316: The Art of High Ticket Sales

Ever feel like selling your premium offers turns you into that pushy salesperson you never wanted to be? We get it.

That's why in this episode, we're sharing our personal journey of learning to sell high-ticket offers in a way that feels natural and authentic.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How to create genuine connections that make clients excited to invest in your premium offers
• Simple ways to craft offers that match what your ideal clients are looking for
• How to communicate the true worth of your premium services (without feeling like you're bragging)
• Our approach to delivering the kind of results that justify premium pricing

If you've been hesitating to charge what you're worth or struggling to close high-ticket sales, this episode is your permission slip to sell differently. We'll show you how to attract premium clients while staying true to yourself.

You'll learn:

• Why your offer needs to be rock-solid before you focus on selling
• The power of using your own products (and why it builds instant credibility)
• Our favorite ways to create trust with high-ticket clients
• The mindset shifts that make charging premium prices feel natural
• How to deeply understand what your clients want

Master the art of premium sales when you join the Lucrative Business Mastermind, starting in January. Seats are limited, so apply today!

Learn more and apply for the mastermind here

Full transcript:

Steve Haase  0:00  
Welcome to the Superabound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where vision-led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing well being. You are listening to episode 316 the art of high ticket sales. Welcome everybody. We're excited to be here today. The conversation is about converting great clients who will pay you a premium without being salesy, cheesy, sleazy or otherwise giving up on your vision. It is possible. We've learned how to do it. We help our clients do it, and we're going to share some of our secrets today.

Erin Aquin  0:39  
And I just want to start because I always get a little bit of the ickies when we talk about this, or the if you will, because I think there are so many people out there that really do this from kind of a scammy place. They're like, we're going to teach you how to manipulate people into paying more for your like, crappy offer. That is not what we are talking about. We are not talking about psychological manipulation or any of that sort of nonsense. We are actually talking about creating something that is really going to deeply help your ideal or premium clients and making sure that you are backing that up at every stage along the way. So we teach a process called relationship based sales. It is something that is going to be a major theme of our upcoming lucrative Lifestyle Business Mastermind. And one of the features of that we're going to get into it a little a little bit more, but one of the features of that is, before we talk about the selling and the art of the selling, you have to really have something that you are standing behind. You have to actually have an offer that you know is going to be effective. It is not enough to be a great salesperson and then have shitty delivery. So I'm not I'm not scolding anybody, but I just want to say that if you're going to sell something that is a high ticket offer. It has to work. It has to be functional. It has to be well planned and well thought through. I'm going to just speak to the coaching industry for a second, even though we have clients across many industries. So many people focus too much of their resources on becoming really great at marketing and really great at sales, and they don't focus enough of their time attention and energy on delivering an incredible product and incredible service. So we're talking about sales, yes, but I always want to bring in the complexity that this is for you. If you have something that you know is amazing, you know it is effective, you know it's wonderful. People are raving about it. And you want to really work with those higher ticket types of offers, those premium clients. This is what we are talking about. This is who we are talking to. You're here trying to get a scammy

Steve Haase  3:27  
tip, no scammy tips, no

Erin Aquin  3:29  
scammy tips. Sorry, you have to have something that is worth beyond the price that you are charging for it.

Steve Haase  3:38  
Sorry, you open up so many good points. A

Erin Aquin  3:40  
lot of coffee today. I'm gonna drink some more. I want

Steve Haase  3:43  
to pull on all those threads, but the one I'm gonna focus on is that it works. And the best way for you to know that it works and really share with the world that it works is to use it yourself. So if you are a PR company, use your process to get your name out there. If you are a software company, have a business using that same software. So you can see, oh my god, this thing is amazing, or this thing really needs some tweaks, and here's what I'm going to do about it. The best companies have the user experience right there in the middle. It's not out there trying to be foisted upon the unwitting masses. It's actually at the heart of why the company exists. The gross term for it is dog fooding. You're like, I'm gonna eat my own dog food. I'm gonna drink my own champagne. So we drink your own champagne, the thing you make needs to become the product that everyone at the company is living and breathing, because that's how the best selling happens. It's not through convincing. It's through experience. It's through a heart to heart connection. Of you or your people, connecting with your ideal customer.

