Tired of doing the “it’s normally 10k but when you sign up on the call it’s 7k” thing?
And want alternatives?
I’ve got one for ya 🙂
The alternative is: Nothing.
Just decide the price and tell people.
The right people still sign up even when there’s no externally-imposed incentive to do it “right now.”
Now, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to get people to say “yes” faster and stop deferring (e.g. saying they’ll get back to you or need to check with someone or gather funds or think about the amount you’re charging).
There’s one very important thing you can do, which I’ll share in a second.
I remember when I initially discovered the concept of offering an incentive if the prospect signed up while still on the call.
I thought it was so cool because I had done dozens and dozens of sales calls for my high-ticket program and gotten zero yeses.
Yep. Zero.
Every single person was a “sounds great but I need to think about it and get back to you” or “sounds great but I didn’t expect the price to be so high, I can’t do that amount right now.”
(and then they’d either disappear totally, or start emailing me a bunch of questions about the program which I thought I had already covered on the call)
And then when I started doing the discount-on-the-call strategy, finally I started getting some “yes”es.
(Yay! I can’t tell you how exciting that was.)
But, even so, I always felt really tense and awkward when leading prospects through that part of the call, and my anxiety was through the roof, and I could sense the same from some of them too.
And I noticed a curious thing from a lot of clients who signed up this way:
They still didn’t seem to totally understand exactly what I’d be doing with them in the program.
Some even expressed surprise and resistance to the things I asked them to do, once we started working together.
After a while, it started to dawn on me that maybe the reason why some prospects hesitate and defer is that they just don’t understand exactly what the offer is about.
And putting the fast-signup incentive into place didn’t really fix that.
It just instilled some fear/anxiety in people about losing money if they didn’t make up their mind (even though they didn’t really feel like they had enough information to make up their mind).
So a lot of the people who signed up without being totally clear on the program were literally just “trusting me.” Based on what exactly? I don’t know.
Maybe they thought I seemed like a good and trustworthy person or had heard about me and my work via word of mouth (a few told me that one).
All of that is completely valid, of course.
But, because so many clients were lacking clarity about the program when we started, I had to admit that my sales system was not 100% airtight, and that bugged me.
(It’s my nature to want belief systems, business systems, and all other kinds of systems to be 100% internally consistent and therefore delivering the same output 100% of the time – and it irritates me when such is not the case 😉 )
And for me, the success of marketing and sales processes is not just measured by how many leads and clients you get, but also by what happens after someone becomes a client.
Specifically: do clients get what they expected to get? Are they satisfied with the experience? And are they satisfied with the results?
This was where my system broke down, and it prompted me to take a second look at everything.
I decided to try being more clear and explicit about what my methods involved.
Instead of mushing through a quick 60-second pitch about how I would “help them get leads from social media, work on their sales pitch, and create client-attracting content”… I started explaining all of that stuff a LOT more.
And it was too much to stuff into a discovery call script so I started putting it in my content.
Like explaining exactly HOW I help people get leads from social media.
“My method involves friend-requesting 50 potential clients per day and then writing posts on your profile that encourage them to send you messages about working together.”
And not only that, but about 1,000 more words (per post) about the details of what that looks like.
Such as how to find the right people to friend (that in itself can be one post, or even several).
Or what the components are to a post that gets people to message you.
(I’ve written dozens of posts on that topic, each covering a different aspect of a post that converts – plus I’ve done detailed video trainings breaking down the posting framework from beginning to end.)
Consistently putting out that kind of detailed content, for months and then years, eventually resulted in an absolute dream for my perfection-craving brain:
Almost 100% of the people who reached out were ready to sign up, had no objection to my price, had few or no questions about what my method would involve, were on board and even excited about putting the methods to work (and in some cases had already begun and just wanted me to help them optimize).
In other words, my system was nearly airtight.
(Though a little exception still happens here and there, and it does bug me that I may never do better than to have all of this be 99% airtight 😆😆😆 )
Isn’t that what we all want? To have only perfect-fit people contacting us and to repel all others?
By the way, when people have so deep an understanding of your work, that’s when sales/discovery calls can actually become completely optional.
Talk about a mind-screw there… I had spent years trying to master sales calls only to realize that my content had rendered them unnecessary.
But, getting back to the original point.
The idea that people need a fast-action discount to be motivated to sign up when our content and methods are so clear seems laughable to me now.
And I proved that to myself by looking at my cashflow statements from the years when I was obsessing over my sales call skills and using a fast-action discount… and comparing them to the statements from the years when I was writing phenomenal content.
There’s no comparison.
I went from about 8 clients per year to an average of 6 clients per month.
And, for those keeping score, 6 sales per month multiplied by a mid-four or five-figure price equals… the life of your dreams. 😍
As I look back, it all makes beautiful sense. Sales tactics like fast-action discounts are sorta like trimming weeds with scissors, whereas getting better at explaining what you do is like ripping the problem out by its root.
And I don’t know about you, but I always ultimately find root-cause solutions to be much more satisfying, even though they take a lot more upfront work and a total transformation of myself and my skills.
Because once you transform yourself, you become unstoppable and the world is your oyster, no matter what external constraints may appear to exist.
I’m not even worried about future changes to social media or the internet because I know that the skill of explaining what I do can be used in any context, and it’s so much a part of me that it can’t be taken away.
If you’re someone who wants to develop this skill (even and especially if you already have it), it’s what we work on in my 30-day intensive.
I look at your content and help you take your explanations from good to phenomenal – so that everything you write can contribute to calling in and pre-selling the right clients, at a rate of at least one per week.
A full explanation of the 30-day program can be found here.
If interested, the next step is to send me a private message on FB and we’ll discuss your suitability for the program. I’m enrolling new clients for it right now! 🙂
If you’re interested in teaching my methods to your own clients, I have a certification program coming up. You can send me a private message for that one too. More info here.
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