#217 - The real secret to always selling out your offers

Hey. Hey, lovely. It is Kate again here from hello, funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. I am really excited to be sharing another little super valuable snippet from our UFW live event in today's podcast. So this is a little sneaky peek behind the scenes of one of the moments from the event that had so many people. Like, there was emojis, there was thumbs up, you know, there was like praise hands. It was was like, this is one of the things that really made a lot of people have that be aha moment that big. You know, that thing that just clicks that I know they're going to go away now put this into action and it's just going to make such a big difference. And we're talking today, this little snippet that I'm sharing, I'm talking today about just a really simple reframe that I think everybody needs to make right now that is going to make selling your offers so much easier because it's going to just highlight for you the thing that you should be focusing on. So I'm not going to ramble on anymore. I hope you love it. If you do, make sure you let us know down below and let's dive on through into our little snippet from UFW day number two.

One fact before we dive right in. And this is something again, I think once you sort of realize this, it can make life a lot easier and it can make where you are sort of focusing that time when you're trying to troubleshoot a bit clearer as well. So the fact is that you have to be really good at sales and marketing to sell a not 10 out of 10 or, you know, as close to that as possible offer. And in the reverse, if you have an amazing offer, you don't actually have to be amazing at sales and marketing. And I think for most people, most people come in and again, obviously not everybody, but will come in and be like, all right, I'm just going to try and like, learn how to do this sales tactic, learn how to do this and if and your actual area of expertise, your actual area of your experience and stuff like that. For most people, it's not necessarily sales and marketing. It's like you're really good at what it is you do and what it is that you teach. And it's a really long road to try and catch up and get to that level of expertise with your marketing. Most people, it takes years and years and years to become, you know, quote unquote, an expert at anything and the same goes with sales and marketing. So what is usually a faster, fast fix is rather than trying to spend that time, become amazing at marketing, learning how to have a perfect webinar or a perfect email sequence or a perfect launch to be able to sell this thing, which is your people see it and they go, oh, kind of, yeah, maybe is if you flick, flip that over and all of a sudden, if you have an offer that is just so irresistible, so exciting for people that they're like, oh, where has this been? This is like the best thing ever. This is exactly what I need. This is exactly how I want to learn. This is like, I'm so excited. Like, let me in. You don't actually have to be that good at sales and marketing. And I find for most people, for mostly like in this expert space, because you're not like sales and marketing isn't necessarily your area of expertise, it's usually much easier to just make your offer really, really good. And that's going to be a much faster and much bigger needle mover. I'm not saying don't try and get good at your sales and marketing. Absolutely. I'm just like, it's usually a faster way to grow if you get that offer nailed first, rather than the other way around. So let's talk about what I call Hells yes. Offer. So I know we've got some lovely people from our ecourse empire here today. So you guys are going to be well aware of the Hells yes offer. But basically, the hells yes offer is like the happy middle point where you're able to match these sort of three things. And it's not just about going out and matching them, but for your audience, it also has to be matched energetically for you. When we talk about the first sort of pillar that we want to make sure we're getting right is pricing. And this isn't just about, okay, I'm going to go out there and make it cheaper. I'm going to be the cheapest in the market. So pricing, it's not about being the cheapest and having like that as the tick, but it is about finding the price that matches the value that both you are putting into something. So if someone buys it and you get money in the bank, you go, oh, that feels good for what I need to do to deliver it, how I need to show up, the energy I need to give. And also that value needs to match for your client what they think they're going to get out of it. So they're going to go, I'm happy to part with this money to be able to get this outcome or to be able to have this thing be faster or easier or more likely to to be successful. Usually when we are looking at pricing and people are kind of going out and going like, what should my pricing be? Because in the online education space, like whether it's courses, group programs, we're helping people in a certain niche to get a certain outcome. And for every single combination of that, there is usually a really vast pricing scale. So you will have somebody who is promising to help somebody achieve the same outcome that you promise in your $2,000 program. They will have it in a $7 ebook and you'll have someone else selling it in a $25,000 mastermind. So how do you know where you price and what is going to be that right price? So I'll give you like super quick set of steps that you can do if you are feeling like the pricing isn't really a good fit match. So how do you kind of figure out like, what is the right price then? Given that it has to feel good for you, it has to feel good for the audience. But that's kind of feels a bit airy fairy, right? So how do you actually do that in concrete? Like, how do we make this practical? I'm all about like practical steps. So first step is I would go out, go and do your research, go have a look around and find out, like, what is that scale, right? Like what is that price range that you can see right now is in the market and seems to be selling well? And you can usually, I mean, people