How To Close More High Ticket Clients (Without Changing Your Ads, Content Or Sales Script)

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The Weakest Link In Your Coaching Funnel
Plugging The Gap
Automate Your Application Form
Turn Your Coaching Application Into Free Money
More Effective Follow-Up Marketing
The Shortest Route To Closing More Clients

As a high ticket coach or consultant, your funnel probably looks something like this:

To ‘get more clients’, most coaches focus on the first half of that process… by tweaking their ads or refining the content presentation.

Another popular approach is to work on becoming a phone sales ninja to convert more of those phone conversations into sales.

Both of these are important – but there’s a critical piece that usually gets overlooked.

(Hint: it doesn’t require you to change anything about your ads, your content or your phone script).

The Weakest Link

The little gap between your application form and your strategy call is actually the secret weak link in the funnel – and the easiest way to turn more applications into clients.

There’s a surprisingly high number of qualified prospects who apply for your program but will never actually get booked onto a call with you.

Your adverts worked perfectly… the content converted… your sales script is lined up and ready to go – but you just don’t get them on the phone.

Here’s why:

Your prospective clients are at their MOST excited and engaged when they first fill out the application form.

As the hours tick by, they become less excited, they get distracted by other people’s content and (by the time you get in touch with them about their coaching application), they actually forget about why they want to join your program.

That’s why a lot of your most qualified prospects apply for your coaching program and then never finish up booking a strategy call… they just lie in the bottom of a CSV file for eternity!

Plugging The Gap

When you’re manually checking every application and deciding what to do with them, it’s time-consuming and complicated… so it’s impossible to follow up with every person in the perfect way.

The trick is to automate the process, allowing the qualified prospects to schedule their strategy call within minutes (and redirecting the people who don’t cut the mustard towards something more appropriate). 

For example, our friend Chris teaches fitness professionals how to grow their personal training business, with his coaching program which is $8000. 

To qualify for the program, you need two things:

1. A minimum of 10 existing clients
2. An investment of $8000

That’s his criteria. If you don’t have those two things, then his program isn’t going to work for you.

When someone applies for his program, he assesses every aspect of their application, of course, but the decision about whether they get offered a strategy session is based on those two factors.

Looking at your program or service, you’ll know what your price point is and what other important criteria you have.

Automating Everything

The decision to offer someone a strategy call doesn’t need to be made by a human – it should all be automated.

Based on their answers to just a couple of ‘key’ questions, your application form can easily calculate who qualifies for a call and who doesn’t.

If they need a certain budget or experience level, then make sure the system is looking for those answers and then segment your applicants, instantly!

Direct your ideal applicants straight over to your scheduling tool, to immediately book in their strategy session…

…and, for bonus points, pop them onto an email list with a sequence of emails designed to get them to show up to the call (more on that in a minute).

(Our favourite scheduling tool right now is appoint.ly.)

No applications will fall through the cracks or get missed.

Every single application is instantly either ranked as a great fit or not.

If you, or your assistant, need to take a couple of days out, the process just keeps running… 24/7 and 365.

Just by implementing this one simple tweak, we’ve found that significantly more qualified applicants actually book their call.

More strategy sessions from more qualified applicants = more sales (with less manual labour).

For extra brownie points, make sure to put something in place for those people who DO qualify but don’t go ahead and schedule their call.

I’d recommend an email follow-up sequence aimed to push them over the threshold and send them back into your appointment tool!

Free Money From Your Application Form

What do you do with the applicants who don’t qualify?

At the moment, you probably ignore them… or send them a polite message to say ‘Thanks, but no thanks’.

That’s leaving money on the table!

Instead, you can instantly take them to a page where you offer them something that’s more appropriate.

Maybe you have a product which is a cheaper price? Perhaps you have something that is aimed for people of a different experience level?

Here’s how it looks:

By automating this segment of the funnel, you’re able to reduce your workload, get more people onto a strategy session and pick up a bunch of sales from people who aren’t suitable for your coaching… but would really benefit from your other products.

This gives you an all-round increase in sales and efficiency, without changing anything about your advertising, content or sales process.

The Follow-Up Marketing

To make this strategy even more effective, you can pop every single applicant directly into a follow-up sequence of emails, based specifically on their answers.

By putting applicants onto different email lists, or tagging them, in your email marketing system, you can send them emails designed to prompt further action.

(When we're talking about your email marketing system we mean guys like Mailchimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft etc.)

For the successful applicants:

• Send them emails with case studies, testimonials and additional content, designed to further pre-sell them on your coaching BEFORE your scheduled call.
• You can have different email content, depending on their answers to your questions.
• For example, if you’re a coach in the ‘Golfing’ niche and your application form asks for their age, you could make sure that the case studies feature people of a similar age bracket. When your prospects see other people who are ‘just like them’ getting great results in your program, they can really see themselves being in your program. This personalisation strategy is much stronger than generic case studies of any Tom, Dick or Sally.
• This really moves your prospects closer to a buying decision (before you speak to them).

For the unsuccessful applicants:

• Send them through a sequence of emails offering them other products and training that would be more appropriate for them.
• This will maximise your return on investment, by creating sales you wouldn’t have made of your other products (on autopilot).
• Use these emails to ascend these applicants from where they are right now to where you need them to be to join the program.
• We typically make 2x our ad spend from these additional sales… which means that your whole funnel pays for itself, twice over… and all of the coaching sales are 100% profit.

Oh, and make sure to drop your Facebook and Google advertising pixels into your application form, your appointment booking calendar AND your sales pages for other products.

Each person goes straight into a relevant audience so that you can run ads to them, taking them back to the appointment booking OR showing the unsuccessful applicants your other products.

The Shortest Route To Closing More Clients

By paying attention to that gap between the application form and the strategy session, you’re able to:

• Automate the whole process (which means less work)
• Stop applications falling through the cracks (more successful applications)
• Pre-sell your qualified applicants by email (higher sales conversions of your program)
• Make ‘free money’ from the unqualified apps (allowing you to spend more in ads and bring more applicants in)
• Retarget every applicant (even more applications)
• Send more relevant messages to everyone (increasing your relationship with your list, which leads to more sales from every single thing you promote)

Here’s the step-by-step plan to pop this into action:

1. Give your application form the power to decide who is qualified (and who isn’t).
2. Take qualified applicants straight to your appointment booking system and unqualified applicants to more relevant offers.
3. Create a simple follow-up sequence for qualified applicants, with case studies, additional content and relevant messages to pre-sell them (before your strategy call).
4. Create a simple follow-up sequence of emails for unqualified applicants to offer them other products.
5. Pixel every applicant and follow up via Facebook advertising.

If you’re looking for your simplest point of leverage to close more of your clients (without spending any more of your ad budget), implement this today and you’ll be amazed by the results.