I used to think that the top salespeople knew something that the rest of us didn’t.

Maybe they had a secret script or strategy that I just had to get my hands on.

Well, after generating millions of dollars of sales in both my own coaching and course business and my clients’ businesses, I now know better.

The “secret” to selling coaching actually lies in these 5 essential selling secrets….

If you want to know how to sell high-ticket coaching services, read on.

Selling Tip #1: Get potential clients on a call!

Wondering how to sell yourself as a coach?

The first tip I have for you today is basic but incredibly important, especially if you’re just starting out. And that is to get your potential clients on a call.

Way too many entrepreneurs try to sell directly from a social media post or an email when they’re new in business.

Don’t get me wrong — that has its time and place when selling coaching, especially as you scale out your business. But when you’re starting out, nothing is more effective than getting someone on a call with you. (Personal relationships never go out of style.)

It’s much easier to connect with someone on a call. For example, research shows that smiling builds trust. And it’s much easier to convey a smile on a call than in writing.

It is more work, but I promise it’s so worth it. Not only are you going to make more sales, but you’re also going to learn so much about your audience, your clients, and what they’re connecting with and not connecting with in your content. And that knowledge is going to pay off for the life of your business.

Related: If you don’t know how to get clients onto calls with you, make sure you check out my tutorial on how to do that using social media.

What do you do once they’re on that call with you? Read on to find out…

Selling Tip #2: Lead with emotion, close with logic

This tip is really important. Maybe you’ve heard before that people buy on emotion. (And if you haven’t, now you definitely have.) But that’s not the whole picture.

People buy on emotion but they justify that purchase with facts. (This is backed by neuroscience.)

The first time I realized this, it was such a huge aha moment for me, because up until then I’d been guilty either of focusing too much on the facts or too much on the emotion. Once you realize how these two fit together though, that’s how you’re going to make the most sales.

Selling with emotion really is the most effective way to sell coaching and consulting services.

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How do you lead with emotion?

So what does that mean in terms of tangible action items?

What that means is that when you’re creating a new promotional campaign, or the next time you’re on a sales call with a potential client, your number one goal is to uncover what emotion is driving that person.

Why is someone coming to you for help on whatever it is you helped them with? What’s really driving them? What’s the pain, what’s the desire, what’s that emotional hot button?

And you want to really dig deep and understand.

If someone’s coming to you for health coaching for example, they’re not coming to you just to lose weight.

There’s some deep internal reason. Maybe they just have gotten to a point where they feel so bad and out of control with their eating.

Or maybe they really want to revitalize their relationship with their partner.

Or they really want to lose 20 pounds to refind the confidence and energy that they used to have.

Whatever that hot button is, both the pain, and the dream, you really need to speak to that in your sales conversation. (Or your sales page, it’s the same process.)

That’s not all though.

How do you close with logic?

Once someone is excited and ready to buy, you have to be able to help them justify the purchase with the facts.

What does that look like? You’ve got to share the value and the outcome of your offer, and help your potential client relate it to the value of the investment.

How do you do that?

By showing them that the investment is way less than the value of the outcome.

For example…

What would it mean for someone to be able to get the raise that they want and maintain that for the rest of their career? What’s the actual number of dollars that translates into over the rest of their life?

What does it mean for someone to be able to save this much time every single week so that they don’t have to cook their own food? What’s the cost of that compared to the value of your investment?

There are lots of different ways to do this and think about this and those are just two examples.

That’s still not all.

How do you make it a total no-brainer?

What you also want to do is to justify what they get in return for the investment. So for example, if someone is ready and excited to purchase, that’s when you let them know:

“Not only do you get this amazing outcome, but in the value of what you’re getting from my coaching or my course itself, here’s what else you’re also going to get.

Here’s the bonuses, here’s the value of the course, the community, the coaching, the bonuses, everything. And the support that you’re going to get so that you can realize this in of itself factually is also an incredible value.”

That’s how you balance both the emotional driver that’s going to drive someone to be excited about and want to and be ready to purchase as well as the features and facts that are going to help them justify making that decision.

Now, if you’re wondering how to sell coaching packages, the next tip is incredibly important.

Selling Tip #3: Have a conversation!

The third selling coaching tip I have for you today is to make sure that when you are having that sales conversation, whether it’s on a sales call, or you’re writing a sales email, or you’re writing a sales page, that you’re not just following a script. You’ve actually having a conversation.

Something I see this way too often with new entrepreneurs is that, once they’ve found a sales script, they follow it to the letter.

For example, with some of my coaching clients, I’ll listen to recordings of their sales conversations, and hear that it sounds exactly like they’re reading the script…which they are! Because of that, they don’t sound like themselves, and they’re so focused on following the script to the letter that they miss out on the key takeaways of the conversation.

