Raising Your Prices for High-Ticket Sales

Please note this transcript is machine generated so it is not perfect and should be used for reference only, you will get the best from the podcast by listening to it in it's designed format.
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Welcome to this next episode of the Expert Unrivalled podcast. If you're looking to raise your prices or add a high ticket income stream to your business, then this is the episode for you.
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I'm really excited and very passionate about sharing the information within this episode because I truly believe that adding a high ticket income stream to your business and raising your prices is the best thing that you can do at any point. Even if you are selling a low ticket item. I genuinely believe, as I mentioned the previous episode, that it's the best and right thing to do for your business, particularly in the uncertainty of the market as it is at the moment. It's a smart move. We were talking in the day with my other half Andy around how we can secure the business in terms of making sure that we always have money coming in from some kind of direction and it's about having those different income streams within your business and adding this arm of high ticket is a great way to do that.
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Because if some of the volume of sales dries up, if you have a high ticket income stream coming into your business, it gives your business that cash injection that's necessary. You don't need such a large audience. In fact, you can get a huge conversion of high ticket sales from a relatively small audience. So I'm so excited to share this information with you because I believe it's going to be truly beneficial. Now I've just come back over the last couple of days from Hans Zimmer concert. I took my other half, Andy, for his belated birthday because I was actually at a Youpreneur conference and we stayed at the Intercontinental hotel. Now. It was absolutely brilliant. Show stopping. I absolutely loved it, every moment of it. But the Intercontinental was almost a last minute add on when we realized that we didn't want to be rushing, trying to get back to Cardiff from London.
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And so I wanted to treat him so I thought I'm going to pick a decent hotel to spend the night and really turn it into a real experience. Now everything about the Intercontinental when it comes to food and drink is expensive. We, we went up and we drank in the Sky Top bar, I think it was called. And the views of London were incredible over the O2 stadium and seeing the Barclays building and just this landscape of lights and city beauty it was just incredible, really breathtaking. And we take a look at the drinks menu, you're looking around about 16 pounds a cocktail and looking at I'm an absolute massive fan of vodka, not such a big fan of cocktails.
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I don't know. You know what you guys like, I'm relatively boring when it comes to drinks but I really, really enjoy a good vodka. And I was looking at the vodka list and I was like, wow, you know what? I'm going to treat myself to a premium shot of Russian vodka. And so it was 15 pounds a shot. It was just amazing. And I'm like, do you know, I really want to taste a real premium vodka. And then obviously you've got your mixer on top and everything like that. So we're talking, you know, high-end prices when it comes to paying for your drinks in this place. But my gosh, wasn't it incredible? The taste was unbelievable and I know you're listening to this and thinking. 'Vodka Really? It can't be that much of a difference, but genuinely trust me now, when I first started drinking vodka in Gran Canaria back in the day, a few, many years ago, I remember drinking from a bottle of vodka that still had soil in the bottom from where they'd harvested it from potatoes.
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Oh, that was grim. So this was a long shot. A long way. You can definitely taste the difference within vodka is when you're, when you're a connoisseur of vodka, like I am not yeah, I tasted this vodka, the whole experience of the service of how it was presented, how we would treat it, the way the, they brought over the snack balls. If food was, we decided what drinks we were going to have, the way we were positioned by this window with this breathtaking view. The whole experience. I did not care that it was 15 pounds a shot. It was worth every single penny. And so that's where I'm sharing the story with you today because I truly believe that when you offer great value, the price really doesn't matter. Nothing is ever too expensive. If you are providing incredible value. And I want to show you on this episode today how you can do that now.
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A couple of clients of mine that I've worked with in the past spring to mind when it comes to high ticket sales, one from one part of their journey and another from a slightly different angle as well. So let's start by talking very quickly about Julie. Julie is amazing. She is a food addiction coach. This is something that we worked on with her because when she first came to me, she was very unsure of her niche, which way she was heading. She knew it was all around nutrition and food, but she didn't quite know how to angle it. And when we really dug into her story and her experiences and her passions, we, we started to realize that heading in the route of becoming a food addiction coach was definitely the right place for her to be. But the biggest thing that was actually weighing on her mind more than anything else was actually charging high prices.
