Transcription
Right, in this video, I'm going to show you how to build an online coaching offer. In particular, the way that I build online coaching offers for myself and for my clients and how we have managed to scale these offers as high as 83,748 in a single month.
Now, please don't just watch this video; actually pay attention and start building out your online coaching offer, or even an agency offer, following the exact same principles as you are actually watching me throughout this video. Or, if you've already got an offer, then just check your offer and check to see if you've been missing things that I'm going to be talking about and teaching you here.
Now, the first thing we're going to talk about here today is something called the commodity effect. Now, this is one of the biggest problems that coaches all over the world will face every single day with their businesses, regardless of what the actual service they're selling is. The issue here is that a service, when it becomes commoditized, loses pricing power, and you force yourself to just compete at the bottom of the barrel for the worst possible clients, whilst people like me who are running offers and coaching businesses and agencies in the right way are able to charge absolute top dollar for our services.
Now, the best way to explain what the commodity effect is is to talk about oil. Let's imagine that's a blot of oil, that's another blot of oil, and that's another blot of oil there. Now, each of these blots of oil is drilled out of the ground by a different company in a different place in the world: Company A, Company B, and Company C. Now, unfortunately for the companies drilling this oil out, it actually doesn't matter where they're drilling this oil from, or how good they are at it, or how clean they are, how environmentally friendly they are, or anything, because all of this oil is going to go to the exact same place: a global Marketplace. And this Global Marketplace will take oil from absolutely anywhere in the world and it will sell it to everyone. But here's the thing: because oil is a commodity, right, because it is exactly the same no matter where you get it from, that means that none of these companies are able to dictate the price they charge for their goods, and so they're all going to have to sell each barrel of oil that they drill out of the ground for about $80. Of course, it will change, but this is about the average we see.
Now, this makes perfect sense because it's oil; it's kind of like buying petrol or gasoline at a service station, right? It just goes in your car and it does the same thing. Yes, there's 99 versus 95, but when we're talking about 99-grade petrol, it doesn't matter if you get it from Tescos or Shell or Exxon or any other company; it's the exact same product. But when you're an online coach, or when you're an agency, or when you're selling anything as a business—a business you're trying to grow—you want to make a point of not selling the exact same product as everyone else; you want to be a little bit different.
Now, the issue here is that even though you might think you're very, very different and you're selling a different product, a hell of a lot of your potential customers think that you are the exact same as every other online coach out there who's selling the exact same information and outcome. So let's take a look at personal training in the traditional sense here to establish how the commodity effect can affect a service and make it really, really difficult for you as a coach to make more money. We have here Coach A, Coach B, and Coach C, all of them in-person personal trainers working in a gym, selling their one-on-one time for an hour to other people who are just looking to get better, get fitter, get healthier, or lose some weight. Now, they're all operating in the exact same Marketplace as well, right? In fact, the one literally in the gym, and they're able to charge somewhere in the region of $50 per hour. Now, it doesn't really matter if Coach C thinks he's much, much better at his job, or if he wants to market his product in a different way to try and get people to pay him more; customer expectations have been anchored at that $50 per hour mark, so it's incredibly difficult for any of them to raise their prices, and they're stuck selling a commoditized service.
But then someone called Coach D comes along. Now, Coach D is in a similar situation, but he's not selling to the exact same audience; he's selling not in the exact same gym as these other guys, but in an expensive gym in a city like London. The gym I go to is about £250 per month; personal trainers there are not going to charge $50 an hour; they're going to charge $100 an hour. So, by targeting a separate niche, this coach, Coach D, has managed to increase his prices, but he's still not charging huge money, and he still is impacted by the commoditization of those personal training services. At the end of the day, that lay person is going to actually understand and be able to realize that, okay, some personal trainers are going to charge $50 an hour, but some others are going to be much, much better and have better results and experiences, and they're going to charge $100 an hour, so I'm going to be willing to pay twice as much. What they're not willing to do, on the other hand, is pay someone $2,000 or $3,000 for the exact same service that they perceive they're getting. And that is exactly where Coach X comes into the game, because he's followed the advice that I'm going to lay out in this video, and he's able to charge $2,000 per month for every single client he signs, doing purely online coaching. Whereas, in a typical sense, the average person is going to anticipate that actually online coaching should be charging less and be cheaper than in-person personal training where you actually buy someone's hour. But because we're going to be focusing on the lessons that I put forward to you throughout this video, we're going to be building a very, very hyper-specific, unique mechanism; we're going to be focusing on the outcomes that people are getting, not the hours of time that they're buying; and we're going to be focusing and delving into specific niches as well. We're able to set ourselves apart from the competition, and we're able to be like Coach X and charge literally 10 times as much as our competitors, despite the fact we are essentially selling the same information.
