March 24, 2023

The High Ticket Pre-Sale Strategy Guide: How I Made $36,000 in Sales Before Creating My Program

This case study will reveal the method I used to launch my first high ticket program that generated over $36,000 in pre-sales on Thinkific with nothin' but a Dream, a Google Doc and some spicy memes.

Background Story

Watch the Livestream Video Inside the Facebook Community  Here 

Overview

I created this guide to help you make sales simple, fun and fast! Back in 2017, I launched a new coaching program, the 6-Figure Agency Accelerator and sold out 10 spots of our cohort in about 60 days.

This turned out to be one of Thinkific's most successful launches in their history of more than 25,000 creators. They invited me to share my story in a YouTube interview and a case study on their blog. You can watch and read those here.

Today, I want to go way deeper into the method that I used and share my story so you can do the same!

While this case study is focused on my personal experience, I will also be drawing from my experience helping others create and pre-sell high ticket offers. 

Since this pre-sale (which took place in 2017), here are some other customer success stories I have created using this same methodology: 

  1. I helped Joey Thurman, a fitness coach and author create and pre-sell his first $4,000 coaching program offer. Before, Joey was selling 1:1 in-person training sessions for $125 per hour.
  2. I helped Robert Price, a mental performance coach, create and pre-sell his coaching program for $5,000 and $10,000. Before, Robert was doing 1:1 in-person sessions for $150 per hour.
  3. I helped David Swift, a landscaping business owner, create and pre-sell his coaching program for $15,000. Before, David was a business owner and had sold one $4,000 coaching offer.
  4. I helped Adrian and Michael at Dragonfruit Media productize their video production genius into a highly leveraged consulting offer that generated over $75,000 within 90 days of launch. Before, they were maxed out doing high-touch video production for the world’s largest YouTube educators.
  5. I helped Jon Maxim and Kale Panoho of KJ Growth, a growth hacking agency owner, create and sell his performance marketing service for $550,000 per month. Before, Jon was selling highly custom, non-scalable campaigns.

These are just a few examples. You can view more case studies on my website here.

The Pre-Sale Launch Memes

‘Nuff said.

The Beginning

I started my blog back in 2014, my senior year of college and even after several years, my Mom was still my number one reader as nobody else really knew who I was or cared! After nearly two years of publishing twice a week consistently, I had only managed to grow an email list of a few hundred subscribers.

The Leap

On March 25, 2016, I finally decided to quit my full-time job to pursue my dreams of building my own online business as I announced on my blog and YouTube channel here

I got started as a freelance web designer and developer and shared my journey on my blog.

The Grind

A few months later to assist in building my community and business, I created a Facebook group. Through this group and my blog, I consistently shared my journey, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

As I shared in my May 2016 blog, I was hustling my ass off, putting in 80+ hour weeks like I was Gary V. I guess this makes me one of the OG “build in public” dudes, LOL. 

A few months later, I decided to take on a huge project to build momentum… I decided to create a massive “round up post” and personally asked over 300+ millionaires, CEOs, Olympians, bestselling authors, professional athletes & more world class, inspiring individuals to contribute to this post.

After months of grinding, I had secured over 75 contributors and the post itself was a huge success that finally put all my hard work ‘on the map’. It got featured by several other media outlets and reshared by several contributors which generated thousands of views and about a thousand new subscribers. 

The Pay-Off

At the end of 2016, I was inconsistently earning $1,000 to $6,000 per month and was stressed out of my mind. With the few funds I had, I decided to hire a coach to level up, named Ian Luebbers.

Ian absolutely changed the game for me. He changed my mindset around building a business and instilled in me the importance of creating leverage through systems, tech and teams, which I previously knew nothing about.

Within months, my business blew up and I had several $10K and $20K months in a row. I managed to close $22,500 worth of projects in a single day and in April 2017, 13 months after quitting my job, I managed to break the $100,000 revenue mark. 

You can view my client-by-client journey to $100K here.

The best part? I was working less than before. My transformation really started getting people’s attention as they had witnessed me go from struggling for over a year to finally experiencing some major wins. After having some friendly conversations with people in my community, I finally had my AHA moment…

My *AHA* Moment

Through my email list, Facebook group and conversations I was having with my community, it became very clear many community members were struggling with what I was struggling with only a few months ago.

They were struggling with things like charging more, finding qualified prospects, structuring their sales process and delegating their workload to a team. In short, they were tired of operating like a freelancer and wanted to make the transition to an agency that allowed them to have more leverage.

After sharing these insights with Ian, the lightbulb went off and we had our AHA moment…

We realized that my community was facing massive problems and we were perfectly equipped to serve them with a high ticket program specifically designed for them. So that’s exactly what we did!

The Hard and Easy Way to Launch an Offer

The Hard Way

One entrepreneur had an idea for a new product. So he did what everyone does. He spent a few months creating it, night and day, night and day from sunrise to sunset. He put everything he had into this product.

He would frequently daydream of all its potential. He couldn’t wait to launch this product and help people. To make sure this product was absolutely perfect, he decided to hire a few high-end consultants, designer to help him build out his product as well as his website, funnel and marketing materials.

