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SHOW NOTES
Let’s chat about high ticket funnels today my friends.
I am intimately familiar with high ticket funnel strategies because in my business, we sell everything via an application and a sales call – with the only exception being when I live launch my marketing program, Ignite.
If you have a course, a program, a mastermind, a service, etc., that you sell via an application or a sales call, this is episode is one you MUST pay attention to.
Grab your pen and paper, pull up your notes app, whatever you need to do to take notes because I’m sharing seven of Team Hirsh’s 2020 high ticket funnel best practices that you can implement in your own funnel to maximize your sales.
Here’s a sneak peak of each of our best practices:
- Have clear messaging about who your offer is for before they get on your sales call.
- Track the number of applications you need each week, month, quarter, and year to meet your sales goals.
- Put out valuable content consistently to warm up your leads.
- Implement a quarterly live webinar (using Team Hirsh’s hybrid strategy!).
- Create multiple places where a lead can enter into your funnel and begin to be nurtured.
- Meet your audience with where they are with the way you set up your funnels.
- Your sales call should always be positioned with value.
Shoot me a message over on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) if listening to today’s episode inspired you to revamp your own high ticket funnel!
If you’re considering working with Team Hirsh in the new year, head over to helpmystrategy.com to fill out our application and see if you qualify to work with our team! If you’re approved, you’ll be able to book a call with our client success specialist to discuss where you’re at in your business today and how our team could best support you with your marketing.
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope that you guys are having a calm, relaxing, recalibrating week. I, this week that this podcast will launch, actually canceled all my calls and I’m just taking advantage, like we’re home for the holidays and my family will have already been gone. They were here for only about four or five days, and I’m taking advantage of the kind of slower in-between week where it should be slower and less meetings, but I could have just worked like business as usual. And I thought about it and I was like, no, I’m going to take this as kind of one of my CEO weeks. And we still have some nanny coverage for my kids and I’m going to use the time that I have to plan for 2021. We’ve already done all our business planning, but I have a lot of personal goals that I want to do planning for and just kind of reset and reflect on this year and what exactly I want to do next year, whether it’s personal and health and relationships or family, or business kind of big picture leadership goals.
Then also, I’m going to use it as a time to really get a lot of content done. Whenever I cancel my meetings, it’s amazing to me in a week how much I can get done, and it’s always just a reminder to me how I need to keep my calendar as clear as possible because I can get so much content done when I don’t have meetings on my calendar. Then I’m also doing a lot of extra self-care stuff because I find that in your, parents will relate to this, either I’m working or I’m a mom and if I want to even do like a fun thing for myself, it has to be planned and scheduled where we have a nanny and I’m not working, and that time is very limited. So, I’ll be doing that this week and I am super looking forward to it.
But going off of our theme of the last few podcast episodes, I’ve kind of been doing a recap of all these major strategies. So I’ve talked about webinar funnels, self-liquidating offer funnels, and now I want to talk about high ticket sales funnel best practices for 2020, with where we stand and what we need to really, if you have a high ticket funnel what strategies are important for you to pay attention to. So I define a high ticket funnel if you are selling something via an application or a sales call – so this could be a service, it could be a mastermind, it could be a course or a program that you sell that way. If the way you sell happens from a sales call, then this is the funnel that you most likely will have.
This funnel can also be a webinar funnel or a self-liquidating offer funnel that leads to your application funnels, so they definitely go together, and if you want to go back and listen to the podcast I did all about webinars, but there are some specific strategies for selling high ticket that are really important. One thing I also want to mention is this is what I do. Our whole entire business is around high ticket sales funnels because we sell everything, with the exception of when I live launch my course, we sell everything through an application and have a sales call. So I know all of these strategies very intimately because not only do we run them for several of our clients, but also for my own company. I treat my company like a client, I have an ads manager on my account, and so I know these strategies very, very well from that.
