The Value Ladder Explained | Coaching Corner #025

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

What's going on, everybody?

We're back for another week of fun. Yes, you coaching corner.

Yes, it's a party in here. How are you doing? I'm feeling a party where we all make money. Yeah, at least that's the goal, right?

I didn't think about that way, but yeah, okay, cool. Viewing party, walking through how to make more money.

Yeah, that's right. It's like walking through a party and people on both sides are welcoming you with these little money guns shooting money off at you. Anyways, let us know where you're watching from. Uh, if you're new here, welcome in, jump on in, the water's warm. My name is Tyson— uh, sorry, my name is David. Uh, David and Tyson here are your hosts, but I'll be David for today.

It's okay, we can swap roles, it's cool.

I don't know about that.

Either way, we're David and Tyson, happy to be here with you. This is, uh, Tuesday's Coaching Corner, and, uh, today we got a special one, just like we do every week. I see this every single week. We have a fun topic for you today. And, um, yeah, I don't know, this comes back to like fundamentals. Fundamentals are a big one that, uh, get overlooked. People go— they think they need to go straight to advanced stuff that, uh, can get kind of complicated, and just, I don't know, you start losing yourself in the sauce basically. Today we're bringing it back, we're showing you the ingredients And then from there you can go in and make whatever sauce you want. Boom. Okay.

You know, the advanced person just masters the basics and then puts all the basics together.

Absolutely. Couldn't agree with that more. Yep.

Just like in martial arts.

I feel like with everything you do, but especially with funnel building, I mean, we can go into very much a lot of detail here with tech overload if we really wanted to, but that wouldn't be helpful for anybody. The individual items, I feel like, or the individual guides on a specific topic do a little bit more benefit to people watching. So, um, today we're diving into something called the value ladder. If you haven't heard of it, that's okay, we're going to break it down for you just so you understand what we're, what we're talking about, why it's important, why you need to pay attention to it, and, uh, all that fun stuff. This is coming back to something pretty fundamental in most of Russell's trainings. But like, yeah, it's ground one of a lot of the things that we talk about, and it helps you build when you don't know what to build. There we go.

Yeah, yeah. And, uh, you know, I like to say that building the funnel itself is the easy part. This part, the, um, the offer ladder, is part of like your business planning, um, phase. And if you don't get that done right, and if you don't even start on that you don't do it at all, then of course you're going to be confused on how to build a funnel. But once you nail down your business plan, building the funnel part is easy because you just reference your plan.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's where most funnel builds get caught up, is like they just didn't understand the plan or what they're actually building to begin with. They just thought, oh, I need this type of funnel. I don't know what it's for. I don't even know where it fits into my system, but I just— I think I was told that I need this type of funnel for something.

Yeah, yeah. And I've actually worked with several clients where they, they have all these great ideas in their minds, but it's scattered. And so we kind of have to untangle untangle the, the ideas and lay it out on a good value ladder. And then the plan is easy moving forward.

