If you want to close high-ticket sales, such as coaching, consulting, and creative work, you have to get on the phone…
Or in a video call. Or in person, of course. But on the phone, at a minimum.
It’s almost impossible to close any deal of substance over email. Yes, you can initiate the conversation with email, or other digital communication (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). You can also follow-up the conversation in these channels.
But you have to have at least one really good phone call with your prospect if you want them to spend into the thousands, tens-of-thousands, or more with you.
And so if you’re selling your services or other client-work… Or other higher-ticket items… Your most important goal in selling should be: how can I get the most highly-qualified prospects on the phone with me? And then, once I have them on the phone, what can I do to move the deal forward and close the prospects who are ready?
Good news: I’ll give you some direction here.
Here’s what it comes down to:
What can you do in a single phone call to get them a giant step closer to the result they most desire?
That is, you want to consider what result they’re seeking in coming to you. What fundamental promise does your service fulfill on? Why the heck would they hire you in the first place?
Most likely, it’s either to move closer to their dreams, their desires, and their personal destiny… Or to move away from their fears, frustrations, and failures. Or, both. (It’s a spectrum, and we’re always seeking to move away from bad and toward good.)
But more specifically, most higher-ticket products and services have some kinds of measurables associated with them. This first call should be really targeted at that measurable.
So, for example, a business that is selling online has a desire to increase their transactions. They want more sales. They want each sale to be worth more.
Your core offer might be a high-level service where you totally make over their online customer journey to increase transactions. But that’s big, broad, and hard to capture in a short conversation.
Look at the steps along the way to find your opportunity…
For example, their website shopping cart is a crucial part of that journey. And I’ll bet if they took a look at their analytics, they’d find that a significant portion of everyone who put their products in their cart ended up not purchasing.
Perhaps, in one phone call, you could walk through their checkout process with them, and identify a handful of specific reasons customers may not end up completing their transactions. As well as some suggested fixes to test.
By the end of the call, you could give them a list, and they could choose a couple paths from there. They could test these recommendations internally. They could hire you to help them test the recommendations. They could decide they disagree and not act on your advice. Or they could flake out completely and never implement.
Now let’s imagine you packaged this up and called it your “23-Point Online Shopping Cart Inspection” with the promise that you’ll help ecommerce store owners “find and identify leaks in their website’s checkout process, to drop cart abandons by up to 50% or more.”
And let’s imagine that you offered that as a free service, in the form of a 60-minute call on your website. You set up a scheduling program to book appointments (Calendly or similar). Once they’re booked, you ask them to fill out a short information gathering form, including information on where you can view their checkout process beforehand, as well as some more general information about their company that helps you understand how good of a fit they would be, not just for this free call, but for your total service offering.
Even how they go through this process will be telling…
If they’re not qualified (based on the info they gave), they’re not qualified, and you can tell them so while canceling the call. Ideally, with a recommendation for resources they can use to DIY some of the solutions you provide, to build up their success to a level where they’re more qualified.
If they can’t manage to fill out the information gathering form before the call, they’re likely a flake, and you don’t want to work with them, so you cancel the call. If they come back begging for forgiveness, use your discretion on whether or not to take them back. If you do, you’ll be in a much better situation for future compliance.
In all other cases, you can spend the first 30 minutes or so of the call actually going through their online checkout process, ideally pointing out a number of specific improvements that will get them the result they’re desiring.
That leaves the second 30 minutes of the call. Here you have a process in place where you start to ask how their checkout process fits into their total customer journey.
You ask a ton of questions, and are trying to determine how your core offering could serve them…
Done right, you should have given them a ton of value in that first segment, where you were giving them a bunch of specific suggestions to get the results they desire. But by asking more probing questions, you will open up another conversation entirely about everything it is that you do, and the additional value you can provide.
Remember, after we’ve ditched the flakes and tried to weed out anyone who wasn’t qualified, you’re left with three types of prospects. They ALL want the result you’re offering.
One will want to test your advice and see that it works before moving forward. The next will just want you to do it for them. And the third is just humoring you until the call is over.
If you’re dealing with the first or third, they’ll want to close the call by saying, “Let me work with this and see what we can do, and I’ll be in touch on the other things we were talking about.” Unless you’re dealing with someone incredibly direct, both the ‘testers’ and the ‘detesters’ will gently let you down and say they just want to do their own thing for now.
And in any group of 10 prospects who go through this one-hour call with you, there could be anywhere from one to five or more who will simply want you to start work immediately…
(The numbers vary based on a ton of different factors. The better a consultative salesperson you are, and the better quality leads you’ve generated, and the better value you deliver, and the more conviction you have in your solution, the higher conversion rate you’ll get off these calls.)
You’ll want to move forward with this group, presenting them with your core offer which should incorporate the recommendations you came up with in this more limited call. Because they liked your initial advice, they’ll typically need little convincing to go much deeper.
For the rest, who want to sit on your recommendations, you should have a follow-up process meant to simply stay in touch about implementing your recommendations, as well as reinforcing how your solution is a fit for what they revealed to you in your conversation.
The ones who legitimately wanted to test your recommendations will be great, because within a few weeks they should have specific data that supports your expertise. Then, you can encourage them to ascend to your core offer.
The others who simply don’t implement wouldn’t have made great clients anyway, so you can be thankful you found out from this process, and not after you have them as clients and are obliged to work with them.
This goes completely against the “never work for free” mantra but it’s an effective way to close deals…
The thing is, “never work for free” works really well when your reputation precedes you. For example, if you’re a best-selling author in your niche, you can typically rely on your books to establish your expertise, and prospects will self-qualify and come to you.
Or if you’re an A-list copywriter completely at the top of your game and you’re the not-so-secret weapon of your clients, word of mouth will have clients knocking on your door, check in hand, and you won’t have to do this.
But most folks are not in a situation where their reputation precedes them. So until you make that true, this process of having a small, packaged part of your service that delivers massive value and results in a short phone call is a great way to establish your authority while limiting what you give away.
In fact, I’m looking at doing a small test in a brand new market and this is the exact strategy I’m building from.
When I was selling IT training solutions, I did a variation on this that created massive success and had me consistently closing $30,000 deals about twice as often as the other salespeople in the office.
I’d much rather spend 10 hours, for example, talking to 10 prospects and giving away a ton of value, and closing some deals, than I would spending 10 hours spinning my wheels and insisting that I should “never work for free.”
When you hit the sweet spot with this process above, that’s exactly the choice you’re making.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