Now, this leads me onto my first area where we're going to help you escape this commodity effect and actually charge huge amounts for your offers, and we're going to start off by coming up with a marketing angle. Let's say for a moment that you are a running coach, and you're very good at what you're doing. When your customers come along and they want to learn how to run better, they want to train for a marathon, they want to train for a 5k, they want to just get faster or fitter, you help them receive that outcome. Now, what a subpar coach is going to do is he's going to target every single person who is interested in running, and he's going to try and help them all in the exact same way with a similar program that doesn't really go into specifics of what each individual is looking for. What you're going to do, though, is you're going to pick a marketing angle that sets you apart from the competition. You don't just help people learn how to run; you help people learn how to run based on science-backed initiatives. Another marketing angle: maybe you don't just help people get better at running, but you help them enjoy running and use it to improve their mental health.
Now, everyone else in your niche of running coaches is targeting those exact same people, and they probably—in fact, they almost definitely—also run their training and help their clients by using science; they all went to university and got the same degree as you, and they all understand that mental health is important and aren't going to push you to run if it makes you really unhappy. The difference between a coach using a marketing angle and those that aren't isn't that you're providing something different in the market; everyone out there is using science-backed initiatives; everyone out there is prioritizing mental health already, but they don't talk about it, so you're the only one who gets the kudos for doing it. There is a brilliant example of this from a TV show called Mad Men, which is all based on advertising, and essentially these cigarette companies are really struggling to market in the 60s and 70s because they're no longer allowed to make health-based claims. They're not allowed to say, "Doctors say that Lucky Strike cigarettes are less likely to kill you," or "Our cigarettes are healthier," or "You live longer by smoking our cigarettes," or "Ours aren't cancerous," but competitors are. Whenever they would make these health claims, they would then get checked by doctors, proven false, and they'd have to pay out these massive, massive fines. All the other cigarette companies out there were still trying to compete in the same game; they were focusing on these new filters they were bringing out that were supposed to make these health claims a little bit more legal. Yet, Lucky Strike managed to dominate the market by coming up with a marketing angle and just claiming that their tobacco that they put in their cigarettes is toasted. In reality, every single cigarette since the dawn of time has had toasted tobacco, but Lucky Strike were the only ones where the customers recognize that because they were the only ones to use that inherent marketing angle.
So, the first way to avoid the commodity effect, to be able to build a really successful, expensive offer when it comes to online coaching or agencies as well, is to find a marketing angle. Pick something that you can market specifically about your service that sets you apart from the pack. Again, you don't have to be the only person actually providing that as a service, but you're the only person who's going to be marketing that as unique and specific to you. What's one of the marketing angles that I use for my business, Stoic Growth? Well, it's really, really simple as well. Basically, we help people who have never sold information before build an online business and generate $100,000 in yearly sales within six months. Now, let's be honest: every other agency out there selling the same service as me could also work with these same clients who have never sold information before, and I'm sure a lot of them do work with those same clients as well, but they don't shout it from the rooftops; they don't stick it on their branding; they don't announce that on YouTube videos. So, if you, right now, are watching this video and you're thinking, "Well, I've never actually sold information before. I've thought about it for a long time. Sure, I've managed a team in this career, or I've done really successful building X business, but I've never got around to actually selling that information before," you're 10 times more likely to work with me than one of my competitors because you believe inherently that that's where my specialty lies, even if it isn't necessarily true.
Now, of course, everyone who finds themselves as a commoditized service is struggling to scale online; not all of them don't use marketing angles; not everyone is just blind to that reality; some people just don't go far enough, and so they still find themselves attached to the price expectations of customers. So, what's another way we can get away from those price expectations? Well, it's this right here that I'm writing out for you; it's called a unique mechanism. So, how do we build or put together a unique mechanism? Well, essentially, we're just going to take two to three of the most important or significant aspects of the service that we're actually selling; we're going to wrap it all up together, and we're going to brand that with our unique mechanism. Now, in my case, that's really simple; it's going to be: we offer a 100% full-stack service for coaches or agencies looking to scale. That means we can literally do everything for you: we can make ads, we can run email marketing, we can build funnels, we can employ setters and closers and salesmen to actually make sure that your product is sold. And then one of our other focuses of our agency is that we can run paid ads to a cold audience profitably to help you scale. That means if you don't have any audience, you don't have any followers or social media following whatsoever, subscribers, that doesn't matter, because we know how to run ads to the extent that we can take 100% cold traffic and turn them into warm leads. And then, finally, of course, we have this idea that we can help you build out your offer too, so you don't already need to be a coach to work with Stoic Growth, my agency. You can come to us at literally square zero, but you've got some information, some knowledge, or some expertise that you want to share on, you think people will buy, and we can help you get started from the ground up.
Now, this unique mechanism is really going to become one of our marketing angles, but the important thing here is that we have to name this. The name doesn't need to be good; it doesn't need to be catchy; it doesn't need to be impressive or really, really creative. Mine, for instance, is really boring; my unique mechanism is called the Stoic Growth System. Now, obviously, we don't want to name it something completely irrelevant, but what we need to make sure with this naming convention, when we're talking about nomenclature, is that no one else can use this name. If anyone else starts going around saying, "Oh, I run the Stoic Growth System," and their name isn't Max Stoic and they aren't running Stoic Growth agency, people are rightly so going to be like, "What the...? Are you talking about? That's not your system."