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She'd been taunted by someone close to her, I say taunted that's a sinister word, but they did say you're going to struggle to sell that for 300 pounds. And so she had this mindset around how much she could sell her services for and that if she;s going to struggle to sell at 300 how is she going to survive as a business? And all of these fears were coming up. By the time we'd ended up working together, she'd sold a package for two and a half thousand and that was within two months, if I can remember. ,We Had created this incredible valuable package to the right person with the right problem, who needed her help and she was able to sell it like that. No fuss, literally no bother using her words. They just said, yes, let's do this. There was no convincing needed and before she was struggling and she was convincing and she was trying to drag people through a hedge backwards to get them to buy her products at 300 pounds.
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And the only difference is in how you articulate the value. And that's what I want to come on to to tell you a bit more about in this episode is how to do that, but also how to improve your mindset around your high ticket packages. Another person that comes to mind here is somebody called David Williams who was an amazing client and now turned very, very good friend. He is an international education consultant as well as many other things. He's what I call a proper entrepreneur fingers in all the pies. And he came to me having got some incredible results from a independent school where he goes in and he basically looks at their entire recruitment process for students and re retainment and sees where he could improve it and implements the deliverance of change within that process to retain more students and to get more students on boards so they can, you know, independent schools are a business at the end of the day, as well as being a great educational organization.
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But they needed to have, kids in spaces and they needed to keep them there and in order to keep going, that was extremely important to them. So that's what he does. He goes in there and he'd done this and he charged around 10,000 pounds for this experience before and he just knew that it was worth so much more when he saw the return on investment that that client got, he realized that his services were worth so much more than what he'd had priced it at, and this is the thing, sometimes we have to start somewhere. We have to get that testimonial, that proof that our system works before we can start charging more because this isn't about just charging whatever you like or charging what you think your worth is. This is about charging what your results are worth. And it doesn't always come down to money either, which is what I'll come to talk about in this episode as well.
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But you know, in this instance he was saving them and gaining them a lot of money into their school. And so realizing this, it was important for him to charge what those results were truly worth to them charging for the transformation. And we worked through his packages, the articulation of those packages. We also looked at his process because he was going in and he was delivering a lot of stuff for free and without doing himself of a sale because he was giving so much up front. So we looked at how we could tweak that, how we could look at that sales process. We looked at the articulation of his packages and we put an appropriate price point based upon him having that clarity of, okay, wow. Actually I can see now by presenting it in this way, I can see the true value of what I'm offering and he could have a better and more of an unshakeable confidence around charging what it was truly worth.
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And so these days he's charging 8,000 pounds a month to work with an independent school or education system to do what he does, which is just incredible. So if you're looking to get these kind of similar similar results, whether you're already charging 10,000 pounds or whether you're charging hundreds of pounds, whatever that might be, if you've got the inkling that you know that you need to up your pricing, then I'm so pleased that you're on this episode because I'm going to be sharing some more gold with you, but also do a call in with me to chat how we can make that happen for you. The link is in the show notes. But the link is bibit.ly/claritycallpodcast. You can book that in and we can have a chat around how we can work together to start adding that high ticket income stream into your business.
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So market leaders never apologize for that pricing. They don't apologize. They are charging what some people might consider excessive amounts of money. They charge it because they truly believe in the worth of their product. And it's also been validated as well. People are buying it. And the thing is is that you're not trying to sell to everyone. If you're trying to sell to everybody, you're doing it completely wrong and you will have already found out that it doesn't work, that you're not making the sales that you need to make. It's about finding the right people for your product. Or in fact, let's even turn this on its head. It's about creating the right product for people with a, either a big goal or a big problem because the bigger the goal or the bigger the problem, the more people are willing to pay for it.
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So if we look at an aspirational brand such as Apple, people really love Apple products, they want them. It's really important to them that they have the iPhone to go with the MacBook pro that goes with the AirPods. They love the fact that they all link in together. The fact that they have this incredible design that they have these USP that it gives them this identity of being a creative or someone who is on board with that brand. They love all of that. It's a very big goal and Apple isn't sitting there apologizing that they're charging X amount for whatever. They're unapologetic about it. It is what it is and their market validates that by purchasing it. But there will be people out there who will not pay those prices, who refuse to pay over the odds for their iPhone and they'll find a cheaper model because they don't value the brand as much as the next person.
