How To Upsell Coaching Clients to $25K Packages (System)

What's up? So this video is the 3 biggest mistakes coaches make when upselling, how to avoid them, and how you can stop leaving money on the table. So my name is Kyri Nahlis. I own a business called Profitable Education, and we work with coaches, consultants, and course creators to help them retain students and save money and make loads of money on the back end. Quickly, just so you know my experience, um, we helped Elliot add $200K in upsells in less than 2 to 3 months. We reduced IELTS churn to like nearly zero in 3 months. We helped the Growth Partners make $290,000 in less than 90 days. Half of that was via upsells. So I know what I'm talking about. So let's get into this. Upsells are one of the easiest ways for your business to make money. And if you're not absolutely optimizing your business for upsells, I don't think you like money. How much money are you leaving on the table? And most coaches are capturing less than 30% of the potential client value. And I actually think this is wrong. Like, I put this conservatively. In reality, it's probably 90% of the potential client value. Just because most people get a client and they turn that client almost instantaneously, so you don't really capture much. Front-end average coach, let's say you make on the front end $2,000, customer value $2,000, you haven't sold them anything. Like, you just leave them, they either churn or you don't sell them anything. As I said, you're just, you're leaving money on the table. However, if you actually want to make more money, you buy, they get them on the front end, so $2,000, and then you sell something worth like, you know, $5,500 or something, you can have like 3 to 4 times more client value if you just upsell your students. So this means to get one client, it costs you— let's do the maths— 2, 4, 6, 8. One client— it's just under 8, obviously— but one client now, if you upsell them, is worth 4 clients. So where your average coach needs to get like 4 people, you can make the same money it costs them with just one client if you upsell them. That's how powerful upsells are. I have a client called Ayo. He has done— he's got an upsell now. I'm not going to say the exact figures, but he has an upsell now that is literally worth, like, some months over 100% of his normal revenue with proper upselling without increasing ad spend or acquisition costs. Like, it's free money. His upsells make more than his front end, if that makes any sense. So like, and this is not irregular. There's zero reason to not optimize for upsells, but most coaches don't have upsells. I've got friends of mine who you probably watch their YouTube videos, and I've had sales calls with big YouTubers, like I'm talking people do million months who don't really have a backend ecosystem. And like they have sales calls with me telling me about this stuff. And I'm like, wow, you make like that much money a month and you don't have an upsell? You're just losing money, man. So you need to make money on the backend. There's 3 common mistakes that cost you upsells and cost you sales. 1, selling at the wrong time. There's— it's too early, and this means that there's no trust that's been done. Or too late means that you lose momentum. This is a big one. People is— they don't understand the timing. Number 2, there's no clear upsell pathway. Pathway is different to time. Clients finish the program and they don't know where to go next. And then last one, is poor positioning and messaging. Most people have a sales problem in their business. That's just a fact. We all know that in that sales problem is actually goes right through to the back end of the business. They focus on features instead of transformation in their upsells, and that happens in the front end and the back end. But we always try to fix that on our clients on the back end. These are the 3 biggest issues I see, and I work with all of the clients I work with. And I'm talking about people who— I'm not going to name any names, but I have done sales calls with massive players in the info space they have all three of these issues and they don't even know about it sometimes until I tell them they have these issues. So fix these three and your revenue will literally like 3 times, 4 times, 5 times, you know, 5 times. I've got clients who work with me now and they're like, Kyri, I don't even care about the front end of the business anymore. Like as long as we get customers into the business, we can capture like 3.5 times their value just on the back end alone. It's so powerful. Like the people who understand back end economics of business are the ones who make the outsized returns. That's in my opinion based on all the data I've seen. Mistake 1. Now let's go into granular detail about all of these, okay? So mistake 1, selling at the wrong time. So too early, if you sell too early, the problem is this, the client hasn't experienced enough value, the trust hasn't been built with the client, and it comes across as a money grab and the client gets buyer's remorse. So not only are you ruining the upsell, you're ruining the front end of the business. So if you do this wrong and you try to upsell