For the last few years I've been toeing the party line, saying "go out, build a sales funnel, create lots of products at different price points, and get people to show how much they're willing to pay to work with you".
And I'm sorry, but that model just doesn't work anymore.
It's a tried and tested approach.
One that came from the world of retail marketing, and one which--by and large--has worked well in the Professional Expert industry for many years.
But even mainstream marketers are leaving it behind.
In case you've been asleep or in jail for the last 20 years, let me recap.
The sales funnel model says that if you want someone to pay you $5,000 for your coaching programme first you need to see if they'll pay you $1,000.
And to know that, you may need to see if they'll pay you $500, so first you'll need to sell them something for $100, which probably means you need to see if they'll buy at $10 first.
Who do you sell that $10 product to? The tens of thousands of people who have downloaded your free product first.
So you need to create and sell 5 products before you can get people to pay you what you're actually worth.
That's a lot of work! The second problem is that people don't buy all those products at the same time.
Even if it took them a month to work through each product and be ready for the next, its six months before you get to see them.
And the reality is it usually takes a lot longer.
I've heard of people taking 3 years to get through someone's sales funnel.
The third problem is that it's not really a funnel as such.
With a funnel, everything you pour in the top comes out of the bottom eventually.
The traditional sales funnel is actually more like a very leaky sieve: a lot of people fall out of holes along the sides, and only a few are left in the bottom to become your top-paying clients.
So what does that mean? Well, assume a fairly optimistic upsell rate of 10% for your products at each stage (in other words 1 in 10 people who buy a product in your funnel will buy the next one).
If you want just one client at $5,000, you'll need 10 people to buy your $1,000 product, which means 100 need to buy the $500 product, which means 1,000 buy the $100 product, which means you have to sell 10,000 of the $10 product.
Where did those 10,000 buyers come from? They were 10% of the 100,000 people who came to your website! In other words, you need 100,000 in your mailing list FOR EACH HIGH END CLIENT YOU WANT TO HAVE.
That's why marketers in the internet marketing world are so obsessed with list size.
Now, some steps will convert better than others: for example, if you put in a live workshop at some stage, and you've learned how to sell from the stage, you can get as much as 60% conversion or more.
For that step.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that you need to find a LOT of leads for this model to work.
And that's a huge problem in itself.
But for me, the killer is that it's just so "transactional": you see, people only stay in your funnel as long as they're buying from you.
It's all about "qualifying people out" if they aren't buying.
So the underlying assumption is that if someone doesn't buy then they are, from the point of view of this model, of no value to you.
That's a horrible way to look at it! Being The Natural Expert is all about creating a community-I call it your tribe-where your audience grows all the time, and where there are no hoops to working with you, where your focus is on engaging, not selling, and where people want to spend $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 or even more with you very early on.
No more $10 CDs! OK, in the next article we'll look at one change that has happened in the world which has undermined the value of most of the work we do in the Professional Expert industry.