19:02Taki Moore · Talking Head
How To Sell High-Ticket Coaching Without Sales Calls
A coach who ran hundreds of sales calls explains why he fired his whole sales team, and the five-part offer that replaced them.
July 10thThe argument in one line.
Nobody wants to be sold but everybody loves to buy, so a coaching offer sells itself when five levers stack the reward, remove the risk, and add a reason to act now.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach or consultant with a product that delivers results but whose offer page gets lots of interest and few yeses.
- A coach selling a long recurring program who can only describe the end result and has no quick-win story for month one.
- A coach who is always open, always discounting, and has never set a real client cap or enrollment deadline.
- A coach who thinks bonuses mean piling in more videos and worksheets and wants a better test for what to include.
SKIP IF…
- You sell physical products or low-ticket digital goods, since the guarantee and payment-shape examples are built around high-ticket coaching.
- You still need a first paying client, because this assumes a working product and an existing stream of leads.
The full version, fast.
Most coaches have a great product and a terrible offer. Taki Moore says a yes happens when perceived reward outweighs perceived risk, and he gives five levers. Promise is the most important: a clear destination, split into three phases for long programs. Bonuses should remove objections and speed up the journey, not add weight. A guarantee reverses risk. Payment plans (pay in full, front-loaded, monthly, weekly, graduated) make big prices feel small. Real scarcity and urgency, like a 45-client cap and one open week a month, push the decision to now. Score each lever red, yellow, or green and fix the weakest.
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- A compelling offer beats a convincing argument every time, because nobody wants to be sold but everybody loves to buy.
- The product is what you deliver; the offer is how you package and position it, and most coaches have a great product with a terrible offer.
- People say yes when they perceive more reward than risk, so every offer lever either adds reward or removes risk.
- Sell the destination, not the steps: a travel agent sells Bora Bora, not the airport security line.
- A long program needs three promises: the end result, a quick win in 30 to 90 days, and a middle-phase result.
- A good promise is one a 10-year-old walking past could point at and say that person got rich.
- Bonuses should never be measured by weight; in a world drowning in information, only add what gets a better, faster, or easier result.
- Think of your client climbing a mountain: every extra bonus is another thing in their backpack, so make it as light as possible.
- The best bonus removes a specific objection, like a virtual assistant offered to people who say they are too busy.
- A guarantee finishes the sentence: we promise this outcome, and if we do not deliver, this is how you are made whole.
- Between two identical horses, the buyer takes the one with the risk reversal, so be the safe deal.
- People focus on whether they can make the payment, not on the total, which is why cars and houses are sold on weekly or monthly numbers.
- Charging weekly for 52 weeks equals 13 months of monthly payments, so you can look cheaper and collect more.
- Graduated pricing, such as $1,500 then $2,000 then $2,500 a month, lowers the barrier to starting because future money is easy to spend.
- Urgency is limited time and scarcity is limited quantity; they are different levers and you can use both.
- Real scarcity is the number of clients you can serve well, not a fake countdown.
- When the deadline passes or spots sell out, the answer is no, because your reputation comes from keeping your word.
Tip the seesaw toward yes
OFFER LEVERS
An offer converts when reward outweighs risk, and five levers (promise, bonuses, guarantee, payment plan, and urgency with scarcity) let you adjust each side deliberately.
- State the destination clearly, and for long programs break it into an end result, a quick win in the first 30 to 90 days, and a middle-phase result.
- Judge every bonus by whether it gets the client a better, faster, or easier result; cut anything that only adds weight.
- Build bonuses from the objections that stop people buying and from the hard steps on the journey, such as a done-for-you assistant or a ready-made CRM.
- Write a guarantee that finishes the sentence 'we promise this outcome, or we make it good', so the buyer is never left holding the risk.
- Pick a payment shape on purpose: pay in full, front-loaded with a tail, monthly, weekly, or graduated, because buyers focus on the payment rather than the total.
- Offer two options at most, usually pay in full plus one monthly or weekly plan, so the choice stays simple.