too early, you may even incur a chargeback or a refund request because you've messed up the entire sequence of events. So this is actually really bad if done wrong, and it can really damage the relationship between the buyer and the seller. Next is selling too late. The client has lost their momentum, engagement has decreased, and the client has started to look elsewhere. And the program's high has worn off. I can't tell you how many clients of mine, um, and their students have left my Students Culture programs before working with me, and they've joined someone else's program who could have— who just essentially does the same, the same thing that my client could have done for them. But because they upsold too late, or they even tried to upsell too late, the client just leaves. So too early and too late, obviously these are the big two. But this one, if you do too early, is damaging for your business in the sense that you can get a chargeback and like it damages the relationship and then you will never upsell them. You might even lose the client and get charged back. Or too late is bad because you're going to lose them to a competitor. And like, let's be honest, it costs them, especially if you're like in the paid acquisition space and you're like doing ads to acquire these customers. Seeing one of your customers then join a competitor is like getting stabbed in the gut. It hurts. I've seen so many clients deal with that. So it's like you never want that to happen to you, feels devastating. So the results: 40 to 60% less conversion rates on your upsells if you do it too early and too late. I think it's probably higher, more 65%, like very high. Um, it's just such a common issue I see in the marketplace. So here's a solution, I'm just going to get to you straight, don't have to download the lead magnet or anything. So the perfect timing formula, I call it the 40-70-90 rule for upsell timing. In the first like they should, like in the first 40% of the time they work with you, you should get massive wins, some milestone to plant the seed of the upsell. You never want the upsell to come randomly. You need to plant the seed now. Okay. Now I used to teach Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Okay. So one of the things I can tell you is that when someone gets like, they first walk into the door, you let them know, oh yeah, cool. You can do this, this, and this, and you can like get your first stripe on your belt. And then as soon as they get the first stripe, you say, great, cool, man, I can't wait to get your second stripe and all this stuff. And it's like, that's an example of you need to hype them up for the future. You need a future frame that in the first full sprint of the program, you need to always be planting the seeds of, cool, once you achieve goal X, we're working to go, you know, once you achieve goal A, sorry, we're working to goal B, and then once we're at goal B, we're working to go C. And it always needs to be planting it along. You can't just come out random and smash over the head of an upsell. It just feels abrupt. And let's go back up again. It's just money grab. It's just not nice. 70% in, major transfer, major transformation. You can make them an offer. You can actually— you don't have to go towards the end, make them an offer like more than halfway in. Say they've just like— say your offer is— take a random offer, uh, we're gonna help you add $10K MRR by the end of— by the end of our program, or you get a refund. That's the offer. If they're making $7,000 a month now and then you think they're going to crack the $10K, You're not going to pitch them when they're at $10K, it's too late. You're not going to pitch them when they're at $1K though, oh, it's too early. You're going to pitch them when they're at $7K, $8K a month, about to hit $10K, so they're still trying to get it going, they've seen success. And they're like, hey dude, I see you're about to actually, you know, we see you're about to hit this progress, we think you can get to $20K a month. You know we spoke about 2 weeks ago, 2 months ago, you can get to $20K a month based on this, this, and this. Let's have a chat about it and see maybe what we can do, work together to progress it and expedite you get there. And help you to learn even more. If they don't take it up there and then, 90% of the way through the program, give them another chance to buy. Hey, we spoke about this. How about you hop on a call with the founder or the CEO or one of the CSMs and try to upsell them? So 40, 70, 90, remember that. Implementation steps, map out your client's success. Identify the key milestones and the wow moments in the program, the big moments in the program that are like when your client gets that smile on their face and they're like, damn, this was worth buying. Create milestone trigger notifications. So set up either automatic or manual check-ins from your client success team. Like, you need a CSM, like, client— client— customer success manager if you want to go above $30K a month. Make milestones that they can then check in on the clients. This should be an automated system. You should not be doing it on your own. Last thing, use a progress bridge technique. So connect their current results to what is possible, okay? It's like a progress bridge. You're here, you're going to get there inevitably. How about you do it with us faster? 