A great example of this: I was doing a little bit of research before this video to try and show you guys some brilliant unique mechanisms that have some amazing names, and there's this guy who teaches email marketing and is really, really talented. For the life of me, I can't remember his name; I'll try and put it in like captions or something if I do, but he sells a program called "Batchet Like Crazy." Now, if you're from the UK, you understand that "batshit crazy" is a term that basically means you're going insane, and he's teaching people how to batch up their email marketing to make it really, really easy and efficient to send out, and he's called his unique mechanism "Batshit Crazy," which sounds a hell of a lot like "Bat Crazy." And when I first heard this name, I absolutely loved it; it's funny, it's very, very memorable as well, and so I actually remember the name of the program. But I went around the internet trying to find this guy, and guess what? I found three or four other people selling a "Batchet Crazy" course, teaching people how to batch up content creation or how to batch up email marketing, just like this guy had actually created. So, even though he came up with a really catchy name that's even got a pun in it and is clever and relevant to his audience, he didn't name it hard enough; it's not specific to him or his business, and so other people have now stolen that name. And I could go out today and market my services with the idea that we use the "Batchet Crazy" method. So, at the end of the day, if you're worrying about coming up with a catchy or a memorable name or system or unique mechanism, just pick your brand; pick something specific to you that no one else can copy, because personally, I think the uniqueness is much more important than the memorability of the title of this unique mechanism.
Now, again, one final point here: we aren't really worried about what makes up the unique mechanism, just like we aren't worried about whether or not the marketing angle we come up with is actually unique to us. All that matters is that we are the one person marketing in this, because no one else has the balls to copy what we say online. You take a marketing angle, you take a unique mechanism, you tie it all together into your service and your delivery, and suddenly you find yourself within a blue ocean. That's essentially what I've managed to do with my agency service. There are plenty of other people out there who teach coaches and agencies how to scale, but I don't really compete with them. And when I'm speaking with prospects on sales calls, or when I'm speaking with my salesmen and finding out how their leads have been going, we find this time and time again that actually we don't have much competition, and people are making a decision between buying our program or buying no program at all, or buying our agency service or buying no agency service at all. They aren't picking and weighing our program or our service compared to other people because they don't see us as competitors because of how well we've set aside our branding.
Now, once we've got our branding set up, once we've got our unique mechanism and our marketing angle sorted, we then need to go and create the other parts of our offer, which are really going to make it that no-brainer deal. Now, I guarantee—is literally how we do that; it's a very, very simple process, but it is actually quite complicated these days because of how much free value Alex Hormozi has given out over the last few years. Now, look, I know that sounds weird, but when Alex Hormozi came out with his hundred-million-dollar offers and hundred-million-dollar leads, and when he comes out in the future with his hundred-million-dollar sales books, he sells millions and millions of those copies. As a result of that, the market gets saturated and flooded with people following his exact advice, and that is exactly what we've seen happen with guarantees in the agency and coaching space in particular over the last couple of years. And as a result of that, guarantees are not as important as they were five years ago; they are not going to be the thing that saves or destroys your business; they're just going to be a little bonus on top, which makes it 10% cheaper to get a lead into your funnel, increases your close rate by 5%, or increases your monthly revenue by 15%. It's not going to be the needle mover that takes you up to 100K, but it might be the thing that takes you from 40 to 50.
So then, basics of a guarantee: what actually is a guarantee, and what do we need to do to make sure that it exists and actually functions in its intended role? Well, what is its intended role? Really, really simple: a guarantee is an act of risk reversal. Very, very simply, we're taking the risk that someone takes on when they join our program or when they buy our coaching or our agency service, and we're taking some of that risk off of their plate, so that the entire burden of whether or not we deliver and whether or not this entire program is a success—not the entire burden—is on them; we will take some of that burden, or even all of that burden in some cases.
Now, to be perfectly honest, a guarantee is a little bit of a balancing act, because if you go too far in one direction and you take too much of the risk away from your client, you don't leave yourself with enough of the reward for when things go well. And if you do the opposite, you provide your client with absolutely no risk reversal, then you get all of the reward, but it's going to be much more difficult for you to sign clients because there's just not as much in their interest. So, this example here that I'm talking about and showing you is an e-commerce, SMMA agency that went bankrupt a few years ago. Why? Because of their guarantee. It was really, really simple: "We will triple your ROAS—your return on ad spend—or we will refund you in full and send you $60,000 on top." What that basically meant is that every single potential client in the world wanted to be signed by this agency, and they didn't care when the agency failed, but the agency cared a huge amount when they failed, but unfortunately, they failed just a few too many times, and they ended up going bankrupt as a result. Why? Because their risk-to-reward ratio was too low, and the client's was too high.
Now, the other end of the spectrum is going to be over here on the right, where we don't take enough risk away from our clients; they take on all the risk when they buy our programs; we're helping them lose 20 pounds of fat in time for beach season or something, and if we fail, there is absolutely nothing they get out of it. The simple truth is it's going to be much more difficult to actually sell that program, and so we, as a coach, are prioritizing ourselves too much and our clients too little.
