Coaching call: How can I overcome the discomfort of asking for the sale

Today I am coaching Suki van Koeverden from Origami Globe who is a competition expert and strategist dedicated to helping business owners run successful and profitable competitions. Suki has a highly engaged audience however she is struggling with closing the final sale. Today we chat about strategies to adopt to overcome this very common issue.

– Why developing multiple lead magnets is beneficial in addressing your audience's diverse objections
– How offering lower priced products can cannibalise your big ticket items
– Facing the difficult decision to retire a product in return for business growth
– The 2 tiered benefit of structuring your offers to address your audience's problems whilst also highlighting your expertise
– Developing a sales funnel that takes your audience on a journey towards a very specific outcome
– The balance between offering enough without offering everything
– How playing to your strengths to ‘seal the deal' can overcome the discomfort in asking for the sale

 

I'm chatting with one of my Launch Magic students, Suki from Origami globe, where she teaches other businesses to run giveaways that don't just drive likes and follows, but also drive actual tangible sales. And the challenge that we're workshopping together in this episode is one that I've noticed comes up quite a lot with my listeners, and that is this fear or this discomfort around asking for the sale. 

We are so comfortable delivering lots of value for free. But then when it comes to asking somebody to buy or to book in, to potentially work with us, there's a lot of resistance and a lot of hesitation. 

I'm just absolutely terrible at taking it from marketing to selling. So, in one of your classes, you talked about the kind of a pyramid, you know, taking them from awareness to interest, to desire to action. And I put so much marketing out there, I create so much awareness. And then at the end of my blog post, which is kind of my hero content, I'll just say, here's a link if you want to work with me. Okay, bye. And then, that's it. And just hope that people click it. And I'm just really, really bad at turning all that knowledge that I put out there into, Hey, here's the next step. Hey, here's what to do if you want to work with me.

 

Why developing multiple lead magnets is beneficial in addressing your audience's diverse objections

In your case, what I would consider doing is looking at creating slightly different lead magnets for two or three of your best-performing posts, the ones that are getting the most traffic and thinking about who is this person who is reading this post, and where are they?

At what stage are they, and what do they currently know? What do they currently understand? What do they currently believe? And thinking about what kind of shifts they need to make to then be at that point where they're ready to hire you? 

This is the thing, people will always ask how long should the nurture sequence be. How much should I put in the lead magnet? And it really depends on how much they need to know before they get to that point where they're ready to invest in working with you. It could be that instead of doing a typical PDF kind of lead magnet, maybe you have a webinar that you've taught live once, and you record it and you have it there.

And at the end of the training, you're introducing the different ways that they can work with you, including, if they can't afford to work with you one-on-one, including also talking about your course and inviting them to join the waitlist if doors are closed at this point in time.

So there are different ways that you can help them to bridge that gap. But the main thing is that we want to make sure whatever it is, there's a call to action at the end. If it’s an ebook, the call to action could be in the back of the ebook, but we also want to have one of those emails in that sequence with that call to action to work with you.

We want to think about what objections does somebody have to work with you? Answering that objection, addressing that objection, if you were doing it in a webinar format, you would maybe have a shorter version of a sales pitch, like what you did, or what you would do for your webinar where we're introducing how they can work with you, what those outcomes would look like, and addressing those hesitations, those objections that they would have to work with you.

So it might be more beneficial to have something like a competition planning checklist or competition strategy checklist where you are not telling them how to do every single step, but you are laying out your process and you're explaining the reasoning behind why you do each step.

 

How offering lower priced products can cannibalise your big ticket items

The whole process of running a competition, the strategy behind it, there's a lot more to it than people realise. And my hesitation is that somebody who's buying that guide might not realise quite how much there is to a competition, and then they're going to buy the guide thinking that they can do it without support.

They're going to try to implement it, and they're either not going to get to the finish line because there's so much to it. Or they're going to get to the finish line but because they haven't had somebody to help them with the strategy, they haven't had the support of that group environment, they maybe aren't getting those best results. 

