The 5 Offer Types (& How to Decide Which One to Create Next)
If you are somebody who is pretty full with client work, looking to scale, and you just aren't sure what that right next offer is, this is the post for you.
There are pretty much limitless amounts of new offers you could create as a business owner. But generally speaking, we can condense them down to five things.
From there, you can create offshoots of these five offers, or introduce little differences or changes from offer to offer in those categories.
But for now, I'm just going to give an overview of the five different categories of offers possible so that you can decide what is right for you, and also for your clients.
But also, make sure you check out my three pillars of scaling, because those really go hand in hand with what I’m about to tell you.
And if you still feel like you need more support with your sales tactics as you’re selling your offers, I’m including a link to download my no-sleazy-sales method guide that’s worked for me forever. For free. More on that at the end of this post.
First, a Reminder: Start with Yourself
I know we very, very, very often think about what our clients need, what they want, and what they are going to like.
And that is important. Because if it's something they’re not interested in, they're not going to buy it.
But we need to start with ourselves first. Because at the end of the day, we are the ones who are delivering the offer. And if we sell it, and then have to deliver it, we don’t want to be like, “Oops, I don't actually enjoy delivering this.”
It doesn't matter how much you're making. You are going to feel super annoyed every time you have to do whatever it is that you said you were going to do if it doesn’t make you happy.
Sometimes it’s easy to think, “Oh, I’ll offer this because everyone is offering it.” But honestly, that might not be the right offer type for you. And one offer type is not necessarily better than the others.
It really is a matter of what you want to do.
What are you going to get excited about? And what are you going to be excited to share with your people?
Now let’s get into it.
Offer Type 1: Courses
We're going to start with the one that is the most common, and that is courses.
Courses are absolutely amazing. I have definitely been outside shoveling snow, come indoors to check my work email, and I've sold a course. To somebody. I didn't even know who they were. I wasn't even really promoting the course and somehow they came across it, found it, and bought it.
So I literally made money while snow shoveling. While sleeping. While traveling.
And that feels really, really, really great.
But let me be totally honest with you:
It can be a ton of work to create, market, and sell a course.
And depending on how you have it set up on the back end – for example, with a Facebook group or anything like that – you can feel obligated to take up even more of your time to continue nurturing those people.
It's not always a perfect solution to simply say, “I'm going to create a course and suddenly make money in my sleep. And now I own a luxury yacht.”
Ha, right.
That's sort of what gets sold to us – this idea that courses are going to be this amazing, easy passive income and we’re not going to have to work anymore. We’re going to be printing our own money.
But I will tell you, one of my very best friends and clients is an incredibly successful course creator and she works Monday through Friday. She's not working 40 hours a week, but there is constant upkeep, constant sales and marketing and nurturing of her community and doing all sorts of other things.
It's not as set-it-and-forget-it as you would want to believe (or as some would have you believe so they can sell you into their course creation programs).
Just keep that in mind.
Courses are a great way to have something that is at a slightly lower price point than what somebody would pay you for one-on-one work. It's an amazing way to systematize a process and get that into the hands of people so they can go through it on their own.
It can also be a great way to get rid of your one-to-one work entirely. I rave about Denise Duffield Thomas all the time. She just has her Money Boot Camp course, and it's like $2,000, and she doesn't do one-on-one work. It's great for her. She makes plenty of money. She has a paid community manager in the group so she doesn't have to be in there every day. It's awesome.
But if you are just starting out with courses, just know that it takes a bit of time to build up to that and there is a decent amount of work on the backend and even ongoing work.
Offer Type 2: Membership
There are lots of different ways that you could set up memberships – and different price points and deliverables, too.
Sometimes memberships get paired up with courses. So you can, for example, buy into the membership and get a course, then keep paying monthly. Or there may be a hub of information or portal with basic info, past trainings, or other things that you get access to when you are in the membership.
With membership, you are going to be catering to people who are comfortable paying a set amount every single month, and you want to keep them for as long as possible. You also want to be bringing new people in while keeping the people who are already there.
One way to do this is to have ongoing enrollment. You can have enrollment only certain times a year, or you could have a launch with inaugural pricing where maybe initial members get to join for $30 a month and then after that every new member comes in at $50 a month.