Now, as I said earlier, you don't 100% always need a guarantee to be successful, but it does help, and it does help push those clients over the line, especially if you don't have a lot of testimonials or case studies yet. In a moment, we're going to talk about something called an implied guarantee, and a testimony or a case study is really just a form of implied guarantee. When you show someone a testimony, you're not guaranteeing them that they're going to get that result, but you're showing them that you can drive that result because you have done it for someone else, so you are reducing the risk, or at least the perceived risk, for your client.
Now, what we really want from a guarantee when we're structuring it out to build out our offer is a reasonable risk-to-reward ratio. That means we get a decent outcome when we are successful and when we deliver for our clients, but our clients get a great outcome all the time, and their risk is sufficiently detracted and minimized so that people make that no-brainer offer to join your program. The guarantee will basically be: we'll get you a reasonable desired outcome that we can actually achieve in a time frame that isn't ridiculous and we can still achieve, or you get something like a full refund. The risk at present for your client there is still pretty minimal; they're going to either get what they paid for in a reasonable time frame that they agree with in the first place, or they get all their money back. Who wouldn't say yes to that offer? But you, as a coach or as an agency selling that service, you're actually able to deliver for your clients, and when you fail, which does occasionally happen, you're not giving them 60 grand on top to say sorry, so you're not going to bankrupt yourself in the process.
So, let's move on to actually building our guarantee. We need three elements to our guarantee; otherwise, it simply doesn't make sense. We need the X, the Y, and the Z: the outcome, the time frame, and the contingency. Now, the outcome is really, really simple: you get X, or we give you X. The time frame again is really simple: in Y amount of time—days, months, weeks, years, whatever it might be—and the contingency again is simple: or we give you Z, the thing that they get at the other end.
Now, again, my agency, my coaching agency as an example, will add $100,000 in yearly income to your sales or revenue within six months, or you get a 100% full refund. Now, I do understand that a lot of agencies and coaches out there aren't comfortable offering a full refund, and I really would recommend that you just go ahead and do it, because putting your feet to the fire and forcing yourself to deliver results for your clients is the best way to learn. And if you don't succeed, if you do fail to get that desired outcome for your results, just send them a refund; it is not going to kill you. Yes, you've been working for free for a little bit of time, but trust me, the goodwill that that drives with those clients will come back around and get you. But if you really, really are dead set on not using a full refund, which I think is the best source of risk reversal, here are basically the other options we have: a partial refund, a full refund, an outsized refund, a set satisfaction guarantee, and an implied guarantee.
Now, a partial refund is really, really simple: you get some of your money back depending on how well we perform or whether or not we reach certain KPIs. Now, some things will just be: if we don't get you the result, you get half your money back. But where I do like partial refunds is when they are tracked and decided against the KPIs that you're tracking. Let's say you're an agency like me, and you're trying to do something like add a coach $100,000 in...
Yearly revenue to their sales. If, after six months, you only get them an extra $50,000, or maybe you only refund them half of the money they've paid you, now to be clear, that's not how my program works. But there is logic in that people still got half of the result they wanted, and half of that result does still have value. So they're going to be willing, or at least accepting, that they're going to pay for that result that they did receive.
Now, other ways you can do it: you can switch out a refund for something else. So what I've seen some paid ads agencies do is if they don't reach a certain ROI target with their clients, they will then offer to pay X amount towards ad spend with their services over the next month. So if I'm an econ SMMA agency promising to add $10,000 a month to your sales and I don't reach it, maybe I put forward $3,000 of my money to your ad spend over the next month to help you actually reach that ROI. Then, of course, there is the full refund. This really is the gold standard, and I do recommend most people just pick it and stick with it. You get all your money back if I don't get your desired ROI.
Next, there is the outsized refund, which a lot of people think is very good, but I personally am not a fan of. Now, the most infamous example of someone running this is probably Charlie Morgan, who works heavily in the agency and coaching space as well. And I can't remember the exact details of his offer, but it's pretty simple, and it's basically: you pay me 10 grand; if at the end of the year you haven't made 10 grand back with your agency, I will refund you in full and send you $5,000 on top. Now, that isn't the exact details, but that's the gist of it, and that's pretty much how it works.
Now, the reason I don't recommend this is, first of all, you are stacking the odds too heavily in your client's favor to fail. We do not want them to fail. We don't want them to get six months into our program and go, "Well, you know what, if I just give up now, it doesn't really matter because I'm going to get an extra two grand, or I'm going to get a free gym membership for a year." I'm going to get that outsized element of the refund. In the end, we want high-intent clients who actually want to succeed and want to help us succeed as well. When you run an outsized refund, you incentivize people to fail, and I personally just don't think that's a good idea at all. The other reason it's bad is that infamous e-commerce agency I talked about earlier on, where it can literally bankrupt you. It means that you can end up having a negative cost, or a negative LCV, lifetime customer value, where literally every client you sign, because you aren't able to make enough of them successful, you lose money working for them. That's obviously not something I recommend.