He was a perfectionist, so he went through many, many revisions on the product, website and all the marketing content. He knew this product was going to be a smashing success, he was willing to invest everything he had! 

Soon, he had fallen in love with this product and knew his soon-to-be customers would too…

After many, many months and many many thousands of dollars invested, finally, the product was ready, so was his website and all the marketing content. IT WAS TIME TO LAUNCH!

So he fired up his ads, his outreach, his content to drive traffic to his product and waited for the Stripe notifications.

He waited an hour. Then a few hours. Then a few days. Then a few weeks. Nothing but crickets. After investing months of his time, thousands of his dollars, he had nothing to show for it.

So, he did what everyone does, he raised more money to repeat the same cycle again and again!

The Easy Way 

One entrepreneur had an idea for a new product. So he did what smart entrepreneurs do.

He spent a few days surveying and speaking to his target market. He sent a few emails, a few DM’s and had a few group calls. 

He asked his market what their main challenges were in order to identify their most painful problem. 

He asked how this problem was affecting their life and what their life would be like if they had a solution to this problem. He asked them to quantify what this problem was costing them and how it impacted their life and businesses.

He told them he wanted to solve this problem for them with a product, and asked for their honest feedback. 

He spent a day taking this feedback and creating an offer that solved this specific problem for this specific market and put a “pre-sale” price that was a no brainer compared to the value being provided.

He didn’t waste time building the product or creating marketing content, a website or a funnel. He simply created a Google Doc and sent out a few emails, DM’s and had a few calls with the same people…

He asked them if they wanted this offer at a huge discount in exchange for being one of his first trial customers and helping him further develop the product.

By the end of the week, after spending $0 and a few hours talking to the market and creating his Google Doc, he had collected payment from several trial customers.

Now, it was time to actually create the product!

The 3 Phases of Pre-Sales Success 

Phase 1: Rapid Market Research

Market research is the most important part of creating and pre-selling a new offer. The more research, the more precise your offer development efforts but you want to do this quickly and effectively. 

Step 1. Pick a Niche

Prior to performing market research, you want to have a clearly defined target customer avatar in a specific niche. Here’s a template to help you do this.

Since I already had an engaged community, this part was easy as I was literally having conversations with my audience multiple times per week. However, even with a 0-person audience, you can still perform effective market research.

When it comes to gathering market research, there’s three critical elements: offer (to reward participation), questions (to gather insights) and channels (to gather data).

Step 2. Formulate Your Questions

Here are the question templates I always use…

What's the single biggest challenge you have getting {Results} with {Your Expertise}?

This question helps you isolate the most important problem that your offer should solve.

Who have you bought {Your type of product} from in the past?

This question helps you identify competitive offers that are already selling so that you can reverse engineer them.

What {Type of expert you are} do you let into your inbox?

This questions helps you identify competitive brands or individuals that are already resonating with your target market, making them perfect to study AND partner with down the road.

You can ask these questions either as a survey (ie. Google Forms) via email (Content Survey Email Template) or as a series of one question posts on social media.

Survey Example

Post Example

Step 3. Choose Your Channels

Whether you have an audience or not, you can use any or all of these channels to get feedback from your target market… 

Start small and simple! Simply try to get your offer in front of 10 perfect fit audience members, then 25, then 50, then 100 and so on.

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Facebook Groups
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AngelList
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • YouTube
  • Medium
  • Quora
  • IndieHackers
  • HackerNews
  • Discord channels
  • Slack channels
  • Telegram groups
  • Current/Previous Clients
  • Partner Channels
  • Employee Channels
  • Vetted Networks
  • Existing Conversations/DMs
  • Paid Communities
  • Free Communities
  • Other

Step 4. Create Your Research Offer

This is the offer you offer before offering the real offer. But for real.

Most people hate surveys, so it’s important that you make an “offer” for those who will participate in your chosen method of market research. Put simply, you need to bribe them with something of value.

Ideally, you don’t want to have to spend a ton of effort and time to deliver the bribe, so here are a few examples of effective, effortless bribes:

  1. Case Studies
  2. Checklists
  3. Templates
  4. eBooks or Guides
  5. Pre-Recorded Training

Phase 2: Offer Development 

Step 1. Choose Your Productization Level

After spending the 13 months full-time as a freelancer plus the previous 5-10 years as a side-hustler, I realized I was ready for something new and different that allowed me to reach more people in a more leveraged way.

Since my operations manager at the time, boss man Shubham Dhawan (who helped me for almost two years before starting, Coloristy, his own studio in India!), was handling daily operations, I had time to bring this vision to life.

For me, I wanted time and money living in my zone of genius - no busy work, chaos or chronic stress, but I was hungry, full of energy and willing to do something more high-touch in a one-to-many style.

I recommend you also choose your offer type based on your vision and current capacity. Below is a table to help you with this.

Step 2. Answer the Offer Script Questions 

For each one of your offers, you should have an offer script documented and created which you can create by answering the following questions. 

