How to Build and Sell A High End Training/Coaching CourseYou’re incredibly skilled in a particular area and you’re ready to teach the masses what you know. You’ve seen others do very well with their high end training and coaching courses and you’ve decided this is definitely for you. Within your niche, you know you can add a ton of value that people are hungry for.
Before you jump into the deep end and spend days, weeks, or months creating your epic course, here is a guide that will help you along the way. It will give you some important tips, some crucial things to think about, and some important strategies to save you from the common pitfalls that course creators run into.
Pre-Sell Your Course Before You Build It
There is nothing worse than spending endless hours creating what you believe is the world’s greatest course just to find out that nobody actually wants to buy it. This is more common than you think. First time course creators tend to fall in love with their idea and have a hard time believing people wouldn’t actually be interested.
It’s important to test and see if people even want to buy your course before creating it. Unfortunately, even if you survey a group of people within your niche to find out if they would be interested in a specific course idea, you’re not going to get accurate data. It’s easy for people to say they are interested in something if they aren’t actually buying anything. That’s why the best test is to actually pre-sell the course.
Instead of recording 10-20 hours or more of course material, just write down an outline of what would be in the course. List each module and a quick sentence or two of what that module would include. Create an enticing sales page around your course idea. Now, instead of surveying a group of people, actually offer your course for them to buy. Just be clear that the course won’t actually start until a certain date in the very near future.
With these initial pre-sold customers, you’ll have the funds to cover any software or other course expenses, as well as having the funds to start advertising once your course is complete.
It’s a good idea to offer a discounted price to your first group of students to start the momentum. The only requirement for the discount is that they give you a testimonial for the course.
One problem is that you might not have an audience to pre-sell your course to. That brings us to the other important thing you should do before you build a course.
Build An Audience First
By building an audience within your niche first, you not only have your first group of people to pre-sell your course to, but you also have a group of people that you can connect with and figure out what kind of stuff they are interested in learning.
You can build a following on your social media platform of choice, or build an email list by promoting a free offer or a lead magnet to get targeted people to sign up. There are countless guides online that show how to build your initial audience with paid traffic or with organic growth strategies. Choose a method and get started.
As you build your audience, you should already be providing regular value and seeing what people respond the best to. You’ll also be finding your voice as you make helpful posts, which will go a long way when it’s time to actually create your course material.
You should talk to them directly and simply ask them what they are struggling with most within the niche. What do they most want to learn? This will give you some great ideas of what to include in the course once you’re ready to make your pre-sell offer. Try some niche-specific variations of these questions:
- What are you most interested in learning within this niche?
- What major obstacle is in your way to accomplish the thing you want to accomplish?
- Is there anything you have tried to learn but it still seems too difficult or confusing?
- Is there any specific things you’ve wanted to learn but just can’t find any guides online to help you?
These questions are a great starting off point for your course. With these answered, you should be able to create a great pre-sell offer that you can pitch to this exact same audience that you are building. Without building your audience and talking with them first, it might take a lot longer before you have found a course offer that anyone is willing to buy during the pre-sell phase. This takes most of the guess work out of it.
Using Audience Feedback for the Perfect Pre-sell Offer
Now that you have all of that amazing feedback from your audience, you need to use the common obstacles and problems that they talked about in your pitch.
If there was a common obstacles that most of them agreed was the biggest thing holding them back, this should be one of the main headings of your sales page. If you’re in the golf niche and most people said they need help with their putting, your sales page should reinforce this common pain point and offer your course as the perfect solution to that problem.
If you’re teaching people who want to be Instagram influencers and everyone is saying that they are having trouble even getting their first group of followers, they your sales page heading should literally say something like, “How to easily get your first 10,000 Instagram followers within 30 days.”
Are you seeing the trend here? Your course should be fixing the exact common problem that your audience mentioned, and your sales page should make this obvious. If you connected with your audience, found out their main pain points and obstacles, and created your pre-sell offer to match, you shouldn’t have a problem getting some initial sales when you promote your course to them.
This will ultimately validate your course so you know you won’t be wasting your time actually creating it.
Wants and Needs
The trick to any good course is to sell them what they want, but give them what they need. This means that you need to understand their strong desire and sell that to them through your pre-sell offer. What is the end result that they want them to accomplish? How do they want to feel after you have helped them? This is what you need to sell them on for your pre-sell pitch.
The trick when creating your course is to deliver what they actually need to get that result, but do this subtly. It’s a form of ethical persuasion. For example, if someone wants to become really great at playing the piano, they aren’t going to buy a course on the premise that it’s basically telling them that they need to practice for 10,000 hours. They are going to buy the course that tells them that it is the secret of effortlessly getting good at the piano, fast. The actual course material will still emphasize the need for consistent, daily practice, because in the end, that’s what they need. However, the piano course will teach them how to get much more out of their practice sessions in less time. It will display what exercises will help them quicker. It will explain how they can enjoy their practice more so it doesn’t feel like work.
You need to position your offer to appeal to their wants so your course has a high perceived value and people actually want to give you their money. You create a course that gives them what they need so that they are actually being helped. People who are given what they actually need are less likely to make a refund request, improving your overall profits.
Sell them what they want, give them what they need.
Do It Live!
Here is another important strategy that will save you a lot of time and headaches. In the beginning, do your course live! With tons of different online webinar platforms to choose from and recording software, you can actually create your course live while helping your initial pre-sold students. There are a few types of courses this might not work for, but for the vast majority, a live course will be fine.
Ahead of time, create the presentation slides and other materials that you will need for your course. Schedule a webinar for the first group of students and then record your screen and audio live while giving the presentation. You can even get on camera in front of a white board if it fits your course.
After you’ve finished your presentation, you now have all of the videos recorded so you can begin selling your course without the need to do them live anymore. However, keep in mind that with most webinar platforms, students can ask questions during the live presentation, so you can get direct feedback as you’re going during the live recording. The engagement will help provide valuable direction of how you can improve the course.
With the feedback, you can even do another live class for the next batch of students with any course improvements based on the feedback of the previous group. In fact, it’s a good idea to do the course live a handful of times to your first few batches of students. You’ll get better as a presenter, and you’ll be sure to have a much stronger course that will really help people as you scale your business and get many more students.
You can edit the best takes from the different live recordings for your master class. No need to stick with one recording straight through. Your course will likely be several video modules anyway, and you can privately re-record any parts that still felt a little off during your live recordings.
Just be sure to give past students the updated version of your course after you’ve improved it. It will keep your customers happy and coming back for more in the future.
Upselling
What will your students pay even more for?
If you’ve created a great course that truly helps your students, many of them will be happy to pay even more for the right offer.
One simple upsell is to have an upgraded version of the course. This can be a course that has additional, more advanced material, or other bonus content that your students would value. However, be careful with this one. Make sure it’s additional content that only a smaller group of your students would want. If what you’re trying to offer as an upsell is wanted by everyone, then it should have been part of your course in the first place. You don’t want your students to feel like important information is held back so you can upsell them. If you’re selling them a pie, the upsell is the ice cream. You don’t hold back and slice and then upsell the rest of the pie. That will leave you with a lot of unhappy students.
A great upsell is more exclusive access. This can be a private inner circle or mastermind where they can get more of a small group experience. The thought here is that people in this inner circle group are going to be learning at an accelerated rate with a stronger support system to help them along the way.
Another great upsell is “done for you” or “done with you.” If your course is teaching someone how to build a website for their business, the upsell can be your team building it for them or you working closely with them to help them every step of the way.
You need an additional offer that you can promote as an upsell. By not having an upsell offer, you’re leaving money on the table.