We also have then satisfaction guarantees, which again, I'm not a huge fan of, but I do personally use them for courses that I sell with myself or my clients. So if we are selling a do-it-yourself option where there is no coaching and there's just a course where you can just get a load of information, we tend to run a 14-day, no-questions-asked satisfaction guarantee. Basically, if you aren't happy within 14 days, you can just get a refund, no matter what. You don't have to watch a certain amount of the videos or the course; you don't have to do anything; you don't have to have got a result or not have a result; we'll just give you your money back after 14 days. Why do we use that guarantee in place for our courses and our ebooks that we're selling? Well, because frankly, the customers buying those courses and ebooks are just likely to refund or charge back, and if they charge back, it's just a little bit of a nightmare. So we give them every possible opportunity to change their mind later on down the line and just decide, "Hey, you know what, I want my money back; I can't be bothered to go through this course," or whatever else it might be. When we're running a big agency or coaching offer and we're actually having one-on-one contact with our customers, I don't personally like the idea of satisfaction guarantees because I actively don't want people taking in all of my knowledge, taking in all of my labor and my team's labor, and then turning around at the end and just saying, "I'm unsatisfied, and I don't have to give you a reason; you owe me all my money back." Of course, that doesn't happen 99% of the time, but some people out there will seek to game the system, and they will behave like that. So I think it's just much easier not to bother with it.
Finally, then we have an implied guarantee. Now, this is where you don't actively state what your guarantee is, but it still exists and does still help to risk reversal that situation with your clients. Something like this, again agency example: if you're running on a revenue-share basis, well, guess what? If you don't drive any revenue for your clients, there's no revenue share for you, so you won't make any money. That's an implied guarantee because it implies that, "Well, if I don't deliver results, I don't get paid. I'm obviously going to try really hard to deliver results for you so you can make money so that I can make money too."
Now let's move on to an ICP, or an ideal client profile. Now, really, really simply, why do we care about an ICP? Well, because most of our competitors don't care. Most people who are in this space of agencies and coaching, they can't really be bothered to build out a real ICP; they just pluck a few phrases and throw them at a whiteboard and say, "Job done." So when we take this seriously and when we put actual effort into this, we find ourselves performing a hell of a lot better and making more money. So I do really, really implore you to take this seriously, to follow through with me through this video and make an ICP with me right now.
Now, in essence, there are three main factors we want to consider when we're building out an ICP: there are demographics, there are geographics, and there are psychographics. And then that all comes together to make up our behavioral factors. We then take all of those factors and we build out our pain points of our ICP, their desired outcomes, and their client or customer journey. Now, the reason we do all this is because we want to know exactly who we are helping. We want to know everything about them that we possibly can. We want to know what they actually want to get, where they are right now, what they're willing to do to get there, what they're happy with, what their limitations are, what their intelligence level is, what they can do, and what they can't do. So these factors that build our ICP help us learn who our client is so that we can service them as best as possible.
Now, demographics are really, really simple; it's basically: who are they? How old are they? What kind of society or civilization did they grow up in? What kind of job do they have? What kind of income do they have? Are they men? Are they women? Are they, you know, one of the weird things in between these days? Are they in a relationship? Are they polyamorous? Are they uh, married? Do they live in their home? Do they rent? Do they own it? Do they have a mortgage? Do they live with their spouse or with their parents? All of this right here determines the core of who they are, how they were raised, how they live right now, and how they will be willing to act in the future.
Now, geographics, on the other hand, is a lot more self-explanatory, but it's not just what country do they live in; it's what climate do they live in as well. It's what time zone are they based on? It's are they rural or are they urban? If we're talking about personal trainers here, and maybe we're a calisthenics coach, is the person we're targeting in an area where they can actually practice calisthenics? Do they need monkey bars outside? Do they live in the north where it's -20° and they literally cannot go outside without dying? These are elements of geographics that we need to be focusing on, not just what country are they in. On the time zone front, that's going to be really, really important when it comes to building out your funnel. Don't run a live webinar funnel if you live in Australia but your ICP lives in New York, because you're going to have a really, really hard time waking up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning to run a webinar.
Finally, we have psychographics, which essentially makes up the personality of the people we're trying to help, right? What activities do they do? What sports do they follow? Do they watch TV? What news channel do they pay attention to? Is it Fox or is it CNN or is it something in the middle? What are their politics? What are their values? This essentially determines how our ICP think, what they think about different things, what they're willing to do, what they think is right and wrong. This is also incredibly important when it comes to actually selling someone. If you don't understand who they are and what's important to them, how the hell can you understand what to sell them, or how can you convince them that they should buy your program if it's going to help them get X desired result if that's something that they're categorically opposed to on a fundamental level?
