Sequential Selling
I came across an idea a while back called ‘sequential selling’. The idea was to create a ‘product stack’, containing:
- A low price product ($10-30 range)
- A mid-price product ($100-500 range)
- A high price product ($1000-5000 range)
- A premium, luxury or ‘done for you’ offer ($10K+)
You then offer new prospects the lowest price product initially, then upsell them to one or more of the higher levels.
There is merit to this approach. It CAN work. It fits with the 80/20 power curve principle…
Sequential Selling Does Work!
A small proportion of your customers will pay more to solve the problem faster, more elegantly, in luxury, or at greater convenience.
The misunderstanding is that people will go through each step sequentially. In my experience, somebody with $10K to spend on solving a problem is unlikely to buy a $100 video course.
It’s about as difficult to sell a $100 product as it is to sell a $1000 product. (The $10K+ product sits alone because it can’t easily be put on a credit card… at least not without serious questions from your finance department!)
But it’s about as much effort to sell a $100 product as it is a $1000 product. You’re still going to need a funnel. You’ll still need a sales page. You’ll probably still need a webinar.
(In my experience, ‘webinar + sales page’ usually converts better than ‘JUST sales page’, at least in the $1000 range.)
Rather than looking to sell people sequentially through the stack, I think it’s more effective to qualify people upfront and send them straight to the offer that best fits their budget.
You initially need to know:
- Do they REALLY need the problem solving right now?
- Do they have the money to solve it? And if so, how much?
- Do they have the authority to make a buying decision?
The third question gets tougher the higher you go up the price range. Anyone can buy a book or mini-course without attracting too many questions from their spouse, or finance department. (The spouse and ‘finance department’ may in fact be the same person!)
You want to move people UP the price range as fast as possible, skipping the earlier steps if the prospect hits certain criteria.
You then use the lower-priced options as a down-sell tool, if it turns out in retrospect that the prospect’s budget wasn’t quite as big as they initially let on.
If they don’t have the budget, you can say “that’s fine, we have these do-it-yourself options instead…”
The one exception to moving people UP the price range might be a book. When I published my ‘Ultimate Infusionsoft Apps’ book, the leads who came to me having read the book were generally all good leads.
The book itself acted as an education and filtering mechanism. In fact, I was able to move a number of projects UP the price range much faster, simply because they had read the book. Trust had already been established.
But generally, you only want to offer a lower-priced product on the way back down the stack, not on the way up.
Maybe that’s ‘un-sequential selling’ 😉
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