Erin Aquin  5:05  
So good, so good. Okay, so high ticket sales is a different process than you know, slapping together a a landing page for a product or your service, and having a Buy Now button very often, because the investment is more you have to do the work of building a relationship with your potential customer. And I think that a lot of people find this very daunting. This is why a lot of people try to build, you know, high ticket offer businesses and don't really follow through. Is because sometimes those relationships have to form over a long period of time. We've had experiences with our ourselves and with our clients where, you know we have posted something and someone we've never met bought our highest ticket offer thing. But very often it is after a long period of time where people can kind of check you out. They know if they trust you as a consumer, I have never jumped in and bought something that was $10,000 without really carefully following someone's free offers with maybe buying a few of their lower ticket items, maybe something that's a couple $100 or a couple $1,000 I've never just heard someone speak online and then say, Here, let me just punch in my credit card for 10 grand or more. That is not how high ticket sales typically works. And so the very first thing I think we well, I mean, this is what we focus on with our own business. Of course, we do use our own tools, and we focus on this with our clients. Is creating a space within your business, within your marketing, within your sales process, that is safe, that creates trust between you and that future person, and that doesn't have to be one on one. That can be with how you market for us like, you know, I'll just use our business as the example. You know, we have a over three what is this episode? 316 316 episodes of a ever evolving podcast that we've changed a number of times, a best selling book, courses that people have have bought, and that to someone coming into to our world for the First time says, Hey, we are actually real people. We didn't just spin up a business yesterday. We have a consistent track record of showing up over and over and over again. And so what does that look like for you in your business? Maybe your business is newer. Maybe you've been around for a while. How are you showing up and creating safety and trust between you and that potential client, someone paying 100 bucks for something that maybe doesn't need that same level of trust as someone paying 10 or 20,000

Steve Haase  8:35  
you know, I'm going to even push back on that, oh, even at A smaller ticket item? Yes, I bought something yesterday that was 40 bucks. Do you know what I clicked on after I got to the product listing? What did I click on? Confused the stars. Okay, what's wrong with this, what's good with this, what do people like me have to say about this? We are always looking for trust signals out there. And so the more you can create those for your product, the better off you'll be and and many of our sales that have come from people that we haven't known for years and years have come from people who were recommended by people who have known us for years and years. So they have that trust, and they have that trust with somebody else, and so then there's that word of mouth, but really what we're talking about is the transference of trust to create that relationship in a much quicker fashion.

Erin Aquin  9:32  
And the best way to do that, to create that trust is to show up consistently, and is to deliver what you promised to deliver. It's not much more complicated than

Steve Haase  9:46  
that, but it's not easy.

Erin Aquin  9:47  
It's not easy, but it's not more complicated. Yeah, I think what happens is a lot of people think, okay, if I want to next year, increase my offers to be 10s of 1000s. Of dollars if I want to start working with premium clients, that means, oh, you're saying, I have to go start a podcast and make 300 episodes of it, not necessarily. We have an example of one of our clients who has, she has a monthly membership primary, primarily primarily as her main business, and she wanted to evolve into higher ticket, one on one, kind of retreat style offerings. She didn't need to go and start a podcast to do that. She already had built so much trust with a base of her clients, and she's so consistent with social media, people can see her beautiful work all over the place. They know her. They know her reputation. They know people who are in her program. So all she had to do to get her very first sale was send an email, post it. Actually, I think she might have posted it on social media, and got $10,000 plus clients from that posting,

Steve Haase  11:07  
which gets to, I think, a fundamental point of this topic, to make high ticket sales, you have to be bold enough to ask for A high ticket sale. When I was working at a software company, there was a time when their highest price tier was $200 and we came in and the mandate was, create something for the enterprise. And they were like, Okay, we're going to charge 10 times as much and offer access to a person on the phone. And internally, there were so many people whose, you know, hair caught on fire. They're like, this is impossible. This is against the values of the company. But the people who were building it said, No enterprise will think that we're serious. Charging what we charge. You have to charge more to show people that you're serious. And so there's a whole psychological element of selling that you need to embrace if you want to really thrive with high ticket sales. It's not about tricking people or or, you know, selling them something that's more expensive than than it needs to be. It literally is stepping into that relationship of a premium consumer receiving a premium product. There are so like, there's no such thing as a fixed price. Everything is made up by the market. It's made up by humans. And so if you have in your mind, well, this product only costs this much, then you need to find ways to break out of that box, because that belief is what's preventing you from thriving with high ticket sales. It might be one of the things that we do is we will add additional courses. We'll add additional resources or channels to work with us, so that it's not like, oh, it's the same old thing. We're just charging a whole lot more. It's no this is actually a premium package, and that enables us to step into our strength for selling something that is a higher ticket than many others in our space. Do,

