5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Create a New Offer
As entrepreneurs, we often get caught up in ideas about what we should be doing.
Sometimes, all it takes is reading somebody's Facebook post, and suddenly your brain is just spiraling out and you think, “I'm not going to be successful if I don't do that.”
But the reality is that not everyone needs to have a podcast, a monthly membership site, a group program, a free Facebook group, and do challenges and webinars!
It depends on you, your goals, your clients, and your business framework.
We ultimately should never be creating something that is built upon our insecurity or our FOMO.
Here are 5 really important questions that you need to think about before you create a new offer in your business.
You can use these to pause and think and make a better informed decision for yourself and your business.
1. Am I doing this out of guilt?
I know that there is a segment of my audience that just loves what I do, but always say that they can't afford me. I know these people are raving fans, I know that they enjoy my content, that they watch all my insta-stories and read my posts, but I’m just not fitting into their budget.
So this could lead me to start wondering…
Do I need to create something for them? Am I leaving money on the table? Am I being a bad person because I'm excluding them?
There's nothing inherently wrong with creating a bridge offer for people who are in an earlier stage of potentially working with you, but you also don’t want to offer something from that fear or insecurity or guilt.
Creating something from that place of guilt is only going to make you feel resentful when you have to deliver on it.
There will always be people who can’t afford what you offer, even if it’s a $5 monthly fee for a Facebook membership group.
You can’t please everyone.
On the flip side, if you feel foolish for not having some high ticket offer, but that doesn’t fit with what you want to be doing or where you’re at in your business, then it doesn't matter if you set up a $2,500 offer.
If you don't feel confident selling that offer, and if you don't want to deliver on that offer, then you don't have to do it.
2. Am I doing this just to feel busy?
When things are going well (or not going well) in your business, you might think that if you start a new project, it will alleviate some of your anxiety.
I don't know about you, but the feeling of my self-worth is so bound up in how productive I am.
When I'm busy, it really quiets that chatter in my brain, even if I’m busy with something that doesn't matter, that doesn't get me closer to my goals, and that is not an income producing activity.
But damn, if it don't feel good, if it doesn't feel like I'm being productive and industrious and a really good worker, and worthy of whatever comes next. (oh hi, capitalism)
It sounds counterintuitive, but when we get to a place in our business where we feel like things are going pretty well - we have consistent income, we love what we’re doing - we might start to feel like we need to be doing something more.
Suddenly, we start thinking, “I need a podcast!” or “I should write a book!” or any other number of things.
Don't just create something for the sake of feeling like you’re creating forward momentum. It needs to make sense in the larger plan of where you want to go with your business.
3. Who am I creating this for, and where are they in their client journey right now?
When you’re thinking about who the offer is for, you also want to think about what they need, whether this leads them to a next level offer, or if it’s the next step after you have finished working with them.
Maybe you see that your clients end up coming back to you three months after you’ve finished working together, seeking support.
For example, imagine you have a weight-loss program, where you work with someone for six months, you get them to where they want to be, and now they come back to you because they need a maintenance plan to keep at it.
If this is a thing that keeps coming up for you, you could suggest that instead of your regular, twice monthly coaching calls, you’ll bump it down to once a month, and help keep your clients on track.
This isn’t a case of someone just saying they can’t afford your services and you feeling guilty and like you have to serve everyone (like in question #1).
This is a gap that you continually see that is preventing people from taking full advantage of your other offers.
4. Where does this fit in with the bigger picture of my business and my goals?
Whenever you create a new offer, you also want to make sure that it fits within the larger vision you have for your business.
So make sure you ask yourself, what do you ultimately want in your business? And then make sure that your new offer works to support that vision.
Do you ultimately want to work fewer hours and have really deep relationships with people? If it is, you’ll need to have a higher ticket offer and work with fewer people, so you get to spend more time with each person.
On the flip side, maybe you really want to impact hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
A past client of mine, who was a social media manager (and was actually booked out), knew that she had a lot of people in her audience that couldn’t afford her retainer services.
So we worked together to craft a lower ticket offer that fit into her larger goals of wanting to educate and empower more business owners so that they could confidently run their social media accounts.
This worked really well, and it fit into the bigger picture goal of her business and her revenue goals as well.
5. What do you want to create?
Now that you know you’re not creating something out of guilt, or in order to feel busy, you know who you want to serve, and how it fits in with your larger business goals… What’s next?
Looking at all of the options and figuring out what your new offer is.
You know, the beauty and the curse of being a digital CEO is that there are so many options.
And that’s great because different options work better for different people.
It could be…
a downloadable guide
a monthly membership
a course
a six week program
an audit with a plan that they need to implement
a Power Hour
a Day Rate
etc, etc, etc
But this can also feel really overwhelming, because then you have decision fatigue, and you don’t want to waste a lot of time and money going down a path that might not be the best path for you.
You know I'm not about one size fits all, nor am I about spending a lot of time and energy creating one thing, when something simpler, that doesn’t add a ton of working hours to your plate, can get you where you want to go.
But thankfully, there are loads of other types of offers you can create that could work better for your business and life, and might not even need a launch sequence or webinar or anything fancy like that.
You deserve for your next new offer to be something that fills you with “hell yes!” energy.
Hopefully these questions will help you clarify some important things for yourself before spending loads of time and energy creating your next offer.
(you know, so you don’t do all that for an offer that’s not the right fit for you or your business!)
