I’ve said before that high touch is incredibly important for entrepreneurs with premium offers. Despite being told that you can make lots of money while you sleep or that you must have a complicated funnel to be successful, directly connecting with people interested in your products, programs, and services is the real key to making sales at a premium level. In this episode, I share seven high-touch sales boosters to help you increase your revenue.
On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:
8:28 – I dive into the first high-touch sales booster. It’s one of my absolute favorite things to do and can make a huge impact on your launch.
10:25 – How can you personally follow up with your most active community members?
13:22 – Sales booster #3 is a little bit more techie but totally worth it because it produces incredibly high conversions. Here’s how I do it.
17:30 – I only recommend this sales booster if you have someone to help you manage it. It’s a great one for enrollment periods.
18:17 – How can you quickly and efficiently respond to all the emails and DMs you receive during your enrollment period?
20:48 – Using this method can help boost enrollments during the middle days of your launch when things slow down.
25:46 – I save the best high-touch sales booster for last.
Show Links
I've said it before and I'll say it again, high touch is so incredibly important for entrepreneurs who want to make sales of their premium products, programs, and services. I know we've all been told that we can live that online marketing dream where we're making money while we sleep and all we have to have is the 37-step funnel. But the truth is if you are offering a premium product, program, or service, if people are going to be investing into working with you, then we need to remember that connection is key to making sales at that level. In this episode, I want to share with you some high touch sales boosters—seven, in fact—that will help you to increase the sales of your products, programs, and services.
Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.
Hey, CEO. Can you believe we are in the final 90 days of 2021? It has been an intense year for me, many of you know if you've been listening for a while or following me on social, you know I've taken on the care for my mother who is disabled and needs full-time nursing care in addition to homeschooling three kids, in addition to running my business, and everything else going on in the world. If you're anything like me, you are ready for the new year. It is coming very, very quickly and I can't believe it. Before I forget, as we get ready for the New Year, we're bringing back our favorite annual challenge, the Plan Your Best Year Ever challenge. I want to make sure you join us if you are ready to go into 2022 with a 12-month profit plan, a true game plan for how you're going to achieve your goals in your business, and you want to make sure that that plan is actually designed with your life in mind, then I want you to join us. Head over to rachealcook.com/bye. We are kicking off November 1st and I love doing this challenge every single year. Every single year, I talk to people who say that this challenge is the one they come back to year after year after year. It's one of their favorite things to help them get ready for the year ahead. If you know that you need some support in planning your 2022, I encourage you to go sign up at rachealcook.com/bye and join us.
One of the reasons I hear so much about the challenge and how much people love it is because I talk to people all the time. I'm doing podcast interviews or I'm having a quick connection call or a sales call, and people tell me that they took the challenge. It was a huge turning point for a lot of people who were struggling to figure out “How do I keep all the marketing and sales going so that I'm consistently growing my business?” The only reason I know how impactful this challenge is, is because I lean into high touch, I lean into connection with my community, with my potential clients and my clients. Does this mean I'm available 24/7? No. Does this mean that my clients have my personal cell phone number and can just text me at all hours? No. Does this mean that I am always available inside of our Facebook group? No. I have boundaries in place, but connection is so important. I truly feel like we are seeing the pendulum swing the other way.
I think we're in a correction right now. I think a few years ago, or really this past decade, all of technology out there, all of the automation, all of the online marketing really swung heavily into automate everything, make it super scalable, put people through these funnels, etc., and it removed some of the soul from a lot of businesses, honestly. What I have found is that people are smart and they now understand what they're doing when they're signing up for a webinar or signing up for your free thing and they're suddenly getting all of the sales and marketing. They want to know that there is a real person behind it. This is why I continue to do high touch sales strategies in my business. Do we automate more leveraged strategies? Absolutely. I'm doing this challenge coming up, the Plan Your Best Year Ever challenge, and following that, we will open enrollment again for the CEO Collective. That is highly leveraged for us to have a challenge, to have the email set up to invite people into our program.
But I have found again and again that because I offer a premium product, program, or service, people want to know that I actually care, that I give a crap about them and their business. They want to know that I'm actually going to be there for them. Unfortunately, when I talk to a lot of people, I find that a lot of them feel like they have been burned from this industry in general. They have been burned from these super fancy, flashy automation and they get to the other side of a lot of these things and feel some buyer's remorse, they feel like they were just a number, they were just somebody who helped make somebody else's revenue goal happen. That's a real shame to me. I do see that we are in this correction period right now.
I see that there are a lot of very, very successful entrepreneurs who are thriving, who you might not see all the Facebook Ads for, that you probably won't see a webinar funnel for because they have leaned back into high touch. They know that as the market is changing, as our consumers, our clients, our communities are getting more sophisticated, they've been through these processes and now want to have more personalized attention, they know that high touch can be the thing that helps them stand out. Like I said, it doesn't mean you have to be available 24/7 but it does mean you have to put some more personal effort into your sales and marketing.