like to talk themselves up on social media, so don't necessarily believe everything that somebody has said. But if you go to somebody's program and they have a bunch of testimonials, that's normally a good indicator that they've had a lot of people through. Because normally you're going to get like 1 in 21 in 50 people is going to give you a testimonial. So if you've got a good number of testimonials, you've sold a decent number, right? Other things you can do being detective here is to go and see if you can find their Facebook group, see how many people are in it. Again, just to give you an idea of like, okay, this obviously sells, so you wanna go out to the market, find what is that range for the type of offer that you have. So obviously communities are gonna have one type of range. Online courses are gonna have another type of range. Coaching programs are gonna have another Type of range, like what is that range? And then you're gonna sit and look at it and go, where feels right for me? Where in that range do I feel like how I wanna show up, how I wanna deliver works for me. And then the second question you need to ask is, for my ideal client, what feels right? Like this feels like great value, but it still feels like an investment. Like you want to still feel like I've paid for something, I've done something, I've st, you know, I've made a commitment. Not just like I'm grabbing this because it's cheap. You don't want them to have that, that sort of thought unless you're doing like a low ticket offer, which is a different story. And then if you're still not sure, if you kind of go, oh, I feel like I should be somewhere in between, my course should be somewhere between like five hundred and a thousand. I'm not really sure. I would normally recommend you start on the lower, go out, sell it, test it, see how it converts. And then one really good way, one really good indicator, and for those of you who already have a program, one sort of good indicator of how your pricing already sits is have a look at the split between pay in fulls and split payments. And if you are getting way more split payments, I mean at the moment, just to put the caveat on it, like in this current economy you can expect to be getting a lot more split payments than normal. But if you're getting like over 70% of your payments, are people taking like a monthly payment or a split payment or something like that, then that probably indicates that you are on the higher end of the range. If you are getting majority of people paying in full, that indicates that either you have a target market who doesn't like making monthly commitments, which is a thing as well, but in most instances it indicates your price is on the lower range and you definitely have space to increase it. So that's pricing. Next we talk about promise because this is again one of those areas that is often we think we've nailed it and the clients are like, not, this doesn't make sense to me. And it's something that is really easy for us to be way too close to. This can be again one of those levers that you make a tweak here and it can make a massive difference without actually having to change anything. Like you don't have to recreate your course, you don't have anything but just getting in and refining that promise and making sure that is ticking the three following boxes. Number one, that your promise is specific. And when I say promise, it is kind of the tagline, but not always. But it's just like when someone reads lands on your sales page, they don't have to read too far into it. Hopefully it's the first screen or so and they're going to go like, okay, I understand what this program does. What is the outcome is like, what is the problem? What am I going to get out of this? If I buy this and I do this, what happens? Right? Like that's the promise and it's how you are communicating it. So it needs to be specific. They need to know that this is a program for this person who wants to achieve this by doing this and not doing this. Like it needs to be that. So they need to read it and go, oh yeah, yeah, that's me. When we talk about specificity, you don't have to hit every one of these, but we want to make sure we're covering off like the niche. Who is it for? It's not, not for everybody. No program in the world is for everybody. So make sure people know really clearly right up front who is it for? What are they going to no longer have to worry about what is going to be set up for them, what is going to happen, the who, the what, sometimes the how, but more importantly the when. Those are the three things you want to make sure in your specificity. The next thing is that promise needs to to be exciting and also believable. And this is another really important thing, and this one is one particularly for when there are changes in the market that you might want to revisit. Because sometimes what people are excited by or what people believe is possible changes when things around them change. You might have had someone who two years ago was going, oh, I know we use real estate, I want to pay off my house in three years or something like that. And now they're going, I just want to reduce my mortgage payments. It's that sort of for what they are now because of what they've seen, because of what they've experienced, what they are currently excited by or what they are currently believing is possible for them can often quite quickly change. You want someone to see that and go, I believe that if I pay this money that I'm going to get this outcome. If they look at and go, no way, that's not possible, then they're not going to pay the money. So it has to be believable, but it also has to be exciting. Like you're not Going to go out there and say again, using the mortgage market as an example, I'm going to show you how to pay off your mortgage in 50 years. Yes, it's believable. Does anyone want it? No, no, no, no, they don't. I'm going to show you how to pay off your mortgage in one year. Yes, everyone wants it. No one's going to believe that it's possible. So it's like, where do you find your. That balance? Like when you were talking about specific outcome, a specific number, like, you will have learned this, you will