Back during my car selling days, I was only ever successful selling Corvettes to old guys in Scottsdale Arizona. I have no idea why it worked out this way, but it was consistent.

As my business grew, this trend continued. I’ve never had much traction “in the middle.” I tend to attract people to work with that are in the premium and above level of things. I have no idea why. In fact, it bugged me for the longest time.

I’d hear about these huge product launches where people made thousands of sales. But I could never make that happen.

I was never able to sell 600 of something at $299 and walk away with a $180K product launch. I only ever seemed to attract SINGLE buyers who wanted to pay $180K for something.

I ended up in the same place, actually a better one (since I only had a SINGLE buyer to service) but my ego never liked it. I eventually accepted that this is how things will go for me, and I’ve stopped trying to change it.

So much of my experience over the past decade has been with helping people sell very expensive things.

In this short report, I’m going to highlight a few lessons learned from helping to sell millions and millions of dollars of high-fee products and services. This is work I’ve done with clients over the past few years.

If you’re not selling high-fee things, you might consider doing it. The middle is a crowded land full of people who are working 24/7 to get attention from the masses in an effort to sell them things they probably don’t really need. The air is much clearer when PRICE alone precludes a majority of the marketplace from ever working with you.

Plus, high-fee products and services (provided the margin isn’t stupidly small) completely change the numbers of the business. This is obvious but it’s not obvious ENOUGH until you’re actually living on the inside of one of these businesses. When you are able to run a nationwide magazine ad (circulation 80K-140K) and technically be profitable with a SINGLE sale, it’s a good position to be in.

Some of what I’ve learned is rather counterintuitive. If you go in thinking you know what you’re doing, you tend to get your head served to you on a platter. If you go in simply WATCHING what is happening and making adjustments from there, you tend to fare much better.

So let’s jump in… for the purposes of this report, know that when I say “high-fee,” I’m talking about fees in between $100K and $200K, although the lessons will also apply to much lower fee levels, particularly if you’re selling expert type of things (e.g. situations where you’re selling YOURSELF).

Lesson #1: For as Much as People Talk About Pursuing Pleasure and Achieving Greatness, They Are Far More Motivated to Remove Pain

As much as I wish people would learn to pursue what they want based on their own will and intent, my experiences has proven time and time again that humans are far more motivated to move away from pain than to move towards what they want.

This is such a simple but powerful thing to remember. With every product or service you offer, you have the choice about whether to position it as a relief from pain or a vehicle to pleasure.

You can find a lot of people trying to sell pleasure and aspirational angles. But it’s a hard sell in my experience. When we’re trying to impress someone about a product or service, the mind habit is to generally extol the virtues of that product or service. Talk about all the great things it can do. Talk about the life of the buyer with it in his life. Talk about how revolutionary or innovative the product or service is.

But this is, in my experience, not the smart approach.

Buyers either believe they are OK today or they believe they are NOT OK today.

And it’s a big challenge to sell a $200K item to someone when they’re already “OK.” The fact is, most people don’t “NEED” anything that costs $200K. We’re not talking about survival needs here, we’re talking about a product or service that EVERYONE COULD live without.

Focusing on PAIN wins just about every single time. And that means, if you really want to serve someone, you should structure your approach to increase the chances of them asking you for help.

Take these two made up headlines, for example:

• How To Make a Million Dollars From Your Kitchen Table
• How To Never Be Forced to Work a Job You Hate…EVER Again

It’s the same product in both situations, but two very different emotional angles.

You might think people would get excited about making a million bucks. But as it turns out, excitement doesn’t seem to lead to action quite as smoothly in the world of high-fee. The opportunity to relieve pain does lead to action.

Another reason this is far more effective is because most humans do NOT like the current position in which they find themselves on any one day. The majority of people want tomorrow to be different. So the force moving them away from today’s conditions is MUCH more powerful than the force pulling them towards tomorrow’s conditions, which, for most, are little more than dreams in their mind.

Selling what you have as relief for PAIN is selling what you have in a way that’s focused on the buyer’s current reality.

When given the choice, sell the pain. That’s really what your business is, solving problems.

Lesson #2: People Who Are Being Chased Don’t Spend $200K on Anything

You don’t “close” $200K sales. I guess you can, but I think it’s a dumb way to go. The smarter way to go is to engineer everything so that the buying action is a decision of the buyer. No pressure, no coercion.

As the fee level rises, my experience shows that it’s best to attract someone to a sale. Even better yet is to advise them to the sale. This means that, at no time during the process, do you put your “saleperson’s” hat on and close the buyer. Instead, you structure a conversation where it becomes the buyer’s idea that the sale is in his best interest.

This leads to completely different outcomes, far more money and a client/customer who feels as good or better AFTER the sale as they did before.

Chasing is what you do if you don’t know any better.