This is a topic that we are diving into deeply inside of the CEO Collective this month because I find often, especially for businesses that are in that stage two going into stage three of growth, they're in the success stage, their business is stabilized, they're trying to start to scale up, that still these are the things that help people stand apart and these are the things that often make the difference between your launch “working” and being a success or not working as well. Let's dive into these seven high-touch sales boosters. I'm going to give you a quick overview, and like I said, this is a masterclass that we have inside of the CEO Collective as of this month, and it's just something I'm really passionate about because I think we need to bring the people back into our businesses, we need to bring the connection back into our businesses. It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be time consuming. It doesn't mean you have to be available all the time 24/7 to everybody. You can still have strong boundaries and be high touch in your business.
Let's talk about these high touch sales boosters. First up, personal invitations to your dream clients. Hands down, this is one of my favorite things to do. It can make a huge impact on any launch. But this is especially powerful if you have a smaller email list, a smaller community, and you really want to wow those potential clients. I highly recommend sitting down and brainstorming a list of dream clients for the offer that you are about to sell. This could be people who have already worked with you, previous clients. This could be super fans in your community, the ones who are the most active who are the most in your DMs or the most in your inbox. These could be people you talked with before. Maybe you had a consult with them or they emailed you about an offer but they didn't take that next step, but they would be a great fit for this new offer. Sending out personalized invitations to these dream clients is a game changer.
In fact, in the past, when I have enrolled for the CEO Accelerator, which is my mastermind program for those right in the scale up level of their business, I would sit down for 10 people that I want in the Accelerator program, and make a list of 25 people that I thought would be a perfect fit and send them personalized invitations to come check it out and tell them why I thought they would be a great fit for it. One thing that I love to do with this is to send a video email. I'll actually sit down and record a video with BombBomb, Bonjoro, or even Loom to personally invite them to check out this offer that I have. This is one of my favorite things and I think we forget about it so often, but it can really be a game changer.
The second high touch sales booster you might think about is personally following up with your most active community members. This is a little bit different from the previous one. You might not know as well, when you're making a list of your dream clients, these are people you have some insight into who they are and whether or not they'd be a perfect fit. Your most active community members, these are the people who are the most engaged with your brand, they are the ones who maybe comment on your social media, maybe they're the ones that are opening all of the emails that you send out, maybe they're the ones that hit reply the most often. You want to keep track of these people and figure out who are the most active people in your community. Once you identify those active community members, you can go into your database—if you have an email list, you have a database—figure out what their email address is and, again, send them a personalized email inviting them to learn more or jump on a call with you. This is one of my favorite things to do, honestly.
My friend, Tara Newman, shared with me a couple years ago that she stopped looking at her email list as just “How many people can I possibly get on it?” and she started thinking, “If I have 20% of the people on my email list super engaged, that means I could go through email by email and send personalized emails to my most engaged email subscribers to invite them to have a conversation, to connect with me, to learn more about my next offer.” Will all of them say yes? No. But when they get a personalized email that's not an email blast, will it make a difference and help you stand out? Absolutely.
It’s official, we are fast approaching the final stretch of 2021. It’s that time of the year when we’re starting to look ahead for what we want to accomplish in 2022. I know you’re a high-achieving entrepreneur who loves the fresh start of the New Year. And you’re ready to have a real plan to yes to strategic action steps and say no to shiny objects that keep you spinning your wheels in your business. That’s why I’m so excited to announce the 100% free 5-day Plan Your Best Year Ever challenge starting on November 1st. In five days, I’m going to walk you through a strategic planning process that will help you to map out your business and marketing strategy for 2022, month-by-month, so you’ll have a real profit plan that helps you to stay focused on your goals. All you have to do is head over to rachealcook.com/bye and join us.
Third idea here for you is sending a personal email to sales page clickers. This is a little bit more techy so you have to make sure that you have the ability to do this in your email service provider. One of my favorite things about using a tool like ConvertKit, which is what we use for our emails, is we can tag subscribers based on an action that they take. If they read an email announcing, “Hey, we opened the doors for The CEO Collective,” and they clicked to go look at the sales page, we actually put a tag in there that allows us to say, “Hey, these are all the people that click through to the sales page.” Now, there are a couple cool things we can do here. We have a new segment of people that we can reach out to.
