Strategically design your offers to sell your services with ease!
Whatever stage you are at in your business, it’s always a great idea to review and revise your offers. How are you delivering them? How are you presenting them? What are their key components? Are these working for you? For your clients?
So many questions arise when we look into our businesses and assess the effectiveness of our offers. Selling your services shouldn’t be an uphill battle. On a daily basis I work with clients to help them define their strategic offers. When you design your offers this way, it helps you grow revenue, position yourself as an expert and respond effectively to a need. And when you do, you’re able to describe your offers in a way that means your prospective clients want to say yes please!
But I get that it can feel overwhelming and while you want to revise your offers, you might just not know how to.
I’ve prepared some tips that will help you to think through your offers strategically and design an effective business model that works when each and every client is different.
This blog article is a summary of the related podcast episode.
Click here to listen to the tips mentioned in this article.
The tips I’m sharing are designed for businesses and self employed entrepreneurs who provide a service, like consulting, coaching or freelancing. If you own a product based business, you might find these tips useful too. I firmly believe that there’s always room for inspiration and learning more across business boundaries.
These tips are all about structure. If you would like advice about pricing, I have an episode where I discuss how to price your services and products, and what mistakes to avoid.
How to price your services and products
When I talk about structure, I am referring to the business model that sits around your offers and the way in which you apply it. One of the biggest issues I see with clients is that they struggle to define their offers before they actually talk to their clients, as they often have to know more about their needs before they can come up with an offer. This is for instance a typical situation for consultants or freelancers who tailor their offers to the particular project they will work on.
However, if there is no clarity around the key offers of a business, it can be very difficult to be convincing and give a clear estimate of the total investment to a potential client in order to allow them to say yes to it with confidence.
How can you effectively market your offers with so much fuzziness around it? If you don’t know the ins and outs of your offer, how can you expect a client to feel confident about buying from you? Your uncertainty makes them uncertain, and that’s likely to attract a no from them, before you’ve even had a chance to talk on a strategy call.
It’s vital to have clarity about your offers before you talk to a client, even if you need to adjust it later to the specificities of the client.
One of the first steps to gaining clarity is to find your base point. Do your research beforehand. Ask yourself, “what do I need to deliver my offer, so that it provides value to my client?”. Understand what type of client will be ready to buy from you at different steps in their journey. Understand what they need from you and understand how you can deliver it to them.
And if you get clarity on these things, you’ll be able to design offers that elevate your business, elevate your customers’ experience and even more importantly, elevate your revenue potential!
When revising your offers, there are three key questions to ask yourself.
1. What do you actually provide through your services?
This might seem like a very simple question, but it can be multilayered. Ask this question in a factual way, but also in a conceptual way.
For example, if you’re a graphic designer and a client wants a logo, then you factually deliver a logo. It’s a simple transaction, even if the process can be more or less complex depending on how you would take the client through the process. You might also be a designer who does all the pre-analysis work behind the design of the visual aspect of the logo, like the branding pillars and the value proposition of the company. Some designers provide much more than ‘just a logo’, so it’s important to mention what you actually provide and the steps you take the clients through to achieve that goal, because it adds more value to your offer.
If you look at the same scenario conceptually, what is that graphic designer offering the client? It’s better visibility, more effectiveness and more growth, all of which make a far greater experience.
Another example – if you’re a diversity and inclusion consultant, factually, you might provide training, workshops, coaching and speaking engagements. Conceptually, you help companies have more diverse teams, you support people who are part of the different segments of the population and you also help people feel more included and seen in their work environment.
With the same promise and goal, there is more than one way to help clients. How you choose to do this could be very different to other professionals in the market.
Know that your offer could be the main thing that sets you apart from your competition.
Look at what value YOU are providing and HOW you are providing it when you deliver your offer. Just remember it’s not all about you. Don’t forget that you also need to look at it from the perspective of YOUR CLIENT. Define what will make their experience most impactful through the process of using your services or products.
2. What is your customer’s journey and your framework?
This step is all about understanding your customer’s journey and how to solve the problem that they experience. The key is to know your clients really well, which is important to not only market your business properly, but also to design your offers that give value and lead to more clients coming on board.