  1. What is the niche market and the biggest problem that you are helping them solve with this offer?
  2. What is the core transformation that you provide with this offer?
  3. What is the process that must be implemented in order to achieve this transformation?
  4. What are the milestones that must be achieved to measure progress towards this transformation and when are these milestones expected to be completed?
  5. What format and features are part of this offer?
  6. What is the financial investment for this offer?  $3,000.
  7. What is the effort investment for this offer? 2-4 hours per week to show up to calls 1x per week and implement all curriculum assignments.
  8. What are the guarantees for this offer? Example here.
  9. What are the capacity constraints for this offer? We limited our cohort to 10 people.
  10. Why should prospects sign up TODAY? $3,000 for first 10 people, today we charge $7,500.
  11. What is the name of your offer? 6-Figure Agency Accelerator.

Step 3. Create Your Offer Script

Now that you have answered the above questions, the final step is to input your answers into the offer script template to finalize your offer. 

Get started here: Offer Script Examples & Template

Phase 3: Marketing and Pre-Sales

Step 1. The Only Content Type You Need

The one type of content you need in its most simple form are stories. More specifically, you need stories that build your community, educate your audience and sell your offer.

The beautiful thing about this that case studies (blogs, videos, posts - in any version) double as stories that do all three of these things at the same damn time.

This is why I recommend sharing 80% case study stories and 20% promotional stories to sell. To get started, create as many case study stories as you can. Use this template to structure your case studies and success stories…

Visit the case study page here.

Once you have a bank of stories, then use this template to structure your promotional posts and get a direct response from potential customers: No Brainer Offer Creation & Promotion SOP

Finally, publish a mix of these stories on your chosen channels at least weekly.

Step 2. Pre-Sell with Content

Not pre-selling with content is one of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to creating short, content-driven sales cycles for high ticket offers.

However, keep it simple my son. As simple as possible, now and forever, amen. Seriously though, you don’t need all that fancy website, funnel, marketing ish right now.

We didn’t have a website let alone a Google Doc with testimonials on it AFTER we had already served dozens of clients inside the Accelerator. Only after we earned multiple 6-figures, did we invest into a proper sales page and website which you can see here: https://www.predictablegrowth.io/accelerator

I used the following content assets to pre-sell my program:

  1. My Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1710801445842167
  2. Plus My Blog: https://differenthunger.com/
  3. Program Outline Google Doc (View Current Version)

Step 3. Pre-sell on Live Consultations

Here’s the consultative sales process my partner and I used to enroll 10 beta clients into our Accelerator, each paying between $3,000 to $3,6000 with payment plans:

Want Help Implementing? Here’s How Myself and Team Can Help…

  1. Join the Academy for free here: http://predictablegrowth.io/academy/sign-up
  2. Join the 72 Hour Sales Challenge here: https://www.predictablegrowth.io/72-hour-sales
  3. DM me Waitlist at @whoismattkohn on socials to get notified when we launch the membership and Accelerator.

Background Story

Watch the Livestream Video Inside the Facebook Community  Here 

Overview

I created this guide to help you make sales simple, fun and fast! Back in 2017, I launched a new coaching program, the 6-Figure Agency Accelerator and sold out 10 spots of our cohort in about 60 days.

This turned out to be one of Thinkific's most successful launches in their history of more than 25,000 creators. They invited me to share my story in a YouTube interview and a case study on their blog. You can watch and read those here.

Today, I want to go way deeper into the method that I used and share my story so you can do the same!

While this case study is focused on my personal experience, I will also be drawing from my experience helping others create and pre-sell high ticket offers. 

Since this pre-sale (which took place in 2017), here are some other customer success stories I have created using this same methodology: 

  1. I helped Joey Thurman, a fitness coach and author create and pre-sell his first $4,000 coaching program offer. Before, Joey was selling 1:1 in-person training sessions for $125 per hour.
  2. I helped Robert Price, a mental performance coach, create and pre-sell his coaching program for $5,000 and $10,000. Before, Robert was doing 1:1 in-person sessions for $150 per hour.
  3. I helped David Swift, a landscaping business owner, create and pre-sell his coaching program for $15,000. Before, David was a business owner and had sold one $4,000 coaching offer.
  4. I helped Adrian and Michael at Dragonfruit Media productize their video production genius into a highly leveraged consulting offer that generated over $75,000 within 90 days of launch. Before, they were maxed out doing high-touch video production for the world’s largest YouTube educators.
  5. I helped Jon Maxim and Kale Panoho of KJ Growth, a growth hacking agency owner, create and sell his performance marketing service for $550,000 per month. Before, Jon was selling highly custom, non-scalable campaigns.

These are just a few examples. You can view more case studies on my website here.

The Pre-Sale Launch Memes

‘Nuff said.

The Beginning

I started my blog back in 2014, my senior year of college and even after several years, my Mom was still my number one reader as nobody else really knew who I was or cared! After nearly two years of publishing twice a week consistently, I had only managed to grow an email list of a few hundred subscribers.

The Leap

On March 25, 2016, I finally decided to quit my full-time job to pursue my dreams of building my own online business as I announced on my blog and YouTube channel here

I got started as a freelance web designer and developer and shared my journey on my blog.