One way we can reach out to them is to send a personalized email; one that's coming from my email address, it's not coming from the newsletter. Now I can send them individualized emails and send them a personal video message using BombBomb, letting them know, “Hey, I saw you were checking this program out. I'm available to answer questions that you might have. I'd love to talk with you. Here's how you can talk with me. Click here to get on my calendar. I'd love to support you in the next step of building your business.” This converts so incredibly high. It converts so incredibly well to getting people on my calendar so that we can have a conversation.
The thing that I love the most about this is if they're at the point where they've been following along with my content, they're getting the sales emails, they're checking out the sales page, then this is no longer a hardcore sales conversation. This is really a check-in. Is this actually the right time? Is it the right fit for you in your business? I don't have to follow any type of sales script when I have these conversations. I just talk with people and am honest with them, “Do I think this is a fit for you? Is it not a fit for you?” What questions do they have, how can I help? It converts incredibly well to do this.
Kind of a variation of this, especially if you are at the point where you have a lot more people on your email list, you might be thinking, “Racheal, there's no way I could send out personal emails to hundreds of people,” because your email list is big enough where that's how many people are clicking through your sales page, that's fine. You can also automate this. You can create a trigger inside of your email system. Maybe you've seen this, I know a few hundred of you have. Because what we do inside of our launches is we have that tag, you click to the sales page, it tags you as a sales page clicker, and then we have an automation because at this point, I have so many people on the list for me to go in and send out personal, personal emails that would be very time consuming, but it sends out what we call the sneaky email.
The sneaky email is one that goes out maybe 10, 12 hours after they checked out the sales page and it's from me and it basically says something to the effect of, “Hey, our system ConvertKit told us that you were checking out the program and I wanted to let you know I'm available to answer any questions that you might have. You can get on our calendar right here or just hit reply and we will be happy to answer any questions that you have.” That email converts incredibly well, especially because we're giving them the option to either book a quick chat or hit reply and message the team. These little high touch things take a little time to put together if you're going to be tracking that, but now you have a list of people who you know are super interested in this offer, and I love being able to go through that and say, “Okay, let's reach out to each of these people.”
The fourth idea for you to do some more high-touch sales, and I'd only recommend this one if you have an assistant or somebody else who can help you manage it, but adding a chat to the sales page is something that I've seen several people do and it helps answer questions right when the people are actively viewing your sales page. I think this can be a great idea if you are doing an enrollment period and you have somebody who can manage the chat because it doesn't make sense if it's not actually going to be answered or responded to, it needs to be in real time. But this is something that can work incredibly well during your enrollment period for your product, program, or service.
Fifth, actively respond to emails and social media DMs. With all the promotional activities you might be doing during an enrollment period, during a launch, you will probably see an uptick in emails and direct messages. It's so important to respond to those quickly and efficiently. Over the years, a few things that we have done to manage this and make it easy for us to reply back, one, we have an internal FAQ file for ourselves so that the most common questions, we can respond to very quickly, we're not rewriting these emails from scratch, we know the types of questions that people are going to have. By keeping these as canned responses, swipe responses, we can load them with a click of a button, tweak them a tiny bit if needed, and then hit reply.
I've also seen that responding via voice or video, again, this is the video thing, this is such a winner in my book, it is such a surprise for people. During enrollment periods, I tell the team, “Send me these ones so that I can respond to them.” Because if they're hitting reply to an email that we've sent out about an offer and they have a question and I respond to it via text, they don't know if it's me or an assistant. While my assistant can probably answer everything, because she's been with me long enough to know every answer under the sun, there's something about me recording a quick video or a quick audio that helps me to hit reply and send it back to them.
Something else I love is Instagram and Facebook now have an audio option, a voice memo option. I can hit that little microphone, press hold, record, and follow up with them. In fact, I end up having some little sales conversations right there in the DMs. People are always blown away when I do this, which is so surprising to me, but it shouldn't be at this point. I guess not many people think about actually taking the time to reach out to their potential clients. But I love it and it helps me get an idea of who's most interested in our programs, it helps them feel connected to me and what we're doing. It's a huge win in my book.
Sixth, invite to a live Q&A, open house, or something along those lines. One thing that I think we forget about in this world of automation is people need to see us and hear us. If everything feels too automated, if everything feels too polished, it makes us feel a little robotic. The more live touches you're able to build into your enrollment period, the better. One thing that I notice a lot is most launches tend to slow down in the middle. If you're having a week-long launch or enrollment period for your product, program, or service, you might have some people who join the first day and then there's a few days in the middle where you're maybe on pins and needles wondering like, “Are more people going to sign up?” but then you'll see a lot of people on the final day, the final 24-48 hours. One thing that I love doing is having a live Q&A, a live behind-the-scenes tour, a live something about halfway through our enrollment period. I hosted a couple days before we closed down enrollment. What could you cover during this live? Which by the way, you could host this on Instagram Live, you could host us on Facebook Live, you could host this on Zoom, it doesn't really matter the platform. The point is you're showing up. You're showing up unscripted just to be helpful.