- Use real scarcity first by capping clients at the number you can serve well, and add urgency with a fixed enrollment window and a kickoff date.
- Hold the line when the deadline passes or spots sell out, offering next month or a wait list instead of bending, to protect your reputation.
- Score each lever red, yellow, or green and work on the weakest one before touching the others.
Terms worth knowing.
- Offer
- How a product is packaged and positioned: the promise, bonuses, guarantee, payment terms, and reasons to buy now, as opposed to the product itself.
- Risk reversal
- A guarantee or trial structure that moves the risk of a purchase from the buyer to the seller, such as taking the horse for a week and paying only if you love it.
- PIF
- Paid in full. The buyer pays the whole price up front, which returns ad spend fast but raises the barrier to entry.
- Graduated pricing
- A payment shape where the first months cost less than the standard monthly rate, which makes starting easier.
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue. A program billed as a fixed amount every month.
- Micro-magnet
- A small, specific lead magnet used to generate leads, mentioned as one of the tools bundled as a bonus.
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Most of the coaches I meet have a great product and a terrible offer. Honestly, the easiest way to help you make more money isn't to teach you how to hard sell, it's to make your offer easy to buy. And so in this video, I'm not going to teach you why you need an offer, you already know that.
Instead, what I want to do is give you five really simple offer upgrades, little things we can do to dial up the clarity and the attractiveness of your offer so you become easy to buy. Over the last few years, we've got 700 coaches to a million dollars a year and beyond. And we're doing just under two million bucks a month ourselves.
How do we do it? Well, we use this marketing map. So in this series, I'm breaking down each of the steps, each of the pieces we use to generate leads, to warm them up, to make offers and get them to buy.
Today, we're in offer land. Because if we can get the offer right, everything that happens from a marketing and sales point of view actually pays off. So let's die on your offer, make it better.
Here's a big mistake that I think we've all been suckered into. We're all getting better and better and better at making convincing arguments. The truth is nobody wants to be sold.
everybody loves to buy. So the secret to selling more of your coaching isn't to focus on selling, it's to focus on how do we get bought? Because as my friend Dean Jackson says, a compelling offer beats a convincing argument every single time.
Let me give you an example. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of career coaches in the world, and they're all selling career coaching, the same stuff with the same sorts of outcomes. I work with one career coach, her name's Em, and she's incredible.
While everyone else is selling career coaching and sessions, she makes a compelling offer. It's this.
You'll get your next job inside 90 days with a $10 ,000 pay rise or I'll work with you for free until you do. I don't need to be convinced, dude. I want that and I'm in.
So I promise to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The truth is it's really freaking cold right now. Before we hit record, we ordered something hot and delicious.
I don't know if I should drink it or just like huddle around the warmth of the cup. I feel like a baby with a sippy cup and I've just spilt it all over myself. The rest of this video is proudly sponsored by Showbox.
Coffee and manly. So I said right at the start, most coaches have a great product and a terrible offer. The difference is really important.
The product is what you sell and what you deliver. In a physical product, it's what's in the box. The offer is how you package it and position it.
And there are five levers we pull that make an offer so good that it sells itself. So how do we dial in your offer? It's really simple.
If you think about your offer like a seesaw at a kid's playground, if somebody says yes to your offer, it's because they perceive there's more reward than risk. And if they say no to your offer, it's because they perceive more risk than reward. There are five core elements we're going to lean on to stack the reward, to remove the risk, and then one in the middle that flips people over the edge.
I'm going to do them from the outside in because you know if a person's here, it flips the seesaw more than if you put them there. So we're going to start with the most important factor. The most important factor of your offer is the promise.
If you're a travel agent, RIP. Travel agents, it's been nice knowing you. You don't sell the steps along the journey.
You know, the lining up at the airport, the going through security, the delays and the da -da -da and the crappy food. You sell a trip to Bora Bora in Tahiti. You're in paradise, the sun's shining, it's magical.
We need to be really clear about the destination. Remember Em's example? New job in 90 days with a 10K pay rise.