Now, we're basically going to take these factors that make up who our ICP is—their demographics, their geographics, and their psychographics—and we're going to put that together into their pain points, their desires, and their journey. Now, pain points: we're not just going to state what their pain is—"I'm poor and I want to be rich"—that's how the lazy people do it. We're going to establish the details of their pain points, right? How frequently are they experiencing this pain? How debilitating is it? Does it impact other outside parts of their life? Is it impacting their relationship with their spouse because they're unhappy all of the time because of this pain point? With desired outcomes, again, we're not going to be really, really basic and just say, "My client wants to make 10K a month." We're going to establish why they want to make 10K a month. Do they want to move to a new country? Do they want to move into a new apartment? Do they want to move out of their parents' home? Do they really, really want a BMW M4? Very often these desires, these desired outcomes, are closely linked to a pain point that they have. So if they really, really want a BMW M4, there's a good chance that actually they don't care much about the car; what they really desire is to get away from the low-status effect or feeling that they have when they see other people with a nice car and they feel bad about themselves. Now, an M4 probably wasn't the best example for that because they are actually just really cool cars, so a lot of people do just want an M4 for the sake of it. But if we were talking about a Porsche GT3, now that is much more of a status-driven car, as in it's just widely revered online as that holy grail sports car everyday driver, and so a hell of a lot of people buy one just to show everyone else in the world that they are successful and they're doing better than them and you shouldn't think lowly of them.
Now, with our client journey, it's really, really simple: we want to establish where they are before they ever knew you existed, where they are while they're entering your sales funnel, so they've now known you existed; maybe they've watched a few YouTube videos or found you on Instagram or they're DMing you there. You want to establish where they are in that process, and then you want to paint the picture of where they are going to be once they have completed your program and they've gotten their desired outcome. We should try really, really hard to build as specific an ICP as possible because it's going to be incredibly useful not only for selling people but for doing everything when it comes to our building. When we are writing emails for our email newsletter, we go back to our ICP; we take a look at their pain points, their desires, and their journey, and we make something specific to that. When we're writing YouTube videos, we do the exact same thing. When we're building funnels or writing headlines or recording a VSL or editing a VSL, we're always looking back to our ICP to build out our funnel so it's targeting the right person and hitting the right emotions.
When we're talking about pricing and how we should sell our information, I'm hoping that most people watching this are already going to be talking about online coaching or agencies, and so they're going to go straight to high ticket, but I know that some people are still stuck thinking in low and mid-ticket terms, so I want to make it abundantly clear why you should only ever be selling things for high ticket. Now, first of all, what is high ticket? What's mid-ticket, and what's low ticket? Low ticket is under $100; mid-ticket is between $100 and $1,000; and high ticket is above $1,000. These are general ideas; they are not perfectly strict, but in general, low ticket is going to be entirely do-it-yourself; mid-ticket is still mostly going to be entirely do-it-yourself. That means that when you're selling products for under $1,000, you are only selling the information, and you're not selling any help alongside with implementing that information whatsoever—no coaching groups, no group calls, no one-on-one calls, no done-for-you service whatsoever. And then high ticket, $1,000 to about $3,000 to $5,000, is going to be done with you, as in, "I'm just going to give you the information and then help you along the way with my online coaching." And then $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 plus, we tend to move into the done-for-you process, which is, "I have the information; I'm not even going to bother giving it to you; I'm just going to implement it all for you." That's like a full-on agency service—what I sell for my clients that I run their entire funnels. Now, in this circumstance, when I say high ticket, I really want you to think $3,000 plus, but $1,000 is the bare, bare minimum for high ticket, but we should be trying to go higher than that.
Now, when it comes to the actual amount of time that we're going to have to spend per dollar made, high ticket is by far and away the best. You are going to spend much less time fulfilling your clients and actually building out the information into an infrastructure for them for the amount of money that you're able to make. Yes, you'll spend more time per client, but the clients are so much more valuable that, on the whole, you'll be working far fewer hours on that front. We want to be working with high ticket and absolutely not low ticket or mid-ticket. Next, we have client intent: how serious are the people that we're selling to about actually doing this and being successful? Well, again, the more money someone is willing to pay, the more serious and the more committed they are. So they're going to put in more work; they're going to be more coachable; they're going to be easier to work with; they're going to get better results; they're going to give you more testimonials and good case studies that lead to more clients; they're going to give you referrals; you are going to make a hell of a lot of money selling a high ticket compared to mid or low ticket purely because intent is higher at high ticket.