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They perhaps don't value what that company stands for. They don't value the USP because they're not the right kinds of kind of person. And so it's being very clear on who it is, the people that you are trying to target is extremely important. So it's not about trying to find the person with the most money. It's actually about finding the people with the biggest goals and all the biggest problems. Because I've used Apple as an example because I think sometimes we, we get confused with our business. If we're an aspirational seller, I'm one of those people. I'm an aspirational seller because yes, I do solve problems. And I think it's very important that you still solve problems. If you listen to my previous episode, I talked about how Apple solved a big problem for me by having the Mac operating system within their computer because it makes it faster.
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I still had a problem that I wanted, wanted to fixing so you have to have both. You know, there's gotta be some sort of angle, but you will lean more heavily on one than the other. And so when I'm selling in my business, I massively lean on the aspirational aspect because that's what my client wants, that they want to be a market leader. They want to be somebody who is absolutely killing it in their industry. Who is getting that recognition? Who is being quoted, who are getting invited to the best stages. That's who they are. They have that ambition, but there is a problem getting in the way of them reaching that. And so I have to balance out my aspirational selling by also solving critical problems because they logically need to justify why they're spending a of money with me. And I genuinely believe if you're not solving a problem in your business and you don't have a business, problems are so, so important it to be, to be solving.
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And so find people that if you are somebody who perhaps leans more on the, well, I call it shoot the shark or build a bridge. So the aspirational sellers are building a bridge to the, to success Island. And the shoot, the shark people are helping people who want to get over to that Island. Absolutely. But there's sort a grizzly, horrible shark that's about to bite them and they need to get rid of that shock first before they can start making steps towards it. So you have to look at the type of person you're helping and where are they on their journey? Are they at a critical bleeding neck issue moment they need solving first and foremost before they move forward or is it they want to get somewhere, but there are a lot of hurdles and challenges in the way. So whereabouts are they in the journey?
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Identify that, understand who it is you're serving and that's where you will find the most value that you can help and offer somebody. And that's what you can start charging a higher ticket amount for by finding those kinds of people. So we've talked about people and the types of people that you want to be targeting in order to help them solve those critical problems and those goals. But we also have to offer them something that is going to solve that problem. Now, I'm not going to labor this too much because we talked about it in the previous episode and if you haven't listened to that yet, make sure you go back to do that at this point because this is where having that unique magic bullet, that productized USP is really important because that is the thing that is going to help them achieve their goal.
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Or solve their problem that is unique to your business. There is a one of a kind offer so that you're not positioning yourself as an apples for apples offering your something that is very different that stands out amongst all of your other competitors doing similar things because it doesn't matter how far you niche down, it doesn't matter how targeted you are on your ideal client. There will still be other people out there doing what you do and if they, if there isn't, they will be. Because as soon as that market's identified, there's going to be people jumping on the bandwagon. So you have to find a different route to differentiate yourself other than just trying to find this blue ocean, which really these days just doesn't exist. I started out as what was what I was known as the niching queen, the clarity queen.
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And in my experience over the many years that I've been doing this, most markets are saturated and you're going to find a very hard job to niche yourself and find that market that is completely untapped. I never say never, and I won't say it's impossible, but it's extremely unlikely, there will generally be someone else out there doing the same thing as you. So you need to stand out and you need to show your market that you're the person to buy from and say, we need to take that concrete USP and we need to pull it into all of our products so that they can see that it's that product that they absolutely need, that that product fits them like a glove. I love this analogy because they need to know that you are the specialist in helping people just like them, and so they need to know that the product you're offering is meant for somebody like that because you know how many times I've heard both from feedback from my clients and myself in the past where people are like, ''this sounds great, but I'm just not sure whether it's for me.''
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You need to make sure that you're articulating these offers in a way that helps them see that it is for people just like them, that it solves their specific problem. It helps them achieve their specific goal that they want and that you have that formula to help them do it. Now again, we can have this resistance to the word formulas, but when it comes to creating packages and programs, it's important that people know that you've got a roadmap because whilst people buy emotionally, first off, they also require the logical reasoning behind why they're going to give you that money. Because you have to have both. This isn't just about one or the other. You've got to have both. You've got to have that emotional connection. With that, the fact that you get and understand the situation, whether that's, you know, to solving a problem or aspiration, they, they also need to know that you've got that roadmap that's been proven before to get people to the, to the result that they want so that they have that trust and that you have that credibility.
