Mapping out your Value Ladder is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business – or for your clients’ businesses if you are a marketer like me!
A Value Ladder is like a roadmap that connects all the different products and services you offer, in a way that makes it easier to see how to make more money in your business.
Think of a literal ladder, or staircase, where each step represents something you sell to your customers. It starts with the smaller or cheaper offers and provides a clear path to guide people to your bigger, pricier offers, where you can do your most for them!
The idea is that as your people ascend your value ladder, they receive even more value from you. With each rung climbed, you can serve them better, help them achieve bigger results, and get them closer to their big goal faster! At the same time, you are able to charge accordingly with each increase in value.
By having a clearly defined Value Ladder (and a good strategy to guide people along it) you set both yourself and your customers up for the best success. It’s a win, win!
Here’s a few tell-tale signs you’re in need of a strong Value Ladder:
You’re struggling to raise your prices or attract higher ticket clients
It feels like you’re reinventing the wheel for every offer you put out there
It takes you ages to prepare proposals or you struggle to price out projects
Your low ticket buyers don’t often progress to high tier or long term customers
You have sooo many courses, downloads and other offers that it’s stressing you out and you feel like you need to tidy them up and figure out what it’s all working towards
HOW DOES A VALUE LADDER HELP – WHY SHOULD I MAKE ONE?
By always having a relevant upsell or downsell to keep the relationship going, we are much more likely to convert our clients onto those mid and high ticket items when the time is right.
It’s normal for people to join us at different rungs (some customers may want the VIP treatment straight away!) or to climb ‘out of order’ and skip steps sometimes. But what I love about Value Ladders is that they make it so easy to see if there are gaps in our customer journey or in the offers we’re putting out there.
Then, by plugging these gaps, we can meet our people where they are at – and close more sales, help more people, and make a bigger impact in the world as a result!
Is a Value Ladder right for me?
If you are a business owner (or soon-to-be business owner) who has some idea of what they want to offer the world – then chances are YES, you would benefit from mapping out your Value Ladder.
It works for service-based business (where you work 1:1 with people or in groups), information-based business (where you sell courses for example), product-based business (where you sell physical or digital items) and all sorts in between.
The only case I can think of, for a business that may not need a Value Ladder, is if you sell literally only one product or service, with no variations or addons, no samplers to attract leads, no possibility of repeat sales – just a one and done deal! Even for these businesses, I would challenge you to brainstorm ways you could add value to take people further, or offer tasters to attract people earlier, and see where a Value Ladder takes you!
Having said that, I do recommend that, before tackling this exercise, you have some sense of these two things first:
Your Ideal Avatar/Audience (who you want to serve)
and
How You Help Them / What You Offer (some idea of your products/services)
It’s okay if these are vague – but the clearer you are on these points, the more powerful your Value Ladder mapping will be! A big part of my approach involves brainstorming what our people need from us at each stage of their journey, and how we can solve this with something we do or sell. It’s a great thought exercise whether you are new in business, or have been established for 10+ years, and works no matter what kinds of things you offer.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR VALUE LADDER
What goes onto the ladder?
The short answer to this is that anything and everything you sell (or even give away!) has a place on your Value Ladder. But it’s totally up to you how much detail you go into with mapping it all out.
Finding the right home for every product or service can be a tedious challenge, but it’s a rewarding one I promise! You may end up with more than one Value Ladder (perhaps for different avatars, or core services) and that’s totally okay!
To get started, I recommend brain dumping everything you can think of for each of the following categories in your business:
Freebies
Low Ticket Offers (single or double digit $)
Signature Services (the main things you’re known for)
Projects or Retainers
DIY Products/Service
Done With You Services
Done For You Services
Training / Courses
Physical Products (books, merch etc)
Digital Products (templates, resources ect)
1:1 or Group Coaching
Anything else you do or sell!
If you don’t sell any (or many) things yet, don’t worry. Instead, what you can do is think about your Ideal Avatar’s pain points at different stages of their journey, and then think of what you could offer to solve these problems.
