One of the biggest obstacles to sales is asking people for too much, too fast. It’s like proposing marriage on the first date. They call it swinging for the fence in baseball. It’s an all or nothing approach, where you strike out because you are trying too hard to hit a home run. Value ladders are more like getting base hits consistently.
The purpose of a value ladder is to make it easier for people to say yes to doing business with you. It works by creating a low-risk, multi-step on-ramp for new clients. Once they take the first step, you earn the opportunity to lead them up the rest of your value ladder.
A value ladder is effectively an on-ramp for clients. You start with a simple, free or low-cost, minimal risk offer that people can say yes to. The intro offer leads naturally to a slightly larger offer and so on. It’s not just about low-cost first steps. Your value ladder is the idealized path you create to guide clients through your business. From the client’s point of view, it’s like a road map for how to realize full value from you. It’s a way to increase conversion rates, reduce sales cycle times, and lower unit costs per sale.
A value ladder and offer hierarchy are two sides of the same coin. A value ladder is the customer side of the coin. It refers to an escalation of value for the client. On the other side is a progression of increasingly larger offers (the Offer Hierarchy).
It is difficult to make advertising work without specific, time-limited offers and calls to action for clients to say yes to. The absence of a value ladder is one of the most common points of failure in a sales and marketing system. Creating a value ladder is one of the most effective ways to improve performance.
We’ll help you design and construct a value ladder and the corresponding offer hierarchy to build your sales and marketing program around.
