In their desire to provide unassailable amounts of value, I find that my clients are making their offers quite complex. They have too many offerings at similar price-points. They offer too many things. They lack a well-defined pathway of how or one moves from one product or service to the next. And this lack of clarity is hurting their sales.
I mean, consider this: if you, as the business owner, can’t figure out what you’re selling, or why someone should invest in one product or another, your potential client isn’t going to take the time to figure this out for themselves. And, since a confused mind always says No, this pretty much means your lack of clarity is costing you money.
In his excellent book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz talks about how too many choices create paralysis. His findings indicate that level of action-taking diminishes as number of choices increases.
This means that your offers need to be simplified and clarified, and probably reduced in number, in order to make more sales. Sometimes, especially bright, soulful, creative types keep creating new products and programs and services rather than selling fully the ones which are already created.
One area I’ve been challenging my clients in lately is the area of making money rapidly. As in, “How can you make $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 almost immediately, WITHOUT creating anything new?”
This has been an interesting question, as most of my clients go almost immediately to “Oh! I’ll create a new program”- before I mention they can’t create anything new. But then, within this constraint, they actually become more creative. They look more critically at their existing businesses and resources and start putting them together in new- and easier-to-offer- ways.
They make use of bundling- mixing products and services together for higher price-points and more leverage. They start to become interested in automating their sales funnels and processes so they can focus on higher end clients, which creates more revenue. They start to think about their product and service funnels in a new way, noting when their cluster of products actually belongs to one theme- and to one large product, rather than multiple smaller ones. It’s often more difficult to sell 100 things than 1 thing.
When building your offers, or product or service funnels, it’s crucial to ask yourself, “What is the transformation being provided at this level?”- and then see if your programs and services naturally move people into deeper transformations and changes.
So, for instance, in my business, I often begin with offering search engine optimization services. Then content marketing. As these processes start bringing my clients more potential clients, it moves my clients to talk with me about their offers and pricing and metrics and conversion. As we examine that, we start to look at issues of streamlining and efficiency and product/service development. Then we also look at bigger issues of capacity, outsourcing and hiring teams. So, if I were to diagram out a product or service funnel, I would take each of the services I provide- and look at how each level feeds into the next. In my own business, I can see that a business owner must change or transform at one level in order to move to the next. That helps me clarify what services/products to offer at which level.
If I can see a clear progression, it is much more likely that I can explain- and sell- this to my clients and potential clients. When people see that there is a system or pathway for their growth with you, they are more confident about investing with you.
So, if you find that your “stuff” isn’t selling as well as you’d like, I’d encourage you to take a look at your products and services with an eye to identifying what level of transformation each provides, and where you can simplify to make your offers easier to understand, and therefore, easier to purchase.
Easier to understand and purchase means more profitability for you.