The Grind

A few months later to assist in building my community and business, I created a Facebook group. Through this group and my blog, I consistently shared my journey, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

As I shared in my May 2016 blog, I was hustling my ass off, putting in 80+ hour weeks like I was Gary V. I guess this makes me one of the OG “build in public” dudes, LOL. 

A few months later, I decided to take on a huge project to build momentum… I decided to create a massive “round up post” and personally asked over 300+ millionaires, CEOs, Olympians, bestselling authors, professional athletes & more world class, inspiring individuals to contribute to this post.

After months of grinding, I had secured over 75 contributors and the post itself was a huge success that finally put all my hard work ‘on the map’. It got featured by several other media outlets and reshared by several contributors which generated thousands of views and about a thousand new subscribers. 

The Pay-Off

At the end of 2016, I was inconsistently earning $1,000 to $6,000 per month and was stressed out of my mind. With the few funds I had, I decided to hire a coach to level up, named Ian Luebbers.

Ian absolutely changed the game for me. He changed my mindset around building a business and instilled in me the importance of creating leverage through systems, tech and teams, which I previously knew nothing about.

Within months, my business blew up and I had several $10K and $20K months in a row. I managed to close $22,500 worth of projects in a single day and in April 2017, 13 months after quitting my job, I managed to break the $100,000 revenue mark. 

You can view my client-by-client journey to $100K here.

The best part? I was working less than before. My transformation really started getting people’s attention as they had witnessed me go from struggling for over a year to finally experiencing some major wins. After having some friendly conversations with people in my community, I finally had my AHA moment…

My *AHA* Moment

Through my email list, Facebook group and conversations I was having with my community, it became very clear many community members were struggling with what I was struggling with only a few months ago.

They were struggling with things like charging more, finding qualified prospects, structuring their sales process and delegating their workload to a team. In short, they were tired of operating like a freelancer and wanted to make the transition to an agency that allowed them to have more leverage.

After sharing these insights with Ian, the lightbulb went off and we had our AHA moment…

We realized that my community was facing massive problems and we were perfectly equipped to serve them with a high ticket program specifically designed for them. So that’s exactly what we did!

The Hard and Easy Way to Launch an Offer

The Hard Way

One entrepreneur had an idea for a new product. So he did what everyone does. He spent a few months creating it, night and day, night and day from sunrise to sunset. He put everything he had into this product.

He would frequently daydream of all its potential. He couldn’t wait to launch this product and help people. To make sure this product was absolutely perfect, he decided to hire a few high-end consultants, designer to help him build out his product as well as his website, funnel and marketing materials.

He was a perfectionist, so he went through many, many revisions on the product, website and all the marketing content. He knew this product was going to be a smashing success, he was willing to invest everything he had! 

Soon, he had fallen in love with this product and knew his soon-to-be customers would too…

After many, many months and many many thousands of dollars invested, finally, the product was ready, so was his website and all the marketing content. IT WAS TIME TO LAUNCH!

So he fired up his ads, his outreach, his content to drive traffic to his product and waited for the Stripe notifications.

He waited an hour. Then a few hours. Then a few days. Then a few weeks. Nothing but crickets. After investing months of his time, thousands of his dollars, he had nothing to show for it.

So, he did what everyone does, he raised more money to repeat the same cycle again and again!

The Easy Way 

One entrepreneur had an idea for a new product. So he did what smart entrepreneurs do.

He spent a few days surveying and speaking to his target market. He sent a few emails, a few DM’s and had a few group calls. 

He asked his market what their main challenges were in order to identify their most painful problem. 

He asked how this problem was affecting their life and what their life would be like if they had a solution to this problem. He asked them to quantify what this problem was costing them and how it impacted their life and businesses.

He told them he wanted to solve this problem for them with a product, and asked for their honest feedback. 

He spent a day taking this feedback and creating an offer that solved this specific problem for this specific market and put a “pre-sale” price that was a no brainer compared to the value being provided.

He didn’t waste time building the product or creating marketing content, a website or a funnel. He simply created a Google Doc and sent out a few emails, DM’s and had a few calls with the same people…

He asked them if they wanted this offer at a huge discount in exchange for being one of his first trial customers and helping him further develop the product.

By the end of the week, after spending $0 and a few hours talking to the market and creating his Google Doc, he had collected payment from several trial customers.

Now, it was time to actually create the product!

The 3 Phases of Pre-Sales Success 

Phase 1: Rapid Market Research

Market research is the most important part of creating and pre-selling a new offer. The more research, the more precise your offer development efforts but you want to do this quickly and effectively. 

Step 1. Pick a Niche

Prior to performing market research, you want to have a clearly defined target customer avatar in a specific niche. Here’s a template to help you do this.

Since I already had an engaged community, this part was easy as I was literally having conversations with my audience multiple times per week. However, even with a 0-person audience, you can still perform effective market research.

When it comes to gathering market research, there’s three critical elements: offer (to reward participation), questions (to gather insights) and channels (to gather data).

Step 2. Formulate Your Questions

Here are the question templates I always use…

What's the single biggest challenge you have getting {Results} with {Your Expertise}?

This question helps you isolate the most important problem that your offer should solve.