So the first point in the best practices is probably going to be something that you are going to be surprised by, as I always do with my strategies, is that foundational stuff. And one of the most important things with high ticket funnels is that you have very clear messaging around who your product is for before they get to that sales call. So I am a big fan of applications. I think that you shouldn’t talk to everybody. Now, there are maybe some business models where you might want to just skip the application and someone can get on the schedule a call with your sales team or whoever, but in most cases I am a big fan of not wasting time. And so at least filtering out people that you know right away, for whatever reason, you can’t help. They’re not at the right spot in their business, or they don’t actually need your service, or whatever your qualifications are, you’re able to filter them out before they get on a call with you or your team. This overall will just make you so much more just your time so much better managed.
Now, like I said, there are some exceptions where that’s not the case and maybe you have a whole sales team and they have time to do this, and they’re cold calling whatever so that doesn’t apply to you. But for most of our clients and for ourselves, I have personally a very strict application because I don’t want to waste my team’s time, but I also don’t want to waste the potential candidate’s time and lead if I already know that we can’t help them because of the wrong fit business, or they’re not in the right place in their business, or they were up front with what they have to invest. If for whatever reason they can’t fit that investment or where they are in their business, I tell them before I want to waste their time on a call because I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. So having an application, or also having very clear messaging on the page that comes before they schedule a call about who this is for. Don’t make people, I don’t think it’s a good strategy where you make people, you’re very vague about your services and what you do and what you cost all the way up until they get on a call and then you sell them. I think it’s okay to be very upfront with this is who my company helps, this is who we don’t help and be very direct with that.
That’s actually something that I’ve worked a lot on in the last year is on our application page being very straightforward. If you’re here in your business, you’re ready for us. If you’re here, you’re not. If you don’t know your ideal customer, if you don’t know what you sell, you don’t have an offer, what you sell, you are not ready for marketing, do not book a call with our team because it will not serve you. And I’m that direct with it. So if you sell high ticket, there’s probably opportunity for you to go back and look at the messaging to see how you can be more direct, because here’s what’s going to happen. You might feel afraid, “well, I don’t want to lose a potential sale to someone who’s going to disqualify themselves automatically from what I’m saying,” but you also might be losing a potential sale of people who are going, “hmm, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m the right fit for this person or this program, or this mastermind, or this service, because I can’t tell from this page so I’m just not going to book the call because I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want to waste my time.” And that’s what people are saying. If they read a page that’s your application kind of sales page ,or whatever it is, if they read that and they go, “oh my gosh, this is me and this company can absolutely help me solve whatever problem I have, I need to get on the phone with them right now. I need help. I want their thing,” that is going to be a much higher sales conversion and success rate than the other side.
So the first best practice is making sure you have an application. And I think this year, it got even more important. Be direct and clear in your messaging. Don’t try and hide around messaging or beat around the bush and try and just like trick people into getting on calls and then they can find out. That’s not going to work anymore. People see through that. They don’t want to waste their time. They don’t want to waste your time and they don’t want to waste their time. They want to make sure they are the right fit for what you’re selling before they get on the phone with you. So that’s the first best practice.
The next best practice if you are running a high ticket sales funnel is you need to know exactly how many applications and how many calls you need every week, every month, every quarter, every year, in order to hit your sales goals. I have an entire 2021 business plan already planned out, exactly how many course sales I want, exactly how many clients we want to add, and exactly how many applications and calls we need every month. I track it every week. I track it every quarter. It’s religious. So you should have those goals and you really should know, I mean, if you’ve been doing calls, how many percentages of those, how much percentage of those calls you make into a sale. So if you close 40% of your calls and you want 10 sales, then how many calls do you need? Just do the math and figure that out and then track it, actually track the actual results every week, every month to see what you come back with. Okay? So that’s very important if you’re doing this strategy because that’s your metric of success is how many applications and calls you’re booking, because that should directly lead, if you get those, and of course if they’re quality, but if you get those, you should hit your sales goals. And it’s a formula just like that, okay?
Now we’re going to dive a little bit more into the actual funnel strategies. So high ticket funnels, what’s very, very critical is that you have some form of warming up and using content to warm up leads and that you’re doing this consistently. Now, there will be a percentage of people when you sell high ticket who hear about your brand in one way or the other. They sign up for a webinar, they see you do something, that you’re a guest on someone’s podcast, whatever it is, they see you and then they fill out an application, book a call, and then they buy. They are what’s considered cold traffic. There will be a percentage of people that that happens with, but it’s very small. So most people who are going to buy high ticket from you will need to have several touch points with your brand before deciding to make the sale.