Yeah, agreed. So without further ado, I think it's time I'll share my slides and we kind of walk through this together. Um, today, like you said, we were talking about the value ladder, how it comes into play with what you're doing right now with your business, how it helps you lay out future offerings for your business, how, how everything fits together. This is like your business plan, basically. It's like how I like to think about a value ladder. Is people have these very long, intricate, um, intricate documents laying out their business plan. And that could be okay for some, but I feel like having a truly, uh, I don't know, overview, a nice overview of what you're doing and exactly where you're taking customers, the exact customer journey, uh, simplifies things a lot. So anyways, um, what we'll be covering today: what the value ladder is, how it helps you serve your customers at every price points. Uh, we'll cover how to identify the gaps in your current offers and start filling them in. And after that, we're going to wrap it up with walking through how to use something called Todd AI inside of the ClickFunnels platform. If you're not sure what that is, that's okay. We'll show you how to use it, where to find it, and how to make the most of it. It is actually super— it's tucked away for some people, but that's okay, we'll walk through it. It's, it's, um, Man, it's like having Todd literally in your ear and being able to ask him questions about how, how he would set up your business or how he would do certain things, right? Uh, how crazy is that? It's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Okay, let's dive into what the value ladder actually is. Uh, the value ladder is just a series of offers at different price points that all help your customer reach the same goal. That's the fundamental statements of what a value ladder is, right? We are helping people ascend, um, from your base, from the very beginning, the, the hook or your, your initial lead magnet typically, and trying to get them all the way up the value ladder to your high-end or backend offers, right? They're referred to in different, different names, but they're really the same thing. You're going from a free product typically to a, a high-ticket priced product or service, right? Um, this kind of walks you through the actual layout. It's as simple as this, really. We have, um, each step a specific funnel that serves a specific need or, or component in this value ladder. First off, you'll see again baits, and that is also referred to as a lead magnet funnel. Um, this is typically a free thing, maybe like a guide as an example. If you are A fitness coach or trainer, a good example of this would be maybe you have a PDF on how to meal prep for a week. I don't know, that could be an example of a, a good entry point or a lead magnet offer. That is something that you're trading value for value. You trade the value of the PDF or the information for their email address, um, contact information, so you can then keep them climbing or lead them to the next step in your value ladder. Which would be your front end offer, right? The next step would be something of low value, usually maybe from the 1 cent mark to the $49 mark, you know, depending on, I don't know, within that price point I consider to be the front end of this portion here. The next step after that would be something, On the next tier, we have from $50 to, I'd say around like $150. I don't know if you agree with that, David, but that's usually the price point, or $200 maybe.

The middle range.

Middle range, like the next step up after the $0 to $50 product.

I would even say that the middle range is anywhere from $50 to $500.

$500. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. That's fair. After, after the initial tripwire product.

Yes.

Right. That's gonna fit the case for like webinar funnels and stuff. Yeah. But we'll dive into what funnels kind of fit into these profiles in a second or in a little bit here. But, um, the next one after that would probably be your mid-ticket or high-ticket, uh, price points, maybe from, uh, $501 to $2,000 would be like the mid-ticket price, mid, mid-ticket product, right? Um, for these, you'll likely have some sort of maybe application. Well, it depends. It depends on the offer. There's scenarios that come into play here where this would kind of change what funnel you'd use and whatnot. But either way, um, that price point would sit right here, like in the, in the middle area. Uh, and then we have the high ticket, which would be, uh, I usually go like $2,500 and up. Uh, that would probably sit in that category. That's it. Yeah. Fair enough. Or even $5,000. It depends. Again, there's different things that come into play here, but yeah. Yes. If you have something to add on that, please, please enlighten me.

Well, there's two different types of like backend funnel area, you know, the price points at least.

Yeah.

And well, it probably was your plan to get into this, but there's like the presentation funnels, which sell a product anywhere from $500 to $5,000. And then there are the phone and application type funnels, which are designed to get on the phone with a customer or prospect and sell them something $5,000 plus.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the backend type, the higher end type.

Exactly. Before we jump to the next portion, we gotta— I know you have this queued up already. Can you show like where the— what type of funnels fit into each part of this value ladder? Just, just so you have a kind of understanding.

So here we go. Uh, in the front of the value ladder, we have the free category where you're just generating leads.

Okay.

Um, these are the lead squeeze funnels, survey funnels do really well there as well too. Um, free challenge funnels. We know Russell likes those. Uh, the, the free challenge funnels are amazing, um, at basically taking somebody from a free lead all the way to a paying client. And that has sometimes been referred to by some people as the super funnel. So if you want to maybe go fast, you know, the free challenge funnel is a great place to start. Okay, if you don't want to run a challenge, then obviously there's other options. So then if we look at the next one, there's the unboxing funnels, that's anywhere between $100 to $500. And that's selling things like the book funnel or the cart funnel. Cart funnel is like the— any kind of physical product, but it doesn't have to be physical product. It could also be a digital product. Okay. The templates work just the same for physical versus digital.

There's just a structure, really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then paid challenge funnels go right there. Obviously, anything that is free goes in the front, and then anything that is paid is the next tier up. Now this, this graph doesn't really show like what Tyson was showing where it has like the, the tripwire funnel section. Just know that anytime that you have a very cheap product anywhere between $1 to $47 with maybe $27 being like the sweet spot, that would be a tripwire funnel. And that is important just to take a lead contact from a free lead and to change the relationship into a business— sorry, into a paying contact, into an actual customer. So that sometimes is very important in the customer's minds, just to change the relationship between them and you to a business transaction.

