Today I want to share with you a few reasons why you’ve struggled with charging high ticket prices and give you specific strategies and tactics to change that! Now, I love talking about this topic because there are specific strategies, tips, and tactics that are all helpful, and we’re going to dive into quite a few of those today.
The first one I want to share will be kind of surprising because it has almost nothing to do with you. You need to make sure that you adjust your net to the size of fish that you want to create. That means just because someone books a discovery call doesn’t mean they’re gonna be a good fit. In fact, what I recommend is, first and foremost, adjusting your application before someone ever gets a discovery call so that you can learn about their brand and find out some vital information, such as do they have realistic goals for growth? Do they have funding? Is this going to be a sustainable client?
You don’t want someone who’s making, let’s say, $20,000 a year to walk into a Maserati dealership because chances are it’s just not ever going to make sense. Similarly, don’t put your high ticket pricing in front of audiences that can’t afford you. Now, this is an interesting insight. And I could nerd out, really, for a long time here. But generally speaking, I’ve found that almost no client making under $500,000 per year in revenue can afford high-ticket services from a freelancer, so you’ll want to have questions on your application that filter those out.
Now, this is not a knock on any startup businesses. This is more a reflection on what my experience has been and what other similar business owners’ experiences have been. Most business owners are not mature enough business owners to recognize the cash flow that goes into hiring a high-ticket Freelancer. What that means for you is that if someone’s making less than seven figures, you don’t necessarily want to be surprised when they say this is out of our budget or that we can’t necessarily afford it. It’s actually part of why we moved into eight to 10-figure businesses because I don’t want to put my pricing in front of a business owner who can’t afford it. The last thing I need is to hear “you’re overpriced,” or “that costs too much,” or whatever. Honestly, just don’t put it in for them. So the simplest way to avoid that is by adjusting your net, i.e., putting an application before the discovery call so that you know what their revenue looks like before you hop on a call.
You don’t want to waste your time. You also don’t want the listeners either, which is the second big thing I’m going to share with you, which is huge. How you show up is going to be a massive factor in whether or not you’re going to be able to secure clients at high ticket rates. One is obvious, and don’t dismiss this. I used to roll my eyes hearing this and then ignore it. A high ticket mindset means you have to be comfortable with the idea that you can’t price your services out of your own wallet.
If you didn’t grow up around people making a lot of money, if you didn’t grow up around business owners, if you didn’t grow up with people investing in development, it could sometimes be kind of hard to get into that mindset and say “I’m totally comfortable with this.” If you’re anything like me, you did not grow up in a place where there were millionaires. If you were making six figures, you didn’t live in the neighborhood I grew up in. I grew up in, generally speaking, a pretty dangerous area. Some people know what neighborhood that is. Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Not always dangerous, but specifically on the street I grew up on, there were meth dens in the neighborhood. There were sometimes murders in our neighborhood and some different things that were really traumatic. Wealth is not something that I was used to. So I had to understand that there’s a whole other world where people know what it’s like to have money, and they make their decisions differently, and they think about calculating risk and cash flow and profit and growth, which were totally new concepts for me.
So this is going to blow your mind you ready for it? In case you need to uplevel your understanding of how many people are out there who genuinely have the wealth to invest in high-ticket services. There are 56 million millionaires in the world. 56 million millionaires. In fact, there are over 20 million millionaires in the United States alone. And whenever I hear that it helps me to understand that there are thought processes and decision makers who have just a different set of goals, results, and expectations than what I grew up around. And if you’re anything like me, it’s really helpful to understand that and get around those people so that you can see that some people invest in their growth and revenue. They don’t just make decisions based on how they will put food on the table on Friday. Learning that has been a valuable part of this process.
But the second side of this is how you show up in terms of certainty. Now, I could talk about this a lot because people often think that you have to be confident to charge high ticket prices, but the truth is, it is not until you have closed many high ticket clients that you’re like, “it’s a breeze. I’ve got it. I know how to serve these people. This is totally in my skill set.” There’s a book by Dan Sullivan called Confidence Comes Last, which talks about how the first thing you must do is have courage. And that means courage when people say no. That means courage when people say that price is too high. That means courage when you start to doubt. It doesn’t mean you’re confident.
But there’s one thing that you can bring with courage that is going to say to a business owner. “Hey, listen, I care,” and that is certainty. Certainty is a beautiful thing that you can tap into before you know everything. It’s not to be confused with know-how. I see many people with the know-how, but they waffle when it comes time to make decisions. They know a lot, but they doubt themselves, and that doubt trickles into every step of their sales process. Doubt is super contagious. So if you’re bringing tons of doubt to your discovery calls and making business owners feel like there is doubt from them or doubt from you. They’re not quite sure, and it just doesn’t feel right.
Certainty is the ability to say, for example, if someone says I need you to do X, Y, and Z, and you don’t know how to do it, certainty comes in and says, “I can learn anything.” Absolute game changer! So certainty is, “I’m going to find the best path for you. I’m going to implement the best strategies for you. I am going to do my best.” Certainty is just this level of determination and persistence that sometimes can be confused with competence.
I would say I’m pretty confident in this season of life in business, but there have been a lot of seasons of life in business where I have not been super confident. And certainty was an excellent stop-gap for me. So certainty is something anyone can bring to the table whether or not you are competent in your skill set. So certainty is enormous.
Next, I want to share some of these tactics, strategies and buying sets that are super helpful. Here’s one big one. Suppose you are sending emails, especially emails with proposals to your prospective clients, from kittykittysnottysnotty69@yahoo.com. In that case, that’s a pretty good indication that you will not be someone who’s a high ticket provider, whether or not that’s based on reality. Perception is reality. So if you can show up with a semi-professional or clear-looking email address, it helps because the clients are not going to say, “Oh, I was thinking about considering this person, but their email is out there, like, do they not care about perception at all?” This is a perception-based world. You have to understand the game you’re playing to win. Once you realize that, it’s not just about perception; you see how you can play beyond the game of perception. I hope that that resonates with those who needed to hear that today. So first and foremost, I like to understand the game, and then I kind of like to move beyond it.