That's the promise. If you're selling a short product, like a course or a 30, 60, 90 day, program like a hero that's probably all you need if it's only something longer that promise probably wants to be dimensionalized a little bit and so when we're selling monthly recurring revenue programs like we do a lot we can't just sell the end destination you know pay me money right now work with me for a long time and eventually it gets really really good trust me bro that's not okay so we've got three time frames that we want to break our offer down into three phases so if you're selling a long program i highly highly recommend you go what's the end result Amazing.
What's the quick win? So where will someone be in 30 or 60 or 90 days? And then what's the result in phase two?
For us in Black Belt, our job is really, really simple. We want to get you an extra 10K a month fast. That's usually in the first few weeks.
That's phase one, quick wins. Phase two is we grow and scale and there's some strategies there. And then we scale you up to a million dollars a year long -term.
So phase one, phase two, phase three. But if you're selling a short program like the career, 90 days, new job, extra 10 grand does the trick. So the first upgrade is promise.
I want you to give yourself a quick little traffic light score on that right now. Is it red? Really needs work.
Is it green? Oh my God, it's amazing. Or is it yellow somewhere in between?
And if it's anything other than green, let's dial that up. How clear and compelling is the promise? We want a promise that you can point to.
that a 10 -year -old kid walking down the street goes, oh my God, that person's rich now. We want a promise we can point to. I want you to imagine that your coaching program is like Superman's phone booth.
Ordinary person, Clark Kent, walks in. Superhuman person, Superman, walks out. How clear is your promise?
If you're selling something short, make it clear and compelling. If you're selling something long, what's the first, then, and next phase one, two, three results? So before we get into the other four, we built a little tool for our clients.
It's called the offer auditor. You just give it each of these. five steps as we go through and tell them what you're doing right now.
And it's going to give you a score, a red, a green, a yellow, and it's going to make some specific suggestions about what you could change or add or remove to make your offer more clear, more compelling. I think you'll dig it. It's in the description below.
So on the reward side, the piece that weighs the heaviest is the promise. It wants to be clear and compelling. So if you go, I want that, just like that energy drink, five hour energy, it's really clear.
If I drink this, I'm going to have five hours of energy. The second big needle mover we can add to make our offer more attractive and stack the reward is bonuses. Usually time limited.
If I do it right now, I get this cool thing. People think about bonuses all wrong. In the old days, people used to measure value by the kilo.
Literally, they'd throw everything but the kitchen sink at an offer. So you'd have these incredible value stacks with like, you get this and this and this and steak knives and bonuses and more steak knives. I once talked to a great coach called Pete about his time management program.
He's like, it's amazing. I'm like, well, tell me all about it. He goes, well, it weighs three kilos.
It's got real thud factor. I'm like three kilos. How's that some kind of benefit to me?
Because yeah, when you take the box and you drop it on the table, it lands with a thud. Well, that's cool and all. In the old days when things were scarce, maybe that was the best you could do.
Honestly, we're not starving for information right now. We're drowning in it. So the best thing you can do is to take as much out of the program or the product as you possibly can and only put in stuff that helps them win faster, get a better result, easier.
Faster, better. easier that goes in everything else is out if you think about it your clients are hiring you to help them get up to the top of a mountain and they're down here and you're right next to me like hey if you buy right now i'm going to give you this backpack what are we going to put in the backpack everything we're going to have more videos more worksheets we're going to have more sessions we're going to have more coaching we're going to have more you just like load them up with all this stuff in their backpack and all of a sudden I'm already stuck at the bottom and now you're giving me all this to carry?
It's getting harder and it's getting heavier. Your job is to make the backpack as light as humanly possible. Like a race car, the thing that makes a race car win isn't more, it's stripping out all of the weight.
So the only things we're gonna add are, does it help me get a better result? Does it help me get a faster result? Or does it make the whole process easier?
So when you're thinking about your bonuses, I want you to think about this from two angles. Number one, what are the objections that would make someone less likely to buy? and solve those in a bonus.
