Ep. 056: Which New Offer Type Should I Create?

Part of evolving your business is creating new offers that serve different needs among your ideal clients. The problem is that the options for the types of offers you could create is almost endless! In this episode I'll mention the most common, and the pros and cons of each. Hopefully this helps you narrow down which type or types will be best for you as you continue to grow.


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  Erika Tebbens: Welcome back to the, Sell It Sister Podcast. If you are thinking about creating a new offer, especially if you are somebody who is pretty full with work with client work and you are now looking to scale and you just aren't sure what that right next offer is, this is going to be the episode for you. But also when you're done listening to this, listen to the previous episode about my three pillars of scaling, because these two really go hand in hand.

  So there are pretty much limitless amounts of new offers that you could create as a business owner. But generally speaking, we can condense them down to like a handful of things, right? And then there's, there can be little offshoots of those things and little, um, you know, differences and changes from offer to offer in those categories.

  But for now, I'm just going to give an overview of the things that are possible so that you can decide what is right for you and what is right for your clients. So I know we very, very, very often think about. What do our clients need? What do they want, what are they going to like? And that is important.

  It's important to keep in mind because you know, if it's something that they are totally not going to be interested in, then they're not going to buy it. But we also need to start with ourselves first because at the end of the day, we are the ones that are delivering the offer and if we sell it and then have to deliver it, and then we're like, oops, I don't actually like delivering this in this way, it's not going to be good.

  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 wanted to for that program. So I'm, that's why I really want to give you the overview. So you can ponder this and make a better decision, rather than just saying like, Oh, I don't know.

  It seems like everyone's creating a course or a membership. Like I'll just do that because honestly that might not be the right type for you and none is necessarily better than the others. Uh, it really is a matter of what are you going to want to do, what are you excited about and what are your people going to be excited about?

  So, with all that being said, let's get right into it.

  We're going to start with the one that is the most common, and that is courses. Now courses are amazing. Absolutely amazing. Uh, I have definitely been outside shoveling snow and come in doors and check my work email. And I've sold a course from somebody I didn't even know who they were. Right. I wasn't even like really promoting it. I don't know, they came across it, they found it, they bought it. So I literally made money while snow shoveling while sleeping while, you know, I don't know, traveling. And it's great, that feels really, really, really great.

  However, and I have a few pounds past episodes, recent episodes, um, uh, episodes, uh, 47, 48 and 49 that are about like creating courses.

  So you can go back and listen to those, to dive deeper in this, but 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 backend, like with a Facebook group or anything like that, you can feel really obligated to take up even more of your time to continue nurturing those people.

  So it's not always a perfect solution to just say, well, I'm going to create a course and then just have that course and suddenly I'm making money in my sleep and now I own a luxury yacht, right? That's sort of, I feel like what gets sold to us is the, the idea of. Like, Oh my gosh. It's just going to be all this, this passive income and I'm not going to have to hardly work anymore. And it's going to be like, I'm printing my own money. Right?

  That's that's sorta like the gist of how we are sold on courses, but I will tell you because one of my very best friends and clients is an incredibly successful course creator. And she works like Monday through Friday, she, she works.

  She's not working 40 hours a week, but there is constant upkeep. There is constant, um, sales and marketing and, um, nurturing her community and doing all sorts of things, right? So it's, it's not as set it and forget it as you would want to believe, or as, as some would have you believe so they can sell you into their, their course creation, uh, programs.

  So just keep that in mind that, uh, 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. Uh, systematize a process and get that into the hands of people so they can go through it. It's a great way to get rid of your one-to-one work entirely.

  Like I know I rave about Denise Duffield Thomas on this podcast in many episodes. Uh, she just has her money bootcamp and it's like $2,000 and she doesn't do one on one work and it's, 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 and it's awesome. But if you are just starting out with courses, you know, just know that it, it takes, 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. So there is the course, then there is also the membership and sometimes memberships get paired up with a course.

  So it's like, you can buy into the membership and you get a course and then you keep paying monthly. Or, you know, there's like a hub of information in there, like a portal with basic info, past trainings, anything like that, that you get access to when you are in the membership. And again, there's lots of, for ways that you could set it up and different price points and different deliverables.

  There's so many ways that you can do it, but with a 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, right? You want to be bringing new people in and then keeping the people who are already there.

  And you can do this many ways. You can have ongoing enrollment, you can have enrollment only certain times a year. Uh, you could have, you know, if you're launching it, you can have like a inaugural pricing where maybe those people get to join for $30 a month. And then after that, every new person comes in at $50 a month.

  There's so many different ways that you could do it and there's different platforms like, uh, I know that there's obviously Facebook and then mighty networks and, uh, podia, which I use for my courses, they also have like a membership component. There's lots of different places that you can have it. Uh, you could even do it on like a Slack channel, right?