'And we will do X, Y, and Z for you.' You just sell the upsell. That is how you perfect the upsell timing. Okay, property time upsells can increase your rate. I've seen it between 2 to 3 times compared to random. If you just randomly throw this at them, it's not going to work. You have to like do this entire sequence. It's just such a good sequence to use. I use this. This is why my clients can upsell $25K packages. Imagine if you sold one person's $25,000 package. That will change your business's life. That'll change your life. So some souls for you. 2, no, this one is deadly. No clear upsell path 3. The problem is clients finish your program and then there's no clear steps. There's no direction. There's no progress bridge. They leave forever. They probably repeat the same, like with no clear steps. So they either leave forever, they repeat your program, which actually isn't a good thing. Or they find another coach. Leaving forever is terrible. You lost the entire LTV, lifetime value of the customer. It is gone forever. Finding another coach is absolutely terrible because they're paying someone else for something you could help them with. Repeating the same program isn't very good because it's not an upsell, it's not even a cross-sell, it's just a continuation. They're just doing the thing that they've paid for once and they're just paying you again. Yes, it's okay, but you're probably gonna have to sell the program again on a discount because they're not gonna pay for the same thing twice generally. So you're not really going to capture too much MRR. I mean, LTV is, say, the program is $2,000. You say, okay, you can get it again for $1,000. Doesn't really feel that special to me. So whatever. You've done the hard work of solving the problem for them. Like, you've essentially, assuming you're not a scammer, you fulfilled the promise. Like, they stay poor. Like, hey, Kyri, can you help me get to $10K a month? Yes, I'll get you to $10K a month. And then they just leave and find another coach to get to $20K a month. It's absurd. Like, You've solved their problem, you've built trust, you've provided them value, and now they're just leaving. Do you see the problem in that? Like, you're literally giving money away. Like, it's— I don't know why the info industry finds this acceptable. It's just you're losing money for no reason. So the result: 75% of your potential lifetime value is lost. Why isn't it 100%? It's not 100% because some of these people will ask you for the upsell. Hey Kyri, can you please help me with X, Y, and Z? You helped me so greatly. They upsell themselves. That's the truth. But you don't want to upsell themselves. You want to be upselling them. 2, the Ascension Ladder strategy. You've probably seen this on Russell Brunson, Alex Hormozy, and a bunch of other people. I'm just going to reiterate that a little bit because like I'm not going to— I'm not— this is, this is probably one of the only parts of the video where this has already been solved in the industry, but no one implements it for some reason. I don't think no one knows how. So level 1, corporate work and foundation. Level 2, implementation. Level 3, mastery. Level 4, inner circle. I usually only have 2 of these for my clients. So like, we have like a $6,000 product here, and then there's like a $25,000 product there. So I kind of ignore these 2, but I've added them here just to show you the example of a customer journey. Um, so here is how to implement across this like kind of value ladder. Okay, so create natural next steps. Each offer should solve the next logical problem your client is facing. Design at least 3 levels of offers that can increase in price and value, and throughout your program, hint at the next step. So core program, 0 to 10K a month. Bam. Next program, 10 to 15K a month. Bam. Next program, 20 to 50K a month. Bam. And the next last program, you know, 50 to 100K a month. You can just sell that progressively. Most people aren't going to have 4. I put 3 because some people are a little bit uncomfortable going from like 6 to 25K. So they need like 6K to 10K, then 25K. I like— but to be real with you guys, I like just 2. So I like level 1 and level 4. You can kind of just go 1, 3, and 4. I kind of discount number 2, but that is kind of what I would do. So look, create the natural next steps. Each offer should solve the next logical problem. Design at least 3 levels of offer that increase in value and price. And then throughout the program, hint at the next stages to all available students. Okay, just a client journey. I'm surprised most people don't do this, but do this, you'll make so much more money. Just, that's some, again, some free value for you. This could make you $100,000. So this is a pretty funny one. It's so important. And again, it's a sales problem fundamentally, but sales is kind of like an issue in most people's businesses. So the problem is this: most people say something like, my program includes 6 additional one-to-one calls, access to my private Slack channel, and