This is really a very basic idea that most humans have trouble sticking with, especially if cash flow is tight at any one particular moment.

The most effective way I’ve found to counteract the human’s great capacity to feel “need” is to sell through systems. This takes “in the moment” decisions off the table. You can have systems that are written down, you can have systems that exist in thought only, there really are no rules here.

The benefit is that systems tend to remove the emotional charge from a selling situation. They allow a level of predictability and calm that “trying to close” a potential buyer will never produce.

Lesson #3: Monitoring the “Air in the Balloon” is Important

It’s not hard to get 95% of the way to a high-fee sale only to watch as your previously interested prospect just stands up and walks away or disappears into the darkness  forever. The bad news is that we’ve all seen this happen more than we’d like. The good news (or more bad news, depending on how you see it!) is that we seem to be responsible for creating this situation.

This became extremely obvious to me while refining a selling system for a client offering a high-fee training product for just shy of $200K. We designed an entire interview process to help us sift, sort and identify the ideal people for the program.

We did this over the span of a few months, a few pieces at a time, basically “live testing” new ideas and changes as they came to us.

The process ended with the applicant getting accepted or rejected. While the original idea was for this to be the end of the selling process and allow the accepted applicants to join the program and be whisked off to their future success, it actually turned out to be the very beginning of a somewhat odd chase.

What happens when you’re blowing up a balloon and you let all of the air out of it?

It deflates. And with that deflation goes all of the air providing the energy required to turn a flat piece of rubber into a beautiful balloon.

When you release all of the “air” in a prospective client or customer situation, the very same thing happens. You place 100% of the control into the hand of the buyer and allow them to direct the show from there. It’s like trying to win a basketball game and then giving your opponent the ball.

This is dumb on many levels. First, if you actually want to SERVE them, then leaving them to make their own decision does not often achieve that aim. “Here patient, are all of the pills you can choose to help with that sore elbow, just take your pick and let me know how it turns out.” The reason they are speaking with you in the first place is because you solve a problem they are unable or unwilling to solve. So leaving them to their own devices is kind of a crazy approach when you think about it.

Failing to monitor the “air in the ballon” at various points inside of your selling system is also dumb because human nature is such that humans generally want what they cannot have and want LESS those things that are easily accessible.

In this client project, we discovered that once an applicant was “accepted,” the entire dynamic of the situation changed — the ball was now in their court and we watched as too many of them did an “about face” and dribbled away with the ball.

Each step of your selling system should be engineered such that the right people are attracted to next step of the process. That does not end until the sale is complete.

So this takes some deep thinking about how each part of your selling system contributes to or detracts from the attraction towards you.

Lesson #4: Selling Works Best When It’s Their Idea to Buy

I went through years of believing that I was a hot commodity for getting people to buy things I was selling. Big deal. You win the “Coercion of the Year” award. Not exactly an award you’d want to tell your grandmother about.

I had not yet discovered the elevated form of selling that creates an environment where your prospect simply wants to buy what you have.

Plus, if you’re smart, coercion of any type is flat out NOT a good strategy. You leave a taste in their mouth much like a used car salesman. They might actually still buy what you have, but you will have forever tainted their perception of you and how they talk about you to others.

The best way to sell is to build your systems in such a way where the act of buying is their own decision. This is always the truth about selling anyway…especially to really great quality buyers: they buy when they decide to.

The real work is to build a selling system that you control that allows them to be in control too.

At first, it seems like this is a “let the world do whatever it wants” approach to business building, but it’s not. It is simply putting MORE responsibility on your shoulders to figure out how to build out an environment where your prospect naturally decides to buy what you have.

A media platform obviously plays a big factor in this. But there are many tools you can use to help.

While you’re not pressuring a prospect into buying (what type of REAL advisor would ever do anything like that?), that doesn’t mean they can buy anytime they want or however they want.

So you have timing, product/service structuring, tightly controlled buying opportunities and a lot of other techniques in your toolkit to work with.

One of the clients I’ve worked with selling high-fee services built his business on this model using an enrollment window. I guess you could think of it as a “rolling” service launch but it was timed for each person. Very, very simple. The buying window opened and then it closed. Everyone knew that upfront. After a few years, he opened it up to a more “buy whenever” type of model, but that saw his sales team do far more chasing. That is the price you pay in that model.

It’s valuable to really give some thought to how you would advise your prospects to buy. Being a real advisor actually means you’re telling them the TRUTH about what is in their best interest. And many times, that’s to buy what you have!

So you have to get OUT of your head the traditional “sell to everyone who will buy”  mindset and move to “I want ALL of the right people to buy this and I’m willing to build the systems required to properly identify who those people are” mindset.

At first it might seem like a small shift, but in my experience, it’s a completely different paradigm.