High ticket is all about the long game, a hundred percent, because you’re going to have people, and I have this all the time, who have been following you, who have been consuming your content, watching what you’re doing, thinking about working with you, thinking about signing up for your program, thinking about buying your service for months, if not years before they do it. And so, yes, you’ll have a small percentage of people who go buy something quickly without really diving deep and spending time going through all your content. You’ll have that small percentage of people, but you’ll have a much larger percent of people who are going to consume content multiple times before pulling the trigger.
So your job with high ticket is to constantly stay top of mind. The best way to do that is to have content that you consistently put out, you put paid ads behind it so new people consume it, and you do that every day. So you have 5% of your ad budget goes to promoting your content. So for me, the way this looks is we have consistent podcast episodes. We change them out about once a quarter with maybe once every two months, I’d say two to three months. We update which podcast episodes we actually want to run ads to and I spend 5% of my budget every single month running ads to cold traffic, to those podcast episodes so that I can retarget them, but also so that I’m getting more people consuming my content. I put a lot into this podcast. It’s the number one thing I do in terms of creating content. I want new people listening to it every single month because those people lead to sales for me, lead to webinar registrants.
So this is critical if you sell high ticket that you have something that’s valuable and also consistent that you’re putting out and new people are consuming it every single week. If the only way to get new people to consume it is, then you better be running ads. If you don’t have an audience where if you post something new people see it, you better be running ads so that you get new eyes on that. 5% of your monthly ad budget is my recommendation for that. So create a warm audience bucket consistently using very valuable content. All right.
Another best practice and strategy, I talked about this in the webinar podcast a little bit, but this is something that we’ve been doing ourselves and with clients, and that’s the quarterly live webinar. So doing some sort of a hybrid live experience with also an automated experience in the background. So one thing, and this is kind of going to bleed into my next point, but with high ticket, you are constantly going to be creating and making an effort to get applications and calls. That’s like your number one priority, and so those are probably going to have to come from multiple places and entry points. You’re going to maybe have lead magnets, and a webinar, and your podcast, and all different places where people can actually make it to booking a call for your high ticket product or service. So you’re constantly kind of, I don’t want to say hustling cause it’s not really hustling, but you’re constantly having to work to get applications. Otherwise, you’ll probably stay in this like smaller bucket of referrals.
So I could do absolutely no marketing and probably do about half of what we do, about half of our sales come from referrals for my agency. Half come from referrals and half come, probably like 40% come from paid ads, and then another 10% comes from our organic. So half of our sales come from referrals. So if I sat back, I spent no money on ads, I didn’t do anything, my business would still grow slightly with referrals. But I have to go constantly because I want to grow, put out effort to get applications, to get calls, to get clients through my paid ads. And that really doesn’t come from one single thing I’m doing and it’s very rare that you’ll find an application funnel where it’s just that one webinar drives all your applications. You never have to change it. You never have to update it. You don’t have to do anything else. That just doesn’t normally happen.
So the strategy that I like is doing that hybrid of some sort of live experience that will get you that surge of applications when you do it, but you can’t overdo that. Once a month is too much. It doesn’t give you enough time to update the messaging around it, to improve it, to reinvite your warm audience. It just doesn’t give you enough time if you try to do that monthly or more frequently. But if you do it quarterly, it gives you enough time in between to improve the messaging, change the title of what you’re doing, improve the actual delivery of it, and then reinvite your warm audience every single time. Because remember, you’re building that warm audience with content, hopefully consistently. Then in the background, you also still need to be driving applications.
