a small, medium, or large bundle of training & apps.

Historically, my largest sellers are:

• Fundamentals training class bundle, 1 year, $395 regular price
• Fundamentals & Mastering training class bundle, 1 year, $1,295 regular price
• Level 2 Bundle (training classes + apps), 1 year, $1,595 regular price
• Fundamentals & Mastering lifetime pass, lifetime, $2,495 regular price

In 2024, I focused Black Friday on discounts for the latter 3 options. Generally speaking, I’ll do better on sales if customers buy higher-priced bundles. As long as they’re swiping the credit card, you wanna tempt ’em with the next level up to encourage higher average ticket price sales.

For 2025, I really wanna focus on the last 3. I want to market to people who are ready for mastering-level classes, and I want to make sure they’re prepped by finishing the Fundamentals classes first so they know they’ll succeed. So how do I get them ready?

Setting up the marketing efforts

One of the most effective methods I’ve had for marketing training is to give people a free webcast that covers the material they need to know before they start a class. For example, if I want to teach someone a 200-level topic, then I give away a 100-level class for free first.

I teach the class live online for free on Twitch, upload the recordings to YouTube, and in the class, I make a sales pitch at the end for the next class. “If you loved this class, you’re gonna love Class B. Here’s a two-slide introduction to what you’re gonna learn in Class B, and here’s where to go buy it.”

This year, I decided that if I wanna sell the Mastering-level classes, I need to do the Fundamentals (and the classes before that) for free. This is an approach I’ve used before, but I’m amping it up this year, doing more free classes. Here’s how it’ll work:

• September 16-17 and 23-24: free public 2-hour webcasts of my introductory-level classes How to Think Like the Engine and How I Use the First Responder Kit. These are free intro classes that are already available on my site and on YouTube, but for some reason, teaching them live – even with the same material – seems to really draw in new audiences. Folks say, “Wow, Brent’s teaching this live – I should send this to my coworkers to get them to attend.” These will be live streamed, no registration required, but at the end of each class, I’ll talk about the upcoming…
• October 13-17: free Fundamentals Week, public webcasts of my next-level classes like Fundamentals of Index Tuning and Fundamentals of Query Tuning. I’ll do 4-hour versions of these classes live, but registration via email will be required for these. Registrants will be able to watch live, or watch the recordings for a very limited time afterwards. By registering, they’ll also join the marketing email list, which will prep them for…
• November 11-14: free Mastering Week, a totally new thing I’m trying this year. My Mastering classes are 20-30 hours long, the most advanced stuff I’ve got. I’ve never taught them for free publicly before, but this year, I’ll be teaching the first 4 hours of each class for free, only for people who registered via email. During those classes, I’ll be plugging the Black Friday sales, reminding folks that if they wanna see the full class, it’s at the cheapest price of the year.

That’s more than two weeks of unpaid labor right there, in the sense that I don’t get paid for the work while I’m doing it. It’s just a down payment in order to make sure the Black Friday sale is successful. That’s only the delivery part of the work, too!

Setting up the content

For each event, I have to:

• Write announcement blog posts & social media messages about each event
• Set up email automations for the list for each event, reminding folks about what’s coming up
• Update the class material to reflect SQL Server 2025, writing new slides & demos, reorganizing things
• Rehearse & record updated versions of the classes with the 2025 material

Then for the sale itself, I also have to write the blog posts, emails, and social media posts that will :

• Count down to the sale
• Announce that the sale is open
• Remind folks about the sale during November (they can’t just be “yo the sale is still on” – they have to be posts my regular readers will enjoy, that happen to tie into something that’s new in the 2025 classes)
• Count down to the sale ending

Whew. I’m over 1,000 words and I haven’t even made progress towards my goal! Well, I mean, I kinda have, because now you know that the Black Friday sale is coming, dear reader – it’s all part of my evil plan, muhahaha.

This is also why I tend to take very little new client work on during September & October – because I have so much Black Friday prep to do.

Finally, I have to prep my travel for December, because as soon as the sale finishes, I head out to join Yves in China & Japan. (Yves flies over there in early November to let me focus on the Black Friday stuff and to spend time with the family.) We relax and unwind in December over there, and then fly back to the States to get back to work in January. Wish me luck!