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So we do have to be smart when it comes to creating our products and we have to lay it out in a way, not only to them, but to ourselves to really truly see the value of it. Because obviously the next stage then is looking at how much are we going to price this? Now we have to look at the transformation. There's a few things that we look at when we're looking at pricing that particular product. We have to look at, okay, so absolutely how much delivery am I going to be giving on this both during delivery of the service, both before, perhaps in preparation. Any extra support that you're giving after or any added support that you're offering during the, the, the core of the delivery, you do have to look at the amount of time and energy spent with that person.
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This isn't about creating an hourly rate here. We are moving away from that. We want to be charging for the transformation, but we still absolutely have to keep it into account, take it into account the amount of time and energy that we're spending with these clients. Once we've looked at that, we also need to know, okay, so what is the result? What is that transformation that we're giving them? And then what is the impact of that transformation? How far does that go? How, how is that impacting their relationships? Then finances, their mindsets, their confidence. You know, it's not all about the money. You know, health coaches and weight loss coaches are making an awful lot of money out there and the return on investment isn't money. It's about having that, you know, whether it's to do with getting their life back because that's that critical that they need to change something and their life in order to live longer, which is extremely critical and people will pay for because they want to stay alive and they want to be healthy or they'll pay for it because they want the body of their dreams.
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You know the, it doesn't always have to be a monetary return on investment. That's really important for me to make that point because so many people in different industries get stuck. They go, well you're making a ton of money because you're a business coach and you're making, you know you're helping people make a lot of money. It's not necessarily about that. My ideal client absolutely is hiring me based upon that return on investment. Cause they want to know that they're going to make more money in their business. 100% but you know, we're not all serving entrepreneurs and all serving that particular market. So it's important to identify who we're working with and to really understand what, what makes them tick. What are the buttons that we have to push, what's important to them? What do they value the most at the moment? Why would they spend you know, a high ticket price point without batting an eyelid.
(22:09):
What is it that we have to tap into? So we have to look at the full impact on their entire life, not just the immediate result that they want, whether that's the body of their dreams or whether it's the, the, the business that's, that's turning over a lot more money, whatever that might be. We then have to look at, okay, so how is that affecting and impacting the rest of the areas of their life? There we can see a true value of, what it is and the impact that we that we're offering. So yeah we have to take into account that we have take into account the transformation. We have to take into account how much energy and time we're spending with them. Then we could perhaps think about what else is added into the offering - is it a luxury offering?
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High ticket doesn't always have to be about luxury, but let's take my Intercontinental experience for example. It was a luxury experience, it was high end. And so I'm on top of all of that. I'm perhaps delivering the service in a particular way that creates that luxury experience. People will pay more for that. So you have to look at the entire package of what you're offering both in time, energy, results and experience. All of those things are very, very important. And then we can also look at, in terms of building this high value mindset, which I believe is really, really important because you have to feel, feel the value of what you're offering before the market will see the value. So we have to look at, okay, so what is the consequences of not taking this offer? If most the impact, if they choose not to, what are they leaving on the table?
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What is going to get worse or even worse, what is going to stay exactly the same if they don't start taking action on doing something about it with us going for the goal or solving the problem and they you can dig even further into the amount of value. What's the, what's the consequence of them not having you in their lives? So you have to be very clear about what you're delivering and the impact that you have on somebody's business, life, health, finances, whatever that might be. You really have to look at that value first and foremost for yourself so you can confidently price because there's no point charging based upon what other people charge because a, you don't know how they got to that price in the first place and you're benchmarking yourself against somebody who perhaps isn't charging their worth or is potentially something that's very dangerous that's happening in the industry at the moment.
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People who are charging way over what they should and leaving very unsatisfied customers. You have to, in order to Mark benchmark against just against somebody else. You have to know that person's mindset. You have to know exactly what they're delivering in order for you to make that judgment call. So my advice is don't be benchmarking yourself against anybody else. You have this unique offering. Benchmark it against what you truly believe it to be worth, cause you have to feel comfortable with it because if you're not comfortable with it, it's going to show in every pore of your body when you're trying to sell it and they're going to capture and they're going to know something's up, whether that's the price or not, whether they think you're nervous about the price, they might also think that you're nervous about delivering. They don't know. They're not a mind reader, but they just, they know something's not quite right.
