If you have a pre-existing relationship, you should already have meaningful conversations with your prospects and customers. Don’t misread the meaning behind this. When I talk about the relationship, this can just as easily be an online relationship as it can face to face. In fact, for the most part, we are referring to virtual connections. But what if that is not the case? What if you are not having meaningful conversations? What should you discuss to gain their attention and engage with them? The subject that your prospect will be comfortable with is going to be one of two, either:
- The content and messages you have been sending them, or the lessons you are teaching them or reminding them of, alternatively, it could be.
- A subject related directly to their business that they want to discuss with you as a result of reading your content.
Either way, this is a good step forward, and you just need to maintain consistency of the message and bring them further into the process with additional engagement. The key is to remember the core motivations of wealth, health or relationship and the direction of travel; away from a problem or toward a goal. I think it would be very fair to say that these elements will cover just about all possibilities for serious players.
The method employed that has created the most success for all of the businesses that have been researched when this program was being constructed, including, of course, my own business, which was and continues to be the main motivation behind this program, is often referred to as a value ladder. In essence, this is creating a journey for your prospects and customers that takes them through a logical sequence that results in them becoming one of your valued customers who makes multiple purchases from you.
Think of it this way, when you use the value ladder model, you are, in effect, making yourself the guide that will help your prospect or customer navigate the uphill climb they need to make to achieve their specific aims and goals. On each step of the ladder that they make, there is another conversation based on a hook to get their attention, a story to make the proposition attractive and relevant to them and an offer (solution) that they will want to take full advantage of.
If we look at this process of creating a series of conversations as a diagram, the value ladder would look like the example below. You can see that every step is designed to get the prospect closer to their ultimate aim. Each step is a new but related conversation with a Hook, a story and an offer at the end of the sales funnel. It is worth noting at this point that the prospect or client does not have to join at the bottom and work their way up. They can join at the most appropriate point for them. But you can also see that for a cold prospect, you can get them onto the value ladder with a free or low-price offer that is a partial solution to the subject they are interested in. Each of these steps has its sales funnel connected to an appropriate landing page and mechanism for attracting traffic to the landing page. Each step is connected via calls to action to the next level to encourage the upsell.
If you think about it, this is why it is so important to have a clear picture of your business foundations. We looked at these foundations earlier, but for the sake of clarity and for those that have dipped straight into this, here they are again:
- Your one big thing – a major reason why.
- Your three circles test.
- Your guiding principles.
- Your core values.
- Your vision.
- Your mission, based on the board concept.
If you are unsure about these, you may want to look at C1 and 2 earlier in this series.
These elements help you create the foundations from which your entire business is built. These will and should influence the design, look and feel of your business, your brand and your products and or services; that is why it is so important to get this patty of the construction of your machine right from the get-go.
Your core foundations will and should influence the construction of your value ladder and also the content of the multiple conversations you need to be having with prospects and customers at the various levels of their journey with you. When you get the offering and the market information right, the conversations come with so much more ease. The key, again, is the consistency of the activities; the cumulative effect will start to take over, and once the ball is rolling, it becomes much easier to maintain and build upon.