SELL FROM THE STAGE

SELL FROM THE STAGE

In the coaching niche, one of the very important things to learn how to do, especially if you do a lot of life speaking, is to learn how to sell your product from the stage. If you’re not as successful as you want to be in doing this, learning this skill will definitely make you more effective as a coach. One of our agency customers, Ted McGrath, has a product that helps coaches do that better than anybody I know.

If you really think about it, what a coach needs, it is to learn how to be a better coach. The urgent want is “how am I going to pay the mortgage this month if I don’t sell at least a few new coaching customers in the seminar I have scheduled for next week?” This is a highly specific outcome that your prospects want right now.

The end result might be to create a six-figure coaching practice, reach as many people as you possibly can with your message, increase your influence, become a sought-out motivational speaker, and so forth. Those all could be hooks in this space but not nearly as effective as a hook that is super specific and delivers an immediate result. Specificity and immediacy are two very important ingredients in the crafting of a solid hook. When you’re crafting a hook, think about that one tiny, little thing that will actually trigger—or better yet, compel—your prospect to click on the ad to take the next step.

“How to sell from the stage” is a hook that has done well because of its specificity and its immediacy. It’s not “how to be a better coach” or “how to create a six-figure income as a coach.” That’s all well and good, but those wouldn’t work on Facebook as well (we’ve tried, by the way). Also, the latter hook may run you into trouble with policy as it’s making a subjective income claim. Any hook that gives the expectation or promise that your prospect can make a specific amount of income, and even worse if you specify in a specific amount of time (e.g., “make $30,000 in 30 days”), chances are very good that you’ll have some trouble with Facebook policy.

If “how to sell from the stage” is your hook, then a logical offer could be a checklist of “The 15 things to do on your next presentation,” when you’re actually up there on stage. In the offer checklist, your tips would all be very specific things and laid out in order from one through 15. All easily consumable information that gives immediate and specific results, but more importantly, it’s incomplete to the entire solution. The logical next step after this initial offer is perhaps a course on “how to sell new clients into your coaching practice” or “how to create a profitable coaching system.”

The offer is highly specific, easily consumable, provides immediate results when implemented, speaks to a known desire, and most importantly, is incomplete with relation to the end product goal. In this case, the paid program offered immediately after the initial offer serves to satisfy that incompleteness.

LEARN TO PLAY FIVE ROCK LICKS

Now we’re talking hooks. This example is even more relevant to explaining what a hook is because any popular rock song, or any popular song in any genre for that matter, has a great “hook.” The “hook” in a popular song is the part of the song that raises the hair on the back of your neck, gives you goose bumps, or just compels you to sing along. A hook in a song is the reason why you listen to it in the first place.

Starting to sound familiar?

According to our friends at Wikipedia, a hook in a song is defined as “a musical idea, often a short riff, passage, or phrase that is used in popular music to make a song appealing and to ‘catch the ear of the listener.’ The term generally applies to popular music, especially rock, R&B, hip hop, dance, and pop.” This example makes our hook for this niche far more relevant.

So let’s say, for example, you are selling digital guitar training. Selling a new lead for training is the ultimate goal of your advertising. To hook a new lead in, we don’t want to use the “learn how to play the guitar better” as your hook. Yes, that is what they ultimately need, but to hook them in, let’s talk about what they really want. When someone first starts playing the guitar, the biggest thing