How do you put together a high-ticket coaching offer?
Lots of coaches and consultants who I’ve worked with get squeamish at the usage of the term high-ticket.
It moves the focus towards money and away from how they’re massively helping people.
It sounds greedy!
Like you’re charging more just for the sake of it.
But here’s one of the fundamental truths of running a business…
You need to have services that people want to pay for and you need to be charging enough to cover your costs and to pay for the kind of life you want.
And if you’re not in the ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ brigade then you have already made the decision to sell high-ticket even if you don’t like that phrase. Soz! 😊
What exactly is a high-ticket coaching programme?
Hopefully my definition of what ‘high-ticket’ is will put your mind at rest:
A high-ticket coaching offer is a service that offers the biggest change in state for the coachee and therefore is charged at the highest level by the coach.
Janine Coombes, in this blog, right now.
Now, you’ll see that I’ve niftily managed to slip out of putting down a definitive prices range there! That’s because it depends on what you’re used to charging (and paying…)
When I first started my business, I created a consultancy offer that I charged out at £150 per person for 6 weeks of support. Cue intensive over-delivering and ridiculous levels of support…
At the time it made me sweat with nerves saying that number out loud.
Now I realise that it was way too low for the amount of work I was putting in and for the long-lasting, fundamental benefits my clients got out of it. But it felt ‘high-ticket’ to me at the time.
But you live and learn!
For argument’s sake and for clarity in the rest of this blog, when I say high-ticket I’m thinking of something firmly above £1,000 for a body of coaching work or consultancy.
Now let’s dive into some simple steps to take you through how to put together a high-ticket offer for your coaching programme or consulting service.
1. Work out if your target audience is right for high-ticket service
Let’s get this sticking point out of the way right now. If you’re offering your services to people at a rate that you think is reasonable but your prospective clients are constantly saying they can’t afford it- something has gone wrong!
The most likely reasons for this are:
- The value of what you’re offering isn’t clear enough
- They’re not yet convinced that you’re the person to help them
- They don’t believe in your process in some way shape or form
Or …
(Cue creepy footsteps on wooden floor boards and creaky old door sounds…)
They’re the wrong people! 😱
This can be a really dispiriting prospect. That your prospects could be the wrong prospects for you.
What am I going on about?
If you believe the people you’ve been trying to appeal to genuinely can’t afford you then you’re aiming at the wrong audience.
You need to be targeting people who can afford to pay you enough for your business to be a goer.
AKA enough for you to make some decent money in return for the beautiful work you do.
For example, if you’re a book coach targeting fiction authors writing their first book, they may not have the funds or self belief to spend thousands on a coach. Whereas if you’re targeting entrepreneurs to write their business-building book it makes more sense that they’d invest in that opportunity.
This has obvious repercussions. If your heart isn’t in the money-making segment, this thought process can lead you away from your vision of helping a specific profile of human.
That’s why having an experienced sales and marketing coach on hand to talk this through can make all the difference.
Check out The Freedom Giver here which does just that.
2. How does your coaching programme solve a problem for this audience?
Let’s assume that you are targeting the right people and they do have the money to pay you.
The next step is to make sure you are absolutely crystal clear on what result you’re delivering for that audience. What specific outcome are they looking for?
If what you’re selling is just a package of coaching sessions or a consulting package broken down by hours or days, the value of what you’re offering won’t be clear.
Not to you.
And definitely not to them.
Reminder: People are paying for a result not for the pleasure of your company.
How do you make sure that you’re solving a juicy enough problem for them?
A few things to consider:
- Are your ideal clients moving away from a horrible or frustrating situation? e.g. stopping self sabotage and negative self-talk
- Or are they moving towards a desired destination? e.g. to earn more money in their business
- Or both e.g. to stop self sabotaging so they can earn more money in their business with more ease and joy.
These examples are very generic, but you get the picture.
Even if you are really plugged in to how your ideal clients are thinking and feeling, there’s one thing that all coaches and consultants should do.
And you’re not going to like it…
You’re going to need to do a spot of market research!