be able to do this. And the timings around it has to be something that people both go, this is going to be better than if I did it on my own. Substantially better. I want this, and I believe that it is possible for me. And then the final piece, and this one is actually probably, I think the most overlooked, is delivery. How are people wanting to actually learn, wanting to consume? What are they actually willing to do to achieve this outcome? One really common mistake I see people make that falls under this delivery bucket is that they go and on their sales page, they're like, inside this program, I've got 152 million hours of videos and 35,000 worksheets and 300 checklists and. And blah, blah, blah. Like, I've got so much stuff. And when people see that, they go, that is a lot of time and work. And I do not have the energy for any of that. And I'm not saying this is the same for everyone. Everyone's market is going to be different. But you need to know with your ideal market, like, how much time are they willing to spend of their own? You know, the real magic, or I guess skill here is how can you find inside your programs how to give them the information they need and the resources they need and the tools they need in usually the fastest, easiest way for them possible. And every program is going to be different because some you do need to learn a lot of things. Like if, you know, if you were learning to be a brain surgeon, you need to learn a lot of stuff before you're picking up a scalpel, right? There's a lot of steps, a lot of things that have to happen. Most of us aren't teaching people brain surgery. We're teaching something usually a lot more so simple. How can we make sure that that delivery mechanism is in line with what they want? And I want to give you guys an example now of how changing a couple of these things made a huge impact. So this is one of my, like, OG clients. Vesna, she's actually now a really good friend of mine. When we first worked together, she had misalignment in every single one of these three things. She did not have a healthier software. So she was a naturopath. You know, she was booked out with their one on ones. Very successful naturopath, but, you know, burnt out, running out of time, didn't have time to do anything else because she was spending all her time doing one on ones. She had been sort of advised that the solution for her was to bundle up her one on ones into like a premium package of like 10 one on ones, give it a cool outcome, whack a premium price on it. And that was going to solve all of her problems. And that's what she was trying to sell, I think it was because it has been a long time now, but it was between three and $5,000 for like a 10 pack basically of coaching. But it had like a fancy name and an outcome, so it was easier to sell. The problem with that is her target market was busy mums, tired, burning out mums. And where there, there was a misfit on this was on both sides. So for her, if she sold this package, yes, like absolutely $3,000 in the pocket, she definitely wanted that. She felt like the price felt good, but she didn't want to have to then go and deliver 10 one on one sessions. Like her goal was, how can I do something more leveraged? How can I actually free up my calendar? And this was doing the exact opposite. Every time she made a sale, all of a sudden her calendar got more full. The other thing was that how she was selling it. And even though I know this actually not to be true, you don't need to do sales calls at this price point. But she was, for her, the sales mechanism was sales calls. She wasn't a super high converter on sales calls. So it was almost like she had to do 10 sales calls to make one sale to then have another 10 calls in her calendar. So for her, just energetically, like she did not want to sell this thing, even though logically she's like, I want to sell it, this is how I'm going to make money. But energetically did not want to sell it. It was definitely not ticking any of the boxes for what she actually wanted. Then we look at the other side, we look at her ideal client. Okay, so her ideal client, busy mums. What does one thing that busy mums don't have time or spare space in their calendar. So for these busy Moms, they're like, even though if they were at the point of even going, yes, I'd be happy to spend $3,000 to fix my burnout, to get my energy back to reinvest in my kids, they didn't have the time. They're like, I don't want to have to show up for 10 hours either and find that and juggle that around daycare and childcare and whatnot. So it was just this big mismatch, right? And she wanted the outcome, but nobody wanted how it was delivered. So she went back and she thought about that ideal client, how much they're willing to spend, the kind of time commitment they had. They needed something flexible. They needed something that was a much lower monetary investment to start with because they generally, you know, got a lot of young kids. I know I'm generalizing and obviously there's always different people in every market, but the majority of people in that space in their life, they don't have a whole bunch of spare cash. So for them, the dollar value was also very important. So she created a six week, totally DIY style, you know, come in, take it at your own pace online program which had the same promise. She brought the price down from 3,000 to 497. And she went from maybe selling one or so a month to selling 20 a week, making that initial shift of the offer. She saw the sales shift immediately and then it was like, okay, well now I need to put the systems in place, which we're going to talk about on Monday, to be able to sell this easier as well. But she saw from making those shifts like the offer is now the right fit for her for her market, and it started to sell. So. So next thing I want to talk about is why now Moments. Why now? Moments is just a term that I've sort of coined to describe how you structure your actual offer to make sure that people go, are able to say, oh, I need to buy this today or tomorrow in the next short time period, rather than I can buy this always. And the reason why we need to give people why now moments is because