Why Focus on High-Ticket Sales/Clients?

In the world of digital marketing, you come across two kinds of client profiles: the ones who are low risk – low reward and thus generate low ticket sales, and the ones who are high risk – high reward and so yield high-ticket sales.

High-ticket clients are ones willing to dish out more money for your services, and they help your digital agency to step out of survival mode.

While a sustainable business model usually does include its share of low ticket sales, too many of them can slow down your growth. When working with clients on tight budgets, you’d have to pick up more companies and strategize on the number of sales to make worthwhile earnings. In the long run, this considerably adds to your acquisition costs.

So What are High-Ticket Sales?

One example of a High-Ticket sale is marketing for an airline ticket to Hawaii with a one-night hotel stay. Contrast that with marketing silicon-based covers for smartphones, an example of low ticket sales.

What’s the Difference?

It’s far easier to sell commonplace smartphone covers than that ticket to Hawaii. Additionally, you’ll have to sell a truck-load of covers to match the revenue from selling a single ticket, which means you get a higher reward from a single high-ticket sale.

High-ticket sales rates are usually more targeted. It takes a lot more time and effort to grow the numbers of your high value clients. Low ticket sales are mass-targeted, and often triggered through seasonal sales or specific months.

So why should you be targeting high-ticket sales? Let’s have a look at some of the benefits

Why Target High-Ticket Clients?

The massive effort put into winning high-ticket clients shows when you get your revenue. Sure, there’s a lot at stake; you’re working on fewer clients, and might not get any revenue at all if you fail to close the deal. But there are ways you can play smart and get around that. For instance, you can have some low ticket sales to help get the ball rolling.

The biggest benefit of having high-ticket clients is that you get more revenue through fewer clients. One high-ticket sale yields a much better profit margin than many low ticket sales. With the latter, you’ll have to acquire and cater to a great many more clients to make the kind of profit you make with a single high value client.

So with high-ticket sales, you have fewer clients to provide support to. This means you can focus more of your efforts on the high-ticket clients paying more for your services.

Additionally, high-ticket clients are less likely to be fazed by high prices. While low ticket clients find it easy to shop around different agencies for similar services at lower prices, high-ticket clients expect to pay higher prices for quality work. So when you target high-ticket clients, you don’t have to worry about the competition as much. There’s no need to lower your prices or offer discounts here. In fact, you’re in a better position to maintain or even increase your high prices.

How to Land High-Ticket Sales Effectively

When you’re targeting high-ticket clients, it’s good practice to not go in for the direct sell. The last thing someone wants is a sneaky salesman in an online group, spamming members to buy subscriptions. Find communities that your target audience visits, and raise awareness about what you do while adding value to conversations.

1. Assess if Your Service has What it Takes to Land High-Ticket Clients

The first thing you need to assess is whether your service/product compares to the competition. You might have to rebrand your offerings in order to make them seem more valuable, so the price is worth the value proposition. Once that’s out of the way you can now work towards building rapport with leads.

2. Build a Reputation on Online Groups and Communities

You can figure out what groups and communities are relevant to the audience you’re targeting as you build your ideal client profile. Once you’ve entered those groups, focus your efforts on being seen as someone that actually adds value instead of being just a seller.

To close high-ticket sales, you need to build a reputation among high-ticket leads. It can be tempting to send out a proposal to a lead that fits your criteria, but this will in all probability not end well. That’s because while you’ve found a suitable lead, your lead isn’t yet sure that they’ve found the right team for the job. They still need to see you as reputable.

According to Journey Engine, the three most effective ways of increasing your visibility to your target audience are Facebook, LinkedIn, and cold emails. Facebook allows for almost instantaneous responses, while LinkedIn has a slower pace. Similar to Facebook, Twitter also has a quick response time. Use these digital platforms to curate a reputation as an authority.

3. Build Conversations Not Sales

Start a conversation to find out the challenges and problems your leads face. Connect with group members and figure out their pain points. Once you have enough information about this, you could start by writing a long-form blog post about some of these problems and possible solutions to them.

Place yourself as an expert in your field in social media groups where you have relevant audiences to your ideal client. You can do this through Facebook webinars, Twitter campaigns, and engaging with your audience by providing them value every time.

4. Place Strong Filters

In order to land high-ticket clients, make sure only the kinds of clients you desire can filter through into your system. So if you’ve decided to target large healthcare providers in a certain district, restrict your social media posts to hospitals in that geographical area. Make sure you stick to your ideal client profile and spend your time converting the right leads. If your high-ticket client requires a lot more design work, while your scope of work is strictly website development work, then you should ask yourself whether you need to hire more designers to cut down long-term expenses.

You also need to say ‘no’ to leads that don’t fit your ideal client profile. Consider this a favor you’re doing to yourself and your lead; it will save both of you time and let them find an agency that can fit their budget.

5. Add Empathy to Your Voice

Convincing a high value client to convert is easier with empathy.

Address pain points that are common to you both and explain how a certain service or tool solves your problem. Even at the later stage of the high-ticket sales funnel, it’s highly advisable to elaborate on how your solution is the best solution for their problem.

This wins you brownie points, as your client is not only interested in your services but also your methodology. A big win here is that once you deliver work, your client will likely see you as a valuable problem-solver, and not just a sales-oriented agency.

An important thing to note here is to not go out of your way to solve their pain point. If the solution to your lead’s problems will not land you work, that’s a red flag that this lead may not be your ideal client.

6. Follow Ups

Follow up with your leads. Set a few hours during your day to focus on follow-ups if you want to convert the lead to a client.