This is not a one and done situation.
You could get some amazing insights from speaking to ideal customers one year, but the next year they’ve moved on, you’ve moved on or the world has moved on and you need to do it all over again.
But don’t worry- I pretty much guarantee that you’ll enjoy it once you rip the plaster off because you’re in this business to help people, right? Right!
Read more about how to conduct market research and validate your coaching or consulting service in my blog How to make sure your service offer will definitely sell: A step-by-step guide.
3. Do your clients have an evacuation problem?
A few years ago I lived with my family in a small terrace house in an expensive suburb of London.
My husband and I would have endless conversations about us moving to a bigger house in a cheaper location.
So many hours poring over properties on RightMove!
This went on for YEARS.
Despite our growing-up family feeling constricted by our small house, we were comfortable enough.
The kids liked their school. We had lovely neighbours. We were in walking distance of shops, cafes and our favourite restaurant.
What if we moved and the kids hated the school! And the people were horrible! And there was nothing to do!
WE MIGHT REGRET IT! 😱
Comfort and fear kept us in that situation for ages.
Crunch time came during the pandemic. Our house felt smaller than ever and while we were so grateful to have some outdoor space – we wanted more.
Finally galvanised into action we put our house on the market and within 2 months we’d moved to a bigger place in a different county.
And thus we arrive at the least talked about issues that people have with their offers:
They’re creating them for people who aren’t ready to move yet.
‘Comfortable enough’ is why most people don’t buy.
And this is why the bro marketers are despised – because they use sneaky tactics to nudge people to buy before they’re ready.
The better and nicer way to do it is to make sure that all the messaging surrounding your offer and sales efforts are directed at:
People who have a big enough problem and are ready to buy now.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do your high-ticket services solve an evacuation problem?
- Are they in a situation that has become untenable?
- Are they already 90-100% convinced that they need to solve this problem NOW?
THIS is who you should be creating your offers for. Not for people who are vaguely interested and might buy in the next 5 years.
You can create content for those people but not offers.
4. Decide which type of coaching programme is best for your high ticket offer
I’ve seen all sorts of high-ticket coaching programmes, mentoring services and consulting offers.
The truth is – anything goes!
You can have high-ticket courses (Marie Forleo’s B School is pretty high-ticket) and high-ticket memberships (think masterminds for high net worth individuals).
But the most common ones are working with clients on a one-to-one basis or some sort of intimate group programme with lots of face time with the coach.
Rule of thumb: Anything that you’re selling to a bigger volume of people like a group programme, will mean you need a bigger audience to sell it to.
A bigger audience means you’ll need sharper messaging, more marketing and there’s more admin and tech involved in the running of it.
For a more in depth look at the pros and cons of the different options open to you, read my blog Which is the better coaching consulting business model for you: One-to-One vs Group Programmes vs Membership vs Online Courses
5. How much should high-ticket programmes cost?
As I mentioned at the beginning, you can consider anything over a grand to be high-ticket.
But that depends on how long you’re working with someone – if that thousand covers the client for a whole year, it’s pretty cheap!
And of course it’s relative to what you’re selling and the results someone can expect from working with you.
A membership that costs £100 a month is getting towards the more premium end of the market, but a coaching package that costs £100 and has two 1:1 calls with you per month would be outrageously cheap.
For an investigation into why pricing your own services is so tricky and how to get round all those pitfalls, read my blog How to price your coaching or consulting services (so you work less and earn more).
TL;DR?
I’ve worked with coaches who charge anything from £1,500 to £10,000+ for a 6 month coaching package.
Consulting services tend to take a wider variety of formats. I’ve had some consultant clients who sell their retainer services at £300 per month while others have sold team training packages for £120,000+.
The difference in fees depends on the target market of the client and, to an extent, their levels of confidence in their own abilities i.e. your ideal client type and what you’re comfortable with!
Usually you know in your gut if you’re undercharging for something.
Is this you..?
If raising your prices is something that’s been on your to do list for a while, check out my free resource; 6 Steps To Charging More With 100% Confidence workbook.