So you should have some form of also automated funnel, whether that is a webinar or a self-liquidating offer funnel that leads to your application, or a video series, or whatever it is. You should have something automated in the background, but then once a quarter, you’re doing this bigger live experience, live event, live workshop, whatever it is, and that’s like a surge of applications for your business. And you know, right now going into the new year you could plan out your whole year like this very easily, and that’s what we are going to do, but I’ve definitely seen the need in the last year to constantly have new titles, new content, new messaging, to get people really excited about what you are offering. So you’ll notice like the last couple of quarters we’ve done a big live experience, live event, some form of it to really get a surge of applications. And then I also, I have an automated webinar and I have two opt-ins that all lead either to the webinar or to applications, and those are like consistently pushing applications for us. Okay.
Which this is going to lead me into my second to last point. I have two more points, and that is creating multiple places where a lead can enter into your funnel and begin to be nurtured. You really need multiple avenues with high ticket. You need an ecosystem of ways people can be nurtured by your content, get to know your brand, get to know what you offer, build that relationship, build that trust with you. And the way this could look is you’ve got a podcast or a regular video that you post you post organically, and you stay up-to-date on your social media, and then you run ads. You’ve got a couple of funnels. Maybe you have a general lead magnet, then you also maybe have an automated webinar, and then you also do some sort of quarterly live video series, or challenge, or webinar, or podcast secret series. You do something. So you have all these ways that people can come into your ecosphere and really get to know you and get to know your brand and the problem you solve, and then you’re going to hopefully be getting applications from all the different ways and then that surge from that live event.
So it’s rare that I see someone getting the volume of applications that they want with just one single method of trying to get them. You really have to create this holistic strategy where you’re coming at it from all different angles and it should be from content to lead magnet, an opt-in sometimes can be good too, webinars and videos, and then a live experience as well. So creating multiple places and avenues where a lead can enter your funnel. Now that’s not multiple funnels and multiple offers, cause I sing the praises of one funnel, one offer. That’s multiple entry points to a funnel, but it’s not multiple funnels. If I have, like for example I have the Hirsh Marketing Report and our case study funnels that then leads to our automated webinar, that then leads to our application. So I have three different entry points that somebody can get to the webinar and then the application, but it’s all one funnel. It’s all one goal and it’s all to just get applications. So it’s multiple entry points, but it’s one single goal.
And so that’s where the focus comes in. You don’t want to have multiple webinars competing with each other to sell different things and different products. That is a no, but multiple entry points because you’re going to get some people who are super interested in something like your opt-in, and others who are super interested in your webinar, and you want to capture all those people. So don’t overdo it. If you hear this and you’re like, “oh my gosh, I have to go create a bunch of opt-ins and dah, dah, dah,” don’t do that. But throughout this next year, instead of going to create the next upsell or down sell, or additional offer, or do a live lunch, just look at what you have and look how you can optimize it because maybe creating some other form of entry into your funnel could create a lot of impact for your results to your applications. Okay?
And the final best practice I have for high ticket funnels is really trying to meet your audience with where they are with the way you set up your funnels. So I think that short bursts of content such as a micro webinar or a podcast secret series are excellent strategies for high ticket. So micro webinar is basically what it sounds like, a short webinar. It’s a 30 minute webinar. You can either have people opt in or you don’t even have them opt in. You send them to a page and the applications right below that. So tested that, have definitely seen success with that. And meeting your audience where they are means if your audience isn’t going to watch a 60 to 90 minute webinar, do not create a 60 to 90 minute webinar. A lot of times when you’re selling high ticket, you’re looking for somebody at a little bit higher level than somebody not, and so you have to create the content for those people.
When I’m selling to get agency clients, they are listening to podcasts, consuming short bursts of content that have a very low ask of them, but a high reward to consuming that content. And so I know that about my audience, and I’m constantly asking myself, “how do I create content that’s going to serve that audience? Those people who are at that level, who don’t have a lot of time, but definitely want to know the newest and best marketing strategies and stay on top of that for their business, but don’t have a lot of time?” So I cater to this when I go to create my content. So micro webinars or short webinars, you can play with that, like a 30 minute long webinar because you’re also going to an application. And so that’s why this also works very well. If I was selling a $2,000 course on a 30 minute webinar, it probably wouldn’t work, but an application and a call is a form of nurturing. I’m not asking for a sale at that point. I’m positioning the application as something positive. Actually, I’m going to add that on as a final one in a second, I’m positioning the application as something that’s more nurture for them, they’re going to get something out of applying and coming to that call they will get some form of value. So that’s a next step in my nurturing, which is why I can get away with having a shorter burst of content in the beginning, like a micro webinar.