Remember –
It is normal to have more than one Value Ladder, especially if you have multiple areas in your business. For example, if you were in digital marketing like me, you might first group all your offers into the categories of ‘social media, ‘websites’ and ‘content’, if these were the main types of work you did, then break each one down into the pricing rungs below…
How to price out the offers on your Value Ladder
Once you’ve braindumped all your services, the next step is to group them together into rough pricing categories, such as:
Freebies – ($0)
Things that pique someone’s INTEREST and help you capture their details
eg lead magnets, webinars, case studies, etc
Low Ticket ($1 to $97)
Things that help people UNDERSTAND the “why/how” of what you do, and things that help them GET STARTED with a quick win for themselves
eg resources like scripts, templates, swipe files, ebooks, etc
eg training – like mini-courses, boot camps, monthly memberships
Mid Ticket ($147 to $1997)
Things that help people APPLY & LEVERAGE your solutions in a way that is tailored to their business/life, things to take out the hard work out of achieving their goal, and/or things to help them get quicker, easier or better results
Things that help people achieve the HIGHEST SUCCESS with the least effort, things that amplify their results, free up their time/resources, empower their team and drive their business/life (whatever) forward in a big way
eg white-glove service, large projects, premium products, VIP services, inner circle private coaching etc
(The dollar amounts listed as an example only. Your mileage may vary!)
By now, you have the core structure of your ladder, but you might find there are some gaps.
Perhaps you don’t have a freebie or a good enough low-ticket offer to attract people to get started. Or maybe you have a big jump between your $300 services and your $3k package without a clear path between them. You might even find you don’t have much at the high end and nothing to offer people who want more value from you!
Here are a few questions I love to ask myself, to help plug these gaps…
To add a higher rung (mapping from the bottom up):
Where does your customer get stuck next? What are their new pain points?
What would help them get an even better result? How can you amplify this?
What could you bundle together to give more value?
To add a lower rung (mapping from the top down):
What gets in the way of people buying this mid-high rung from you? What do they not understand or believe, that you could show/teach/provide in a lower rung?
What would prepare people for these mid to higher rungs? What should people have in place already?
What would make your job easier – or enable you to do an EVEN BETTER job – if the client had or did X before engaging you for this tier? What extra steps or services do you often find yourself recommending to clients who aren’t “quite ready yet”?
MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR VALUE LADDER
The way I see it, a great Value Ladder is a visual representation of your customers’ success path, as much as it is your own ‘stairway to success’ too. (And the fact that it is both is one of my favourite things about them!)
So there’s a lot of good reasons to spend the time mapping this out.
A Value Ladder can help you:
Meet a customer where they’re at – so you don’t have to turn away those “not quite ready” and can help them become ready instead!
Market yourself more easily – and supercharge your marketing by getting crystal clear on exactly what your people need to hear, at each step!
Improve sales and conversions – by matching their problems with your solutions, and using each rung to help qualify and condition customers for the next
Increase retention / lifetime value of customers – by finding more ways to serve them
Build sales funnels faster – with quick & easy upsells and downsells ready-made!
and much more…
So what next?
You’ve mapped out your offers and joined the dots from low to high – now you have all these great offers that make sense and are well priced! Awesome. Well done! Your next job is to figure out how to drive traffic TO your ladder(s) and also to plan how you’ll move people UP your ladder.
If you’re interested in learning more I highly recommend Dot Com Secrets by Russell Brunson. This is the book that popularised the Value Ladder method and you’ll find so much gold in there, no matter what stage of business you are in.
If you would like some help getting started with your Value Ladder (or just want to geek out about marketing strategy with me!) I would love that! Find me on social or through my website and let me know you read my blog here – I can’t wait to connect!
Georgia is a digital marketing strategist who helps creators and creatives bring their business to life online. From web design to content marketing, social media to sales funnels… it’s all about finding the right vehicle and road map to get you where you want to go. Georgia loves working with passionate people and reverse engineering their big-picture dreams into clear and simple paths that get them to their goals.
