How to Build a Sales Journey for High-ticket B2B Products

Gaining trust and selling to B2B prospects is not an easy feat. It’s even more challenging when you’re selling products or services that cost thousands of dollars.

So what’s the best way to sell high-ticket items, even with objections and hesitation from prospects? The answer is simple: through an effective high-ticket sales funnel.

It’s the most compelling tactic to attract the attention of prospects, educate them about the value of your product or service, and get them to book a call with your team. But it requires a great deal of preparation and strategy beforehand to get it right.

In this article, we’re going to share the challenges that come with selling high-ticket items compared to low-ticket items and a four-step process you can follow to land more deals.

Selling high-ticket items comes with a unique set of challenges that you won’t find with more traditional, lower-priced products.

First, the most important thing to mention is that high-ticket deals typically come with longer sales cycles. Due to the hefty price tag, it will take longer to nurture a prospective buyer down the sales funnel and past checkout.

Another obstacle you’ll have to face is frequent objections from prospects. After all, it’s a natural human instinct to have doubts and feel uncomfortable about spending hard-earned cash.

It’s all because of loss aversion, a cognitive bias that makes people feel the pain of loss more intensely than pleasure. In the prospect’s mind, a high-ticket item comes with the expensive risk that they may not get what they wanted out of it. So the best way for them to avoid this possibility is not to purchase the product at all.

As a result, you’ll have to build a lot of trust throughout the sales process to help them make the right decision. It’s a delicate balance that requires a great deal of empathy and understanding without pushing them too hard for the close. 

It’s worth noting that budget is the most common reason sales fall apart. According to a survey of around 400 salespeople, 55% reported budget as the primary reason stronger opportunities fail. 

A high-ticket sales strategy must consist of finding leads with the right budget and talking to decision-makers who can use that budget. 

That said, while high-value products are harder to close during the sales funnel, the payoff is entirely worth it since you’ll be generating more profit per sale. It’s all about adopting the right combination of mindset, research, and nurturing to secure the close.

Creating a high-converting sales funnel for your high-ticket service starts by identifying the right leads to target. That way, you’re focusing on prospects that are most likely to convert. Here’s how to do it in three steps:

Think about your ideal customer’s key details and psychographics, along with the challenges they’re facing and what solutions they’re looking for. Include these key attributes in your buyer persona:

An excellent way to uncover all of this information is to talk with your sales team. Since they’re at the forefront of customer interaction, they likely have a solid idea of the common objections and challenges your prospects go through and which type of buyer converts the most.

The next step is to focus on your brand positioning and how your product stands in the current market. Here are the different steps you must follow to make it happen:

Once you identify all of the above, you can find ways to incorporate all of this information into your high-ticket sales funnel to showcase your product or service in the best light possible.

Networking on professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn can be a goldmine for prospecting and B2B lead generation. This is because users are on the platform to connect with other B2B companies and professionals to solve their challenges. Some of the different ways to generate B2B leads on LinkedIn include:

Apply these tips, and throughout the following months, you’ll have plenty of B2B leads under your belt to target in your sales funnel campaign. 

Once you identify the type of B2B leads that you want to go after, it’s time to attract as many of them as possible into your sales funnel. It’s essential during this stage to use the right tactics that will provide value and get their attention. Here’s how to do it.

To get the attention of prospects, an excellent digital marketing strategy is to create gated content (content locked behind a web form or paywall) on topics and challenges that they’re experiencing. It helps build trust for your company within the industry, provides value to your target audience, and brings more qualified leads. 

When it comes to content, webinars will be your best option to sell high-ticket items. They don’t cost any money for your audience to attend, they’ll get to learn important information, and it gives you a lot of leverage to explain the benefits of your product or service. Also, signing up for a webinar requires more buy-in than simply downloading an ebook or case study.

While gating high-value content is great for generating better-qualified leads, there are arguments against it in some cases.

For example, it may not always be wise to gate content like ebooks and case studies. Sharing this type of material freely with your audience can lead to more organic results and support thought leadership efforts. 

To gate or not to gate depends on your objectives, goals, and brand positioning. But either way, prospects shouldn’t have to part with their emails unless you have something of real value to give to them.

With the information that you have on your leads and target audience, use the data to launch targeted ads to promote your gated content for ideal customers. 

Organic traffic is great and should be part of your sales funnel strategy, but it doesn’t generate the ROI that paid ads do. What’s great about Facebook and LinkedIn is that they allow you to set up ads based on the demographics and interests of your target audience. This way, you’re always reaching the right ideal buyer at the right time. 

You should approach Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads as individual channels; don’t try to use the same ad creative and copy on both platforms. This is because the audiences are typically on each platform for different purposes and you’ll need to factor that into your ad design.

For example, for B2B marketing, LinkedIn will likely be better for building awareness using your unique selling proposition (USP), whereas Facebook would be a better tool for retargeting and addressing objections.

If your offer is relevant and valuable to your audience, you should see success from the ad. If not, make sure to test different offers to see what generates the most conversions through A/B testing. 

It doesn’t matter how great your gated content or LinkedIn ad might be—if your landing page is glitchy or doesn’t provide engagement, then leads will be dropping off the funnel left and right. It’s why you must optimize your landing page in a way that drives the most sign-ups and conversions possible.