That’s just one idea.
And then there are different platforms you can use, such as Facebook, Mighty Networks, or Podia (which I use for my courses). They also have a membership component.
There are lots of different options for you to create a membership program. You could even do it on a Slack channel.
But first, you have to figure out if your people are the type of people who are going to want to have a recurring payment.
And if so, what value are you delivering?
You also have to figure out if running a membership program is right for you.
For me, I really enjoy being a part of a membership community like Tara McMillan's What Works network.
But I don't think I would want to run my own, at least not right now. I would constantly have to think of new content and value. I would feel like I had to show up a lot in order to make it valuable for the people who were paying me month to month.
That's one thing to consider with membership – you don't necessarily have to have it as robust as a course would be right off the bat. Not that all courses have to be massively huge or anything, but you could start a membership program with a smaller amount of deliberate deliverables. You don't need tons of modules of information, either.
However, you are going to need to be doing some ongoing content creation for that group.
So it’s important to think about if that’s going to be sustainable for you to keep up with.
Offer Type 3: Digital Downloads
This is another thing that is a bit more passive. Digital downloads can be great for your clients because they can be offered at much lower price points.
You may ask, “Why would you sell something for $10 that you have to sell more of when you could just sell one thing for $1,000?”
Well, it kind of depends on what you're selling.
I have a client who’s gone through my three scaling pillars in our time working together. She shifted from all of her revenue coming from one-to-one work to only a third of her revenue coming from one-to-one work. The other two thirds are partially from course sales, but most of the rest is all from digital downloads that are around $50 and under.
Amazing, right?
And she makes good money too. She isn't just selling four of those a month – she's selling a lot of them.
But you need to have a system in place to be constantly marketing those things so that they are constantly selling. If you have something that is a $10 digital download with maybe a $30 order bump or upsell on there, you kind of need to be marketing it and selling it much more frequently to keep the sales up and keep them consistent.
There are a lot of different ways you can do that. Paid ads. Talking about it frequently in your content marketing – not to the point where you're exhausting your followers, but just reminding people that it exists. Put it in nurture sequences. On the backend of an opt-in, like a tripwire.
You can go about it in so many different ways.
There are people who make really good money from low-cost, digital downloads.
The nice thing about those is – if you know the concept for what you want to do – you can have a lot of that work done by a VA or a designer or both to get that stuff all set up.
And digital downloads can also serve as a lower cost start to an offer ladder to get people into other things later on.
Let's say you have a $20 digital download, and then a $200 course. Once somebody has already spent money with you, and they are happy that they did, they are more likely to continue to spend money with you. So you can kind of stack it and create that value ladder.
Offer Type 4: Group Programs
Here’s an example of when a group program would be a perfect new offer:
Let's say that you are a coach. You have a three-month 1:1 coaching program that is $5,000. You are going to work with somebody one-on-one, intensely, for three months, for $5,000.
And then you think, “I'm pretty booked with the people in this program. I can only work with six of those clients at any given time, because of the time commitment and my desired work week. Right now I have five. If somebody else comes along, great, but I'm not going to push it.”
If this is your scenario, you may still want to find a new way to bring in some revenue that can help more people, but is not as time intensive. Maybe these potential clients are not quite where your one-on-one clients are, but they could still use the help you have to offer.
This is where it could be beneficial to create a group program.
Say, a program for 10 people who are one step behind where your dedicated clients are. And you can offer it at a lower price point. Your goal with a group program like this is to get these clients up to the level of those dedicated clients.
If you did a group program for 10 people for a 90 day period, what do you need to consider?
Here’s a quick list to get you started:
What is it going to include?
Where is it going to be? Is it going to be on Facebook, on Slack, on Mighty Networks?
Are there going to be course components to it?
Do you already have a course that you could use for the program?
Or do you want to make this a higher level group program and not just a course with a group component?
Do you just want to have weekly or bi-weekly training calls?
Are there going to be themes each month?
Are there going to be workbooks?
What are the deliverables going to be?
Who is this ideally for?
What is the goal?
It’s a long list, but these are all things you need to think about.
And the great thing is, you get to decide.
Usually what happens with these types of offers is you already have some of these people in your orbit.