Who have you bought {Your type of product} from in the past?

This question helps you identify competitive offers that are already selling so that you can reverse engineer them.

What {Type of expert you are} do you let into your inbox?

This questions helps you identify competitive brands or individuals that are already resonating with your target market, making them perfect to study AND partner with down the road.

You can ask these questions either as a survey (ie. Google Forms) via email (Content Survey Email Template) or as a series of one question posts on social media.

Survey Example

Post Example

Step 3. Choose Your Channels

Whether you have an audience or not, you can use any or all of these channels to get feedback from your target market… 

Start small and simple! Simply try to get your offer in front of 10 perfect fit audience members, then 25, then 50, then 100 and so on.

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Facebook Groups
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AngelList
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • YouTube
  • Medium
  • Quora
  • IndieHackers
  • HackerNews
  • Discord channels
  • Slack channels
  • Telegram groups
  • Current/Previous Clients
  • Partner Channels
  • Employee Channels
  • Vetted Networks
  • Existing Conversations/DMs
  • Paid Communities
  • Free Communities
  • Other

Step 4. Create Your Research Offer

This is the offer you offer before offering the real offer. But for real.

Most people hate surveys, so it’s important that you make an “offer” for those who will participate in your chosen method of market research. Put simply, you need to bribe them with something of value.

Ideally, you don’t want to have to spend a ton of effort and time to deliver the bribe, so here are a few examples of effective, effortless bribes:

  1. Case Studies
  2. Checklists
  3. Templates
  4. eBooks or Guides
  5. Pre-Recorded Training

Phase 2: Offer Development 

Step 1. Choose Your Productization Level

After spending the 13 months full-time as a freelancer plus the previous 5-10 years as a side-hustler, I realized I was ready for something new and different that allowed me to reach more people in a more leveraged way.

Since my operations manager at the time, boss man Shubham Dhawan (who helped me for almost two years before starting, Coloristy, his own studio in India!), was handling daily operations, I had time to bring this vision to life.

For me, I wanted time and money living in my zone of genius - no busy work, chaos or chronic stress, but I was hungry, full of energy and willing to do something more high-touch in a one-to-many style.

I recommend you also choose your offer type based on your vision and current capacity. Below is a table to help you with this.

Step 2. Answer the Offer Script Questions 

For each one of your offers, you should have an offer script documented and created which you can create by answering the following questions. 

  1. What is the niche market and the biggest problem that you are helping them solve with this offer?
  2. What is the core transformation that you provide with this offer?
  3. What is the process that must be implemented in order to achieve this transformation?
  4. What are the milestones that must be achieved to measure progress towards this transformation and when are these milestones expected to be completed?
  5. What format and features are part of this offer?
  6. What is the financial investment for this offer?  $3,000.
  7. What is the effort investment for this offer? 2-4 hours per week to show up to calls 1x per week and implement all curriculum assignments.
  8. What are the guarantees for this offer? Example here.
  9. What are the capacity constraints for this offer? We limited our cohort to 10 people.
  10. Why should prospects sign up TODAY? $3,000 for first 10 people, today we charge $7,500.
  11. What is the name of your offer? 6-Figure Agency Accelerator.

Step 3. Create Your Offer Script

Now that you have answered the above questions, the final step is to input your answers into the offer script template to finalize your offer. 

Get started here: Offer Script Examples & Template

Phase 3: Marketing and Pre-Sales

Step 1. The Only Content Type You Need

The one type of content you need in its most simple form are stories. More specifically, you need stories that build your community, educate your audience and sell your offer.

The beautiful thing about this that case studies (blogs, videos, posts - in any version) double as stories that do all three of these things at the same damn time.

This is why I recommend sharing 80% case study stories and 20% promotional stories to sell. To get started, create as many case study stories as you can. Use this template to structure your case studies and success stories…

Visit the case study page here.

Once you have a bank of stories, then use this template to structure your promotional posts and get a direct response from potential customers: No Brainer Offer Creation & Promotion SOP

Finally, publish a mix of these stories on your chosen channels at least weekly.

Step 2. Pre-Sell with Content

Not pre-selling with content is one of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to creating short, content-driven sales cycles for high ticket offers.

However, keep it simple my son. As simple as possible, now and forever, amen. Seriously though, you don’t need all that fancy website, funnel, marketing ish right now.

We didn’t have a website let alone a Google Doc with testimonials on it AFTER we had already served dozens of clients inside the Accelerator. Only after we earned multiple 6-figures, did we invest into a proper sales page and website which you can see here: https://www.predictablegrowth.io/accelerator

I used the following content assets to pre-sell my program:

  1. My Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1710801445842167
  2. Plus My Blog: https://differenthunger.com/
  3. Program Outline Google Doc (View Current Version)

Step 3. Pre-sell on Live Consultations

Here’s the consultative sales process my partner and I used to enroll 10 beta clients into our Accelerator, each paying between $3,000 to $3,6000 with payment plans:

Want Help Implementing? Here’s How Myself and Team Can Help…

  1. Join the Academy for free here: http://predictablegrowth.io/academy/sign-up
  2. Join the 72 Hour Sales Challenge here: https://www.predictablegrowth.io/72-hour-sales
  3. DM me Waitlist at @whoismattkohn on socials to get notified when we launch the membership and Accelerator.