This gives them a reason to value you as more contact, as you’re going the extra mile and are appreciative of their time. Even if they follow up doesn’t budge the lead towards conversion, the important thing here is to be consistent about checking in on them with a casual greeting.

This is another place that can help you get referrals from these high value leads.

7. Train Your Team to Work with High Value Clients

With fewer clients to manage, you can focus on providing the best support to your High-Ticket customers. However, this does come with a caveat. You’ll be losing out on a lot if a client decides to pull from your services and shift to some other. Finding another client with similar, if not more high-ticket value, takes time and multiple meetings.

To ensure your client stays, train your team to provide higher quality client service. If you’re working solo, well you’ll need to take out time and learn some of the techniques of improving client management and providing value so as to keep giving your high-ticket clients to stay with you. If you have troublesome clients, you can always learn how to fire a client and go after some high-ticket replacements.

8. Focus on Nurturing Your Relationship with the Client

Though you won’t be communicating with multiple clients, you’ll have a lot more communication with your high-ticket clients. So spend more time nurturing your relationship with your clients. Furthermore, pick up on trends, news, and updates about the industry your client is in so you can relate to the pain points of that industry.

Mike Killen’s framework is one guide to landing high-ticket clients. Let’s take a look at this process. Keep in mind that you will need to spend a considerable amount of time during the project discovery phase for such clients.

The 6A Framework to Find High-Ticket Clients by Mike Killen

Before getting to the framework, let’s take a look at your marketing funnel (how you curate your customer’s journey with you from the point they become aware of your service to when they buy it).

The sales funnel typically continues the journey of leads – establishing their intent of making the purchase and facilitating them with this process.

When targeting high-ticket clients, make sure you use the marketing and sales funnel appropriately. For instance, you’re likelier to find high-ticket clients on LinkedIn than on Snapchat or TikTok. So during the awareness and interest phase, create informative content designed to trend on this platform.

Similarly, make sure you use the right platforms and make the right content and connections through your sales funnel. So during the commitment phase, you can use LinkedIn to create blog posts that solve problems for your ideal client profile, and then zero in the audience that’s likely to use your product. Make personal connections with the leads you acquire to convert them, and encourage them to refer you to their network.

Feedback is critical at this stage as it shows room for improvement and the direction of your business growth.

That brings us to the 6A framework.

Agency Guru Mike Killen spoke with us at length about sales funnels, pricing, and more in an interview with us where he elaborated on his 6A framework.

Audience

The 6A framework begins by addressing the ‘audience’; here, you look for a niche that your services/products best relate to. You’ll find this niche by having conversations with people that are in the relevant industry and finding out what the ideal client profile is.

You’ll find the kind of high-ticket audience you’re looking for in industries like financial services, industrial services, healthcare equipment & services, technology & software services.

Amount

Next, break down the ‘amount’ you can sell your services. To justify the amount you’re set on, emphasize to your leads the high value you’ll be providing them. Make sure to arrive at a figure that factors in the team taking care of client management, along with overheads such as monthly subscriptions for tools and software you’ll be using.

Asset

Then you have to manage and optimize the ‘assets’ that you’ll be using to transform your work process into a workflow. This may include changing tools that suit you better by allowing you to automate mundane tasks. You’ll find plenty of tools that agencies use to help with social media, project management, SEO, and automation. It also helps if you build your own specialized tools, so clients know that your services cannot be replicated elsewhere.

Authority

Once you’ve set the amount and the assets, you have to build ‘authority’ in your market. You can do this through long-form blog posts, videos, and other kinds of content that solves your target audience’s problems. Create guest posts that backlink to your site, and give interviews on reputable platforms that establish your authority.

You can also leverage affiliate programs that offer high-ticket sales. These programs can be found in forums, social media groups, and even blogs comprising such listicles.

Attention & Action

Authority leads to  ‘attention’ in the marketplace from leads. Bolster this by building a strong reputation with your existing clients. Through client referrals and word of mouth, you can get into ‘action’ and close these new clients.

High-Ticket Closing – Sealing the Deal

The process of closing high-ticket deals starts with the proposal. At some point, you’ll have a meeting or a consultation call with your client. Ideally, this call should address your client’s pain points, and close with them requesting your proposal.

There’s a number of ways you can reach a high-ticket closing call. For example, Ryan Steward recommends asking open-ended questions like “what you’ve done for marketing to date?” or “have you considered doing a link disavow?” to pick out probable problematic areas. This helps to zero-in on opportunities you can use to offer services that will solve your high-ticket client’s problem.

Once you’ve closed the call, you’re now gunning for the proposal you’ll be sending the client. Consider the proposal a continuation of your conversation with the client, as your client will likely remember the call/meeting you had earlier.

After closing, ensure effective client management and client reporting. Each high-ticket client is a big chunk of your revenue. The stakes are high. You don’t want any of these clients to discontinue using your services because of miscommunication or shoddy reports. Remember that negative reviews from High-Ticket clients can be a big risk to your business.

In a Nutshell

Focus on high-ticket sales to increase your value in the market, and for a larger revenue stream from individual clients.  You now understand the benefits of targeting high-ticket sales, along with the application of Mike Killen’s 6A framework to your high-ticket sales funnel. Once you’ve closed the deal, do the work to ensure client satisfaction.

Taha Qureshi

Taha is a tech enthusiast and he believes there's no end to creativity. His roots are in content, digital marketing, and analytics. In the after-hours, he reads philosophy and teleports his game controller to its afterlife.

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