Now, some people will think that mid-ticket would do okay with this, but actually, mid-ticket is a hell of a lot worse than low ticket when it comes to intent because people buy low ticket and they forget about it, and that's fine; they've paid you their money; they don't really care about the $20 ebook they bought that they never even opened. They do the same thing with mid-ticket. When someone buys a $500 course, they still never open it 90% of the time; they still don't go through it and use that information and get results and give you a good testimonial. But they've now spent enough money where it is worth asking for a refund or complaining about not getting a refund because they didn't check the policy in advance and they waited more than 14 days or something, or just going straight to their bank and charging back. Now, that obviously causes a whole lot of more problems for your business, and it's just not worth it. So in this front, in terms of the intent of your client, mid-ticket is the worst of all of them. Of course, with success, you're going to get far better results with high ticket because people just work harder than they do on mid-ticket and low ticket. They also tend to be wealthier, more experienced, more committed, and just a little bit more intelligent if they are wealthier as well. With testimonials, you're 10 times more likely to get a good testimonial when someone is successful, and they're more likely to be successful with high ticket, and you tend to have a personal relationship with them, so it's easier to ask and get a testimonial from them. For refunds and chargebacks, it's going to be the same thing again. You might expect that you get the most amount of refunds and chargebacks with high ticket because people have spent the most money, but because you're working with people on an individual basis often enough, you know their name, you know their face, they know you back; they are, first of all, willing to put in more work, so they're more successful, so they're less likely to ask for a refund or a chargeback. Then, but on top of that, when they don't get their desired result, they can recognize that, "Actually, you know what, fine, it was my fault; I didn't put in the work; you were chasing me every day; you were sending me text messages trying to get me on Zoom calls to get me to put in the work and do the thing; it's my fault; I failed; I'm not going to charge back; I'm going to have a little bit of integrity." Basically, all of this culminates in saying that high ticket is 100% the place to go; low ticket and mid-ticket just suck a little bit. Now, you can do little bits with low ticket or mid-ticket, but I really don't recommend it until you're doing like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a month plus, but we will get on to that in a moment here. And my final point as well: yes, high ticket, I technically put as $1,000 here plus, but I want you really to think of it as $3,000 plus; that's the magical mark we really want to be at. You're going to get much better results. If we were to put out an extra high-ticket bracket here, that would be the one that wins everything out; it's just much, much easier to drive great results for your clients, to find clients, to actually get them the success that they want, to make money yourself, to build a successful business; high ticket is the way to go, and the higher the better.
Next, we're going to talk about how you should be marketing this offer when you're making landing pages, VSLs, email newsletters, talking about it in videos, and all of that kind of stuff. Now, there's a quote here: "Sell the whole, not the drill," came from some very famous marketing guy; I forgot his name, but I remembered the quote; that's how valuable a quote it is. And if that doesn't make sense to you, it's really, really simple; it means sell the results of what you're selling, not what you're selling itself, right? When we're talking about selling online coaching or an agency service, we can feel a little bit inclined to say, "You're getting X amount of my time every single week; that's worth this amount," or, "You're getting my course, which I usually sell for $1,000; you're getting it for half that price," or, "You get access to my private paid community, which is worth $200 a month," or, "You get access to my coaching, my information, my help." That is selling the drill itself, not selling the outcome of what the drill achieves. On the other hand, when we're selling the results, when we're concentrating our marketing on painting an endpoint picture of our client's journey, that's when we see close rates and just points of friction at each level of the funnel get lower and lower, and we end up making more money. So stop selling one hour per week of coaching and start selling, "You will lose 20 lbs in six months." Stop selling, "You get my course," and start selling, "You will place in a bodybuilding show of your choice." Stop selling, "My paid community," start selling, "Build your successful dream business that gives you the lifestyle that you want." Stop selling your coaching; start selling, "Okay, you will sign X amount of new clients, and that will make you this much money." Stop selling your help; start selling, "I've run out of ideas; um, I'll get you a better job offer at a rival company or something." So the outcome, not what gets you to the outcome. Too many people focus all of their time and effort when it comes to their marketing on selling the actual physical pip pieces that make up the remnants of your offer; that doesn't convince anyone; no one cares about what's in your offer; they care about the result they're going to get from your offer, right?
Next, we're talking about the 80/20 rule and how this relates to building an offer. The 80/20 rule, if you don't know, is really, really simple: 80% of the outputs that you get come from 20% of the inputs, right? So 80% of your qualification, your degree at university, comes from learning just 20% of the actual course material that you study, just the most important part. So 80% of the income that you're able to generate with your business comes from just 20% of the work that you actually do on a daily basis. Now, why is this so relevant? Well, because it's a stupid way to live; we should be focusing all of our time onto that 20% that is actually driving the most results and ignore the 80% of inputs that lead to 20% of outputs. How does this relate to offer building? Well, here's the really important thing: your core offer is the 20% of inputs that gives you the 80% of outputs. You do not need to be building out 10 different offers—one that's $10, one that's $50, $100, $1,000, $10,000—all the way up to cover every single customer in the world before you can start making money. You will make a hell of a lot more money, a hell of a lot more quickly, if you focus all of your intent and strategy and efforts into just one single offer, into marketing it as effectively as possible, into making it as successful for your clients as possible, into taking sales calls and running outreach and focusing on your paid ads for that one single offer. You will do so, so much better doing that. And you might feel like you're leaving money on the table by not doing an upsell or by not running a downsell, or you might get a sales call where someone comes on and there should be a perfect fit for your program, but it's $5,000 and they just don't have the money and they're just not comfortable putting it on a credit card or whatever else it might be, and you're sat there thinking, "If only I was selling a $2,000 offer instead, I could have saved that client; I could have still got a sale and still got some more money." And yes, you may be right that you would have signed that individual client, but on the whole, that individual client will not be worth the time and effort that it's now going to take you to go out and fulfill and build a brand new offer. You are better off just sticking to your guns, running one core high-ticket offer, and going full blast on it until, until you are making a bare, bare minimum—let's say $30,000 a month. Really, you should be earning like $50,000 plus before you start putting in secondary offerings.
