What Most People Find Challenging About High-End Sales

Are you a coach, trainer or speaker looking to get more premium clients? Have you had difficulty getting those clients in the past? What stopped you?

This is where you may say to yourself:

“I don’t know how to talk to someone who may make more money than I do”

“Premium clients are difficult to convert”

“Premium clients are more demanding”

“Premium clients are hard to find”

etc., etc. All these assumptions come down to one thing. They are all myths. They simply are not true. Let’s bust these myths and change the assumptions so you can start earning more with premium clients.

First of All What Is A Premium Client?

In my organization, a premium client is any client worth over $10,000. It may be different for you. Your premium client may be $1000. Figure out who qualifies as a premium client in your org. A premium client conversion is someone that you take from a block of ice, to cold water, warm water, then hot water, and finally steam.

As you go through these stages of conversion, you’re building rapport and friendships. Eventually people don’t care what it is that you’re enrolling them in or selling. What they care most about is that they can count on you. Like with any other sale it comes down to

Know > Like > Trust

Why Are Premium Clients Important?

Now, again, the keyword is premium. There’s a difference between a client and a premium client. Non-premium to me, is, let’s say, a hundred dollar client. Most everyone can get a hundred dollar client. If you’ve got 50 clients at a hundred dollars, that’s $5,000 a month. That’s not bad.

Now, if you talk to a hundred people and you have a 50% conversion rate, then 50 out of a hundred people will say yes. That’s $5,000, if you’re selling a $100 product.

But if two out of a hundred people said yes to a $10,000 premium product, that’s two percent conversion. You’ll have 98% rejection, but you’re making $20,000 a month, as opposed to $5000 a month.

That’s the difference. A hundred dollars versus $10,000. That is why premium clients are so important. They are, in terms of effort, more valuable. Less effort – more value.

So let’s look at the myths surrounding the ever-elusive Bigfoot of the entrepreneurial world…the premium client.

Myth #1: Premium Clients Are Difficult to Convert

False.

Premium clients are only difficult to convert when they don’t know, like or trust you. In fact, there is no difference between a ‘regular’ client and a premium client. You don’t know what’s in someone’s bank account when you first meet them.

It comes down to establishing rapport with someone no matter who they are. Once you’ve established a rapport with your client they will trust you. Whether you’re offering them a $100 product or a $10,000 product they know it’s worth their time and will help them because they trust YOU.

What you’re selling, after all, is you. It’s not your book, or your webinar, it’s you.

Let’s say you want whiter teeth. You’ve got a lot of options. You can use whitening toothpaste. You can bleach your teeth. You can get veneers. No matter the dollar value, you still want white teeth. It’s the final result that you want.

Premium clients are looking for answers, and they are willing to spend what it takes to get the answers they’re looking for. So your job is to have those answers.

There is no gravity in a marketing funnel. Start with the premium offer. If your candidate doesn’t want to start there then show them what other options they have. It’s much easier to down-sell than to up-sell.

Myth #2: Premium Clients Are More Demanding

False. Actually it’s quite the opposite. Premium clients are less demanding. The people who have paid you the least amount of money are more likely to be problem children, meaning more demanding. The higher the dollar value, the less demanding they are. Why? Because they put a very high value on their entitlement and because they have greater access to you.

Premium clients are also less demanding because they tend to be self-starters. They’ll look for answers themselves first and use their access to you when they’ve exhausted other possibilities.

The people who’ve spent the least amount of money tend to be people who need more reassurance that what they just bought will work for them. They tend to have more self-doubt than someone who buys a premium product from you simply because of access.

With a lower-end product people don’t have as much access to you. The premium client has more access to you and therefore feels more confident that your product will work because they know they have access to you anytime they need it. That’s also a selling point for your premium product: greater access.

Greater access means done-with-you as opposed to a top-of-funnel offer which is DIY. They’re paying for speed of service, the correct sequence to make the recipe work for them and the status that comes from having access to you.

Premium Cost = Speed-Sequence-Status

Myth #3: Premium Clients Are Hard To Find

Premium clients are actually easier to find, because they want a faster, better, and easier solution and are willing to pay. They are ACTIVELY LOOKING for the product or service that will help them the fastest.

Premium clients are only harder to find for three reasons, and they all have to do with you:

• You don’t want to enroll them
• You don’t feel that you deserve premium clients
• You don’t feel confident about the quality of your offer

Otherwise, premium clients are out there and actively looking because they have the capital to spend on solutions that work. And they want those solutions now. They don’t want to wait.

Myth #4: Premium Clients Are Biased To Gurus

This is not true. A premium client just wants a solution faster, better and easier at a reliable price point that they can afford and they feel is a quality exchange between what you have to offer and what they’re willing to pay.

A guru is someone who has a lot of answers to a lot of problems but the premium client is only looking for one answer at a time.

Ryan Deiss, the founder of Digital Marketer and the Traffic and Conversion conference, taught me a very valuable lesson. Business is not about B to B, or B to C, or business to government, or even business to patient. It’s ALWAYS H to H, human to human.

When you’re able to connect with someone on a human level, or heart to heart, you build trust. It’s the trust that will allow someone to pay you a lot of money as a premium client, whether it’s the first time or the tenth time.

Myth #5: Premium Clients Don’t Renew

Actually, they renew more often. Why? Because of a proven concept in marketing. It’s called RFM, recency, frequency and monetary value.