Often, people will send over pricing sheets when clients ask. Don’t do that! Don’t do that! If you were to email your doctor asking for a random prescription, they’re going to say, “No way, Jose, you need to come in.” Because the truth is you rely on an expert, a doctor, a sommelier, or an interior designer. They are not the same thing as an order taker or a cashier. Now real fast, no hate or anything! I used to be a server and worked as a cashier too. Those jobs can sometimes be relatively simple because people walk up they show you exactly what they want to get, and then you can go ahead and ring up their order. As a sommelier, a doctor, or an interior designer, clients don’t just come in and say, “I want this or that.” Instead, they are coming in for that person’s expertise. So that expert should be asking a ton of questions. They barely talk about themselves.
When I was a hairstylist, I found that my clients didn’t care about me at first. And that’s important to share a lot of people would try to impress their clients by talking about different things. In fact, here’s a little fun tangent. I used to know a fellow hairstylist who would be Republican with their first client, Democratic with their second client, and Libertarian with their third client of the day. They’d constantly be shifting their beliefs in conversation (which is not the same as shifting based on perception). That is being inauthentic to win people over. But the truth is, I found that most of my clients didn’t care about me at first. What they cared about was that I listened and took the time to understand them. And what’s cool is I’m actually Facebook friends and social media friends with a ton of my clients from back in the day, and we all still root for each other, which is really cool. But that wasn’t developed because I tried to win them over. That was created because I first and foremost authentically cared about their problems and pain points and then helped find solutions that actually met their needs and fixed and solved their problems. And that’s when clients started to care about me.
If you are talking more than five, maybe 10% of the sales call. This isn’t about you. This is about their experience, as crazy as that sounds. Create social media content if you want your voice to be heard. That’s harsh, so I’m going to say it exactly as I want to because I’m going to be honest, you guys, I’m 32 at this point. I feel like I might as well be 42 or 52; I don’t have time to soften everything all the time, so I’m just going to go for it. A sales call is your time to shut up. It’s their time to talk.
High ticket service providers understand that business owners feel alone. Everyone is talking to them, trying to impress them, especially when they’re venting about their pain and problems. If you can get them to share their pain and problems, you have the best chance to be the high-ticket service provider they need simply because you listened.
When prospective clients have the opportunity to feel like someone’s genuinely caring about them. They say, “I want more of this—no one’s listening to me. I’m tired. My team is running the show. I have no safe place to share that. I feel inadequate because I don’t have enough followers on Instagram. I’m not going to ask my friends. All my friends are crushing it. My mastermind isn’t a safe place to be vulnerable because everyone there is winning. And that’s my client base.” So many things come up when we actually shut up and listen. That can be so helpful.
I get emotional when I talk about this because the number of business owners I’ve connected with who feel so alone has helped me to slow down and say,
“ This is your safe space right now. You get to vent here. And what’s going to happen is I’m going to ask you a series of guided questions and uncover as many different things as possible. So you throw me your problems, your pain points, and I’m going to turn it into an incredible resource system or strategy.”
I’m going to say you’re probably used to these kinds of calls where people will talk about themselves and tell you why they’re fantastic. I will not do that because I’m not here to convince you of anything. I’m not here to tell you all the reasons why. I’m asking about you because if you want to know about me, you can Google it. Honestly, I would rather hear about you and uncover some of the pain or the problems you’re experiencing and come up with solutions. And I just go off and just take notes and ask a series of questions as we go. I also recommend that you don’t share your pricing on the call. Let it be a little vent sesh. That is an absolute game changer not because you’re trauma bonding, but instead because you can take all of those problems and ultimately create solutions like real systems strategies that make them say, “this is the first time in running my business for five years I actually feel listened to.”
I like to actually take one to two days and craft a customized proposal for them. Send it over with a video that kind of breaks down precisely my process for that, and then present it to them via email. And I find that putting that time and intention into everything you do is a game changer with high-ticket clients.
The next big thing is we’ve crafted a specific three-tiered proposal that helps stretch people’s imagination and make them (and you) see what’s possible. All it took was someone taking my high ticket package, and then I realized, “Oh, this is just where we’re going to be now.” No matter how desperate I am, there will never be $150 for social media. There will never be $500 a month for social media management. And so you have to first and foremost create the belief for yourself, and it will take some tries, and you will miss, and it won’t always go according to plan. But once you get the breakthrough, you say this is what I want. All it takes is working with one dream high-ticket client, and you say this is what I want to work with for the rest of forever. So it’s interesting because many people will charge you for many courses that are a lot less valuable than these simple strategies and tactics.
I love focusing everything on the relationship and the psychology of the relationship versus tricking, urgency, scarcity, FOMO, or high-pressure sales, like if anyone recommends all those things. Not that there’s anything wrong with scarcity and urgency when used ethically. But if anyone tries to tell you like those are the secrets to high ticket clients, guess what they’re doing to you right now? The truth is, it’s not some funnel. It’s not some Facebook ad. It’s not some email sequence. I bought all those things. I’ve spent way more than I even care to admit trying to chase those things. When the truth is, this stuff happens first and foremost in my brain and my mindset. Then in my ability to listen and articulate how to fix the problems for that business owner. If you’d like to tap into it, we have an entire program inside the Social Clique called High-Ticket Client Secret. If you enjoyed this, you would love that. Go to Cliqueforlife.com
Bye for now.
Check out this Youtube video on this topic!