What do your prospective buyers need to know about the solution you provide to make a simple choice about whether or not it’s in their best interest to buy it? That’s the question to ask yourself over and over again.

Lesson #5: Reorienting Your TRUE Intentions on Something BIGGER Than the Sale

In my experience, as fee levels increase, the disdain for being “sold to” also increases. People investing $200K don’t want to be sold, they want to buy.

This works in anyone’s favor who is interested in becoming THE leader in their industry.

I’m sure there’s some workshop you can go to that will teach you all the ways to “sell without selling,” but I have a really simple way you can do it without even having to leave home or watch someone’s webinar!!

Reorient your reason for being so that it actually becomes something FAR BIGGER AND MORE IMPORTANT TO THE WORLD than just selling your stuff.

If you can get this feeling right in YOU, then it naturally permeates through your marketing, through your phone calls, meetings and everywhere else you might interact with a prospective client or customer.

There is nothing more attractive in this world than a super successful feeling person who doesn’t need anyone to buy. You can engineer and craft this perception or you can just actually BE this type of human.

Are you able to truly feel a desire that is stronger for the future of your prospect than the desire you feel to get him to say Yes?

Are you able to set yourself on a mission that is much BIGGER than how many zeros are attached to your bank account?

People can feel this. And this “indirect success approach” where you actually aim for a goal, the natural BYPRODUCT of which includes things you used to really want (sales, leads, etc.)…this actually increases attraction because it decreases the pressure your prospect feels from you.

It transforms the vibe you emit from one of salesperson to one of the TRAIN. You’re going somewhere that is bigger and beyond any ONE prospect you ever deal with. This is extremely powerful, but you actually have to believe it and embody it to have it work. “Trying it out” or anything less than complete conviction and you can get some pretty weird results.

Humans generally want to belong. And by setting your sights on a goal or mission that does not DIRECTLY involve or require them, there is a natural attractive pull for people to be involved.

Lesson #6: You Are Responsible For Properly Positioning the Gold

You are the gold. And as an extension of you, so is your product. Sadly, so many business owners do not remember this when it comes time to sales and marketing.

When your focus is on getting someone to buy, you are only two mental steps away from showing the world need.

It’s often hard to remember just how TOTALLY IN CONTROL you are of the universe into which your prospective clients and customers step. You control the story because you’re writing the story. If you provide no story, then the prospect is forced to supply their own, based on their experience so far in life.

No one comes to you knowing that you have the gold. You literally have to show them you have it, you have to act like you have it, you have to speak like you have it. And most importantly, you have to treat yourself and what you offer with the respect that real GOLD demands.

That last one is probably the most important because your prospects will follow your lead with the story you tell. And by “story” I mean the story you tell through your behavior, not what you actually say.

Would you simply give away gold to anyone? Would you give them how ever much they asked for? Would you give them MORE if they squandered the first batch?

With this single perspective shift, you can completely transform a sales system and prepare it for much higher-fee selling.

For example, when you realize that YOU, your product/service or organization are the gold for your clients and customers, then things like “sales calls” take on a very different form and vibe.

• Sales calls become interviews.
• Marketing promotions become invitations to submit applications.
• Lead generation efforts become opportunities to qualify.
• “Buy it whenever we can sell it to you” becomes tightly controlled enrollment windows.
• Buying almost becomes an opportunity that is granted to the buyer rather than something that is pushed down their throats.

Are you at a point where you can actually feel that? Because if you can feel it, then you’ll act it and do it and be it.

This is a feeling that completely obliterates the “we’re trying to sell you” approach to business. In fact, if you build systems that function this way, you will find they are extremely effective tools for UPGRADING your own belief in the value you bring to the world. You build a system that communicates to the world that YOU have the gold and you end up strengthening your own belief in that fact.

Lesson #7: It Is Actually Easier to Sell Very High-Fee Than It Is To Sell Cheap Stuff

This is not logical, but it does seem to be true. And hopefully by the time you’re done reading this, it will make you think twice or more about why your fees are set where they’re at.

Given that YOU’VE got the gold, are you selling gold at silver prices or lower? That wouldn’t make a lot of sense to do that would it?

My experience being involved with the selling of some pretty high-fee products and services is that it is often easier to build the systems to sell those things than it is to sell  far cheaper and more “accessible” things.

There are a few reasons for this…

First, the numbers of the business change completely.

No direct marketing person in his right mind would spend $30K on a display ad to get a single sale. But when you’re dealing with high-fees, everything changes. That’s obvious once you do it. But it’s not so obvious as a REASON to move to the very top of your marketplace and truly push what most think are the limits on what you can charge.

There is a big difference between what the market will bear for a widget and what the market will bear for someone to have YOU involved in the solution they seek. These two numbers are completely different.