Table of Contents

Background Story

Watch the Livestream Video Inside the Facebook Community  Here 

Overview

I created this guide to help you make sales simple, fun and fast! Back in 2017, I launched a new coaching program, the 6-Figure Agency Accelerator and sold out 10 spots of our cohort in about 60 days.

This turned out to be one of Thinkific's most successful launches in their history of more than 25,000 creators. They invited me to share my story in a YouTube interview and a case study on their blog. You can watch and read those here.

Today, I want to go way deeper into the method that I used and share my story so you can do the same!

While this case study is focused on my personal experience, I will also be drawing from my experience helping others create and pre-sell high ticket offers. 

Since this pre-sale (which took place in 2017), here are some other customer success stories I have created using this same methodology: 

  1. I helped Joey Thurman, a fitness coach and author create and pre-sell his first $4,000 coaching program offer. Before, Joey was selling 1:1 in-person training sessions for $125 per hour.
  2. I helped Robert Price, a mental performance coach, create and pre-sell his coaching program for $5,000 and $10,000. Before, Robert was doing 1:1 in-person sessions for $150 per hour.
  3. I helped David Swift, a landscaping business owner, create and pre-sell his coaching program for $15,000. Before, David was a business owner and had sold one $4,000 coaching offer.
  4. I helped Adrian and Michael at Dragonfruit Media productize their video production genius into a highly leveraged consulting offer that generated over $75,000 within 90 days of launch. Before, they were maxed out doing high-touch video production for the world’s largest YouTube educators.
  5. I helped Jon Maxim and Kale Panoho of KJ Growth, a growth hacking agency owner, create and sell his performance marketing service for $550,000 per month. Before, Jon was selling highly custom, non-scalable campaigns.

These are just a few examples. You can view more case studies on my website here.

The Pre-Sale Launch Memes

‘Nuff said.

The Beginning

I started my blog back in 2014, my senior year of college and even after several years, my Mom was still my number one reader as nobody else really knew who I was or cared! After nearly two years of publishing twice a week consistently, I had only managed to grow an email list of a few hundred subscribers.

The Leap

On March 25, 2016, I finally decided to quit my full-time job to pursue my dreams of building my own online business as I announced on my blog and YouTube channel here

I got started as a freelance web designer and developer and shared my journey on my blog.

The Grind

A few months later to assist in building my community and business, I created a Facebook group. Through this group and my blog, I consistently shared my journey, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

As I shared in my May 2016 blog, I was hustling my ass off, putting in 80+ hour weeks like I was Gary V. I guess this makes me one of the OG “build in public” dudes, LOL. 

A few months later, I decided to take on a huge project to build momentum… I decided to create a massive “round up post” and personally asked over 300+ millionaires, CEOs, Olympians, bestselling authors, professional athletes & more world class, inspiring individuals to contribute to this post.

After months of grinding, I had secured over 75 contributors and the post itself was a huge success that finally put all my hard work ‘on the map’. It got featured by several other media outlets and reshared by several contributors which generated thousands of views and about a thousand new subscribers. 

The Pay-Off

At the end of 2016, I was inconsistently earning $1,000 to $6,000 per month and was stressed out of my mind. With the few funds I had, I decided to hire a coach to level up, named Ian Luebbers.

Ian absolutely changed the game for me. He changed my mindset around building a business and instilled in me the importance of creating leverage through systems, tech and teams, which I previously knew nothing about.

Within months, my business blew up and I had several $10K and $20K months in a row. I managed to close $22,500 worth of projects in a single day and in April 2017, 13 months after quitting my job, I managed to break the $100,000 revenue mark. 

You can view my client-by-client journey to $100K here.

The best part? I was working less than before. My transformation really started getting people’s attention as they had witnessed me go from struggling for over a year to finally experiencing some major wins. After having some friendly conversations with people in my community, I finally had my AHA moment…

My *AHA* Moment

Through my email list, Facebook group and conversations I was having with my community, it became very clear many community members were struggling with what I was struggling with only a few months ago.

They were struggling with things like charging more, finding qualified prospects, structuring their sales process and delegating their workload to a team. In short, they were tired of operating like a freelancer and wanted to make the transition to an agency that allowed them to have more leverage.

After sharing these insights with Ian, the lightbulb went off and we had our AHA moment…

We realized that my community was facing massive problems and we were perfectly equipped to serve them with a high ticket program specifically designed for them. So that’s exactly what we did!

The Hard and Easy Way to Launch an Offer

The Hard Way

One entrepreneur had an idea for a new product. So he did what everyone does. He spent a few months creating it, night and day, night and day from sunrise to sunset. He put everything he had into this product.

He would frequently daydream of all its potential. He couldn’t wait to launch this product and help people. To make sure this product was absolutely perfect, he decided to hire a few high-end consultants, designer to help him build out his product as well as his website, funnel and marketing materials.