You could talk about FAQs about what are the top questions that people have and you can take questions live. If you're going to do a live FAQ, I would highly recommend showing up with at least three to five questions that you know most people have and starting with those to get the ball rolling until people come in with their own specific questions. Because honestly, you probably have seen the same questions again and again, and then you might have people who ask questions about their specific situation that come in as you go through the FAQs.
Another thing you could do in the live is to show behind-the-scenes of the program. I think this is one of the most powerful things you can do, especially if your audience is not used to doing programs the way that yours specifically is. Maybe you have a membership site and most of your audience has never taken an online program and they've never used a membership site. This happens, especially in the B2C space. If you're not working with business owners or entrepreneurs, you might have a lot of people who just aren't that familiar with “How does this work? What does this look like?” If you're working with the general public, this could be a thing and they want to know what it looks like and how it feels. Is it easy to do? Am I techie enough to do this? Answering that will be really helpful. If you're doing something that is more interactive, just showing them what it looks like, what is the experience going to be like? That can be incredibly helpful.
Another thing you can do is invite a star student to come on and share their experience. I love doing these, I'll bring a star student on to share their experience, I might bring a couple people in, I might even blend this in with an FAQ or blend it in with the behind-the-scenes where I bring somebody on to be like a live case study and I ask them specific questions about “Where were you before you started working with us? What helped the most? Where are you now?” It gives an opportunity for people to see that there are real live humans who have gotten results from your work.
Another thing you can cover during the live is an open-house style like walking them through what all is included. Now this I think is really helpful if you have a more comprehensive or higher-level offer because people want to know exactly “What is it going to take to get through this program? What are all the things I'm getting access to? What does the support look like?” All of those types of things, and it's almost like walking them through the sales page live. I put together a slide deck when I do this, but it helps again for people who, maybe, reading a sales page is not their favorite way to process information, for them seeing you walk them through the offer can be a great asset. You can also introduce your team during the live. If you are like me and you have people behind-the-scenes who are going to be working with your clients, you could bring them on and have them share what their role is inside of your business. How do they work with your clients? What's their favorite part about it? That is another way to make people feel more comfortable and confident that they're going to be in good hands. I love adding a live component to the overall enrollment process.
Last, but definitely not least, I think we saved the best for last, invite people to jump on a call with you. Just invite people to book a call. You've heard several of the other ones lead to, “Hey, jump on a call with me. Jump on a call with me.” The reason I always love doing this is because I know that nine times out of ten, the reason somebody is on the fence is because they're wondering, “Is this a good fit for my particular business? Am I ready for this right now?” That means they are in the special snowflake zone where they're like, “Well, my business surely is different,” or “I'm surely different from everybody else who's worked with you.” That's why I just love jumping on a call with them because the easiest way for me to answer that question is to understand more about their business. I can't give a blanket response. Their business might not be a good fit. We don't work with retail businesses. We don't work with drop shipping companies. We don't work with manufacturing companies. There are a lot of businesses we don't work with. We're just not setup to support them. They are way outliers of the rest of the work that we do with coaches, consultants, service providers, course creators, and creative entrepreneurs. I want to make sure they know that.
They might get value from the podcast but in terms of the containers that we hold, they don't make sense. We want to be honest about that and we want to make sure we can get to know and understand what their business model is and what would make the most sense for them. I open up my calendar and I make sure that when we are planning enrollment periods—this is one reason we do specific enrollment periods throughout the year—I make sure that the last two or three days of our launch, I've opened up my schedule and made it easy for people to get onto my calendar to talk with me. Again, it's just something that pays off so much because I get a chance to understand them and their business, I can give them the best answer about whether or not it's a fit, whether or not they're ready, I can give them some pointers. If they aren't a fit, I can send them to the right place if I think they're not ready. They always appreciate that I'm the one showing up on the call.
I hope this overview was helpful for you. I think these high-touch sales boosters are truly a game changer. We don't talk about these enough. But like I said at the beginning of this episode, I think we are seeing a correction in the overall industry. I think when we are starting to ask people to invest into our product, program, or service, especially if they are investing two, three, five, ten thousand, or more to work with us, they're going to expect some personalized attention. That's just the way it is. When we don't offer that personalized attention, it often leaves people feeling a little uncomfortable about investing at that level. If you are offering premium products, programs, and services, think about adding these into your sales process.
If you already do some of these, I want to hear from you. What kind of results have you gotten from these? Do you have any more ideas of high-touch sales boosters that work for you and your business? I would love, love, love to hear those. Make sure you head over to Instagram, connect with me @racheal.cook and we will talk all about it over there. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode and we will talk next week.