The more you know about your client’s journey the more you can provide offers that are relevant.
This will also help you design a business model that provides you with different revenue streams depending on which point you’re intervening in the customer’s journey.
The benefit of this exercise is that it helps you to define your entry point offer – the one that is easy to say yes to. This offer is also a great way for you to build trust with a new client, so that they buy more services from you.
This exercice is also about figuring out what your big signature offer is. What is the offer you want to be known for and that you excel at? Your signature offer can evolve over time, but I highly recommend that you think about it when you start your business, but also as you grow in your business.
I applied the same customer analysis process to my business. When I started tandem nomads it was all about helping expat spouses turn their dual career challenges into a successful portable business. At this time 7 years ago, entrepreneurship wasn’t something that most spouses thought about as a solution to their career challenges whilst living on the move. I had to ask myself how relevant am I as a business and marketing coach if people don’t even think of entrepreneurship as a solution? My first step in the customer journey was to educate people that entrepreneurship was a possibility – a source of fulfillment, and a solution to building a real career, a revenue stream, and financial independence, all whilst living on the move and raising a family.
This is how the podcast Tandem Nomads™ was born. I provided free resources to inspire them into thinking that a different kind of life was possible.
As people started to respond, I developed my first program, the Business Idea Accelerator™ with my great friend and partner, Sundae Schneider Bean. Sundae is a transformational and solution-orientated coach and our partnering complemented each other’s skills. I took care of the developing your business idea and marketing, whilst she covered the career and life transformation aspects.
From this came the Portable Business Accelerator™ to help clients to go deeper and build the foundations of a successful portable business whilst living on the move. This program provided a natural progression for clients who newly had their business idea and needed help to launch it to the world. The Portable Business Accelerator™ is now the signature program of Tandem Nomads™. It contains my own signature framework, the 3Cs system in which I take people through a process to gain clarity, develop consistency, and convert their strategies into results.
As clients developed their businesses in more depth and evolved them in line with their mobile lives, I developed my third offer, the Business Growth Accelerator™. This focuses on 1:1 support to fix a particular challenge or plan the next step in a business, like a new program, a new product, a business pivot or repositioning.
This customer journey has evolved a lot over the 7 years of Tandem Nomads™. There’s more to come too, I’m really excited to share it with you all soon!
By breaking down the steps, you make it easy for customers to say yes.
Clients can buy one program or buy the full package according to where they are in their journey and what they need most help with. It gives them choice, but informed choice within known boundaries and understandings. It is from these different programs that you can also develop your framework, like my 3C System™. Think about your patterns and the recurrent themes and systems that you’ve put in place when working with clients. How can you turn these into your signature framework? It’s an important step in the growth of your business, because developing your own framework and methodology will really help position yourself as an expert. Furthermore, when you attach it to your offers, it really elevates your customer experience and enhances your professional positioning.
3. What is the transformation you provide through your business and each offer?
If you cannot answer this question clearly, you’re going to struggle to sell what you have to offer. It’s really important to reflect on what transformation means to you.
I highly recommend that you follow a process of questions and thinking. It’s also really important to use the language that your clients would use in these scenarios.
- What is the situation before a client works with you?
What situation does the client find themselves in? Why are they seeking your help? Really understand their pain points and the emotions involved. - What results will the client get after working with you?
Ask this in relation to them working with you generally, but also for each of your programs or offers. - How will you take them from the before to the after?
This may include the number of hours or sessions you’ll work together, or the actual steps you will take them through. It’s really important to be very clear here, so that the client can visualize the process and feel comfortable about the process that you will go through together. It creates a sense of trust and certainty. You might also have other aspects of your offer, which you need to explain are included like a program workbook, an online course or other resources that adds more value to your offer.
You now have a good understanding about how to strategically revise your offers to elevate your business but also to sell with ease to your ideal clients.
These tips will help you to be strategic about how you deliver that quality and value to your clients, not only through the services you provide, but also through the journey you take them on via your offers.
If you want to learn more about my framework and do some exercises to help you build solid foundations for your offers, to grow your revenue and make that desired impact with your clients, download my free guidebook.
And let me know how you go with strategically reviewing your offers. I really do love to hear about your adventures!