In this solo episode of the Doing It Online podcast, Kate McKibben explains why selling mid‑ and high‑ticket coaching programs has become increasingly difficult—more competition, higher ad costs, and growing buyer distrust. She argues that ads alone aren’t enough; a successful funnel also requires a well‑designed offer and continuous audience warming. Kate introduces the concept of a “gateway offer,” a low‑ticket product that serves three purposes: it fuels sales of higher‑ticket programs, expands the audience pool, and remains profitable enough to scale with ads. She then outlines the three most common mistakes coaches make when building a gateway offer: (1) making the offer too niche, which limits ad scalability; (2) solving a functional problem instead of a “vanity” problem that customers are eager to buy; and (3) pricing the offer either too low or too high, missing the impulse‑buy sweet spot that still allows profitable ad spend. Kate wraps up by promising a follow‑up episode that will walk listeners through the step‑by‑step creation of an effective gateway offer.
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Over the last few episodes, we've been talking about ads and how Facebook ads have really helped us make a massive jump in our revenue this year already. But here's the thing. Ads alone are not the solution. You need ads, you need the right funnel strategy, and you need the right offer. So this month, we're going to be talking all about the offer and specifically about what I call gateway offers, because here's what I'm seeing. A lot of people are struggling to sell their programs. You know, the ones that feel like an investment. Not just some $27 low ticket impulse buy, but the real programs, the $500 programs, the 997, the 2000, $3000 programs. And they're wondering why. And that's exactly what we're going to be covering in this episode. Hey. Hey there. I'm Kate McKibben from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. Today we're diving into why it's so hard to sell programs, that kind of investment right now, and what you actually need to be doing about it. Because here's what's changed. There's more competition. Ads are more expensive. And even when you do make a conversion from Cold Traffic, it's probably not as profitable as it used to be, which makes it harder to scale. But the biggest shift, people are distrustful. They're distrustful of you, the person selling to them, and they're distrustful of themselves. They've bought a lot of things, they've invested a lot of money, and either they followed the program and didn't get results, or, and this is what a lot of people find, they spent the money and didn't actually do it. I'm guilty of that. I've bought so many programs and watched maybe the first video or sometimes never even logged in. And the thing is, if they can't even trust themselves to follow through, it doesn't really matter how good your offer is. And that's the fundamental thing you need to understand. So let's break this down. All right, so here's one of the biggest problems I'm seeing. The way that you're selling your offers is only designed to work with a warm audience. Let me say that again. The way most people are selling their offers is designed to work with a warm audience. And that's fine as long as you are constantly refilling and rewarming your audience. But a lot of people aren't doing that. And if you don't have a system in place to be inviting people into your world, all the time. And I mean all the time. Not just the couple of weeks before a launch. You're going to struggle. You should be adding hundreds of people to your list every single week, if not more. And you should be warming those people up correctly. Not the old no like and trust way. That's very 2020 the way that people need to be warmed up right, right now, this year. So that when you present them with offers, whether this is done evergreen or done live, it doesn't really matter. They've had enough touch points, they've built enough trust, not just in you, but also in themselves. And that is a real shift. They need to trust that they're actually going to follow through this time, that this is the right decision, that this is the right time, that this isn't just going to be a big waste of their money. And if you're not doing that, if you're just relying on your existing audience, if you're promoting to them over and over and over again, or you're trying to sell to cold traffic straight into a $2,000 program without any trust in between, it is just not going to work well. Not well enough to be hitting those goals that you just set. So what's the answer? The answer is you need a gateway offer. Now, a gateway offer is a low ticket offer, but it's not just a low ticket offer. And this is the piece that I see a lot of people missing because there are plenty of people out there who are running low ticket offers and still going, but hang on, I'm not making sales. And that's because your gateway offer needs to do three things really easily. So number one, it needs to allow you to sell more of your programs. That's more of your mid ticket and premium offers, the ones that feel like an investment to the purchaser. Number two, it needs to grow the audience who are going to see those offers. So not just promoting the same thing over and over again to the same people. And number three, it needs to be profitable enough that you can scale it with ads. When your gateway offer does all three of these things, it's a game changer. But a random low ticket offer does not cut it, will not cut it. Please don't waste your time and money there. So let me walk you through the three biggest mistakes I see people making when they try to create a gateway offer. All right. Mistake number one is going way too niche. Low ticket is not actually the place to go super niche. And here's why. For your low ticket offer to work really well, you need to be able to run profitable ads to it at scale. At scale means a lot. It means spending probably more on ads than you've ever considered before. It means being able to sell 10, 20 a day. That's what scale if not 40, if not 50. Okay. It's not one or two sales here or