Here’s what you want to do instead…

How to make your sales calls so good, you will get a ‘yes’ on the spot

For any sort of sales conversation – a sales call, a sales email, a sales page – you start with drawing in your reader / your listener, and you do that by understanding what they’re struggling with. What is that emotional pain that’s driving them?

Then, you lead into what that emotional dream, their goal is. What do they want out of all of this? What is their goal, their hope, for overcoming it?

And then, once you understand that, you can present how your offer really addresses both the pain they want to overcome and the dream that they want to accomplish.

As you can imagine, there’s no one set of questions that applies to every single person and every single industry. So you really have to understand the core concepts of that, which I just shared with you, to be able to have that a sales conversation that is effective for your audience and your business.

The ONE thing you need to do to close the sale

That also allows you to customize the conversation and take it wherever it needs to go to be able to close that sale.

For example, most of the sales calls I listen to start in the same way. By asking, “Hey, what’s going on with your problem and why is that, why is that, okay what’s the dream that you want for that problem.”

Instead, how can you customize that for your audience?

So for example, one of my clients that I helped with this recently helps people build their Pinterest accounts so that they’re driving a lot of organic traffic.

And what we did was we worked on customizing that script so she now asks them:

“Hey, what’s going on with your problems with driving traffic,” because that’s why they come to her.

“What are you doing right now to drive traffic? What do you not like about it? Is it even working?

How well is it working? If it’s not working, why don’t you think it’s working? What had you be interested in Pinterest in the first place?”

Next, she asks…

“What is ultimately your goal for Pinterest, how does that fit into your business goals for the long term, what does that mean for your business and your long term business and life goals?”

As you can see, it’s basically the exact same script, except that we’ve modified it for that specific client of mine so that it becomes a conversation that’s much more aligned with what she offers and what her audience is coming to her for.

Take a second and think about how you can do that for YOUR sales conversations.

Then, move on to the next tip, which is one of the most important selling tips…

Selling Tip #4: Talk about the money with confidence

That is a reminder to, when it’s time to talk about the price, state your price with confidence. What’s more, when you hear the money objection of, “Ooo that’s more than I thought it was gonna be,” or “I don’t know if I can afford it,” hold that place of confidence for you and your potential client.

Related: Not feeling confident about the price you charge? Read this now.

Don’t do this – it will kill the sale!

So often when I listen to sales call recordings of my new coaching clients, I hear them having these amazing conversations…until it’s time to get to the price.

All of a sudden, their energy on the call plummets. And you can hear that they’re trying to get “the money” part over with as quickly as possible. They say something like…

“Here’s the investment, I would love to work with you.” And then, when someone talks through the money objections like, “Oh I don’t know if I can afford that,” they just stop.

They’ll say something like, “Oh okay, I get it, thanks for having this call with me.” (Does this sound familiar?)

I want to make it very clear — I’m not talking about being pushy or salesy. But if someone has raised their hand, has gotten on a call with you, and has expressed their interest in wanting your help, then there’s a reason that they did that.

And so often when they raise their money objection, it’s not so much that they truly can’t afford it as there’s some fear coming up.

Now, I do want to caveat, if someone is having trouble paying their bills, you need to get clear if that is truly the case, and if so they need to go and focus on that. But most people have the self awareness and the survival skills to not be hopping on sales calls with people when they’re struggling with that.

Why confidence is one of the most important selling techniques

And so where confidence comes in is in being confident not only in your price, but in your ability to help someone get the results that they’re coming to you for, and in understanding that the value of that result that they’re going to get is going to be so much higher than the actual cost of the investment with you.

Once you really, truly believe that and are confident in that yourself, what that allows you to do is stand in confidence to have that money conversation.

It can be as simple as asking someone, “Hey, would you be willing to talk about this a little bit more?”

If they say yes (which most of the time, they will), you can ask…

“I’d love to talk about why it’s coming up that you think you can’t afford this.” Listen to their answer because understanding that opens the door for you to have an actual conversation with them about their money thoughts and beliefs and what they’re really struggling with.

How I use this in my sales calls

I’ll tell you, so often I’ve had clients come to me with that issue and it often turns out that it’s just because they’re scared, or they’ve been burned before by other bad business coaches or courses.

And so we talk through that. We talk through their fears about that. We talk through the possibility of, “Let’s look at what would happen if you weren’t burned this time? Because I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m the real deal. You know, you can Google me, you can look at my results.”

“What would that look like? And is it truly about not being able to afford it, or is it really just about being scared about making the investment?”