When you’re one of a kind, everything changes. The widget world has a price spectrum almost dictated to you by a pool of buyers and the other has virtually zero limits.

Second, expensive contributes powerfully to allowing buyers to more easily self select. Some people always buy the expensive thing. Most people who buy expensive things have the money required to fund those things.

Either way, the audience changes and you have a very simple “test” (price) through which to qualify your prospective buyers.

If everyone can afford what you have, you’ve just added a BIG todo list item in that you have given up PRICE as a way to easily sift and sort buyers. You have to figure out another way to stick out from the crowd and make it easy for your prospective buyers to choose YOU.

Third, you are now able to (usually) deal with a FAR SMALLER universe of prospects. This allows you to focus more often and more deeply on those people. From a systems perspective, this allows you to better address each prospective buyer and to more tightly tune the conversation to their exact situation.

Lesson #8: The Longer Your Sales Cycle, the Better Your Buyer

Everyone wants fast. For some reason, we’re all wired to desire that. But when you’re selling high-fee products and services, my experience is that SLOW is better. Slowing down the selling process allows you to end up with a better buyer and ultimately a better sale.

When you’re selling really expensive stuff, slow is generally just how it goes anyway. No one shows up and drops $200K on the first day. I’m sure it happens, I just haven’t seen it happen.

So what you see after building, refining and optimizing sales systems like this is that slow is actually better. Slow creates a certain type of magic that is literally impossible with fast. Time and what energy inside of someone does over time are the factors that make the magic possible.

Slowing down the selling process is an effective way to jettison the people who really don’t belong and also a very effective way to deepen the perception of you as THE EXPERT that the buyer develops.

I remember Dan Kennedy say once (maybe in his Trust Based Marketing book) that he’d much rather delay a sale he COULD have today until tomorrow or beyond. The first time I heard him say that, I thought it was crazy. Then I lived it over and over again.

It’s also funny and counterintuitive that slowing things down tends to increase the attraction someone has to you. You’re not the only one who wants “fast,” all of your prospects are wired for that too. And when you slow them down, you send the signals of someone who does not need them.

Lesson #9: There is a TON of Money in the World and a TON of People Who Have It

The first experience I ever had selling really high-fee products and services was when I worked with a land investor well over a decade ago. There I was in my little house in Flagstaff Arizona building out a sales system to bring him investors ready to invest in raw land right outside of Las Vegas.

This was well before the bridge over the Hoover Dam was built and the land investors were buying was right in the path of growth that was going to explode once that bridge got done.

One of the biggest lessons for a struggling copywriter just getting started (I think the first check he ever sent me was for like $4K…I thought I had won the lottery!) was to see that the world is literally filled with money.

This is a lesson that’s hard to believe depending on where you’re at in your business. And really, no matter WHERE you’re at, whether you think $1 million is a lot or that $100 million is a lot, we humans tend to get very used to our comfort zone and to think that anything outside of that will take work to reach.

We just make up a story for ourselves and that story becomes our future if we allow it. The story and the belief structure that supports it LITERALLY affect our vision of opportunity, limitation and abundance.

The truth is money is everywhere.

Lesson #10: Empathy Reigns Supreme

There is not a lot of “selling” that has to happen if you simply do the work to develop a VERY deep understanding of the emotional condition of your buyer. If we all understood each other, life would be pretty smooth.

I would know what YOU want and why. You would know what I wanted and why. And we could find common ground in those things.

That’s not how the world works at the moment. Right now, most everyone THINKS they know what other people are thinking, what they want and why they do or do not do things.

Selling via systems allows you to build a machine that slowly helps you paint a true and accurate vision of your buyer. This leads to much deeper levels of empathy than most people think are possible.

In a weird and twisted way, the idea of empathy always reminds me of a story Gary Halbert used to tell about picking up a beautiful girl at a party. I don’t remember his exact words, but I remember the point.

This beautiful woman was at a party dealing with a constant barrage of men trying to take her home. Countless men tried, but no one succeeded. And then, one final man walked over to her, whispered in her ear, and smiled as she took his hand and walked out of the party with him.

What magical words did the man say? “I’m a drug dealer and I can get you your next fix.”

Good or bad, he understood her in a way no one else did. Truly understanding the human beings you seek to serve IS the work.

In my experience, this takes a lot of focus, a lot of humility and a willingness to suspend what YOU think in favor of understanding what others think. But this is the ultimate secret.

The better you understand them, the better you can serve them.

Most of us stop when we THINK we understand them. But this is very different than actually learning to SEE these human beings at a very deep level.

Humans WANT solutions to problems. Many of the obstacles we build in between their problems and our solutions come from US projecting our [incorrect] understanding out into the world. The real work is to stop doing that and seek to understand them at a level no one has ever gotten to before.

As the great Ogilvy once said, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”

See you next time,

Jason