There is a question that comes up often in work with my clients, and it is one that I always wish I had a blog pre-written to answer. Today’s the day I put this one out into the world! When it comes to selling, there are two approaches that you’ll often see. One that pitches straight for the big offering and one that takes a more incremental stepping stone approach. What’s the right angle for your business? Let’s talk about these two different sales strategies.
Strategy 1: You put an ad out there, or you do a webinar, or you sponsor an event. Maybe you’re a vendor at a community function or you do a post on social media. Wherever you are marketing your business in this scenario, you have a chance to put a call to action out to your audience. In this strategy, the thing you put out there is a higher-priced offering.
Strategy 2: Again, you are putting a marketing message somewhere, like I illustrated in Strategy 1. Again, you can insert a call to action in your message. This time, instead of a higher-priced offering, you offer a FREE or very low-priced offering with the intention of hooking a higher volume of people for ongoing nurturing (hoping to build them to the larger offering or repeat sales).
On the surface, you may be thinking, “Well, I’m a business owner and I have bills to pay. I’d rather sell the higher priced product/service.” Let’s take a look at these two sales strategies in more depth to see how this plays out.
With Strategy 1, you are very much playing a numbers game. If you put an offer out there for a product or service of significant cost, there is going to be a percentage of people who receive the offer who are ready to buy this thing right now. Those people are the “low-hanging fruit.” If you market to 1000 people, there will be a percentage ready to buy now, and that percentage may become predictable to you over time if you test this out enough.
If you are marketing to an ice cold audience, the percentage will probably be low, even if you are reaching your target market. But the more opportunities you have had to get a message in front of these same people, the more credibility you have that backs up your message, the higher quality the touch point (having their attention for a 1-hour webinar is higher quality than a social media post they see for 2 seconds) – these are all factors that can increase that percentage.
There is some science to perfecting your pitch, but at the end of the day, you need a certain volume of people and a certain volume of interaction to make these calculations work in your favor.
Let’s talk about Strategy 2.
In this one, you are trying to lower the barrier of your audience’s objections. If the first call to action is free, you’ll get more people who take the action. That action may include signing up for your email list, for example. In a perfect world, you are picking an action that will allow you to continue to reach out to them to deepen the relationship.
If the first call to action is free, you’ll get more people who take the action. #business #biztips #smallbusiness #smallbiz #salestips
Click To Tweet
Once you attach a cost higher than zero to your call to action, you will start to see a drop off of those who take the action. Is that the worst thing? It depends on what your goal is. If your goal was to generate more leads so you can nurture them in bulk and get more people to start buying things of increasing cost from you, you may want to lower the barrier for entry.
On the other hand, you may find that those who pay money at any level for your offerings could be more committed, more serious. They have more skin in the game. This isn’t always true, but it is one argument you can make about the value of low-priced offerings.
So, what’s right for your business? This is where it gets tricky.
NO ONE can give you the perfect answer to this question. This takes intention, experimentation, and measurement for your business, with your audience. There may be people out there who have a lot of experience with a certain sales process, but they still haven’t tested your audience with your brand. The right finely-tuned sales approach will be unique to your audience.
The right finely-tuned sales approach will be unique to your audience. #biztips #business #salestips #smallbusiness #smallbiz
Click To Tweet
I can shed light for you on my thought process for my own business. For the type of clients I like to work with, it sometimes takes a while for them to be ready to buy my services or products. I know that. Sure, there are people who find me from a workshop and then are immediately ready to work with me. But, just as often – if not more often – someone was reading my newsletters, eBook, and consuming other resources of mine for months or years before they contact me directly.
What does that mean for my business? It means I have to be ready to capture leads and nurture them for a while, knowing that each of them will be ready at different times. So, you will see that I have many free and low-priced offerings made available before I spend much effort talking about the higher-priced packages. This has been working for me in the long-term.
Are there other marketers who only sell higher-priced packages? Yes.
What I’m telling you is that there isn’t one correct answer to which of these sales strategies is right for your business. The best answer for you may be different for different parts of your sales pipeline, different products, or different audiences you are reaching. And that’s okay. It’s about thinking through the strategy you want to try, executing it with intention, tracking the results, and testing out your theories with the audience in mind.
Next time you are at the point of deciding what to sell in your marketing message, I hope this can be a guideline to show you the paths in front of you. And may you find what works best for YOUR business!
If you like the idea of the stepping stone approach, read more in this blog about upselling as a strategy for your business.
The post Two Different Sales Strategies appeared first on Melissa Forziat Events and Marketing.