As you can see, it’s really up to you to stand in that place of confidence, of knowing, “Hey I can get help you get results, I know the results are going to be more valuable to you than the investment, and so with that foundation, I’m gonna help you really talk through if it really is about not being able to afford it or being scared to make the investment.”

Keep in mind: Those are two completely different things. You can coach someone through the fear of the investment. That’s actually your job if someone’s coming to you interested in what you have to offer them.

The truth behind why people say “I can’t afford it”

Also, you have to remember, people love to buy. I can’t tell you how many times when I was starting out in my business I would believe someone when they said, “I can’t afford this.” And I would feel like I was doing them a really great service by saying, “Okay. Thanks for the call. Thanks, that’s it.”

Then, a few days later, I would see them talking about this amazing vacation they’d been on or this new coach they just hired who probably, I didn’t realize at the time, but I do now, was able to stand firm in that place of confidence and walk them through their fear of investing, to feel good about making the investment.

I know that this can be hard to absorb because we all want to just help people and do the right thing, but trust me. Try this a few times and you’re going to be amazed at the results that you’re going to see.

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And this might help even more…

How to get past your fear of talking through this objection once and for all

Think of three people who you’ve spoken with in the past who told you they couldn’t afford you. Go and check out their social media profiles and see what they’ve been up to.

Chances are pretty darn high that they’ve gone out there and made a significant investment that’s at the same level or higher than what they were thinking about investing with you. And they’ve loved it.

That’s going to help you truly absorb that belief that when someone says they can’t afford it, it’s not always that they can’t afford it. Often, it’s simply that they’re afraid of making the investment, and that’s YOUR job to walk them through it.

Which brings us to the last of today’s selling tips….

Selling Tip #5: Make sure you’re painting “The Vision”

The final tip I’ve got for you today is to make sure that in your conversations, you’re not just laying out the benefits and the features and the dreams, but you are also truly painting a picture for someone.

Why? Because storytelling increases sales conversions, as research shows.

Let me give you an example of how this works…

How my client learned how to sell by painting the vision

One of my past students used to be an Olympic athlete. That’s pretty darn cool, right? Through her Olympic workouts, she realized a way to help people get fit doing a specific type of workout that anyone can do.

So she started a health coaching business to help busy people lose weight and get fit with these workouts that she’d created.

Now when someone comes on a sales call with her, we talked about not just saying, “Hey, what are you struggling with in terms of your health, what do you need help with, and here’s what your life is gonna look like once we get that going for you.”

She painted a very strategic picture based on the details that that person shared. And how she did that was, again, having a conversation just like we talked about earlier. Understanding exactly what their struggles with, and then sharing with them, “Hey, here’s how I’m gonna help you.”

So she might say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about what’s going on with your life where you don’t have the time to work out and you feel just not great with your body.”

That person might say, “You know what, I’m busy at work all the time and I sit, I don’t know, 18 hours a day. And then I come home and then I eat unhealthily and then I go to sleep. And then I do it all again the next day.”

Then my client might ask, “Tell me how your weekends look.” And that potential client might say, “Well I like to spend time with friends but we’re always just going out and having drinks, and that makes me feel unhealthy as well.”

And so, with those small details, we talked about her doing is when she’s painting the emotional outcome, she doesn’t just say, “You’re gonna lose weight.” Instead, she maps out specifically how she’s going to help her.

So she says for example,

“Based on what you just told me, we’re going to fit your workouts into what you just shared. And what that’s going to look like is I’m going to walk you through how to fit these small workouts that I’ve created into your time while you’re sitting at your desk.

I’m gonna show you these sit down workouts that you can literally do and not have anyone notice you so it doesn’t look weird.

Then what we’re gonna do is create a really customized easy meal plan that you can use immediately after you get home, that’s not gonna take you a ton of work to cook, but it’s gonna be a no brainer for you to eat so that you can instantly become healthy.

And finally, what we’re gonna work on is on the weekends, we’re gonna come up with fun things for you and your girlfriends to do that don’t necessarily involve having a lot of drinks and eating, overeating.”

And so as you can see, what that does is it helps that potential client really ground into how their life is gonna change and how doable and possible it is for them.

Paint an irresistible picture… And close your next client

Now, I want to caveat something here.

I’m not talking about coaching them during the actual sales conversation. That’s not the point. You do not want to be doing that.

What you’re doing is painting a picture for how you’re gonna help them, so that it’s customized for them and they understand, okay this is how it’s gonna change, I can see how it’s possible.

Armed with these selling tips, you’ll see your sales rates skyrocket even if you don’t think you’re a “good salesperson.”

That’s it, now you know how to sell coaching services online.

Selling coaching doesn’t have to be hard… It comes down to implementing these steps consistently.

But to build a profitable and sustainable coaching business, you need the right strategy.

Want to know what it is?

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