That's a big one. That's a huge one, because otherwise they're gonna just sit there and try to keep consuming free stuff, right? But you can kind of weed out the people that are on your list or people that are just ready to move forward in whatever, whatever value ladder you have set up, whatever, right? Whatever experience you're trying to set them up for. Right.

And then here you see we have presentation funnels. This is where it gets into the longer descriptive type funnels where you need more like an actual video or a video sales letter or a webinar or a product launch to actually do, you know, to convince them to buy. Right. And then we have the phone funnels, and these take even longer or more investment from the, the customer and from the seller. It takes more of an investment on both sides to complete the transaction. Okay, so if, if you have a product that's $5,000 plus, or, you know, you just want to be able to answer their questions on a call, because sometimes people, they need to be able to talk to a human in order to get their questions and objections and concerns answered. They want to talk to a human usually, okay? Because $5,000+ is a pretty big investment.

That's fair. They just need someone to hold their hand a little bit during that process or answer a question. Maybe like they're stuck on, I don't know why they need to actually move forward. Exactly. One thing to clarify too, amongst all these different steps in the buy letter is that it's not necessarily that you're selling a different product each time. It's more like you're selling a different experience for the same overall goal that you're trying to help them achieve. So like, the value ladder as a whole serves one specific goal, and each step in the value ladder is just one step closer to making it easier for them to actually achieve that goal. That's, that's really what it is. So in my example with the, the personal trainer, right, the, the initial lead magnet would be maybe the free PDF on how to, how to, uh, meal prep for a week, right? The overall goal of the value ladder in this case probably is likely going to be how to transform somebody's life, um, or physically transform their life. I don't know, say something like that, right? And so each step inside the value ladder, the next step would still want to live up to that specific title or up to that specific mission. Um, it would likely be something like a, I don't know, more in-depth guide, a video series, right? Yep. And then from there, maybe a course on how to do that thing even better with even more detail or like more resources to help them get that, that goal easier, right?

Um, here's a good, uh, quote to take away from Russell, that, uh, people will pay more money for the same thing packaged to them in a different way.

True.

More money for the same thing packaged to them in a different way. So free lead magnet, then a book, then a course, then an in-person event, then an inner circle, all for the same thing, just to get a higher touch. It's all about time to epiphany. I heard that one said as well, to the speed to the epiphany and speed to results, basically. Good point. Is what matters. I do want to read this portion here before we move too far away from this entry section here. So what we'd like to reference to you guys for our readers out there, we want to get you the article, the blog article that we are referencing. And this way, if you would like to read it and get more in-depth information on all the details, you can come here to this blog and read more details. But I do want to read this part here: why most businesses only have one offer and why a value ladder can make you more money. So most people start a business by creating like one thing and selling it at one price. And, you know, some people, they start like in the middle and they sell a course and then they charge, you know, $200 or so. That's the offer. Or maybe you do a one-on-one coaching for $150 an hour, or you sell a physical product for $49. And whenever somebody buys it, that's the end of the relationship. They got what they came for. You know, you got paid and now you're back to finding the next customer. So that is kind of like Amazon. Right. This is, this is one of the reasons why funnels were invented and why it can increase your average order value, your average cart value, because you can continue to foster that relationship. This works for a while, but it caps how much you can grow, and every dollar you make depends on finding someone new. If you can only afford to spend $50 to acquire a customer because you're only making $200 per sale, then you lose to competitors who can spend $500 because they're making $2,000 per customer. So to grow past this point, you need a value ladder, not just one offer.