Like I've got this friend, Joanna Martin, who used to teach people how to sell from stage. One of the big objections to joining a program about how to sell from stage is most people are terrified of speaking from stage, of presenting in public. And so she added the bonus, which is this meditation that you do, like this visualization that goes for two or three minutes that gets you calm and confident and feeling excited about it.
It was a bonus that removed an objection. That's a really good way to lens to think about it. It's true.
The other thing you do is you think about all of the key steps on the journey up the mountain. that they're going to need to do and go, okay, how can we make that easier or faster or better? And that easier or faster or better?
And that easier or faster or better? Let me give you some examples. One of the things that people are going to need to do on the journey, one, is to have a great offer.
And so we've built a bunch of tools to make that easier and faster or better, and then turn their offer into an offer doc that they can use. So we've got the offer auditor, like I told you about. With our clients, we don't just audit.
We've got an offer upgrader. So audit shows them the holes. That's when you get the offer.
Upgrader takes the input from that. and goes, here's five things that I would change or add and tweaks their actual offer. There's another tool that takes that and turns it into an offer doc that's killer and perfect and amazing.
If they need to generate leads organic, one of the tools is a hand razor matic that writes the hand razor post, makes it actually kind of funny, clear and compelling and entertaining. And they just go bananas. If they need micromagnets to generate leads, we've got a micromagnet maker.
There's a bunch of tools that just make it easier for them to get a result that's better than they could on their own, faster than they could doing it solo. They're the bonuses we want to add. So I used to run a two -day workshop called the Million Dollar Coach Intensive.
And it was like a crash course on how to grow a coaching business. And at the end, I'd invite the right people to join us in Black Belt. And after two days of learning all the things that they could do, there was a chance that they might feel a little bit overwhelmed.
There's a lot. So I'd ask people to be honest with me about... what's the thing that might hold them back?
And most people said, well, I'm just really busy and I'm not good at the tech. So I'd ask them a hypothetical question. If you had a virtual assistant, not full -time, let's just say, I don't know, 10 hours a week to take care of some stuff for you.
Let's make a quick list. I'll give you 60 seconds. Let's make a list of all the things that you get that person to do on the marketing side of things for you.
And then make this list. They'd write emails. They'd schedule emails.
They'd get your posts out. They'd maybe do your graphic design. They'd take care of your calendar and your email.
I did that on day one. on day two, guess what one of the bonuses was? Oh, and we'll pay for a virtual assistant for 10 hours a week to take care of that list of stuff that you made.
And they're like, oh my God, that's just what I've always wanted. I know, I got you to want it. But that's the whole point.
It was a bonus that overcame a specific objection. One of the steps up the mountain is going to be getting really good at marketing. And so that's going to be email marketing and funnels and checkout pages and calendar pages if you sell with calls.
So one of the things that we do to help our clients win faster and easier, we built a CRM. We white labeled go high level and we put all my funnels and campaigns, pages inside this thing.
So now a client goes, oh, that's what I want. And they press the button and their stuff's in it. Done my way with their content and it's perfect.
It makes their job easier. So they get a faster, better, easier result. So I think you get the idea.
Our job is to make it easier for clients to win and easier for them to say yes. So I want you to think about your bonuses right now and score them. Is it green?
Compelling and juicy is like, oh, if I get that, I'm in. Is it red? Frankly, could use a bunch of work or it's okay and could use an upgrade.
If it could use an upgrade, make a list of the objections and the steps and go, how do we make it faster, easier, better with a bonus that I get if I sign up right now. So far, we've talked about the reward side. Promise is most important.
That's why it's on the outside. If we flip to the opposite side here, the risk side, the promise is making some pretty big promises. That's kind of its job.
But there's a part of everyone's inner monologue which goes, okay, but what happens if it doesn't? I'll help you get your next job inside 90 days at a $10 ,000 pay rise. But what if it doesn't work?
That's what we need to do here. That's where your guarantee comes in. And the guarantee just finishes this sentence.
We will promise or we'll blank to make it good. So the promise. It says, we'll get you this outcome.
And the guarantee says, and if we don't, this is how you'll be made whole. There's this amazing old story that J. Abraham used to tell.