  But you have to figure out, are your people the type of people who are going to want to have a recurrent payment and if so, what value are you delivering? So part of why, uh, like I am in a paid membership, uh, community that I really enjoy. It's a Tara McMullin's What Works Network, but I don't think I would want to run my own, at least not right now, because I would constantly be having to think of new content and value and feeling like ahead to be showing up a lot in order to, uh, make it valuable for the people who were paying me month to month to month. And I just don't want to do that right now. I'm not going to say not ever, but at this point in time, it's just more than I would like to take on. So, uh, just that's one thing to consider with that is that you don't necessarily have to have it as robust as a course, like right off the, off the bat.

  Not, not even that all courses have to be like massively huge or anything, but, you know, you could start it with a smaller amount of deliberate deliverables; you don't need like tons of modules of information. However, you are going to need to be doing some ongoing content creation for that group.

  So just keep that in mind. Uh, then there are digital downloads. So this is another thing that is a bit more passive, these can be great because these can be much lower price points, and it may seem like, I know sometimes people say, you know, why would you sell something for $10 when you have to sell more of that?

  When you could just sell one thing for, you know, a thousand dollars and you only have to sell one? Well, it kind of depends on what the thing is that you're selling. Right? So I know people, I have a client who, um, we have gone through my three scaling pillars in our time working together. And she shifted from all of her revenue was coming from one-to-one work.

  And now only a third of her revenue is coming from one-to-one work. And the other two thirds are from a small portion of that is core sales. And the rest is all on digital downloads that are like $50 and under. So that's amazing, right? And she like, and she makes good money. Right? Like she, she, isn't just selling like four of those a month.

  Like 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. So that's the other thing, right? Like, If you have something that is a $10 digital download with maybe like 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, to keep them consistent there's a lot of different ways you can do that.

  You can do that with some paid ads. You can do that with, uh, you know, talking about it frequently on, uh, like on your marketing, not to the point of like where you're exhausting your followers, but just reminding people that it exists, you can put it in nurture sequences, uh, on the backend of an opt in like a trip wire.

  There's all different ways you can do it, but there are people who make really good money from low cost digital downloads and the nice thing about those is if you know the concept for what it is you want to do, you can, uh, have a lot of that work done by a VA or a designer or both to get that stuff all set up.

  So digital downloads definitely a way to go and digital downloads can also serve as a lower cost ladder to get people into other things later. So 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, that value ladder, that Ascension model, that way.

  And then the last couple are group programs and then smaller one-off offers. So let's say that you are a coach and you have a three-month program that is $5,000. So you are going to work with somebody one-on-one intensely for three months for $5,000. And then let's say you thinking like, well, I'm pretty booked with those people.

  Like I can only work with six of those clients at any given time, just because the time commitment and my desired work week and, and all of that stuff, I can only do six one-on-one clients at a time. And you're like, right now I have five, somebody else comes along, that's great. I'm not going to push it, but I want to find a new way to bring in some revenue that can help more people.

  And is not as time intensive for me, but I still get to help them. And maybe they are not quite where my one-on-one clients are, but I still know that I can help them and I want to, and I am going to create like a group program that is for 10 people who are maybe one-step behind of where my one-on-one people are and I'm going to make that a lower price point and my goal with this is to get them up to that level of where those one-on-one people are in their business. Right?

  So you're like, here we go, group program, 10 people. We're going to run it for that same 90-day period, right? So we're going to do it for three months and then you can think. What is it going to include?

  Right? And again, like this can be a whole other rabbit hole. What are you going to include? Where is it going to be? Is it going to be on Facebook, on Slack, on mighty networks, all those different things. Are there going to be like course components to it? Do you have a course that you already, that you've already created or you're in the process of creating, but you want to make this like a higher level group program?

  And not just a course, or do you just want to have weekly trainings or biweekly trainings on different things? Are there going to be themes to the month themes for the week? Are there going to be workbooks? Like, you know, what, what are those deliverables going to be? Who is this ideally for? What is the goal?

  Like where should they be when they're done? All of these things are things to think about that you can do. And the great thing is, is that you get to decide. And usually a lot of times what happens is with these types of offers, 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're like, yeah, I'm just not to the level of like, even if, even if they could afford your regular one one-on-one package, 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. So you can actually whip this together, all the parameters, and then just reach out to people already in your orbit and say, Hey, this is what I'm cooking up. What do you think? Would you be interested? And you could just sell it very, very, very simply that way.

  Super simple, no sales page, no bells and whistles, nothing like that, you just get it out there and maybe like, maybe you fill six spots before you even start your marketing plan, right? Then all you have to do is try to mark it for those other four slots. Isn't that awesome? Like, I love anything you can do simple and easy.

  I am just here for all day long and so that is a real possibility. And the last one is for like a one off offer, that's different. So it's almost like the group offer, like what you would be delivering to them, but just a little bit, a little bit different. So it's still, you're still kind of working with them in like a one-on-one capacity or maybe it's a super small group.