Yeah. The thing also with the value ladder that is probably worth noting on this case is that each step you're building more and more trust with your customer. And so they're more willing to spend more money every, every part of the experience. The reason why we collect emails in the first place is so we can kind of— we can follow up with people, we can nurture that relationship, we can build trust, we can, uh, be their go-to in the case or in the scenario when they're ready to move to that next tier. And whatever it is that you do, right? Yeah, that is the overall goal. And the value ladder is just the process or the experience you want them to go upon to actually get the end result, right? It's the experience you're taking them, but each step they're going to trust you more. They're going to want— they're okay with spending more money with you because they trust you more. And, um, if anything, it just— it, it's going to make you— it's going to make you a lot more money. Like, just, yeah, over time you're nurturing the same customer, but at the same time, it's like you're, you're, you're watering a garden, right? You're gardening, you're, you're watering it daily, and, um, you're hoping that that'll take off, it'll grow. Yeah, I don't know, that's it, you know?

100%.

I'm not even just hoping. This is like— this is proven time and time again at this point. So it's, we're just kind of outlining it for you.

Yep.

The, um, next thing here. So as a, here's another example of a visual example of the value ladder in play, right? If you don't want the crazy visuals, here's just a line of going from free to paid, right? This is kind of what it would end up looking like. That's it. That's too crazy. Keep it cut, keep it simple, uh, and your life will be way easier.

Uh, give people some value up front and then start selling them stuff.

Now we have something that we kind of mentioned, uh, wait, we have— before we dive into this, we have a question from, uh, Robinson here. Do you have a value ladder sample for B2B SaaS? Uh, and how do tiers go? On a value ladder? It's going to be relatively the same. You're still plugging in, you're basically just plugging in the same, same scenario from free to high ticket.

Yeah, for, for each individual specific case, you're going to have to get creative. And you can also talk with our friend here, Todd Dickerson, to help, to help you with your value ladder development. So great question. Thank you for the lead into our next portion here.

It's, yeah, relatively, I mean, the products themselves would change perhaps based off of the clientele, but that's really it. You're still taking them from A to Z. Well, actually each integral will be A to B, right? And then C to, or B to C, but you just have to figure out what steps are the natural sales cycle or natural process for them to get more and more value based off of the overall mission statement that you're trying to serve them on. Yeah, anyways, there's that. Uh, if that didn't answer your question fully, hop into our open office hours. We can dive into it one-on-one. We can, we can talk about it together. And, uh, well, more on that, more of that in the end here. Yeah. Um, okay, so Todd AI is inside of your ClickFunnels account right now at this moment in time, and you can use it as included with your subscription, right? You might as well take advantage of it. Um, it is a huge— it was a huge undergoing to go and manually create this, uh, this type of experience where you could ask something and it would reference something that was said from Todd or Russell. Um, from marketing to business to the tech stuff around the platform, like, there's so much you can do. But anyways, To first get started with Todd, if you don't already have it on your dashboard here, that's okay. I'll show you how to actually find it. But if you do have it on your dashboard, cool, you can just click on Create Your Personalized Game Plan here and it'll open up your chat with Todd AI, right? If you— excuse me— if you do not have that on your dashboard though, just go up to the top right side of your screen and you should see this little rectangle with a star planted right in the middle of This is your friend Omni. All right, this is like the overall AI inside of ClickFunnels at the moment. All you have to do is say, hey, I want to chat with Todd. And I actually put that over here. I'm just going to copy and paste. And I gotta mention here, I did put the word please in there because, you know, we are— we have to keep up that, that social AI currency going. Uh, keep that up. Hey, yeah, by the way, I'm a believer.

By the way, for this week's notes on the coaching— on our coaching corner, uh, we do update this weekly. Uh, so if you want the notes, if you want to, you know, follow along and/or copy what we've got on the slides here, uh, go to clickfunnels.com/coaching-corner and you can get everything that we're showing you here, including that prompt. If you'll show it again.

Uh, there we go.

Yep, there you go. That's it.

