Most of the coaches/mentors/trainers are introverts. I am one of them. We are very good at writing, spending time alone, reading, and doing market research. We also somehow manage to do webinars and build a personal brand in front of an audience.
When the ed-tech industry in India started heating up, many of us scaled our revenue using sales pages, VSLs, and webinar sales. 2020 gave a boost because many people were wanting to upskill and they had plenty of time to do online courses due to the lockdown.
In 2023, things are different. The cost of customer acquisition has shot up. Everyone wants to become an „online coach” and they learned how to run Facebook Ads. Due to the sheer amount of competition the ad cost has gone up.
The ad costs have gone up not just due to the competition in the ed-tech space but also because of the competition from D2C brands. With shows like Shark Tank India, every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to sell something online directly to the consumer.
While the cost of Google search ads is contained only to the target keywords, on Facebook, someone who wants to learn a specific topic is also targeted with ads from D2C brands though they might not be a direct competition. This increases CPMs.
As a result, online coaches have seen:
- Lower CTRs
- Lower conversions on the landing page
- Lesser webinar show ups
- Lower conversions on the webinars
If a coach invests 1,00,000 rupees in ads and generates leads (let’s say webinar registrations) for 100 per lead, the coach can generate 1000 leads. If the cost of a front-end coaching program (usually a self-paced course) is 10,000, the coach needs a 1% conversion ratio to achieve 10 sales out of 1000 leads and they will just about break even.
Plus there are other costs like salary for themselves, electricity, internet, and online marketing tools (out of which a CRM will cost the most).
Unless the coach has a high ticket program, where another 10% of them subscribe for a 1 Lakh program, they will not profit.
But based on my experience, if you are selling anything more than 30,000 rupees, it doesn’t convert well on webinars. People need 1-on-1 conversations and get their objections cleared before they can shell out a high-ticket price for what they are buying.
Usually, it doesn’t make sense to sell anything less than 1 Lakh because unlike webinars and landing pages which can scale, you don’t have unlimited time to sell 1-on-1.
I can take 2-3 calls a day at best and if I get into that myself, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. There is no way I can do the 1-on-1 sales myself. My time is best invested in building the brand, doing content marketing, doing market research, and planning for future projects.
We introduced our high-ticket program: AlphaClub, a mastermind program for freelancers, consultants, and agencies. It is a yearly membership. 2 years back we started with a 1 Lakh ticket price but now it has gone up multifold due to the demand. We have a hard limit of 99 members.
We sell 8-9 memberships every month and sometimes we have 20 people expressing interest to join. That’s when we increase the price of the program to accommodate the most serious people into the program.
I send out an email to my list, do webinars, and add links to AlphaClub wherever I can. The call-to-action in all these communications is: book a call with us.
Right now we have 2 full-time sales closers who do 1-on-1 sales and each person brings in an average of 4-5 sales a month.
At this rate, our annual revenue from just AlphaClub has gone up to 3-5 crores a year. Our pricing is customized based on requirements. Sometimes, we also build landing pages and set up Facebook ads for our customers.
Our sales closers are well-trained in sales methods and we do consultative selling. There are hardly any sales happening in the sales call. We just understand the business challenges of our prospects and add value to the call.
Sometimes we reject them if we think that they are not a good fit for us right now. Yes, we say no to real money and that’s how we have built a strong brand for AlphaClub.
There is no acquisition cost for enrolling people in AlphaClub because all our ad costs are already liquidated and funded by our low-ticket programs. I also get a lot of traffic from organic sources which adds to my email list. And we just need 99 members in one year and it is easy to get it via our email list which has 3L+ active subscribers.
Coaches, mentors, and trainers cannot scale their revenue and make their work sustainable unless they have a high-ticket program and in most cases, you cannot sell a high-ticket program unless you have 1-on-1 sales happening. For that, you need a sales team.
That’s how we did it, and that’s how you can do it too.
