3 Phases Of Your High-Ticket Consulting Metamorphosis
Last week we talked about the five major shifts required to become an online marketing consultant rather than just a garden-variety web designer. The two big takeaways were that once you make those five shifts you have created a much more fulfilling career for yourself because you’re creating meaningful, often times transformational results for your clients. You’re also more than doubling your own income in the process.
Last week’s session, however, focused on your overall mindset, marketing, and business positioning. We didn’t get into the practical, step-by-step details of how you make the change from a technical perspective. So, today, let’s look at the three phases you pass through during your metamorphosis into a high-ticket online marketing consultant.
Better Pricing Requires Better Results
You can’t just charge more for websites for two reasons. If all you do is raise your rates you’ll never close a deal because your potential clients will see through your pricing and realize they can “get the same thing for less” from somebody else. So, from a purely practical standpoint simply raising your rates to the point where you’re charging significantly more than everyone else means you’ve priced yourself out of the market.
Price Elasticity Only Stretches So Far
There is room for some degree of price elasticity in web design just like there is some degree of price elasticity in virtually everything. For example, I recently bought a bushel of freshly picked apples from a farm in New York. Those apples were about $1.25 each which is a lot more than $0.45 per apple price in the grocery store. Some people will pay the premium for hand-picked, fresh, organic apples. But you hit a limit. For example, nobody would pay $20 per apple.
The same applies to websites. The average WordPress site goes for around $1,000. If you’re better than the average designer you can raise your rates and maybe charge $2,500 and people will still say hire you. But nobody is going to pay $20,000 for “just a website.”
The Morality of Reality
The other problem with just raising your prices is the morality of the reality of what your client is getting. Is your client going to get more leads because they bought your expensive website?
You can argue that a $500 website will look amateur compared to a $2500 website built by a professional. But, to build a 6-figure income for yourself you’re going to need to charge a lot more than $2500 per project. For example, in DoubleStack, we target five-figure clients. If all you’re doing is delivering a website and you’re not doing any marketing or lead generation, they’re going to be getting just as many leads from their $2500 website as they would from a $20,000 website. And that’s going to be close to zero because websites alone don’t generate traffic and leads. Marketing does.
Doesn’t it seem morally wrong to charge someone 10X more than they could have paid for the exact same result? How do you justify such dramatically higher pricing when the reality of the result is virtually the same?
Shifting Into Value Pricing
Therefore, if you’re going to be charging dramatically more, you need to be generating dramatically better results. When you shift into the world of generating results, you have crossed the bridge into value pricing.
If you can demonstrate that you are able to add $150,000/year to your client’s business it becomes a no-brainer to invest $15,000 to get there. That’s a 10X return on investment. So, you’re stacking your value next to the value you’re creating for your client.
Any serious business owner would happily pay $15k to generate $150k. But no savvy business owner would believe a “website” should cost $15k.
Adopting a value-priced financial structure with your clients is the secret to breaking out of the price race to the bottom. You need to stop competing on price and start winning clients with results.
Developing The Skills
Developing the confidence to win clients through your results happens in three stages. First, you develop the raw skills. Then you put those skills to use with specific niche-specific tactics. Finally, you assemble a collection of tactics into a comprehensive marketing strategy.
It’s sort of like becoming a musician. First, you learn the notes. Then you put the rights notes together to form chords. Then you arrange a set of chords into an awesome song.
So, the first step is to develop the raw skills you need in order to use the tools necessary to create results.
When you join DoubleStack the first thing I do is turn you into a marketing ninja. You get comfortable with email marketing, drip campaigns, landing pages, lead magnets, etc. You develop and become confident deploying a wide variety of marketing skills, tools, and platforms.
Discovering The Tactics
Next, drawing from your base of design and marketing skills we start to assemble tactics. For example, I’ll show you how to develop funnels where you combine landing pages, email opt-ins, email marketing, and online scheduling. The idea is that you begin to assemble the raw notes into beautiful chords. In other words, you’re taking the individual skills and putting them together to create a lead generation system.
Becoming The Marketing Strategist
Finally, the last step in the process is to assemble a collection of individual lead generation systems into a comprehensive marketing strategy. In the same way that one tactic involves multiple skills, the marketing strategy involves multiple tactics.
For example, you don’t just develop a funnel and let it sit there by itself. You also have to execute tactics for inbound traffic. You need lead nurturing tactics for people who begin your funnel but don’t yet complete the call to action. You need tactics for onboarding clients. To deliver results you have to create the complete marketing strategy to get there.
Are You Ready To Get Results?
When you’re ready, hop on over to my calendar and schedule a call with me so we can develop a customized, step-by-step plan to transform you into a high-ticket online marketing consultant. Together we can quickly move you through the three phases outlined above so you can start offering results like this to your clients without having to reinvent the wheel by yourself.
Bottom line: If you’re serious about using your skills to help other people succeed, I’m serious about making sure you get paid really well in the process.