I love it. I think it's the perfect example. In a village many years ago, a man wanted to buy a horse for his daughter.
And at the time, there were two horses for sale in the village. So the man went out to see both of the people who were selling the horses. And the first guy said, hey, this is my horse.
It costs $100. Take it or leave it. Okay.
So he goes to see the other one. He goes, let me check my options. I'll come back.
goes to see the second guy and the guy says well this is my horse uh it's good it's kind it's it's a lovely horse i think it'd be perfect for your daughter but of course i'm going to say that it's my horse and i'm trying to sell it to you so why don't we do this once you take the horse for the week i'll get my son to bring it to your stables uh every morning he'll come and feed the horse he'll clean up the horse's mess He'll help your daughter and the horse get to know each other and have a go on her first few rides.
And at the end of the week, one or two things is going to happen. Either you're going to love the horse, in which case I'll expect to be paid, or you don't like the horse and I'll just take it back. No worries at all.
Which horse do you think the man bought for his daughter? Well, obviously the horse with the risk reversal and the guarantee. You want your coaching to be a safe deal for people.
And part of your offer is, if the offer is high reward and we can take the risk out, then you become a walking, talking good deal. So right now, are you a safe bet, a risky bet, or somewhere in between? Green, yellow, or red?
Have a think about what's people's biggest fear. If I don't get this, what's the risk? And how do we remove as much of that as we humanly can?
The next lever we can pull to remove the risk is just adjusting the terms of payment, the pay plan. It's really interesting. You can sell expensive things, but just by changing the payment terms or the payment plan, it can feel like nothing.
People are focused on, can I make the payments, not the total amount. That's why people who sell cars and houses sell easy weekly payments of X or monthly payments of Y, not buy this car, it's 60 grand. Most coaches can dramatically increase the uptake on their thing just by changing the payment plan.
And there are a few different payment shapes, which I think makes sense. So there's a bunch of different payment shapes that we can talk about. And the easiest way to think about it is, how do they pay over time?
And so let me give you a few that you've seen and maybe a couple you haven't. All right, so these are just a few different options. Let's start with the one that I'm sure you've heard of.
It's called the PIF. This is where even if the program goes for a long period of time, they pay it all up front. I get the attractiveness of that.
Especially if you're running ads, you want to get as much of your ad spend back as quickly as you can. The problem is that you've created a barrier to entry or a hurdle. Let's call that option one.
An alternative to this that a few of my clients do when they are running big ad spend is they have an upfront chunk that goes for the first month or couple of months and then a lower monthly payment. And that's totally valid. That way you still get the bulk of your money up front, but you've got a trail that it's like a, my friend Sean here just called that big head, long tail, like a sperm.
Like a whale. Next one you've definitely seen, this is just like. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, where it's this much per month.
For example, Black Belt, the traditional payments are $2 ,500 a month. Next up, this is really popular in fitness. In fact, I first saw it with Alex doing this when he was coaching gyms, was weekly payments.
So it's a lower amount paid weekly. Again, people focus on the... payment, not the total.
The cool thing about weekly payments is not only is it an easier, smaller number, but if you do the math, 52 weeks gives you the equivalent of 13 months worth of monthly payments. So you can charge less, but make more at the same time. Kind of ingenious.
Here's one you might not have seen. The way we do it in Blackbird is called graduated pricing. And like I said before, the monthly payments for Blackbird are $2 ,500 a month, but the first month is $1 ,500 and the second month is $2 ,000 and then it goes to normal price after that.
And so those first two months are a little bit less, which makes it easy for people to get started. The biggest objection you're going to get is almost always like time and money. Like I'm busy right now.
I got a lot on and I don't have the cash. And so anything we can do to push payment into the future makes it easy because future money is easy to spend. We've experimented in the past with two months free, then X per month.