He was a perfectionist, so he went through many, many revisions on the product, website and all the marketing content. He knew this product was going to be a smashing success, he was willing to invest everything he had! 

Soon, he had fallen in love with this product and knew his soon-to-be customers would too…

After many, many months and many many thousands of dollars invested, finally, the product was ready, so was his website and all the marketing content. IT WAS TIME TO LAUNCH!

So he fired up his ads, his outreach, his content to drive traffic to his product and waited for the Stripe notifications.

He waited an hour. Then a few hours. Then a few days. Then a few weeks. Nothing but crickets. After investing months of his time, thousands of his dollars, he had nothing to show for it.

So, he did what everyone does, he raised more money to repeat the same cycle again and again!

The Easy Way 

One entrepreneur had an idea for a new product. So he did what smart entrepreneurs do.

He spent a few days surveying and speaking to his target market. He sent a few emails, a few DM’s and had a few group calls. 

He asked his market what their main challenges were in order to identify their most painful problem. 

He asked how this problem was affecting their life and what their life would be like if they had a solution to this problem. He asked them to quantify what this problem was costing them and how it impacted their life and businesses.

He told them he wanted to solve this problem for them with a product, and asked for their honest feedback. 

He spent a day taking this feedback and creating an offer that solved this specific problem for this specific market and put a “pre-sale” price that was a no brainer compared to the value being provided.

He didn’t waste time building the product or creating marketing content, a website or a funnel. He simply created a Google Doc and sent out a few emails, DM’s and had a few calls with the same people…

He asked them if they wanted this offer at a huge discount in exchange for being one of his first trial customers and helping him further develop the product.

By the end of the week, after spending $0 and a few hours talking to the market and creating his Google Doc, he had collected payment from several trial customers.

Now, it was time to actually create the product!

The 3 Phases of Pre-Sales Success 

Phase 1: Rapid Market Research

Market research is the most important part of creating and pre-selling a new offer. The more research, the more precise your offer development efforts but you want to do this quickly and effectively. 

Step 1. Pick a Niche

Prior to performing market research, you want to have a clearly defined target customer avatar in a specific niche. Here’s a template to help you do this.

Since I already had an engaged community, this part was easy as I was literally having conversations with my audience multiple times per week. However, even with a 0-person audience, you can still perform effective market research.

When it comes to gathering market research, there’s three critical elements: offer (to reward participation), questions (to gather insights) and channels (to gather data).

Step 2. Formulate Your Questions

Here are the question templates I always use…

What's the single biggest challenge you have getting {Results} with {Your Expertise}?

This question helps you isolate the most important problem that your offer should solve.

Who have you bought {Your type of product} from in the past?

This question helps you identify competitive offers that are already selling so that you can reverse engineer them.

What {Type of expert you are} do you let into your inbox?

This questions helps you identify competitive brands or individuals that are already resonating with your target market, making them perfect to study AND partner with down the road.

You can ask these questions either as a survey (ie. Google Forms) via email (Content Survey Email Template) or as a series of one question posts on social media.

Survey Example

Post Example

Step 3. Choose Your Channels

Whether you have an audience or not, you can use any or all of these channels to get feedback from your target market… 

Start small and simple! Simply try to get your offer in front of 10 perfect fit audience members, then 25, then 50, then 100 and so on.

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Facebook Groups
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AngelList
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • YouTube
  • Medium
  • Quora
  • IndieHackers
  • HackerNews
  • Discord channels
  • Slack channels
  • Telegram groups
  • Current/Previous Clients
  • Partner Channels
  • Employee Channels
  • Vetted Networks
  • Existing Conversations/DMs
  • Paid Communities
  • Free Communities
  • Other

Step 4. Create Your Research Offer

This is the offer you offer before offering the real offer. But for real.

Most people hate surveys, so it’s important that you make an “offer” for those who will participate in your chosen method of market research. Put simply, you need to bribe them with something of value.

Ideally, you don’t want to have to spend a ton of effort and time to deliver the bribe, so here are a few examples of effective, effortless bribes:

  1. Case Studies
  2. Checklists
  3. Templates
  4. eBooks or Guides
  5. Pre-Recorded Training

Phase 2: Offer Development 

Step 1. Choose Your Productization Level

After spending the 13 months full-time as a freelancer plus the previous 5-10 years as a side-hustler, I realized I was ready for something new and different that allowed me to reach more people in a more leveraged way.

Since my operations manager at the time, boss man Shubham Dhawan (who helped me for almost two years before starting, Coloristy, his own studio in India!), was handling daily operations, I had time to bring this vision to life.

For me, I wanted time and money living in my zone of genius - no busy work, chaos or chronic stress, but I was hungry, full of energy and willing to do something more high-touch in a one-to-many style.

I recommend you also choose your offer type based on your vision and current capacity. Below is a table to help you with this.

Step 2. Answer the Offer Script Questions 

For each one of your offers, you should have an offer script documented and created which you can create by answering the following questions. 