  It's like you and just three people. And this is what I did with a client of mine who was thinking about creating a course and then we just created this one off offer instead, and we put a cap on the amount of people. So what it was was that she was going to spend one hour a month with people. So yes, it is time for money, but. it's far more compressed than if she was to take on a one-on-one client and manage their social media five days a week,right? So one hour a month and she would do a, uh, audit of their social media, she would help them create a 30 day content calendar, and then they would come back next month and do it again.

  So the client themselves, the responsibility was on them to implement the plan. So they got expert help creating the plan, they had to implement the plan, they had to do the engagement, they had to do all of that on their Instagram or whatever social media platform they were using. But then it meant for my client that they had already committed to doing it for 90 days.

  So she knew at the price point she was offering, she would have recurrent revenue. From those people each month for three months, when they came on and she knew she could do 10 hours in a whole month that she had available. So she had a cap on it for herself. So she wouldn't be overworked, right? So that was really, 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 because 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 right.

  So the beauty of this is, is that as she fills those spots, then once they're at the end of their 90 days, she could always say, Hey, now for this next 90 days, like the price is going to go up, right? So she could continually, uh, you know, obviously to a degree, like at some point there's going to be a cap on that, but she can rate, she can gradually like, stair-step it and raise the price so that she's still giving the same 10 hours every month.

  But then she's making more. Now the beauty of this is, is as she is doing 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, Oh, I am teaching the people the same, like eight out of the 10 people have the same.

  Five questions or confusions or misunderstandings, or needed me to like re-explain something or really got tripped up at this part. So then in the future, if she's like, I don't want to do this offering anymore. Or she's like, I love doing this offering. But I am, I can't re, really raise the price too much more on this.

  And I also don't want to add on any more client hours. She now knows exactly what people are struggling with the most and what they need the most clarity on and what is going to help them the most so that when she goes to create a course or a digital download or whatever it is, that's a passive offer.

  She doesn't have to do customer research or any of those things. In fact, she could probably hire a professional course creator and say, Hey, I know all of the things that people in this range of business at this like level of business that they are struggling with with understanding and delivering on a good social media content plan.

  And then she already has the framework done. So she can say, this is it. Here you go, please, like, you know, build it out. However you're going to do it. I'll record some videos and then it's done. And then she could even hand it off to somebody who does full launch strategy for courses and outsource that piece of it too.

  But she's using the time, spent working with those people to gather really strong data. Of 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 that she can then outsource that whole process to bring in more revenue in the future.

  So the great thing about this kind of like, as you can see, as, as you are doing these different things, it is going to inform what your next steps will be, and you might choose one of these and do it and do it for a while and then go, you know what? I'm just not feeling it anymore. Like, I actually don't want to promote this course anymore, or this group program or this membership or whatever, and that's okay.

  You can always change your mind, you can always shift and mix it up. You can, however you want to do it. You are allowed to do that. But the important thing is, is to really take a moment and write out, you know, some pros and cons and what you want to do and how you want to work and all of that, because you, you would not want to let's say, 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're like, Oh crap. I actually don't like, it's, it's really hard for me to have a consistent two-hour time block to coach every week. Like I goofed and now I. I'm going to have to deliver on this.

  And I really like this is going to be challenging until, you know, the next three months are up that I said that we would do this program for. So those are all things that you just 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 like, all right, I'm debating between this offer and this offer Erika and I don't know.

  Reach out to me or if you're still like, I really don't know. I feel totally stumped. I feel like I could go in any of those directions. Uh, again, just reach out. A lot of times when I talk to people because I'm totally objective I'm on the outside of your business. I can look at something and ask you some clarifying questions and you'll be like, Oh my gosh.

  Yes, that all makes sense. Like, and it's not because you're dumb or you don't know or anything like that. It's just, we, we are all including me we're all too close to our businesses. So it's good to just have that, that outsider, uh, weigh in sometimes. So find me over on, uh, Instagram Erika Tebbens Consulting.

  I would love to know, especially if you already think, you know, what your next move is, make sure to, um, post over there, like screenshot this tag me in your stories. Uh, tell me what your next offer is going to be, send me a DM. I would love to know you can also find me on my website at erikatebbens.com and send me a message through the contact form over there, because new offers can be really cool and really amazing and great ways to expand your business and grow your revenue.

  They can also be really, really daunting. So there you have it. Thank you again for listening. I so, so, so appreciate you and you giving me your time and make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and as always happy selling.

  Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the, sell it sister podcast. If you loved it and you want more, be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode and then head on over to sellitsisterhood.com to join my free Facebook community group. And as your mama said, sharing is caring. So if you got a lot of value out of this episode, be sure to share it with your biz besties too.

  Okay.? Now get out there and Sell It, Sister!