humans, the way human brains work is if we don't have a deadline, when you've got so many competing things in your brain like everybody does, your mental list of things that you need to decide on or to do or whatever is a thousand things long, right? Even for the most organized people, the things that get decided on first are the things that have the most pressing deadline. Like, I need to decide this today, I need to decide this tomorrow. I Need to figure this out. Okay, I'll make that decision. Given that we know that and that with social media and stuff like that, like that, people are at this point of decision fatigue so much earlier. We need to give them a reason to make that decision. Otherwise, even if, like, I think, like, I really want to solve this problem, I really want help with this, I think this is the right person for me. But if you're like, you come back to this at any time, as much as they might be like, oh, great, because I really didn't want to have to make another decision, you immediately go to the bottom of the list, it disappears, the decision never gets made, and then they never join. Give them a reason to act now. So one, every single one needs to have either urgency or scarcity. So urgency is it has to be done by this date or it goes away. Scarcity is there are only X number of these. So you've got to jump in now because you might miss out. Next up is bonuses. So that thing that expires or that ends for some people, it's literally like doors are closing. You can't get this offer after this. For other things, it might not be that the doors are closing. It might be that bonuses are going away. Some examples of some great bonuses that you can be adding or removing. So as a way of updating and making your programs and your promises more relevant to the current environment and current climate without having to completely recreate your program can be to update the bonuses that go with it. So I'll give you, give you an example. In my space, like in the marketing kind of space. And I'm not creating a bonus on this because it's not my area of expertise. But I think for other people it might be something that could be great. But there are so many people getting into these like master resell rights, private label resell kind of products right now. Like we get applications all the time from people wanting to create like face, teach people how to do like faceless Instagram and then resell something on a stand store. Like that seems to be the new Bitcoin or the new affiliate marketing or whatever. Like seems to be a thing having its moment right now. I don't necessarily think it's going to last more than 12 to 18 months, but it's thing having its moment and it's a thing that's getting a lot of buzz. People are getting very excited about it. So maybe if you had a lot of people thinking about is this something that's for them and that was your Market, you'd be like, okay, well, I'm going to create a bonus about, you know, how to make the most of that, how to do that. Again, your target market might be really feeling like, maybe if your target market is families who typically own their own home and therefore having like mortgage stress and stuff at the moment, maybe you want to add a bonus. And again, this will only work for certain topics, but maybe this bonus is how you can save the investment back over X amount. So maybe you're going to show them with budgeting or with some discounts or with some other kind of strategy, or maybe you'll show them how to make, like, here's three emails you can send and you'll make back the investment. So it kind of takes away that stress, but it's something that, you know, it's like, of the moment. Like, this is something people are worried about right now. Can I create a bonus for that? And to add the urgency of scarcity, first hundred people get the bonus, or people who buy by Friday get this bonus. All right, bit of homework for everybody. And this is like three questions that is going to make a real difference. If you can answer them and answer them well and use this in your marketing. There's three questions you need to be able to answer about your offer. Anytime you make a promotion, anytime you plan something. So you need to be able to say why you? Like, what is about you that's different and right for them? Why now? Like, why do they need to act now, why do they need to buy now? And how is it different from things they've tried before or what else is in the market? Like, what is unique, what is special about this offer, this product, this program, how it's delivered, this pricing, this bonuses, this, whatever. Like, there needs to be something different. Why you, why now? And how is it different? Alrighty, moving right along, I want to quickly go through some tweaks that you can make. And I don't recommend making all of these. Listen to them and see if any of them land and resonate as something like, oh, I could probably try that. If you are right now in a season where things have slowed down. So number one, which we kind of talked about, is updating your promise, making sure that the outcome that you're talking about, that, the phrases that you're using to describe that outcome, that it's still connecting, it's still relevant and it's still valuable. It's still like the most valuable way you can describe what you do, the most current, the most relevant to your clients. And again, like we talked about, you want to be using their own words here where you can like their own terms for things, how they describe it. Number two, play with pricing and or timings. So this can be something like adding a longer payment plan or offering a shorter or DIY option of your program at a lower price. I'm not talking about going, oh okay, sales have slowed down, I'm going to slash my price in half. That's not really what we want to do. Unless you're not planning on offering the program again, like dips in market. Markets have peaks and troughs all the time. That's normal. And when you're in a trough, you don't want to go and make any kind of decisions that are going to negatively impact you once we get back to the peak. I mean if you're looking at the pricing and go, oh actually this is a clear misfit, I, I