You can always type it in too if you, if you feel so inclined, but Either way, head over there. Um, now from here, just paste this in. I'm going to paste it into the chat bubble here, the bottom right, and from there it should say, "Will do, right on it, I got you, I'll transfer you over to Todd." Give it a second and it'll open up for you just like that. All right, at this point, Todd AI now lives in your workspace. You can easily access it in the bottom right-hand side of your screen. Just click on this little arrow to open and close it. Um, and this leads us to our second thing, which would be the prompt for Todd AI. Now the goal that we're trying to achieve is just actually building out your value ladder and to make it as easy as possible to do it. So, uh, we'll paste this in there, and basically all it says— I'll read it out loud here— uh, I'm a type of business, brackets there, obviously replace that with your own business, that helps blank achieve the blank and you're just writing in and filling these in. Uh, can you help me map out a value ladder with offers at different price points, starting from a free low-cost front-end offer, uh, all the way up to a premium high-ticket offer? Okay. Uh, in our case, let's see, I am a— I'm gonna stick on a personal trainer level here. I'm a personal trainer. Who helps, um, busy moms, maybe busy moms achieve their, um their weight loss goals. Goals. Cool. All right, we'll hit enter. There we go. Let it do its thing and it should spit back some examples. Oh, I actually— I prompted it earlier, so it's still, uh, remembering my earlier conversation. Okay, pretend I'm a videographer. I'm going to change it up now because that was my initial prompt. It's confusing too right now. Um, I'm a videographer looking to build a value ladder. Um, and that's all I changed right now. It'll start off by giving you what would be a smart way to get people in the door, talking about your lead magnet, right? The value ladder, uh, starting point there. Um, I gave an example of 5 mistakes couples can make when hiring a videographer. Right, or short video learning, uh, before and afters of your best work, right? It'll walk you through each of these packages. If you have questions on any of these as well as you do it, you can just naturally ask it. You can just— you can, you can just respond saying, I'm not sure I really understand this point, can you please expand upon this or give some other ideas that might resonate more with my audience? And it will do exactly that. It'll provide that feedback based off of what you're, you're asking. Um, one other thing worth mentioning here too is that you, if you prefer talking, you can technically do, uh, like a call situation with Todd, the AI Todd here, by just clicking on a little call button, and you can go back and forth just by talking if you prefer that as well. You do the same thing, get the same result, but you could just do it a different way. Yeah. So you have anything to add on that, David? Anything that I might have missed?

No, you did pretty good with that. I feel just, you know, keep in mind, always try and be as specific as possible whenever you're talking with any AI. It helps you get a better response and try and talk to it like, like a human. Try and talk to it like it's a consultant. And it should help, you know, clarify all of that kind of stuff. Now, you, uh, a good question was asked here. Does any of this help if your product is not good? And when will it be obvious so you don't continue to waste more time on a product that can, that needs improvement? Uh, so great question. Number one, don't have a product that sucks, right? Um, have a good product, try and get people results. Get people, you know, give people some results, believe in your products. And if your funnel is not converting, then it always goes back to one of three things. It's always either the hook, the story, or the offer. And so if the, you know, if nobody's buying, right, then be testing one of those things, but be split testing one thing at a time. And so what you could do is be split testing different offers with the same headlines.

Yeah, yeah. Or even it could come down to who you're getting in front of, right? So double-checking what audience you're actually targeting and who's actually seeing it, because if you, if you could have the right message but in front of the wrong audience, it's just not going to resonate at all, right? It's gonna, it's gonna be confusing. They're not gonna understand why they need it. Like, it depends how you're marketing it and how you're putting it out there as well. That's a big one. If you are advertising, double-check who your audience is and, and, uh, see if you can hone down a little bit further on who would better resonate with the product you're trying to get out there. Also, try leading with value first, meaning a lead magnet. If you are going straight for the sale, sometimes, um, especially if you're just getting started, you'll find that it's gonna be a little bit harder to get some sort of traction. I find that If you, uh, instead trade again value for value— I gotta keep resonating or keep restating that, uh, with a lead magnet where you trade something of value for free and for their email address, you can nurture that relationship. And even if someone's not ready to buy at this moment in time, you can keep that conversation going, keep that conversation alive, build the trust. And eventually, once they have had enough touch points with you and they they trust you enough, they will then be willing to check out the stuff that you actually sell, right? Yes. So that also comes into play here.

Yeah. So always, always do your best to have good quality content and products. Um, it's never good to have a not good product. Nobody wants to buy a product that doesn't, you know, do the thing that it said it was going to do. Fair, right?