And then both of those, in a way, damages your reputation in their eyes because they're like, oh, I tried her process and it doesn't work. But meanwhile, they haven't tried your process with the support, the accountability that comes with the group, the course version or the one-on-one version. So that's my first hesitation with that. 

My other hesitation with that is that your process is like your secret source. It's what you do better than anybody else in your space. And if you are giving away your process at a much lower price point than the other options to work with you, I wonder if that is devaluing the other two options because they're think, well, you know, her secret source is the process. I can buy the process for a very low price point. Then when they see you open doors for the course or see you put out a call for new clients, they will then be like, oh, I bought her process years ago. I'll do that first. And meanwhile, they never do it. So they're never at that point where they're ready.

I do wonder then if we could find a better way for you to help those people rather than giving them the entire process in a guide format.

And the first thought that comes to my mind would be some kind of workshop. It could be a live workshop or you teach it live once, and then you sell the recording where it's planning out the competition and planning the strategy of it. Showing them why it's important to not just run a competition for likes and follows, maybe helping them to choose a prize, getting them to that point where they're excited now to take action.

And actually make their competition happen. 

And the next step for them to do is either sign up for the course where they're going to get the amount of support and the accountability that they need to have a successful competition. Or if they want to, they can work with you and they can have that one-on-one advice, your expertise in a much more tailored way.

Those are the two options. 

 

Facing the difficult decision to retire a product in return for business growth

It's all in the transformation. So with the lead magnet, that's a super valuable lead magnet already.

So what we would then want is that lead magnet would be the first step in the process. Then potentially the second step would be some workshop. So we think about where they're at, when they've finished that lead magnet, what have they done, what have they achieved in that lead magnet? 

So then the next step would be, once they know what they're going to get out of it, then it would be planning a couple more steps of that giveaway.

Ideally at the point or at the end of that paid workshop, we want them to feel like they know what it's going to look like. They've got some kind of win. And I don’t know what that win could be.

So it's a bit deeper than what your lead magnet's going into, but it's a very specific outcome. And it might be that somebody has run a giveaway in the past and they're like, oh, I feel pretty comfortable with the process of the giveaway, but I am not convinced that the prize that we gave away last time was correct. So then that would be really beneficial for them as well. 

 

The balance between offering enough without offering everything

But I suppose the overlap would be the first module or two modules of the course cover very similar content, just in more depth than we would have done in the webinar. 

So potentially ending that workshop by laying out the extra steps that you need to be across. You might not be aware of these steps, but this is what they are, and this is what we can work on in a one-on-one format or in this course container. 

So in this kind of product, I'd be giving them the 20% strategy, which is key to having a successful competition. If you don't have the strategy, you've got nothing to promote in the first place. But then working with me in a course format or a one-on-one format, they get the 80% promotion, which is where basically where the profit is.

I think this comes back right to the initial challenge that we started going down the path of where you said you're not asking for the sale or you find it hard to ask for the sale. So maybe then instead of going straight from blog post to offer, maybe it's partway through the blog post where it fits in naturally linking to your lead magnet. And maybe also at the bottom, a link to book a call, and then vetting, obviously having some kind of intake form where you say, look, this is what the minimum investment is to work with me. Is this in your budget? So that somebody isn't just jumping on the call blindly, not having a clue like how much this is potentially going to cost them.

So if you can get somebody on that call and you can identify how you can help them, and then you can present them with that package to help them, that could be all it is that you need to do. So instead of asking for the sale and your content, you're asking them to book in a call.

But I would say, my biggest recommendation would be to consider retiring that written guide. It's heartbreaking retiring any kind of product because you took so long to do however many years ago. But if it's affecting or potentially cannibalising all of your other offers, or it's not serving your clients in a way that it could be, I think that's a good call to potentially remove that.

So your next step is to go and retire that guide and consider where you can add that call to action for booking in a call and consider where you can add that call to action to download your lead magnet. And I know at the start I said, to create different lead magnets. That's not something to go and do overnight. That's something to build out over time. For now, just stick with that one lead magnet you've got. And over time, as you identify potentially other lead magnets you can add in.

 

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