These are the people who follow you, they love you, they love your content. They're digging everything that you're putting out. But they think they can’t afford your regular one-on-one package or they're just not to that level in their business yet where it's going to best serve them.
They need something else first to get to that level.
You can actually whip this together – all the parameters – and then reach out to people already in your orbit. Tell them, “Hey, this is what I'm cooking up. What do you think? Would you be interested?”
You could just sell it very simply that way. No sales page, no bells and whistles, nothing like that. You just get it out there.
Maybe you fill six spots before you even start your marketing plan. Then all you have to do is try to market for those other four slots. Isn't that awesome?
I love anything you can do simply and easily. I am here for it all day long.
And in that school of thought, a group program is a real possibility.
Offer Type 5: One-Offs
Smaller one-off offers are almost like what you would offer for a group offer in the way, but a little different.
You could still work with clients in a one-on-one capacity. Or maybe in a super small group – like you and three people.
This is what I did with a client of mine who was thinking about creating a course. We created this one-off offer instead, and we put a cap on the amount of people.
The plan was that she was going to spend one hour a month with people. It is time for money, but it's far more compressed than if she were to take on a one-on-one client and manage their social media, five days a week.
In that one hour a month, she would do an audit of their social media, help them create a 30-day content calendar, and then they would come back the next month and do it again.
The responsibility was on the clients to implement the plan. They got expert help creating the plan, but the implementation, the engagement – they had to do all of that on whatever social media platform they were using.
For my client, it meant that she would have recurring revenue from those people each month, for three months, when they signed on.
And she knew she had 10 hours in a whole month that she had available for this. She had a built-in cap on it for herself so she wouldn't be overworked, which was really important for her and important for me to help her with.
And it was easy for her to deliver. She didn't have to create this huge course, she didn't have to monitor a membership site, she didn't have to do a big launch or even a sales page or anything. She knew she could easily fill those 10 spots from people she'd already had conversations with but who couldn't afford her done-for-you rate.
The beauty of this is that as she fills those spots, at the end of the 90 days she can always increase the price. There's going to be a ceiling on that eventually, but she can gradually stair-step and raise the price while giving the same 10 hours every month but making more.
As she does this, she is going to start seeing patterns emerge from the clarity that is going to come through the action of that work.
She is going to notice if, say, eight of the 10 people have the same five questions or confusions or misunderstandings, or need her to re-explain something.
This will guide her in the future on what her clients need the most help with and help determine if she wants to continue to offer the same thing, if she can raise the price, or if she needs or wants to add any more client hours.
With that clarity, when she goes to create a course, or a digital download, or any passive offer, she doesn't have to do customer research.
In fact, she could probably hire a professional course creator and say, “Hey, I know all of the things that people at this level of business are struggling with,” and she already has the framework done.
She could record some videos and be done or even hand it off to somebody who does full launch strategy for courses and outsource that piece of it too.
Either way, she's using the time spent working with those people to gather really strong data on exactly what their pain points are and how she's going to solve them to get the best results.
And she's got revenue coming in so that she can then outsource that whole process to bring in even more revenue in the future
So, as you can see, as you determine what offers are best for you and best for your clients and you start implementing them, it is going to inform what your next steps will be.
You might choose one of these offer types and do it for a while and then decide you’re just not feeling it anymore. And that's okay. You can always change your mind. You can always shift and mix it up. You are allowed to do this however you want to do it.
But here’s the important next step: Take a moment and write out some pros and cons, what you want to do, and how you want to work.
You wouldn’t want to create a group program where you feel like you need to be in there doing a two-hour group coaching session every week. If you decide it's actually going to be really hard for you to have a consistent two-hour time block to coach every week, you’ll think, “I goofed. And now I am going to have to deliver on this.”
These are all things that you want to be mindful of before you spend a ton of time and energy and even money on creating this new offer for people.
If you're debating between offers, reach out to me. Or if you feel totally stumped, just reach out. I'm totally objective. I'm on the outside of your business. I can look at something and ask you some clarifying questions. And it will start to make sense. We are all too close to our businesses, so it's good to have that outsider weigh in sometimes.
So tell me what your next offer is going to be. And if you need help, I’m here. You got this.