personalized feedback based on your materials. Yeah, sounds cool, and that'll work if the client trusts you, but it's kind of boring, you know? Like, all right, you want me to spend $25K and I'm just going to get this shit? What you should say is, we will help you achieve your goal in X amount of time. Nice and simple. Um, the trans— people buy transformations and they don't buy features. That is something you've heard in sales a lot, so I'm not going to hammer this too much because I'm a customer success and product focus person. But this is the big problem I see in the market. People don't position the message, their upsell, correctly. It needs to focus on, like, if you do it wrong and you focus it as a feature instead of a transformation, clients will see as like an unnecessary expense to hit their goal, but Because do they really need these 6 split, these 1-to-1 calls and like private Slack channel with you? I don't know. More of the same. Like, I mean, do they really have 1-to-1s with you? You know what I'm trying to say? It's a nice to have instead of a must have. And it's a sales tactic instead of a value opportunity. Like, you need to really sell the transformation. So I'm going to quickly stick to the value stack. You know what the value stack is. I'm not going to go into too much detail about it. I assume you know what it is. So it's transformation. So essentially how to transform your message into an upsell. So The before and after framework. I use this for all of my clients, even though this is essentially what we do for everyone. So where they are now, got initial results but struggling with specific pain point, transformation outcome in half the time of their stress. Bam! It's that simple. You don't have to talk about features. And there's also the risk reversal method. So it's like, show how not upgrading is a riskier choice. That— oh my God, I shouldn't be sharing this publicly, but this one is so good. So continue with— so they're gonna be like, Kyri, you know, I really want to achieve $20K a month, but spending $25K off of you guys for the next year is really expensive, um, so I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it. All right, cool. Look, Tom, I get you, but look, you're still going to be struggling with lead gen, you're still going to be struggling with sales if you just do it on your own. It's going to take you 6 to 12 months longer to achieve a goal anyways, and then you're probably— the opportunity cost of like not working with us is huge. Like, we've already got you a result here, so why don't you just like you know, transformation outcome. Why don't you just work with us to get to $20K a month in half the time it'll cost you on your own anyways? We've already proven in the front end that we can help you. Just, you know, just show them that them doing it on their own is actually the risk. So they're already working with you, so let's continue that momentum and keep working with you so we keep making money. Implementation steps. Identify transformation gaps. What's the next level outcome your clients really want? Reframe features as transformation accelerators. For each feature, ask, so what, what does this enable? And then create bridge language. Bridge language is essential. Use their current wins to introduce the next level of results. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. Use their current wins to introduce the next level of results. Hey Tom, you're at 8K a month. You're clearly very capable at lead gen. You're very capable at following our guidance and you're great at sales. I think we can accelerate to $20K a month within half the time by joining our Accelerate program. How does that sound? We'll also give you like a— you can just throw in something like that. We'll give you like a 10% bonus because you're an existing student, or discount because you're an existing student. They're like, great, how much does it cost? $20K for 12 months. Bam, sold, done. Bridge the gap. Proper trans— I have genuinely found like proper transformation messaging can increase your upsell rate by 40 to 80%. Like I can't express that this, like, this, like, upsell messaging is the make-it-or-break-it for upsells. If it just sounds like a— I'm gonna put it— if it just sounds like a, um, a nice-to-have or like a sales tactic or more of the same, they're not gonna buy. People don't like buying the same thing. They like buying new things, you know. So make it sound new. So your action plan in the next 7 days to get results based on this in 7 days or less: day 1 and 2, Uh, so this is— I'm gonna say day 1 to 7 upsell timing. When do you currently present upsells, and what client— what client milestones trigger your offers? So audit your current approach again. When do you currently present upsells? So how are you currently doing it, if at all? What client milestones will trigger the new upsells? I want to go away and think about these things. And in the bottom of this video, I've actually got an entire way to audit your current upsells. So grab that for free, it costs you nothing. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, I'll be doing more of these, as I said, twice a week. Have a nice day.