After Your High Ticket Offer . . . Then What??

I started selling info products online in the mid 90s. I developed a system that I began to teach people in my seminars, workshops and bootcamps. 

The concept was simple. Get people to buy an inexpensive "front end" product, and then put them into a follow up sequence to upsell them to higher-priced products going forward. 

In those days, it worked. 

I've now abandoned that approach. In fact, I do the complete opposite–with great results.  

Here's a real life example:

One of my clients, Bill DeWees, is a voice over artist. We use Facebook ads to set up “discovery” calls (let’s call them what they are…sales calls).

[SIDE NOTE: When I use the word "client" to describe Bill, that's not entirely accurate. Any and all of my clients are actually JV partners. I am a 50-50 partner in the info product side of their business.]

On the aforementioned discovery calls, my goal is to get people to invest in a $5,000 program.

The $5k offer consists of 3 components: 

1. 70+ Hours of Online Audio/Video training 
2. Access to a variety of live Weekly Webinars - recorded for future viewing
3. Membership in a closed Facebook group where they can ask Bill questions and watch him "do his thing" in real time.

On that initial call, for every one person who buys the 5K package, there are 75 who don’t. The rest remain on our list. They are presented with valuable content four times a week: short videos that we put up on YouTube. People remain on our list for this valuable content. They continue to hear about our 5K product fairly often.   

Twice a year, all of the non-buyers are given a really incredible offer–once on Black Friday and once in the early Spring.

In both of those, we pitch two options. One, the Blueprint Core, costs $147 and the other, our Core Plus, is $397. Both of these are just a small slice of what the $5k offer includes.

These offers appear (and actually are) really a great value to our customers. When someone purchases either Core or Core Plus, they are then presented with a one-time-offer to upgrade to a 120-day trial of the "full" VO Blueprint. They can either pay $997 or 3 payments of $350 each. 

Every buyer, regardless of what they purchase, is told that they can upgrade to any of the more expensive offers at any time . . . and they only pay the difference in price. This becomes a huge selling point for those people who trade up to the higher-priced products that we sell. Many start with the lower priced seasonal offers and trade up to the full VO Blueprint after seeing the quality of the content we offer. I often talk to people who are ready to purchase our 5K offer that have been on our list for a year or more.  

Another important aspect of this process is recouping the cost of advertising for the discovery calls. Bill and I have been using Facebook ads for this process for over 3 years. We've learned that it's important to try and liquidate the cost of that advertising as quickly as possible. If not, the ads are simply unaffordable.   

Example: Any amount of money we spend monthly in Facebook ads, we want to try and recoup that investment within 90 days (preferably less). The traditional way to do this has been to sell a trip-wire for under $10. Making people an irresistible offer, of great value, to help to immediately recoup at least some, if not all of the advertising cost.

Using a trip-wire does help defray the cost of advertising, but our Spring Fever and Black Friday sales have proven to be even MORE effective.

As you can see from the attached picture, we generated over $62k in our most recent Black Friday sale. Given that our total Facebook ad spend for the year was around $38k, this 8 day sale generated almost double what we paid for ads for the entire year. 

Every sale made via the discovery call was pure profit!

As was every additional dollar made from our "Spring Fever" sale.

People who are on our list are constantly being solicited to get on the phone for the $5k offer. The non-buyers know and understand the offer and the price–and over time, they begin to appreciate the value.

When these same non-buyers are given an opportunity to purchase a piece of our Blueprint, many jump at the chance. In both cases, we tease the offer for 7-10 days before we open it up. This year we extended the offer for 24 hours at the very end, extending it through Cyber Monday. This allowed us to generate an additional $4337 on that one additional day.

If you're selling a high ticket service of some sort, I highly recommend the strategies outlined above. There are inevitably some significant time and dollar costs involved in delivering on your high ticket offer. On the flip side, the sale of these smaller “slice of the larger package” info products have virtually no cost to fulfill.

So what are the lessons?

First, create a high-quality, high-priced info product to sell. Second, create offers 2 or 3 times a year at and sell them at a significantly lower price point than your core high ticket offer. Third, use the revenue to offset the dollars you are spending on advertising your high ticket offer. 

I love making $5k sales for our core offer. But more than that, I enjoy the biannual cash flow surge we get from the system described above.

When you implement this or a similar system, please let me know how it goes!