Now, the other reason I really, really suggest you don't build out a downsell in particular early on is you may default to selling a downsell earlier than intended, and that might actually cost you money in the long run. I personally do not allow my closers—the salesmen that I manage—to sell anything other than the high-ticket core offer on a sales call. If someone is a perfect fit for the program and we have a downsell ready for them, my closers are not allowed to sell it on that sales call.
Whatsoever, why? Because if they were allowed to sell it, they would default to selling it when they don't need to. Maybe someone just needs a little bit of reassurance, or they need to think something out, or they need to work out their finances to be able to afford that core offer that we actually want to sell. But my closer, getting that first point of resistance, just goes, "Ah, it's just take the cheaper offer instead." Now my business is out of money because this closer defaulted to a cheaper product when he shouldn't have, and we lose out on that marginal gain. So I do not allow my closers to sell mid- or low-ticket products on a sales call, no matter what. It has to be done in automated sequences or with appointment setters off-platform, on another sequence.
If you are building out a downsell, please, please, please do not allow it to cannibalize your core offer. That's a very difficult thing to do. You need strict qualification sequences and parameters that determine when someone will be offered the downsell or not. If you allow everyone to buy it, it will cost you money, and you need to stop doing that now.
Finally, upsells and downsells: when should you use them? Well, straight off the bat, when you're doing more than $50,000 a month, you should have a downsell in your repertoire. At that point, below that, and you probably don't need it. Below $20,000 or $30,000 a month, and you definitely don't need a downsell or an upsell. When you are running a downsell, you should have zero time input to actually selling the product and zero time into fulfilling it. What that means is what I just said: you need an automated sales sequence. No messaging someone on text, on WhatsApp, no hopping on a call with them, no getting a Zoom call, no spending any time tracking these leads and deciding whether or not they should be an upsell or a downsell. If they are unqualified, they are automatically sent into a different sort of your sales funnel, and they are told about their offer, their opportunity to buy that mid-ticket offer.
Then, once they are in that mid-ticket offer—say, a $500 or a $1,000 course—you do not give them help on top of that. They have not paid enough for you to be helping them or building a relationship with them. They have paid enough for the information; they need to now implement that information under their own parameters, under their own strength. If they are not willing to do so, that is not your fault. You should not be selling your time so cheaply that someone can buy a mid-ticket offer and still get the opportunity to get help from you directly. That devalues the high-ticket offer that you run next.
Then, when it comes to a high-ticket offering, when should we be thinking about building a more expensive program or something to sell on top to our customers? Well, in general here, when our past, present, active clients are successful and they need that next level, that next tier of help. If we are running a coaching program—like I am, helping coaches and agencies be successful and build a successful business and make lots of money—we should not be building out a mastermind or a more expensive coaching program with maybe more, you know, personal access to me, until I have at least 10 to 20 clients who are ready, who I think personally would benefit and are likely to buy that product. This super high-ticket offer is not the first thing that anyone is going to buy; we're still going to be funneling them to that core offering first of all—that $3,000, $5,000, $8,000, $10,000 product. We're then going to send them to the $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 product once they have actually been successful, they've been in the program, they've got help from you, and now they need the next tier of support.
Now, the easiest and really the only forms of upsells you should be running are very, very simple: closer access coaching. Maybe with your core offer, you run group coaching; maybe you offer one-on-one coaching for twice the price. Make sure that you're happy doing that extra work and working personally, individually with people for how much you're charging. Or you go the one-off route: the mastermind. You do an in-person event; you grab a couple of your friends or other coaches or agencies to come and help other people learn and educate, and you charge like $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 one-off for a price, a ticket to come and network with yourself, with other people who are willing to spend that money and to learn in the same time. If you're thinking about anything else, you really shouldn't be. If you have a background in software development or AI, then fine, go out and build a low-ticket subscription AI or software and sell that to your customers as well. If you don't have that kind of background—you're like me, you're non-technical—you really shouldn't be messing around with it. We should be focusing in dead straight onto info products, onto high-ticket products in particular.
When it comes to other things like self-liquidating offers and order bumps and ascension funnels and then ebooks and then running multiple core offers, we need to be doing $50,000 a month minimum. Any less than that, and it's just not worth our time. The N20 rule is 100% real. We should be focusing in on our core offer—that is basically how to build an $83,748, I think it is, dollars per month offer. This is the process that I use to build offers with my agency, with my clients, with the people I coach, and the people I run their entire funnels for. If you are interested in working with me, uh, you know, check out the link down below in the description. Or I've got some lead magnets I'm giving away now; go down there and check out the lead magnets as well if you want some more free information. If you want to join my free community or my free newsletter and learn more from me, peace.