Before you dive into this post, I want you to know one thing…
I do not believe that there is only one way to do any specific thing (i.e. there’s only one way to approach sales). I believe in aligning approaches to the way that works for you. This means sales calls works for some, in-person events work for others and webinars or low ticket offers may work for the rest.
They all work, but it is in my strong opinion that the reason why many say some of these strategies do not work is because of one of three things…
- They did not give it enough of a chance. Sometimes we give up before putting in enough reps to collect the data to tweak and make it work
- Your using the wrong sales mechanism for your audience
- You’re simply using a method that doesn’t feel good ‘for you’ or align with you and it’s causing a lot of friction in that part of your sales cycle
I really do believe that being an entrepreneur is part art and part science. There are some principles in business that stand the test of time, no matter the business and then part of business is you just trying new things, figuring things out, until you find something that works for you and delivers results.
Today, I want to tell you about a client who was struggling to sell a particular offer. We worked together for 3 months to build a marketing and sales strategy and system that aligned better for her and what her clients wanted. When we worked together, we ended up doing 3 things;
- Restructuring her content strategy and creating a system that no longer made content creation tedius
- Created a lead generation strategy that did a better job at attracting the ideal person who could potentially turn into a client
- Switched the core offer she was selling which seemed like a better fit for her target audience.
One of the switches we made was to replace sales calls with a live webinar. She was rarely getting sales calls and when she did, people were rarely converting. This client had tried. She had REALLY tried. I believe she had attempted for over a year, hired 2 coaches and things just felt a little off. There was nothing bad about any of the coaches that she was working with, but there was clearly an alignment issue somewhere.
I have a process I usually talk my clients through and I explain to them that your business can not only serve you. There is another person on the other side of the screen and you need to make sure that you’re connecting with them in a way that they will receive your information.
We created the webinar. Shad 75 people register for her webinar. Seventy-five people who raised their hand and said ‘yes, I want to hear what you have to say’. That’s not a small thing for someone who has never ever done a webinar. Now imagine if instead of a webinar, she’d been trying to book each of those 75 people onto a discovery call. For this client in particular, this was an overwhelming thought. That’s 37 hours of sales calls. Thirty-seven hours just to have the conversation before any paperwork, before any delivery, before any of the actual work she loves doing.
With a webinar? That’s only one hour to have a conversation before anything happens. You can probably include some time for setting up the webinar and time spent on optimization, but it would still be nowhere near the 37 hours she was spending previously.
I know this math isn’t hypothetical, because I’ve watched coaches live it. I watched it happen in programs I was brought in to support. The model that was handed to them was to do a sales call. Book a call, show up on the call, close the call. Everything sounds cleaner on a whiteboard.
In real life, it costs you something nobody mentions when they’re teaching it to you: your entire week, every week, just to fill your calendar. This doesn’t matter for entrepreneurs who may not have any other commitments except their business, but…
- For the single mom who only had a capped capacity, or;
- The carer who has an intensive job of looking after a loved one, or;
- The full time employee who can only commit a set number of hours a week
THIS IS A LOT!
The model isn’t wrong. It’s just not for everyone.
The point I am trying to make is, High-ticket sales calls work brilliantly for certain types of offers, certain types of buyers, and certain types of coaches. For someone who genuinely thrives one-on-one, who sells something bespoke and high-investment, who has the bandwidth to hold pipeline pressure every single week, a sales call model can be powerful.
But I’ve worked with too many coaches who are running a sales call model not because it fits their business, but because that’s what they were taught. It was the model in the program they bought. It was what the success stories demonstrated. And so they implemented it, showed up, worked harder, and then wondered why the whole thing felt like grinding gears.
The problem was never their ability to close. It was that the friction in the model was working against them from the start.
The Results of Switching to a Live Webinar…
The client with 75 registrants had been running one-to-one discovery calls and a conversion rate that made the whole thing feel like maybe this business isn’t worth it anymore, even when she technically knew her offer was good.
We switched to a live webinar, she only had to show up once and spoke to all 75 people in the same hour. Answered every objections live. The same objections that were showing up on her calls, but now in a room where everyone heard the answer at once. By the end, she had buyers. Not because she pressured anyone to buy right there, but because she gave them everything they needed to make the decision themselves.
The webinar didn’t replace the human connection, and I say this because the argument I often hear against webinars is the fact that it eliminates the human connection. It just changed the container. Instead of proving herself 75 individual times, she proved herself once, to everyone, together. She gave everyone the opportunity to ask questions live, so there was a two way conversation happening. It wasn’t just her talking at them.
And The Numbers…
- 25% of everyone who saw her landing page registered.
- Her cost per lead from Facebook ads came in at $8.28 without optimization
She had a goal of 1 sale. My goal for her was 4. She ended up with 3 sales. Her goal was low because of the price of the offer.
These were 3 sales that would have likely taken her months to sell when she was doing sales call. That’s not luck. That’s what happens when your sales model actually fits how your audience wants to buy. The numbers may not look impressive to seasoned entrepreneurs but for someone who is figuring it out, she did great!!!
The question nobody asks early enough.
I don’t identify as a coach. Identify more as a consultant. You tell me your pain points and I use my experience, research and data to guide you on what to do next. When I work with coaches on their business model, one of the first things I want to understand is not only what they’re selling, but how they’re currently asking people to buy it, and whether that process fits the person they’re asking.
Some audiences want a call. They’re high-consideration buyers, they want to ask questions directly, they need that personal exchange before they’ll commit. A webinar would feel too anonymous for them. In my agency, I can’t imagine selling my retainers on a webinar. Is it possible? Probably? But it’s not the sales mechanism I feel is best for that.
Other audiences would rather absorb information at their own pace, see the evidence, make their own decision, and then either buy or not. Putting those people on a sales call creates friction. They feel pressured, the experience doesn’t match their buying style, and they drop off even when they’re genuinely interested.
The problem isn’t always your price. It’s not always your copy. Sometimes the offer is right and the audience is right and the thing that’s broken is simply the road you’re asking them to walk down to get to yes.
Things to This About If Your Sales Process is Not Working…
If your sales calls aren’t converting at the rate you expected, before you rewrite your pitch or lower your price, ask yourself these questions:
- Does the person buying from me typically make high-consideration purchases? Or do they research independently and then decide?
- Is the friction of booking a call, showing up, and making a real-time decision something my ideal buyer would naturally do, or something they’d quietly avoid?
- Could I deliver the information that currently happens on a call in a format that doesn’t require us to be in the same room at the same time?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the starting point for redesigning your sales model around how your specific audience actually buys — rather than how the framework you were handed assumes they should.
I’ve spent 8 years in the backend of coaching businesses. The ones that grow without burning the owner out are almost always the ones where the sales model fits the client’s buying behaviour, not just the coach’s preference for how they like to sell.
If yours doesn’t fit — that’s fixable. But you have to be willing to question the model first.