Latest / Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue / Get Paid to Sell: How a Low-Ticket Offer Can Double Your Close Rate

Transcript

Get Paid to Sell: How a Low-Ticket Offer Can Double Your Close Rate · Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If your signature offer isn't closing the way you want it to, I want you to consider something.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: The problem might not be your pitch.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: It might be the gap of trust between you and a big check.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I mean.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: When someone comes to you, they normally have a short list of what they think they need: a new website, an email campaign, or a business card.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: But you can see the bigger picture.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know it's actually going to take a lot more to get them results, but they don't know you yet.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that list you're about to hand them is a lot longer than the one they came to you with, and it's a lot more expensive.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they hesitate.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what if instead of trying to close them on the big things right away, you gave them a smaller paid first step?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I call it the entry point offer, and it changed the way I sold at my agency Lawson House.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I started offering strategy sessions.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now everybody always asks me, what should I charge for a strategy session?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, the price ranged over the years.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have charged$5,000 for a strategy session.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've charged$250 depending on what I was including and what we were selling at the time.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, the number wasn't really the point.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: The point was that it served as a bridge to the bigger project.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd always tell the client, if you decide to work with me to execute this, I'll credit back what you paid on your first invoice.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because this strategy work is a part of what we would do together, anyways, which is true.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why I say that the price doesn't really matter.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It just needs to feel like an easy yes to your clients.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in these sessions, I was auditing current gaps, mapping out opportunities, and showing clients what was actually possible.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a quick example.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: One client came to me as an educational consultant.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: She worked with private schools and she was looking for a website, but she had no branding and no clear messaging.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we audited her current marketing, we looked at her funnel, we built a plan to get her what she actually needed in the timeline that she needed.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Seeing everything laid out and hearing from me and getting to see, oh, I trust Susie's vision for this.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I see where this is going.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell how this all comes together.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, she was on board to spend more because she saw how much more she was going to get out of it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it ended up increasing her investment by about$3,000, which really mattered to us at that time.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: We really wanted that$3,000 and the extra work and her trust.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the interesting part.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It only felt like an extra$1,500 to her because she had initially bought the strategy session and then she saw that awesome discount line, uh, line item on her invoice when I sent it to her for her full project.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so even though she technically spent an extra$3,000 more than she was originally planning, it didn't feel that way to her.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's some psychology in there that I'm sure somebody way smarter than me could get into about pricing.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: But what I found is just giving people an easy yes made the whole experience feel better and made their spend go up.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I found that this was especially true with bigger teams too.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: If I was trying to get a team on board or it was a bigger business, or I knew that they could get something approved on their credit card for under$5,000 for a bigger deal, and they didn't have to get their bosses or CEO's approval for something under that amount.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: This was such an easy way to get my foot in the door, establish myself as a trusted vendor, and now they want to make the most of their investment.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is the closest thing to a free trial you can give somebody as an agency.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you another example.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched this play out with one of my friends who added a$1,500 audit in front of her$5,000 to$10,000 a month retainer.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: She's not trying to make a killing on the audit.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: She actually doesn't care.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: She just wants people to have some skin in the game before they saw that bigger number.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: When she was initially trying to position this, people are like, whoa, she's a copywriter.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they were like, whoa, that's a lot of money for copy.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But after seeing her magic and after seeing her work in that audit, they're like, no, yeah, I want you to run this for me.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: The trust was there.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: They see the vision for it and they can see why she charges what she charges because she's going to make them a ton of money on the other side.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The audits worked so well that people were actually booking them on the very first call and giving her their credit card right there, saying, Yes, put me down for that date.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they were so excited about working with her and it felt like such an easy decision.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing she did that was really smart is she told people, hey, you can take this audit, and then you can go do it yourself.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you decide, hey, I don't want to pay somebody$15,000 to write this funnel for me, they could take their audit and go.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she still has made$1,500.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So she's pumped.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the even better part though.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: When people did the audit, she saw that their close rate went up by 80%.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: So they were booking this audit with her.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if they had just gotten on a call with her, her close rate was between 25 and 40%, typically, depending on seasonality.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: But once they did the audit, if she could get them on the audit, 80% of people were then moving forward with this retainer.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And her close rate went way up to 60% of people actually booking the audit.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: So now she's got crazy numbers of people moving forward with way bigger projects.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'll throw this out there too.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: She also stopped giving away her time and her energy and her creativity for free.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Every sales conversation she used to have, she was already building on a marketing plan to convince someone to hire her.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: But now she gets paid to do that.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the shift.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You stop working for free to earn the sale and you start getting paid to do it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is not just an agency thing.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen this work across so many different kinds of service-based businesses.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: A website designer who sells a scope and a wireframe before the full build, a photographer, and I love this one, who charges$500 to put together a full timeline for a wedding day and then credits it back to the bride if the bride books her.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: She works marks up the package by$500 and then marks it back down with the discount.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: She breaks even either way.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: But now she's doing something no other photographer in the market is doing.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: She's showing her couples exactly how she thinks, how detail-oriented she is, how much she cares about their day before they've even signed a contract.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is trust you cannot buy with a pretty Instagram grid.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Another business coach I know sells a 90-minute intensive before her six-month program.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: An online course creator I've worked with sells a curriculum audit before she pitches her done-for-you build.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: It looks different for everybody, but the principle is the same.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Find the piece of your sales process where you're already doing the strategic thinking and charge for it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: The key is to make sure that the price feels like a natural next step towards your bigger offer.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It can't be so low that the jump to your signature price feels absurd, and it can't be so high that it creates its own barrier.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: You want them to feel like they're already on their way, not like they just paid for something totally separate.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: There should be a logical thread between the two.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll throw this out there to you too.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: It can't be a PDF.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: It can't be something passive.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: It actually has to be you on the call.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a service-based business and you want to show up for your clients, I know that it's tempting to be like, I'll put together this course and it'll be totally passive.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea here is that they see you in action.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: You want to wow them, they want to connect with you.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's going to be even easier for them to say yes to that bigger check.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've been struggling to close before you rework your whole offer or drop your prices, try this first.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Create a small paid entry point, charge for the strategy, credit it back to them when they move forward and watch what happens to your close rate.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you want help figuring out what that entry point should look like for your business, whether it's an audit or a strategy session or a planning call, I'd love to think through it with you.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can book a call with me for free at susiecoli.com.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, sell well.