Over the last several posts, we’ve been looking at a concept I call stretching the gap. This is so crucial to the sales process that skipping it usually results in you pushing your program too hard on a prospect who’s just not that interested.
They end up making excuses why they can’t buy, and you end up wasting your time and missing out on a sale.
Obviously, that’s not what we’re after.
Lots of sales processes are pain-focused. You dig for the pain, find the pain, and use the pain to sell your program. These processes can be great and they have merit, but it’s even more powerful to start with a vision of the end result and contrast it with their current reality.
I call this process of contrasting stretching the gap. In the last post, we talked about the first step: painting the picture. This is when we help our prospects get really clear about where they want to go.
To get our prospects eager to buy from us, we need to stretch the gap between their desired result and their current reality. What exactly does that mean?
Stretching the gap involves three main steps. We need to identify:
So, the first step is to get them really clear about where they want to go.
Your marketing is starting to pay off, and what was once a prospect is now a solid lead. Before you know it, you’re in the sales meeting, pitching your coaching program.
There are hundreds of strategies out there that claim to “guarantee the sale,” but I’ve found there’s one strategy that stands out above the rest.
I call it stretching the gap, and I believe it’s an absolutely essential part of the sales process.
How many words is a picture worth, again? I can’t seem to remember.
I honestly don’t know what’s more annoying: hearing that overused phrase one more time, or knowing I constantly need to be reminded of the wisdom in it.
We are all visual people — some of us more so than others, but the fact remains. We know how powerful pictures can be.
Why is it, then, that we become completely blind to this truth when developing our coaching models?
There’s something you should know before you take another step forward with your marketing: Your prospects don’t give a damn about you or your business.
They don’t care who you are, what you’ve done, or how well your coaching business is going… at first, anyways.
When you first reach out to clients, they care about themselves and their problems. That’s it.
The only way we can hope to break through is to empathize with them and connect with their cravings so they feel like we see them better than anyone else in the world.
For a coaching model to be successful, it must meet the needs of four key stakeholders.
It must work for you, your prospects, your clients, and the coaching business as a whole. Without meeting the needs of all four, you’ll inevitably run into serious problems.
In the last post, we talked about meeting your needs before we take care of our prospects or clients.
Now we’ll take a look at meeting our prospects’ needs.
I woke up this morning and there’s a question inside our Black Belt Facebook group asking about what is the best way to get really amazing live event testimonials.
And there’s a question in there about what’s the best question to ask to get really great testimonials for a live event.
The problem with running a live event is, people, got to book a time, go to travel, go to book you a flight and accommodation.
A great client of mine, Vanessa, once asked, “How do I know what’s the best next step to invite people at the end of the webinar. Do I sell my product? Do I sell a session? Do I sell a big product? What’s the best offer?”
The answer is actually easier than you think.
It’s really simple. I go by price point. This is a rule of thumb, so it can be broken.
We’ve just been chatting about websites and we’re talking about the 3 core offers you need to have on your website. But really you need three offers, a green offer, an orange offer and a red offer. And as what we’ve discussed, there are three types of people that go on your website, these are the cold leads, warm leads and hot prospects.
Cold leads are skeptical visitors and what we want to have for them is a green offer.