High Ticket Sales: It’s About How They Want to Buy, Not How You Want to Sell
High ticket sales can be done without ever having to meet in person, but in order to do that, you really need to nail not just your sales process but the entire customer experience.
High ticket sales is the art of dealing with very valuable and hence expensive goods (above $1,000 at least). From the buyer’s point of view, they’re making a big commitment, and in turn they expect the sales process to treat them as valuable customers.
Traditionally, high ticket sales covers goods such as:
- luxury brands
- cars
- yachts
- real estate
- fancy trips
- etc.
In the world of software, it usually refers to enterprise products, delivered as a service or installed on prem, and it covers 15% of all online sales.
When we think of high ticket sales in B2B, we think of flying out to meet the client, not just to deliver a custom presentation on how our solution is the best fit for their needs, but to meet them face to face.
It’s only logical that big commitments require trust to be established, and the best way to do that has always been through formal and informal meetings. Deals are best made when there are no empty stomachs so to speak, and eating at the same table is how humans have established trust since time eternal.
But when we are selling over the internet, customers will interact with our brand and content first, and with our business developers via email, chat or video calls.
High ticket sales can be done without ever having to meet in person, but in order to do that, you really need to nail not just your sales process but the entire customer experience.
In short, you need to do your best to emulate the feeling of being treated as a VIP in a traditional environment solely through digital channels.
Having scaled high ticket sales teams at software companies up to $15 million ARR, here are the lessons I’ve learned on what are the best ways to do just that.
But first, let’s uncover some myths.
The False Dilemma of Enterprise vs. Product Lead Growth in High Ticket Sales
The old school enterprise sales software’s website was dense and cryptic. It demanded that you book a call with a sales rep before seeing the product in action or the pricing information.
Nowadays, that would be nigh unthinkable as the Product Lead Growth (PLG) revolution sweeps through sector after sector. Popularized by Blake Bartlett from OpenView Ventures, the term PLG refers to software products that basically sell themselves. To do this, the software must be very easy to use in order to be offered in a self-service way. Not only are free trials common, but pricing is tailored on the low end for individual users.
Hence one would think that PLG and high ticket sales are mutually exclusive categories, yet nothing could be further from the truth.
A good example would be Klaviyo, a marketing automation platform. While they follow a straightforward PLG motion, offering a free signup, their pricing is usage based, scaling well into the enterprise category:
They only really make you talk to a sales rep at this stage if you have over 250,000 contacts.
The reason why they do this (and you should too) is twofold:
- HockeyStack recently ran a benchmark study on how sales pages perform, specifically transparent vs. non-transparent pricing pages. While non-transparent pricing pages had better conversion rates in terms of MQLs (4.6% vs. the 2.8% performance of transparent pages), when it comes to converting into actual pipeline, the transparent pages drove 1.7x the amount of conversions than their more secretive counterparts.
- When it comes to high ticket sales, you don’t want to have a top price cap, ever. As long as your service is delivering value for the customer, they are more than happy to throw money at you, which is why Klaviyo has a “let’s talk” option for the biggest prospects. If they didn’t and just had an all-inclusive top plan for their most valuable cohort, they would be leaving a lot of money on the table!
In short, in 2024 it’s not “enterprise or PLG”. If you are doing high ticket sales, you have to do a bit of both.
Which brings us to the next big lesson of the PLG era: show, don’t tell.
High Ticket Sales and Interactive Demos
PLG motions work because there is so little friction during signup that the prospect can get their hands on the product almost immediately. While this fits very well with B2C use cases, B2B software tends to be more complex, hence no matter how great your product is and how much confidence you have, it’s natural to be careful in letting customers in without any assistance.
Enter interactive product demos, which allow you to record how your product ought to work in the best way for the use cases that prospects are interested in.
Software such as Navattic not only helps you make such interactive demos easily, but it comes with analytical capabilities as well. This means that not only do your customers get that crucial feel of your product, but you also gain valuable insights on that experience. This is great because it allows for continuous iteration, which translates to a continuously improving customer experience.
And in high ticket sales, since your goal is to tailor said experience, a tool that lets you iterate based on feedback is key.
Interactive demos originally rose to prominence as part of the product marketer or GTM leaders stack, but they have quickly found their way into sales, both as a tool of enablement and as a formidable tool in conferences.
In fact, Navattic’s product usage research now states that it’s about an even split between sales and marketers:
It’s easy to see why. The idea behind the use of interactive demos is aligning your sales process with how the buyers want to buy. By the time they are on your website, 90% of the buying process is behind them: they know their problems, they’ve researched the solutions and they can’t wait to get their hands on your solution.
So give it to them!
The Role of Face to Face Contact in High Ticket Sales
I’ve started this article with real life examples of how big ticket transactions look like. If you are about to drop a lot of money on something, you expect to be pampered by the company. This is why traditional big ticket vendors go out of their way to welcome their customers and make the buying experience as delightful as possible.
You will be assigned a person whose job is not just to answer all your questions, but to cater to all your needs.
The physical world has the advantage of things being immediately obvious. If someone turns up at the luxury car dealership, the sales people there don’t need any intent data to figure out that it’s time to talk to them.
In the online world, things are a bit more difficult, and we need all sorts of technical wizardry to figure out who’s on our website and how to talk to them.
In our previous post on lead response times, we covered how businesses are fumbling their best opportunities by being slow to follow up on their leads.
Needless to say, if you’re in high ticket sales, you can’t afford to wait and lose the interests of your buyers. In fact, being slow to respond in such circumstances would add insult to injury as from the buyer’s perspective, it might even seem rude!
The best way out of the slow lead response trap is being proactive.
Suppose you’d have a tool that’s capable of telling you who is on your website, gather intent data based on the pages they have been visiting (eg. if they’ve been staring down your pricing page that’s a good indication of interest), and would allow your sales team to call them via video while they’re on the page?
That tool would be our very own Captiwate. Following a one minute setup, you can start calling your inbound leads when they are the most engaged and ready to buy: the digital equivalent of assigning a personal concierge to a VIP customer when they roll into the shop.
Feel free to book a demo to try it out.
Concluding thoughts
No matter how much we go digital, some fundamental aspects of human nature will never change. High ticket sales is an aspect of that, being more of an art than a science, one that requires a human touch.
When it comes to online sales, the challenge is ultimately about translating that human experience into a thoughtful online one. To do so, one must be mindful of the perspective and expectations of the buyer - and not what’s most convenient for our business to do.
Thankfully, we now have the right tools to make these buying experiences almost magical, and we have the data that proves that the new ways are winning over the old.
Don’t make your buyer's life difficult: instead, go out of your way to meet their needs when and how they want them to be met.
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