In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about why strategy sessions are different than sales calls and how to use them to sell more of your high ticket products and services.
Now this entire week we’ve been talking about automated sales funnels or the legendary funnel as we have come to call it because we build a lot of them. It is a funnel that you can sell masterminds. You can sell industry services. You can sell anything high ticket. If it’s $1,000 or more, you can sell it with this model.
We put together a PDF for you that you can download for free. If you go to doneforyou.com/legendary, then you can download the guide. You can see that we’ve been going through it throughout the week, and we’re on the tail end. This is the last episode of the week.
We’ve covered a lot of ground. We talked about the tools and tech, automated webinars, offers, and setting up the email sequences. What your emails need to do both before the webinar and after the webinar. It’s all inside this PDF, so you can download it. There are little spots in it so you can take notes. There are task lists in there, or a little checklist, so you can see what you need to have to pull this automated webinar off.
For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn. I created doneforyou.com, where we create offers. We build sales funnels, and we set up marketing and traffic, or automation and traffic for our clients.
Sales Call
Now the point of today. The model to sell anything high ticket is sales call strategy session-related. You need to get on the phone and talk with them, and this is difficult when you first get started. I remember when I got started, I was shy and timid about selling something on the phone and selling something for a lot of money. Luckily you get better at it in time, but more than that, it just takes … It’s understanding that when you’re on a sales call, you feel pressure to sell. And that’s, this is all, it’s very … This is how I think about it.
When you’re on a sales call, you feel pressured to sell. You feel pressured to pitch. You feel that you need to close, you need to sometimes be a high pressure closer or whatever. Whatever that is, I don’t even know what that is.
Strategy Session
Strategy sessions are not that way. The goal of a strategy session is to have a conversation with somebody and root out some of the problems. And maybe you’re going to be able to help solve some of those problems for them or at least help guide them towards a solution. And that’s what of strategy session is.
Now, there are lots of different ways to think about a strategy session. A strategy session can be a strategy session. It’s a very common term in marketing now. It wasn’t so much when I started doing them five, six years ago. We use other phrases for other clients. One of them is a quick start call. Another one might be an action plan call. Another one might be a … There are lots of different ways you can term it. The quick start is pretty prevalent now. But the goal is always the same.
You’re going to get on the phone, you’re going to meet them where they are, or Zoom now, so much it is on Zoom. But you meet your prospect where they are, and then you help root out some of the issues and then you try to come up with a solution for them. And if the solution is mutually beneficial, if not … If you enjoy working with them or you see yourself enjoying working with them and they of you, then there might be an offer there. And maybe you pitch it on the phone or maybe pitch an afterward or whatever.
There are lots of different ways to make the pitch. You can talk about the price on the phone or you can send them a proposal afterward that has the price in it. We’ve even seen and implemented some more interesting pitching scenarios where it’s, like the offer, let’s say it’s a $5,000 coaching engagement and the offer is … Well, if you were invited, then the obligation is $5,000 for three months worth of coaching. At the end of the day, I’m going to meet with so, and so, my boss, the team, whatever. We’re going to go through what it is you’re doing and we’re going to decide between us if you are a good fit for our program. And if you are, you will get an email inviting you.
So there are lots of different scenarios. It doesn’t have to be an out and out pitch. At the end of a strategy session, you can be creative with the offer. There’s just a lot of ways to do it.
Now, a strategy session is a free private one-on-one call with a potential client. It’s with you and a client. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes, sometimes it’s 30 minutes. Sometimes it’s 45 minutes. We keep ours at 45 minutes typically, because usually, it takes that long to talk, to get to the heart of some of the problems that people are having in their digital business, which is obviously where we come in.
Is it a traffic thing, a funnel thing or an automation thing or are revenues and products great, but they’re launching something new? So oftentimes it takes a little bit of time to get in and start looking at that stuff. But the key to a strategy session is really to establish credibility and trust before making your offer. And everybody does this a little bit differently. It might be rapport building based on location. It might be talking about finding mutual common ground with the college you were at. If you went to Duke, let’s say, then you …
I don’t know, you know what I mean? You just naturally find common ground or common footing within usually the first five minutes of a conversation, which is important.
You can sell anything you want on the strategy sessions, coaching, consulting, software, high-end digital products. Any kind of assisted programs or certification programs where there’s digital training and then you certify them or there’s a group coaching element to it.
Why strategy sessions?
It’s difficult to sell something over $1,000 online unless you have a significant relationship with that person. And that relationship is usually brought up by hearing somebody’s voice, by seeing them, by talking to them. So there are situations where somebody has followed a client of ours for a couple of years. And then all of a sudden they just decide to go invest, and that’s a pretty quick turnaround because they have been following somebody for a couple of years. They know that person more intimately than just a cold traffic lead. We’ve had the same.
Where we’ve run into problems with strategy sessions is when folks are selling something expensive, let’s say a $10,000, three-month program, let’s say, and they don’t take the bonding and nurturing time into consideration. They go paid traffic, to a landing page, to a video, and then have somebody opt-in below. If they don’t have a brand … Or then they have somebody schedule a call. If they don’t have a brand, if they haven’t been in the market a while, if they’re not doing a lot of podcast stuff and a lot of videos that are just out there on Facebook or YouTube or in their blog or whatever, they’re going to have a really hard time selling that thing. Because they just haven’t invested the time.