It's worked great for us for upgrades. It hasn't worked so well as a front end offer. So let's talk payment plans.
is yours juicy and delicious is it horrible and disgusting or is it somewhere in between ice cream anchovies brussels sprouts dribbled in bacon and maple syrup somewhere in between and if so you've got a menu here that you can tweak your payment plan to make it easy for people to say yes for most of our clients we'll have two options pay in full as an option a and then a monthly or a weekly one of those two not both as a b that's a pretty typical but you've figure out a payment plan that makes your offer attractive.
So now we've got four of our offer upgrades dialed in. Two on the reward side, two on the risk side, which leaves us with the fulcrum in the middle. What we want is something that adds a little bit of now factor, a reason to do it today and not delay till later.
We've got a couple of levers we can pull here. They are called urgency and scarcity.
A lot of people conflate the two, think they're the same thing. They're not. Urgency is limited time.
Scarcity is limited quantity. And we can play with both. Let's talk scarcity first of all.
Most coaches treat their business like, I want as many clients as I can get. Like there's unlimited supply. The truth is there's not.
If you took on 100 new clients today, tomorrow morning, you would probably die. Somewhere between zero clients and 100 clients, there's an actual number of people you can look after. That's real scarcity, not fake scarcity.
Please don't do that. real scarcity what's the number of people you can look after and do a really good job for that's the scarcity number so for us in black belt it's like 45 and we started by with how many we're selling right now and did a little bit less than that as our first limiter to prove that we could we sold that out and then every month we've just ratcheted up the number and we've settled on this happy 45 we've got demand for 60 maybe maybe 70, but probably 60 comfortably.
But we cap it at 45 because we've got an amazing coaching team. And I know that in a week they can onboard that number of people and do a great job first week of the month. That's when we do it without burning out, without frying their brains and making sure we keep a super high level of service for the other clients in the community.
So for us, that number is 45. And we mentioned that number. And as we get closer, we go, there's this many spots left.
Oh, there's this many spots left. We've got this many spots left. And they go.
Today, we sold out for the 13th month. I'm super stoked. So that's scarcity.
You've got a number. We should pick it. We should mention it.
And the moment we sell out, we should tell people. And then there's urgency. If you're always open, there's no reason to do things right now.
So we open the doors to Black Belt for one week per month. And so we've got limited number, but we also got limited number of days. And when the doors close, they close and the train leaves the station.
So that's scarcity. Let's talk about. urgency.
Again, most coaches are always open, so there's no reason to do things now. But for us, brand new clients have their first key touch point with us, first magic moment at the kickoff call. It happens on the first Tuesday of every month.
And so if this is the day when the train leaves the station, everybody's got to be in before then. So urgency and scarcity. I want you to think about your coaching business and go, am I leveraging urgency?
Hell yes, hell no, or Not as well as I could. And scarcity, exactly the same.
The easiest lever to pull for a coaching program is usually scarcity. I'd lean on that one first. And I guarantee you're going to be incredibly tempted after you've sold out all your spots or the deadline passes.
Somebody's going to reach out and go, oh, I'm so sorry. I missed the email. Can you please squeeze me in?
And everything in you is going to be like, I've got to let him in. Of course you want to do that because it's money and you've been busy chasing. But black belts don't chase.
We choose. And the most important thing you've got is your reputation, which comes from keeping your word. When the deadline's done or the spots are sold, the answer is no.
They can buy now for next month if you want them to, or you can put them on a wait list. It's your call. We usually say you can jump in early for next month so you don't miss out again.
And that's how we do it. So there are five elements we can upgrade to make your offer better. Here's your action plan.
Number one, we want to do an audit. Take these and use the offer auditor that I mentioned below. Dictate your stuff in them.
AI style and get the robot to give you some feedback about what's hot and what's not and how to make it better. Then make some tweaks because there's nothing worse than having a great product and a shitty offer. If we can make a great product and wrap it in a great offer, you've just got sex on legs and that thing will sell.
So we've just upgraded your offer. Next comes the fun step where we take your offer, we put it through a simple dock so people can buy it without even having to talk to you. That's what we're going to do in this video right here.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Most coaches have a great product and a terrible offer. Taki Moore says the fix is not a better pitch but an offer so easy to buy that the pitch barely matters.