there now to be able to do that, particularly the way that ads are working right now. And we discuss this a lot in the last couple of episodes. If you miss those, go back and have a listen. But you need to have an offer that is going to appeal to a really, really large audience. I'm talking tens of millions here. Really, the bigger the better. Now, the trick is finding an offer that is going to both appeal to your ideal client. Absolutely. But also an audience that's bigger than your ideal client. And you need to be totally okay with that. You need to be totally okay with making sales to people who are some of them not going to then go on and buy other things from you. The thing is, you're still going to make the same number of sales to your ideal client, most likely, if not more. But the other people coming in, those non ideal clients, what their sales are doing is actually helping you to fund your ads, helping you to get enough scale in your ads that you can get in front of more ideal clients. And this is actually going to allow you to scale your ads faster and more profitably, allowing you to get in front of more people. So when you're thinking about your offer, your gateway offer, it needs to be something that's going to appeal to your ideal client, but also an audience that's broader than that. So you have a big audience of potential buyers, all helping you fund your ads. And then within that, you're going to have a section of ideal clients who will come through and buy your other programs. The mistake people make here is going too niche and therefore throttling the size of your audience, which therefore makes your ads really expensive and stops you from being able to scale. So don't make that mistake. All right? Mistake number two, solving a functional problem instead of solving what we call a vanity problem. Now let me explain what I mean by that. So as experts in our chosen topic, we know that the problems people think they want to solve versus what they actually need to do to solve their main problem, they aren't always the same thing. Also, the things that they think they need to do versus what they actually want to do. Again, not always the same. So when we're talking to a cold audience with direct ads, we have Very little time to get our message across, to get their attention. We need to speak to them and meet them where they are right now. And we need to be offering them something that is solving the problem they are looking to solve in a way they're happy to solve it. We call this a vanity problem. It's normally the kind of problem that most likely is probably going to be easier to solve than the real problem. It might feel a bit surface level to you, but that's why they want to do it instead of doing the real work, the harder thing, which guess what they can go and do in your main programs. Let me give you an easy example. So in the health and wellness space, maybe to be really successful, they need to be tracking their macros, they need to be dealing with their mindset. Something that feels a bit more difficult, a bit more time consuming. Right? But what they're looking for is a new and novel seven day meal plan that's gonna work around the kids and takes 20 minutes a day. Something that feels easy, seven meals, eat them every week. Something that's gonna make it so simple. The meal plan itself is not the answer, but it's what they're looking for. Vanity problems generally work best for low ticket offers. Over functional, behind the scenes, more difficult to solve, more effort involved problems. So the mistake here is that most low ticket offers try to solve those functional problems that people don't actually really want to do the work to solve. They just want the outcome. Flip the switch and start focusing on vanity problems and suddenly everything gets much easier. All right, mistake number three, pricing it all wrong. So people either price their gateway offers way too low or way too high. Pricing is one of the things that you definitely need to test. Although the easiest way to test it is to actually go out and look and see what is the most common price point for your niche for this kind of offer. There were trends a while ago of doing things for $7, and you can do that if you get really cheap quality leads and have a cheap niche. But don't forget, for this to work well, you need to be able to run ads, lots of ads, scalable ads. And to be able to run scalable ads, you need to be breaking even and preferably profitable right up front. And that is really hard to do on something that's only $7. The other thing to keep in mind is that any order bumps and upsells are usually anchored by the initial price. You can't go from a $7 offer to a $97 upsell or a $300 upsell is too big of a jump. So then everything, your entire average order value just shrinks. You need to find that happy medium between a price point that still feels like an impulse buy, that doesn't feel like a decision that really needs to be thought out, that still feels like something like, oh, that's interesting. What have I got to lose? I'll just grab it. Right? So you need to find that impulse buy price, but not the cheapskate impulse buy, which means you're never going to be able to run profitable ads. So that's mistake number three. All right, so now you know what not to do when creating a gateway offer. Don't go too niche. Don't try to solve a high level functional problem. Solve a vanity problem instead. And don't price it too low or too high. But knowing what not to do is only half the battle. Next week, I'm going to walk you through what you actually need to do to create a gateway offer that's going to allow you to scale your sales, make more sales of your premium offers, and have it all running and growing on autopilot. This has been one of the big game changers for us. We've talked about it already. We focused on the ads last month, and that's part one. But the offer, that's just as important. So make sure you tune in next week. And if you have any business besties out there who you think would love or need to hear this, please pass it on. All righty, that's it for today. I'll see you guys next week. Bye.