  1. What is the niche market and the biggest problem that you are helping them solve with this offer?
  2. What is the core transformation that you provide with this offer?
  3. What is the process that must be implemented in order to achieve this transformation?
  4. What are the milestones that must be achieved to measure progress towards this transformation and when are these milestones expected to be completed?
  5. What format and features are part of this offer?
  6. What is the financial investment for this offer?  $3,000.
  7. What is the effort investment for this offer? 2-4 hours per week to show up to calls 1x per week and implement all curriculum assignments.
  8. What are the guarantees for this offer? Example here.
  9. What are the capacity constraints for this offer? We limited our cohort to 10 people.
  10. Why should prospects sign up TODAY? $3,000 for first 10 people, today we charge $7,500.
  11. What is the name of your offer? 6-Figure Agency Accelerator.

Step 3. Create Your Offer Script

Now that you have answered the above questions, the final step is to input your answers into the offer script template to finalize your offer. 

Get started here: Offer Script Examples & Template

Phase 3: Marketing and Pre-Sales

Step 1. The Only Content Type You Need

The one type of content you need in its most simple form are stories. More specifically, you need stories that build your community, educate your audience and sell your offer.

The beautiful thing about this that case studies (blogs, videos, posts - in any version) double as stories that do all three of these things at the same damn time.

This is why I recommend sharing 80% case study stories and 20% promotional stories to sell. To get started, create as many case study stories as you can. Use this template to structure your case studies and success stories…

Visit the case study page here.

Once you have a bank of stories, then use this template to structure your promotional posts and get a direct response from potential customers: No Brainer Offer Creation & Promotion SOP

Finally, publish a mix of these stories on your chosen channels at least weekly.

Step 2. Pre-Sell with Content

Not pre-selling with content is one of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to creating short, content-driven sales cycles for high ticket offers.

However, keep it simple my son. As simple as possible, now and forever, amen. Seriously though, you don’t need all that fancy website, funnel, marketing ish right now.

We didn’t have a website let alone a Google Doc with testimonials on it AFTER we had already served dozens of clients inside the Accelerator. Only after we earned multiple 6-figures, did we invest into a proper sales page and website which you can see here: https://www.predictablegrowth.io/accelerator

I used the following content assets to pre-sell my program:

  1. My Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1710801445842167
  2. Plus My Blog: https://differenthunger.com/
  3. Program Outline Google Doc (View Current Version)

Step 3. Pre-sell on Live Consultations

Here’s the consultative sales process my partner and I used to enroll 10 beta clients into our Accelerator, each paying between $3,000 to $3,6000 with payment plans:

Want Help Implementing? Here’s How Myself and Team Can Help…

  1. Join the Academy for free here: http://predictablegrowth.io/academy/sign-up
  2. Join the 72 Hour Sales Challenge here: https://www.predictablegrowth.io/72-hour-sales
  3. DM me Waitlist at @whoismattkohn on socials to get notified when we launch the membership and Accelerator.

The Client

World class product with massive ambition
SteelCon is an innovative family-owned engineering firm based in Canada. Their proprietary product is up to 30% lighter weight than traditional steel allowing for higher cost effectiveness and faster project implementation while minimizing the carbon footprint of commercial development projects.

The Problem

Struggling to grow beyond local network
Despite having a revolutionary industry and world-changing product, SteelCon was seeking to expand internationally, however, they struggled to generate business outside of their local network.

The Solution

Managed business development
SteelCon realized they needed to create a predictable growth engine that allowed them to generate qualified leads and sales opportunities outside of their existing network. With Predictable Growth, SteelCon hoped tocreate a predictable B2B growth engine from managedgrowth that allowed them to expand their client base internationally.

The Results

S10M+ sales pipeline from scratch in 26 days
Within less than 4 weeks of launching their business development campaign, we generated a sales pipeline worth well over $10,000,000 by converting 2% of prospects we reached out to into sales appointments on the calendar.

Business Development Process

Develop Your Avatar

As always, we began by defining the ideal client avatar in detail, including both demographics and psychographics, to craft a story-driven message that resonates.

Pictured: Our Customer Avatar Template

Develop Your List


Develop Your ListAfter defining our client's avatar, we produced a high quality, pre-vetted list of 500 perfect prospects that matched our client's targeting criteria.

Pictured: Prospect List from SteelCon's campaign

Market of One Research & Strategy Development

We researched our client's industry and competitive landscape in order to identify the opportunity gaps for them to make the competition irrelevant.

Pictured: One of several positioning exercises we use for developing our client's Market of One strategy

Develop Your Market of One Positioning, Messaging & Copywriting

After research, we refined our client's positioning and messaging from "a market of many" to a "market of one" and wrote a hyper-personalized sales outreach sequence designed to stand out from the crowd and generate responses from qualified leads.

Pictured: Our campaign messaging map, inspired by Donald Miller's storybrand framework.

Launch Your Business Development Campaign

We launched a a multi-step business development test campaign to a small list of 500 targeted prospects in order to generate interest in our client's service offerings.

Respond to Leads, Follow Up & Set Appointments

After prospects responded, our team responded, pre-qualify leads based on our client's criteria and set warm discovery calls on our client's calendar.

Pictured: Real life example of a prospect conversation that led to a $3M+ opportunity for our client. Click the button below to get the full email sequence!

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