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So you've got to be comfortable with that. So you know when it comes to raising your prices, sometimes it's about raising your prices in stages, which is what we did with David Williams. It wasn't about going right. Okay, well I think you should be charging this. So you're going to charge, this is what are you comfortable after seeing all the hard evidence around what you're delivering, you know, and the impact of that and the transformation, the time and effort that you're putting into it. What do you feel it's worth? And let's start there. And then once you build your confidence and once you've sold at that price point, it's just about taking those steps to raise it again and again and again. And you know, this process is almost, I would say never ending because at the end of the day that the longer you've been doing something, yes, it's not the USP that people are after, but your skill level and experience and your confidence in what you do rises and you get better at it.
(26:24):
And so therefore your prices should be going up. Or you should be creating different products at different price points that are all raised in ratio, in comparison to each other so that you are delivering for what you're truly worth and you're, you're not undercharging where you should be charging more. Which now brings me on to my last point around building this high value mindset. So, so far around this, we've talked around the three PS and we've got a fourth one coming up. But just to recap, so we've talked about people, about the type of people we need to be targeting. It's not necessarily people with the most money, but it's the people with the most critical goals and the most critical problems we've looked at your product. So how can we create something that's utterly unique but delivers something incredibly powerful that we articulate that value to the client, that they shows them that return on investment, on what they're going to be giving in, and the fact that they're not going to find this anywhere else.
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We've also looked at pricing, so how you can start to look at how you're going to price something. The fact we're not going to benchmark it against anybody else. We need to be confident in that price point, but we need to be pricing with all of the cards on the table because at the end of the day, if you're delivering something truly unique that cannot be compared to anybody else, which is the goal that you're after here, something that really packs a punch that adds incredible value, that solves a really big problem and solves a really big goal but is also entirely unique. You know, the expense really doesn't even come into it because you're willing to pay for that. You're willing to pay for that specialist that helps people specifically like them that is delivering this unique solution, this new and fresh way of working. That price doesn't really come into it.
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People are willing to find money to pay for something like that, to pay somebody like that. Which brings me on to that fourth P, which is personal expertise and you really have to own that. And sometimes by going through the process of the first three P's can actually really help it because we get hung up on what we are worth as a person. And there's all sorts of other crazy things that start pulling into the, into the, into the park when we start looking at that. But when we look at, okay, so extracting all of my accidents and putting it into this program or product, I can absolutely see that this is, this is delivering incredible value and that whether I'm delivering it or whether someone else is delivering it, as long as we're delivering on the promise, does it really matter who? And sometimes actually by removing yourself from the situation, you can have a greater understanding and a greater view of what you're offering and what you're putting on the table for that prospect.
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So you do have to take into account that person experience. Like I said, the more you're doing this, the more experience you have, the more weight you have behind you. You know, the more specialist and an expert you are in delivering it, the more you should be charging. So if you can grasp these four P's and create this high value mindset around your entire business, it will transform not only the amount of money that you bring in, but it will transform the desirability of what you're offering. You will start positioning yourself at that market leader level and you will start to see your confidence in what you're offering and how you offer it and your positioning within the market. It will go through the roof, so make sure you take this into 2020 with that focus on creating that high value mindset around all of those four key areas.
(30:23):
You're going to catapult yourself into market leader position, which I'm very excited for you today, so I hope you enjoyed this episode and the previous one. Please make sure you hit subscribe on the podcast so that you don't miss another episode and please do. If you have enjoyed these last couple of episodes, please do leave me a review. I would be eternally grateful and again, any aha moments. Hit me up at Jen@jen-hall.com , that will be in the show notes that you can go and click on my email. I love hearing from you guys, so if there's anything that you want to mention or ask, or even if you have a question that you want to ask around this topic, becoming a market leader, becoming the number one choice in the market, then please do let me know by email and I'll be more than happy to potentially record an episode around your question and remember, if you would like to talk to me about how you can start creating a high ticket income stream into your business, or even if it's just raising your prices, then do you make sure you book in a call with me at bit.ly/claritycallpodcast
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I will see you in the next episode