Also the podcast secret series, if you guys watched, I just did one of these, but it was basically delivering content in the form of audio instead of video. So instead of a webinar, people opted in and signed up to get access to a private podcast feed, which then gave them audio content that they could download and listen to. We’ve had so much success with this. We now have a, I’m doing a training in my program this month about how to run that funnel for themselves for my students, and then also we have a whole resource for our clients because we’re starting to help them implement this strategy because we’ve seen so much success with it. But again, this came from me knowing my audience, knowing they listened to audio versus always show up for webinars. I’m not writing webinars off. I’m just creating other avenues for those people who will never come to a webinar. So I’m actually still doing a webinar. I’ll do one in January and I still will have an automated webinar funnel because they work, especially for my program Ignite. But for done for you agency clients, I have to be really creative with how do I get them to consume my free content to build that relationship with me and get that application in.
So my bonus add on to that I just came up with as I was talking, because I had these all written down, but this is a very important one that I should have written down and I’m going to share it, is when you send people to an application or a call, it should be always positioned with value. You don’t say to someone well just book a consult or like just book a call with me. What’s the value in that? Why do I want to book a call with you? And if you’re doing it right, there will be value in that call. You will hopefully be analyzing where they’re at in their business, or their life, or whatever it is, and then giving them the next step, whether that is your offer or not. Yes, you’re going to sell on it, but you’re serving them with what their next step should be and you are hopefully doing some sort of consulting and you know, not deep work, but you’re helping people get clear on where they are right now and where they need to go in the next step. Whether that’s, for me it’s their marketing, for you it might be their health, or their business, or growing their team, or whatever problem you solve.
Now, if you’re boring and you just say like, “oh, well just book a consult.” Like people won’t do it. That’s not, some will if they really, really want what you offer, some will. But make that application and that call an enticing strategy in itself that if they book that then they apply, or they schedule the call, they will get value out of just taking that action. That will be so much more successful for you when you are pitching that in a webinar, or however you’re pitching that application and that call. We call ours a strategy audit because it really is. I’m not lying when I say that every single time people come to a call, we are doing an analysis process to see where they are in their marketing with their business right now today and we might be able to help them. So of course we will share those opportunities with them, but also there’s many times when we can and we go tell them, hey, go back and do this, this and this, and then come back and talk to us, or go hire a branding expert, or go do this, this is your next step. So there’s value in that call itself. And I absolutely position that value whenever I’m talking about my application. So that is a very important best practice to your high ticket funnel.
All right, you guys. So those are my high ticket funnel best practices, and if you want to check out my funnel and you want to consider working with Hirsh Marketing going into the new year, you can go to helpmystrategy.com to see if you qualify to work with us. We have two different options. We have our course and program called Ignite, which is a combination of learning materials, training videos, swipe files, templates, calculators, as well as one-on-one support from our Ignite success coach as they walk you through how to create your marketing strategy, launch it, get the ads up. And then we have our full done for you agency, where we do everything from the ad copy to the images, to the strategy, to go the reporting, to the targeting, to setting up the ads, to managing them on a day-to-day basis, all of it. That’s our done for you. Both of those can be found at helpmystrategy.com.
And actually, if you go through our application process, it kind of tells you which one is best for your business based on the questions that you answer. So if you want to go through that process, if you want to consider working with us, we are starting to have to even limit our course. Our course is blowing up, which is awesome, but we have a success coach who does one-on-one calls and so there’s a capacity there. So if you’re considering joining, don’t wait because for the first time we’re having to actually put a capacity limit on that. We’ve always had to do that with clients, but because we’re now offering these one-on-one calls with our success coach, there’s only so many hours in his week to do that. And soon we’ll probably hire another one, but for now we have a capacity limit on it. So that’s helpmystrategy.com. Thank you so much you guys and happy new year. I’ll see you all next year.