Erin Aquin  13:13  
yeah, that. I mean, that's such a good point. The the kind of the back end for the high ticket offer is also thinking about, especially if we'll talk to the service providers for a second. You know, if you are charging for your time with someone, one of the things we did when we sort of shifted our prices in the last couple of years is I stopped working with about half of the number of VIP clients that I was because I felt like, Okay, people are coming in. They are paying a lot more, and they're paying more not just for my coaching skills. They're not paying me for a set of coaching skills that they could go out and find anywhere else. They are paying me for my specific Superabound, our specific you're there too, our specific Superabound, methodology, those tools, plus something unique maybe to us as coaches, is that we do a lot of thinking. Partnership. We have clients who will bring us an idea for a course, a product, a program. We will help them work that out. We'll help them get the marketing together for that, we will kind of be thinking partners as though we were there, their chief marketing officer with them for a day. So we do this kind of work, and I know for me, I'm almost 42 I can't do that at a high level for five hours a day. I cannot give what is in integrity for me, if I am just one. After the other kind of treating my clients like they are existing on a conveyor belt and I'm just there. I need more space. I need time. I need to actually practice what I teach so that the thing I offer has value. And so for a lot of folks who feel like they are so overworked and they're thinking, Okay, I need to actually raise my rates. I need to come up with some high ticket offers, because I'm just so burnt out. I would say that's the probably, maybe going to sound weird coming from me, who thinks that self care is the best thing ever, and I really am an advocate for it, but I think it's a terrible reason to change your prices. I think it's a terrible reason to concoct a new offer, because what happens is you just double your price on something so that you're making more money, and there is not necessarily added value for the client. With high ticket sales, you have to have something that backs up what you are doing. So maybe it's going to get another certification that's going to bring you into a new realm. Maybe it is expanding your offering. Maybe it is doing something that's unique that they cannot find somewhere else within your field or your industry, then it makes sense to have a high ticket offer. But if you're just doubling your rates, just for fun or just because you're tired and you want to make more money, it's, it's, it's, I guess it's okay, it's an okay reason, but it's not the best reason, and it's going to lose that aspect of effectiveness.

Speaker 1  16:43  
So let's quickly just talk about relationship based sales. Wrap up for today.

Steve Haase  16:47  
So the foundation of relationship based sales, as we teach it, is the acronym sale, s, a, l, e, as in Cha Ching, and that stands for safety. We've been talking a lot about that in terms of the trust that you create, the presence that you have, the fact that people can relate to you over time, and you have that relationship. So their safety a is alignment, and this relates to how well do you know your target customer, your ideal customer, if you are really tuned into their needs, their desires, their pain, then what you're talking about and the offers that you make will be aligned for

Erin Aquin  17:29  
what they want and what they need now that the now is really important. You just want to add that, yeah, they have to want it. They have to need it. They have to want and need it now. And one way of creating alignment that I'll just I'll give you, I'll give you, one of our ways of doing it is with our high ticket offer, which is one on one coaching. We now give people kind of a taster package, so we charge $1,000 someone can work with us a few times, get a sense of what the coaching relationship could be, and then if it feels like a fit, if it feels aligned to them, then we move into our deeper buy ticket package. If it doesn't, then, you know, they spent $1,000 they got some tools. They learned a couple things, but they didn't have to take a big risk and commit a bunch of money and a bunch of time to find out that it wasn't exactly the right fit.

Steve Haase  18:34  
Beautifully said, L is lucrative, and that stands for lucrative for your customer, the person who is going to be buying needs to see that what they get from that sale is worth far more than what they're going to pay. And you can show this through case studies, through testimonials. You can even just show it through helping them walk through the math in their mind, giving them a taste of the future with your product in their life will give them a glimpse to how lucrative it can be, and that needs to be way higher than what you charge. And so, you know, we do business coaching one on one, coaching for leaders. These are people who are responsible for multi 100 1000s of dollars, or millions, multi millions of revenue, paying $15,000 for a six month engagement might sound like a lot if you're, you know, not a business owner, but if you are responsible for that kind of revenue, it's going to make a lot of sense if You see the benefit to that engagement.

Erin Aquin  19:41  
And then finally, we have talked about this. We started with it. It has to be effective. If you are trying to sell something because it sounds good and you're trying to put a big price tag on it, just because you want to see if you can, it's probably not going to be the most visionary. Experience for you or for your clients, and it will cause more headaches in your business. This is something that we are really going to be helping our clients in our mastermind go through really craft and create, because high ticket sales are amazing. Premium clients wonderful. This is how you can also build a lucrative lifestyle business that sustains you and helps a lot of people for the long term. So if you're interested in learning more, we still have a few spots available. You can apply for that lucrative Lifestyle Business Mastermind. It is not a high ticket offer in our business. It is a mid tier offer. It is a $5,000 US for four months of small group support, where you will learn about AI, how to use that as a thinking partner and a system creation partner in your business. You will learn about relationship based sales, and you will learn the Superabound tools that will take you from where you are today to your next lantern. Go

Steve Haase  21:06  
ahead and learn about the mastermind and apply if that seems like a fit for what you want to do starting out the new year that's at besuperabound.com/mastermind, we'll see you there. Take care. Bye.