I put our pricing on our websites and…people don’t look at it.

What we’ve seen in the data is that 42% of the people who come across us (most of our leads are coming through one-to-one marketing or they’re coming through cold email outreach) are not checking out the pricing page, which means 42% of the people that we talk to on a regular basis have no idea what our pricing is.

It becomes a conversation issue.

Agency owners, when you were doing the selling, were you seeing a higher conversion rate than you are now moving to your sales team?

When I did this in my first agency, then my other agencies, what I found was whenever I would take a call, I could close them about 38% of the time, and then when I brought in sales staff, they were converting about 20% of the calls.

I started to realize that there’s something special about being the owner and founder, right? As owner/founder, you’re going to have some cachet that other people like, that makes them feel special. Everyone wants to talk to the owner-founder. You know this, and you can give stories and case studies because it’s in you! This is your business, it’s your baby.

So, one of the things I started to do was taking my team through a training process on consultative selling.

Have you heard about consultative selling?

I’ll lay it out. This is how we run all of our companies now, with the same sales model. What we saw when we did this was the conversion rate the sales team was getting jumped from 20% to 33%.

When people first come in, we do 30 minute calls. What we would do is for the first 10 to 15 minutes of a 30 minute call, we would ask a series of questions.

On these calls we can disqualify 60% of the people that we talk to. They’re not a good fit to work with us. I didn’t make that number up– that’s a real statistic. After the first 10-15 minutes I’m going to know if a lead qualifies or not.

I will say at the end of that time, “Hey listen, you don’t qualify. You’re a nice person, you’re just not a good fit for our process, our product, our service. So I’m gonna let you, give you 15 minutes back of your day.”

Otherwise, the potential client will qualify, like 40% of our prospects do. At that point, I’ll make an offer so good it’s gonna be impossible for them to say no.

To which the prospect goes, “Absolutely, that sounds amazing, great.”

Then I say, “Hey, I took a look at your website. I have an idea of what you’re up to, but tell me in detail what your business is about and what you have going on.”

Then they talk to us and then we’re just asking them questions like, “How many email campaigns are you sending out every month? What are the results that you’re getting? How old is your list? Are you updating it constantly? Is it segmented?”

SaaS owner/founders, people want to talk to you first. They want to be heard.

One of the things that I see a lot of SaaS companies do is they bring in people to a conversation and they go, “Hey, let me show you what our program looks like.”

Then they start going through a slide deck. What this does is, instead of being engaged in the conversation, the prospect is already sitting back here and they’re going, “Okay, yeah, let me see if this is gonna work for me.”

So, we ask those questions, and we’re getting those details on the front end so that we understand the whole problem.

Then– this is the key. We say, “Alright, so based on what you’re telling me, how much money do you think you are losing because your email marketing isn’t as good as it could be?”

They’re gonna say, “I don’t know.” Promise.

So you say, “Okay, what’s your average purchase? Like, what’s the dollar amount for your average purchase?”

Let’s say it’s $200. Let’s say the potential client has a list of 20,000 people with a conversion rate of a quarter of a percent.

Our average client sees a conversion rate of half a percent.

I’d say, “So if we’re just doing math here, it sounds like you have a pretty expensive problem because you’re performing at half the rate that our average client does. So if I could get you an extra quarter of a percent of 20,000, what would that be? 1% would be 200, so an extra 50 purchases at 200 bucks a month, an extra 50 purchases, that’d be 10 grand. So if I charge you $5,000, but you make an extra 10 grand, would that work for you?”

I just fixed their problem, they’re gonna make more money, and I told them how we do it.

Here’s why our solution works, here’s why we’re great, here’s what we do, this is what makes us different from other people, and probably different from what you’re doing.

That first little step is, “How much is it costing you?” It may be costing them a million dollars. I’ve had those conversations.

What ends up happening is we have such a high close rate because we took the steps to set up the client for success. Most of the time, it’s as simple as working them through the logic that’s gonna help them see what’s achievable.