probably should bring it down and be more aligned with my market. That's one thing. If you're just like, oh my gosh, I'm freaking out, I think it's gonna be easy to sell it if I slash the price. Don't do that. But there's other things you can do that don't negatively impact the value of your offer. So maybe you have what's normally a 12 month program and you're going to introduce a 90 day sprint or a 30 day sprint that's going to take one piece of that program and do it in a shorter time period. So that's going to scoop up those people who are like, I just don't have the energy to commit to something that's 12 months or I don't have the time or things feel too uncertain right now. I don't know where I'm going to be in six months time. So maybe I don't want to lock in 12 months of this, but 30 days, maybe that feels more doable for them. And again, maybe lower price point. And then of course, you know you're going to want to introduce, you're going to want to invite those people who do the 30 days to come and do the rest of the program. Right? That's just a given. And we'll talk about that with selling and stuff on Monday. So price and timings, the next thing, and we've kind of already talked about this briefly, was making your pay in full extra juicy because you want to try and get as many pays and falls as you can, particularly right now because the rate of failed payments on payment plans is sky high. So if you can try and get as many people as possible to pay in full, whether that's by giving them a slightly bigger discount than you previously were, or chucking in some extra bonuses or whatever it is you need to do to go make this as desirable as possible for those who can afford it. Obviously we're not trying to make people over invest when they don't actually have the capacity to do so. But for someone who is sitting on the fence who's like going, well, I could painful, or I could just take the payment plan because it feels easier. You want there to be something they go, oh, but I would miss out on that if I did that. So I'm going to do the payment for. Okay, so that we want to have like some kind of extra special bonus for that next really big one is protecting yourself. I would recommend if you are getting a lot of payment plans or you do have payment plans, not everybody offers PayPal and not everybody has the capability to mix and match. But if you can remove PayPal from your payment plans as an option. So sometimes what that means is you have to maybe have two products in your checkout software. One for the pay in full and you have one button that goes to that. One for the payment plan, you have one button that goes for that. And then the payment plan button you just deselect PayPal and the pay and full button has both. And the reason that you want to do that is because inside PayPal if someone does a split payment option and then they go into month two and they're like, I can't be bothered doing this anymore, I've changed my mind or I never logged in or whatever, they can go in and cancel it themselves, which, you know, you don't, you don't want that. Like you've delivered, you've given your side of the things for people to do that. I feel like that's a super shady thing for people to do. But there are some people who are out there who do do that. So I would remove that. Also, if you have a large number of payment plans going through stripe, look to add something like this tool called Churn Buster, which just makes it easier for you to recoup the failed payments. So it goes above and beyond what stripe does organically. So it will keep retrying for longer. It might retry more frequently. You can actually set it to send emails and stuff like that. Changing to making it so that if somebody takes a payment plan, their course that they get is dripped out rather than accessed all at once again. That can be another thing that is a good like incentive for people to pay in full versus going payment plan. But again, it just means that you're not going to have someone go, I'm just going to take one payment, go through, get everything I need and then I'm going to cancel or go into a chargeback on Stripe or something really nasty like that. And then looking to add again, if you can do it easily. And I'm pretty sure inside Stripe you can just turn a lot of these things on now, but with a lot of the checkout software, they have them also built in. But adding something like Klarna or After Pay or one of these other pay later options, because that does remove the risk from you, that means that it's then up to them to chase the payments. And you get the payments regardless of whether the person makes them or not. Like they're taking on the risk and the credit and they're acting as the bank rather than you, the small business owner being forced to act as a bank and take on that risk. And then the last one, yep. Is adding upsells and downsells. I think that's another really important thing that you can do right now. So if you're not getting quite as many sales as you used to, have a look to see, can I add an upsell to increase the average order value of the people who are buying? Can I add a downsell to scoop up those people who really wanted to jump in? But you know, for whatever reason, whether it was a time commitment or a money commitment, they didn't feel like they had either of those things to invest right now. So you can make them that. Would you like a shorter option? Would you like a DIY option? Would you like to try the first two modules for X amount? Like, would you like to have a longer payment plan? Like there's lots of different ways you can do downsells and you know, none of these things are going to triple your business overnight. But if you're Getting an extra 10% here, an extra 10% there, an extra 10%, 2%, 5%, it all adds up. And in this kind of economy, having that extra 2%, extra 5% next time, like that is how you actually end up making the big shifts. It's rarely going out and switching, like flicking one switch. It's about adding on layers that all build on top of each other, if that makes sense. Well, we've gone a little bit over today, guys. So wonderful to meet you all guys and I will see you all next time. Bye.