It’s a direct marketing principle that has been proven again and again for the past 100 years. “Customers who have purchased from you recently are more likely to respond to your next promotion than those whose last purchase was further in the past.” click Database Marketing Institute to learn more about RFM as an analysis tool for your business.

The $10,000 premium client who recently purchased from you will be more likely to renew than the $100 client. Your current premium clients will be more willing to renew than a new, non-premium client. Why? Because of how recently they bought and because of their monetary value.

3 Costly Assumptions When Selling to Premium Clients

Why don’t people like to sell? because they don’t want to get rejected, they anticipate getting rejected. They fear rejection.

My son is going through this right now. He’s getting recruited by Ivy League schools for rowing, because he’s a very good rower. He’s anticipating getting rejected from Harvard, or Yale, or Dartmouth.

I’m coaching him, asking, “How do you know you’re going to rejected? Why not go all in? Like in poker, just put all your chips in and show the coaches what they want to see: leadership and doing your personal best.”

It’s the same with selling. Rejection is a part of life. But there are ways to mitigate it in selling.

Assumption #1: I Can Avoid Rejection

“I’ve got to be great at persuasion to avoid rejection.” False. You’ve got to be great at transparency, at telling the truth, in order to avoid rejection.

Nothing is as persuasive as the truth. Persuasion is not the key to selling. Being truthful is the key to selling, because people can smell a lie.

Assumption #2: I’ve Got to Talk To Lots of Leads

“I’ve got to talk to lots of leads.” Well they’re not leads my friend. They are people.

I like to use the term candidates. People hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. What you need to do is talk to pre-qualified candidates to convert sales.

Conversion is about taking a block of ice and converting it to steam. When you pre-qualify someone you’re making sure they’re interested in what you’re offering. So they’re already warm.

One of the ways you can avoid cold-calling and start melting the ice is through a process of discovery and that starts with an application. Why not create an application people can fill out to see if they are right for you? Not the other way around. Don’t try to find out if you’re right for them.

Take the step-work out of the sale for them. Don’t make them have to see if you’re right for them. What do they know about your specialties and talents? Nothing. Do it for them. Create a discovery process to see if they are right for you. Start with an application.

In my organization, people fill out an application, then they have a discovery session. After that they put down a deposit and finally they schedule an appointment with me and we start. I don’t make cold calls.

So the next natural question is, “Alex, how do you get people to come apply?” Every single time you repurpose, whether it’s through Facebook Live, a seminar, or an email campaign, you can lead them to an application landing page or squeeze page.

Let’s say you got 100 people to come to your application page, and 50 of those 100 people complete the application. Out of the 50 who completed the application, 25 say ‘yes’ to putting down a $150 deposit. From that, there will be about 20 who show up for a discovery session with you.

Of the 20 that showed up to the discovery session, 10 might say yes to your $10,000 offer. That’s $100,000. Do those numbers weigh in? They do for my business. In fact, this month I’ve got 100% conversion rate.

Use your content to drive candidates to your highest offer and then let gravity do the work. If they reject your highest offer show them your less premium offers. It’s much easier to down-sell than to up-sell.

Related Post: Do You Make These Mistakes When You Sell? 
Related Post: 4 New Ways To Sell Anything 
Related Post: The D.E.L.T.A. Process: How To Sell Your Product In 5 Simple Steps

Assumption #3: I’ve Got to Ask for The Sale In The First Meeting

…or I will lose it. Let me be very direct: bullshit. In fact, if you get the sale on the first conversation many times it doesn’t stick. You are not ascending a mountain of prosperity, it’s a bunch of hills. You go from one hill to the next, to the next and all of a sudden it becomes Mount Everest. It goes up and down, up and down.

Again, in my organization, we have a setter who sets the enrollment (sale), and then you have a spiker, who spikes the enrollment. Then we have someone who knocks it over the net. That takes several meetings.

Here’s a key point, if you have an offer that’s under $10,000. You can do it in one discovery session. But if you have a product over $10,000, I believe it takes more than one meeting. The highest sale we generated was a $240,000 product. It took six meetings. Is it worth it? It’s $40,000 a meeting. Come on. It usually doesn’t happen in one meeting. You don’t lose the sale in one meeting.

The Bottom Line

Premium clients are incredibly important if you want to grow your business. It’s wise to structure your business and your marketing funnel to serve premium candidates and clients for several reasons.

• They take equal or less effort than a regular client and yield greater value.
• They are easier to talk to because they are laser-focused on finding answers. They aren’t fishing. They’re hunting. Big difference.
• They’re paying for speed of service.
• They’re easier to find because they are actively looking for the product that will serve them the fastest.
• They’ll stick around because of something called RFM = Recency-Frequency-Monetary Value.

And in order to start nabbing those premium clients you must do three things:

• Be transparent – you won’t avoid rejection but you will avoid rejection less by being truthful
• Talk to pre-qualified candidates – this is a quality over quantity game.
• Be patient. Converting premium candidates is the long game. Stop believing you have to make the sale in the first conversation.

Do you want to learn how to pre-qualify quality candidates? Click Here for a tool that will give you the confidence and certainty you need to enroll more premium clients. And learn how to pre-qualify for your high-end coaching, training and speaking programs.

Btw, what do you find most challenging about high-end sales? What has been your experience? please take a moment and LMK below.