You can start optimizing your landing page by doing the following:

Getting leads to sign up on your landing page is just the first step. Next, you must nurture the lead relationship, so they continue to learn more about your offer and proceed to book a call with your sales team. 

During this stage of the sales funnel, the goal is to provide value to your prospects, educate them on your high-ticket products or services, and build trust so they eventually convert. Here are the tactics you can use to achieve this:

Don’t forget that not all leads that sign up for your gated content are going to convert. Part of the lead nurturing process is to qualify the leads you generated, so you can avoid wasting time and money on leads that won’t purchase your high-ticket product or service.

To identify which leads are most likely to become high-ticket clients, you can run surveys and ask them qualifying questions. The best way to run a qualification survey is to use the BANT methodology as inspiration:

Running this type of survey will help you better understand your lead’s motivations and which you should be targeting. You can also get a sense of their objections earlier in the process. This will help you build trust sooner as you tailor their experience to counter those objections.

Sending customer success stories during the nurturing stage helps prospects better understand the value they can get from your high-ticket products and services. In addition, by reading about the stories of others who were once in their shoes and were able to experience success, they’ll feel more motivated to purchase the product as well. 

When choosing the best format for your customer success stories, we recommend that you use video testimonials. It makes your success stories feel more human and personalized, helping gain the trust of your prospects as a result. 

Since you’re selling high-ticket offers, you want to offer and remind the prospect that there’s a money-back guarantee, in case they’re worried about the risk of losing a lot of money. In addition, it gives an extra push of motivation to take the plunge and purchase your high-ticket item. 

Aside from a money-back guarantee, you can also provide the prospect with peace of mind by offering a free trial. It gives the lead time to explore your product and see the value they can get out of it without any financial pressure before deciding to purchase.   

Your prospect can’t learn about your expensive price tag at the last stage of the sales call. So, as you’re nurturing leads, always make your pricing clear to identify which leads are ready to pay. This way prospects won’t receive any bad surprises in the funnel. 

Salespeople can be intimidated by making their pricing clear, worrying that it could scare away prospects. All it takes is a subtle mindset shift: this is actually what you want. By introducing pricing earlier in the sales cycle, you can identify which leads are willing to purchase and save time in advance. 

Now it’s time to close the deal and get your leads to purchase your high-ticket product. What your sales professionals do during this stage is what could make or break the sales funnel, so here’s what you must do to ensure that the process goes smoothly:

Empower your sales team to do their best through sales enablement, which gives them all the tools and content they need for success. It will help your sales team become more efficient, close more deals, and in return, drive more revenue for your company. 

For effective sales enablement, your marketers and sales team must align with each other. Marketers must provide sales with resources such as videos, blogs, product guides, and any other forms of content that can help sales win more deals. 

Sales enablement also means providing your team with the right technology to boost their productivity. The best sales enablement software we recommend is Salesforce CRM (customer relationship management) software. It comes with various tools to help your sales teams, such as lead management, forecasting, and revenue intelligence.

The richer your CRM data, the better your reps will understand your leads and be able to personalize their experience. Fill your sales enablement tool with insights to support each sale, such as webinars they downloaded, ads they clicked on to arrive at your website, and what pages they’ve viewed.

Ideally, you’ll also get a sense of their contact history and communications preferences. You should be able to easily see in your CRM how leads have been in contact with you before (e.g., web form, email, live chat, etc.) and note any important details from completed surveys. This is all rich intel to inform your sales teams.

After qualifying your leads, it’s time to pull the trigger and ask for phone calls or conference meetings. Reach out to your best prospects with an invite to hop on a call and discuss more about your product or service and how they can benefit from it. 

Also, make sure to follow up if the first emails or SMS messages don’t work. After all, the prospect could have missed your message because their inbox was full, or they weren’t working when you reached out to them. Try to follow up at least three times before letting go of the prospect and moving on. 

To warm up the prospect before the call and land new clients, send them a video of what they can expect from the meeting. It’s even better if you include personalization in the video itself for a more human feel, such as using the prospect’s name and mentioning information you talked about in your emails. 

Identify the possible objections that could arise in the call and find ways that each sales rep can overcome them to close the deal. If you have employed a sales enablement tool, like a CRM, you’ll have quick and easy access to objection intel based on leads’ past behaviors

For example, let’s say that your prospect has a suitable budget but you can see from a web form entry that they are weighing up your product’s higher price than a competitor. A salesperson can overcome this objection by letting the potential buyer know about financing options that your company offers.

Or, let’s say that a prospect is interested in what you have to offer, but they give you the “now’s not the right time” objection. To close the deal, your sales team can offer a limited-time discount to get them over the line. 

As scary as high-ticket closing might seem, you can overcome even the biggest objections through the right strategy and tactics.

Make sure to research who your target audience is and create gated content that will appeal to their needs. From there, make sure to nurture the leads you’re generating to identify which ones are the most likely to purchase your high-priced item. 

Before reps hop on the phone with the prospect, they should prepare in advance. That includes identifying the objections headed their way, along with sending a video of what the prospect can expect from the call. Doing so will get your company one step closer to landing the new deal and getting the lead to say yes.

With enough sales experience and practice, you’ll build a team of high-ticket closers efficient at closing deals left and right. Your company’s sales and revenue will prosper as a result.