Your prospect doesn’t know who you are. They watched a couple of minutes of video of you, and then you’re pitching them a $10,000 thing. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But if they’ve seen two, three, four hours of video from you, they feel like they know you a little bit. They’ve seen your writing, they’ve seen your email, they see how you conduct yourself on Facebook or on LinkedIn or the things you share or how you contribute in groups or your blog posts or whatever. If they have a relationship and all those different modalities with you before they get on the phone, then you’re able to command higher ticket prices. And that’s really about building your brand.
It’s about building the brand. It’s about building the reputation of the brand, and then that sale can happen. But if the brand isn’t established, then it’s much, much more difficult to do that. So that’s one of the reasons why strategy sessions are important because they help not only bond somebody to you, not nurture the relationship, but they also let you sell that complex service that you’re trying to sell.
Here we talk a little bit about strategies in sales versus sales calls. So as great as it might sound to sell to everyone you talk to you, it shouldn’t be your goal. You need to find the best fit for you because if you don’t find the best fit, some of them are going to have unrealistic expectations. Some of them aren’t going to take action on what you teach them. They’re going to have personality conflicts. They would rather argue than follow your advice. Where you are the expert in they’re paying for the advice, but yet they’re going against it. And sometimes they’re just, they’re simply looking for something other than what you offer.
If you consider yourself to be a natural salesperson, the strategy session model is, really, really well suited to you because it doesn’t require you to be a pushy salesperson. You don’t need a script usually. It’s just a conversation. We have scripted out some of our client’s dialogues on the phone, and generally, they’ll use the script here and there for the first 10 or 15 calls. But then once they find that natural cadence, they move away from it and they sell a lot better because it’s just more natural. And we’ve had clients fucking shoot themselves in the foot because they follow this god awful script and it’s just not natural. It’s not a natural conversation.
They’re trying to make it a sales call. And one of the best examples and the most unfortunate stories is this one client who paid a guru a bunch of money. Guru wrote a script, the script fucking sucked. I mean it was like they went zero for 102 sales calls when they were closing about one in six before. And this sales script, I listened to eight of the calls afterward and they were just ridiculous. But there was this huge, there was this block of text. You could see it on the sales script. It was real quick, there was a minute or two of rapport building, and then it was like, “All right, now we are here to decide on such and such and blah, blah, blah. And are you an action taker?”
“Yes, I’m an action taker.”
“Okay, good.” Then it goes, the script starts playing out. It was ridiculous, it was absolutely. There was no flow too, there was no cadence to the conversation. It didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. If, and then as he went down, and if they said yes down towards the end of the call, there were still a couple of people. It was a great offer. So there were still a couple of people who were saying yes, then he was talking to them out of the sale because the script didn’t give him the ability to make his choice. He became, he was just running on the script and that’s it. The script was a crutch in that sense. So it’s good to use scripts. It’s good to get your bearing with a script, but once you’re able to move away from a script, do that.
Let’s see, the basis of a sales call, establish credibility, schedule the strategy session. You want to form a connection, take the lead, show your value, and improve on the results, overcome objections, and then start the relationship right. So screening somebody is, so you always want somebody to apply or sign up for a strategy session. So basic, you want somebody’s first name. You want their email address, their phone number, their Zoom link if you want to send them a Zoom link if you want it to be digital.
You also want to ask them six to eight questions that are important to you, important information that you need to know before getting on the call with them. Because if you ask the right questions and you know exactly how the call is going to play out. You know that you’re going to pick up the phone, you’re going to talk to this person. These are all the things that are important to this conversation. And just thinking for three to five minutes before you get on the phone about how this conversation is going to go and just mapping it out in your head.
You A, know whether the person’s going to close or not, and B, you know where the conversation is going to go before it goes there. So you’re able to kind of pregame it a little bit. So it’s always been really important. As for us, if you’re selling business-related services, what’s your website URL? You are around how many people are currently on your email list? What is your current monthly revenue? What’s your monthly ad budget? How willing and able are you to invest in growing your business? And then at this time, what investment can you make in growing that business?
How to set up an automated webinar that sells highly complex, high ticket products and services. Here at the very, very end of this PDF, you have your next steps. We have a CRM that you can play with. Click here to activate your free accounts. Then we have a funnel formula masterclass, which is it’s an accelerator course on putting together your funnel. And then we also, of course, will, we can book an action plan call and go through your business. Set up your sales funnels, set up your traffic, all that other stuff. So there’s the link for that.
For Questions and Guide
With that, we’re done covering this automated webinar playbook. Go ahead and download it, print it out, read it, mark it up, take notes. And you have all of our contact details. If you would like to talk about any piece of it, just book, just go to doneforyou.com/start. Book a call there, and we’ll get on and we’ll put something down for you. So I will talk to you soon, have a fantastic weekend and I’ll see you on Monday. All right. Thanks. Bye.