Yeah. And that still comes with testing, like David said. I know. Um, and getting feedback. If, if you have people that have taken the thing, it's— and, um, you haven't asked them for feedback or like just some sort of, uh, indication whether they liked it or not, like just to see how they, how they received that product. Was it good? What could be twisted or what could be— sorry, uh, improved? Improved. Yeah, you know, that, that's a big thing as well.

So, yep, 100%. I want to show one thing before we're getting close on to the end of time here. I want to talk about two things. Number one is where, where should a person start in the value ladder? And where I typically find that people like want to start is, is good. It's either going to be in the middle where you sell like a $300 product or it's going to be like a lead magnet. And sometimes you're going to get the case where it's okay to actually start with a tripwire funnel. So just pick one of those, build that whole system out all the way through to completion. You don't want to just start on one of those, you know, pathways and just like stop halfway and then start another one. You got to finish the bridge, otherwise you're never going to get to the other side. Just the only recommendation here is don't start with the backend, like the highest tier. Yeah, because, you know, the inner circle, you're gonna need some, some case studies for that. You could do like free work for people to get those case studies, and then start with that kind of a funnel as long as you have some testimonials to really, you know, push that sale over the line. But how long do you want to do free work for? You know, kind of depends on that.

I have a— I have one counterpoint to that. What if you're already a positioned person in your market and it is just like it's a new venture, right? Like at that point you might be able to get away with doing a high ticket first. It depends on the positioning.

Like there's— yeah, that's a good point.

It's— I feel like a lot of things we talk about can be situational. It depends on where you're at and what, what your current landscape looks like.

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. And then last thing that I do want to make sure that everyone sees, um, once you get to this point in your business to where you have people at the highest tier of your current value ladder, ask what's next. Ask how else can you serve them, and then, and then create that product and, you know, price it way up there. Price it way up there and, um, deliver it in a way that's not going to burn you out. Okay, like Inner Circle type stuff, you can only handle so many personal people at once. And so there's going to need to be a cap with that. But there's always going to be a segment of your audience that's going to want the premium products that you sell. And so you got to ask yourself, just like here in this, in this image, what do you sell after they buy your $5,000 program? What's next? And so if, you know, if there's nothing else, then that's the end and you could be making more money with them. So here's an example. The Titanium Mastermind Group was offered— it was a documentary with Dan Kennedy for an additional $30,000. Apparently there was a webinar done with this and the result of that was half of the people in the room bought that product. And that's $30,000 times 9. So imagine, you know, all of the money that you would lose out on if you don't have the next platinum tier level at the very top. Okay, so just give them the option. Your creativity, your imagination is the only limitation here. And, you know, ultimately it also comes back to how much do you want to serve them? How much do you care about their results?

Bingo.

So, yep. So don't be selfish. Give them the next step and allow them to give you $30,000.

How's that? What a kind gift. What a kind gift.

Yes.

Um, if you want to go deeper into what we were talking about, we have this actually on that, uh, on this page here that we were talking about on the Coaching Corner page. Um, the link is at the very bottom. Check it out. It's just a little bit more in depth on what we kind of are talking about right now. If you want to— if you prefer reading, you know, you want to recap on what we've talked about today, um, head over there, check it out. It's a great read. You'll, uh, definitely enjoy your time.

Yep.

That's it. That's it. Alrighty guys. Um, that's, that's a wrap for today's session. Thank you for hanging out with us. Yeah. One final thing I guess before we actually leave is, uh, yes, you can reach out to us at outreach@clickfunnels.com if you have any questions on things you're working on. But if you haven't noticed yet, we do have something called Open Office Hours. Uh, and that is throughout the week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. At 11 Eastern. Uh, you can find that invitation or the link to that inside the Facebook group. Click on it, hang out with us. It is live. It's the three of us, uh, David, Rob, and myself answering questions there on the spot. And if it's tech stuff, cool, we love tech stuff. I, I'm a fan. If it's strategy, cool, we love strategy. Let's do it. Um, we'll be there.

Yeah, we'll be happy to chat with you and help you out in any way we can.

Yep. Alrighty, I think it's— things— I think we're closing out now. That's it.

Bye everybody, thanks for joining.

See you later, have a fantastic week. We'll see you next Tuesday. See you later, bye.