6. Things to avoid when pricing your high-ticket coaching programme
Learn from my client’s mistakes (and mine!), here’s a little run down of some things that can trip you up when you’re selling high ticket coaching programmes and consulting services:
Using what your idea of ‘expensive’ is to set the price
It’s so funny how we create stories in our heads when talking to potential clients about how much it costs to work with us.
This happens much more when you’re selling high-ticket services vs low-ticket.
You speak to someone who seems so lovely and you want to help them so much – you start to get scared they’re going to say ‘no’.
So the stories start…
‘Mm, perhaps they can’t afford this. They probably think I’m too expensive! Why would they pay this when they could use it for a holiday or some new clothes or their mortgage or or or…’
Never discount your high-ticket coaching programme (but you can offer freebies or other goodies to give people an incentive to buy).
Again, this happens less with the ‘old hands’ at coaching and consulting, but it’s a frequent phenomenon where people say the price and then don’t stop talking.
They end up negotiating themselves down before the potential clients has a chance to utter a word!
When it comes to stating the price on a sales call the best thing you can do is to state the investment and then SHUT UP.
This is a key piece of info that the person you’re speaking to has probably been waiting to find out. They need time to absorb it. Their mind is likely to be racing; ‘Oh that’s more/ less than I was expecting. Can I afford it? How much does that break down per month? Can I move that money from X account over?’
For the love of all that is crunchy, give them space to think! Let them speak first.
Not believing in yourself and letting it hold you back.
This is why I only work with coaches and consultants who’ve been running for long enough to know they are absolutely the mutt’s nuts and getting results for their clients.
When you know in your bones that you can massively help people this is an essential touchstone that you can always come back to when things get shaky.
Five sales calls faltered at the pricing stage? It’s ok, you have others who’ve bought at that rate before and have had fabulous results.
But I get it – it can eat away at your self esteem if you’ve had a run of nos on sales calls or if you’re getting crickets on your posts and emails.
But this is rarely an indication that there’s something wrong with your prices.
It’s far more likely that something in your messaging is off. That’s why I tackle this first in The Freedom Giver.
Pricing too low and being overworked.
This is one of the main reasons I created The Freedom Giver!
There are too many coach-shaped-people who are working their socks off but still not earning a decent wage.
If you love working with your clients in an intimate way, one-to-one or small group programmes, pricing becomes more important than ever.
I see some coaches, consultants and mentors leaping to the decision to ‘scale’ with a membership, lower priced programmes or courses. But don’t fool yourself into thinking offering a ‘one-to-many’ option will make it easier for you to earn money. It’s not a silver bullet. And it won’t bring you that satisfaction of getting the deepest results for your clients.
One-to-many is a fine way to make a living but you will need to pour more time, energy and possibly money into building your audience, more advanced tech and maybe adding team members too.
It’s sensible to crack your 1:1 business model first, get it to the point where leads are rolling in and your serving people efficiently and then add a one-to-many option.
If you’re not yet earning £30-£75k per year from your coaching practice or consultancy book a call with me now.
Yes I know £30- £75k is a wide margin, but my clients have wildly different visions of what they want from their businesses!
My job as a sales and marketing consultant with a coaching approach is to help you achieve your vision of success – not to thrust mine onto you.
Forgetting to sell your offers
Listen, I’ve done this myself many times. You might be feeling under the weather, or have others stuff going on in your life. Or perhaps you believe that you just hate sales. But there comes a time to us all where we forget to actually tell people what we do and how we can do.
That’s all selling is.
Telling people how you can help them.
And if you don’t tell people – and remind them often – how can you actually help them?
You’ve spent all this time and money getting educated and trained plus all your years of experience.
It’s all for nothing if you’re not able to attract people to work with you.
Need a kick up the bum and some specific advice about how to get more sales?
Check out my blog 7 ways to get more sales of your high-ticket services today.
Or if you’re a coach-shaped-person who’s decided now is the time to start earning some decent money click here to book a call with me today to see whether you’d be a good fit for one of my services.