#21 - 3 simple reasons your course is HARD to sell

They want you to come in and take their hand and say, I am going to make it easier and faster and more likely for you to achieve this outcome that you want than if you were to go off and, you know, drown in Google on your own.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking, nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hey. Hey everybody. It is Kate McKibben here from HelloFunnels Co and today I have a bit of a doozy for you. That is Australian for a big one, in case you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about. So I don't know if you know this about me, but I am the queen of dishing out the tough love. And if right now your online courses and programs are not selling like the hotcakes that you know they should be, the delicious maple syrup covered kind, you know, with choc chips and blueberries and all the good stuff that just flies up the shelves if you don't have a wait list of hundreds of people long, if your launches aren't absolutely blowing up, then today I have a whole pile of that good old tough love just for you. Because I see this so much. I see amazing, smart, talented, hardworking people who slog their guts out and their sales still suck. Some of them really suck. And it doesn't matter how many shiny new marketing strategies they try, nothing seems to move that needle not more than an inch at a time. And this is when the self doubt kicks in. Well, to be honest, it's probably been raging long before then, but it really grabs the microphone and takes hold. This is where people also decide to throw in the towel or try something totally different. And often this cycle continues and it continues for years. So I'm here today as a PSA for everyone who is nodding along right now. I'm here to help save you years of wasted time, effort, sweat, tears. Because the truth is, most offers can go from crazy hard, almost impossible to sell, to selling like those freaking delicious hotcakes with just three simple tweaks. And I'm going to walk you through exactly what they are today. And if you would like even more help to make your online programs and offers sell better than ever before, we are about to run another round of our free 3 day sold out Success challenge where we will deep dive and share so much value and it is so much fun too. So if you want to save your seat and come and overhaul your offer with me, my team and hundreds of other entrepreneurs, then it all kicks off December 8th. It's live. All you need to do is head to kateschallenge.com right now and save your seat. So have you done that? Great. Now let's dive on into those three also common offer killers that I was talking about. So the very first and probably the biggest mistake that I see people making over and over is they create what I call it's a kitchen sink course. So what is a kitchen sink course? A kitchen sink course is kind of what it sounds like. It's when you've created, you know, a course where you've thrown in everything including the kitchen sink. And this happens usually, you know, with when it's your first or second offer, but it still can happen again, you know, later on. And the reason it happens is that, you know, we're teachers, we are people who want to help and we think that the best way for us to help is that we have to teach absolutely every single thing we know that is related or semi related to the topic of our offer. We think we have to over deliver and we think the best way to over deliver is to just fire hose people in the face with everything that we've ever learned. We think that's how we add value. But to be honest, the opposite is actually true. I think. Gone are the days where people look at an online program and say, oh, this one's got, you know, 12 models modules, sorry, and, and 16 videos and 35 PDFs. Therefore it's more valuable than this one that has four modules. These days people are overwhelmed with information. What they don't want necessarily more information. What they want is for you to give them some certainty that you're, they want you to come in, take their hand and say, I am going to make it easier and faster and more likely for you to achieve this outcome that you want than if you were to go off and, you know, drown in Google on your own.

Hey, it's Kate here and I've got a bit of a super nerdy present just for you. It's my six figure course calculator. Inside it shows you exactly the impact that growing your list has creating a course and going evergreen can have on your business and exactly how quickly you'll be able to do it too. It's pretty powerful and totally free. Just head to hellofunnels co calculator and grab it now and then jump in and start mapping out your own epic six figure course empire today.

That is what people want. They already have too much information. They want something clear and concise. They want to move from where they are to where they want to be in the easiest, shortest way possible. They don't have time for reading all of that extra nice to have information. They just want the information that they need, the action points that they need and to get the outcome that they want. Everything in the middle is just fluff. So if this sounds familiar, then you probably have a kitchen sink course. The other problem with the kitchen sink course is that it becomes really, it makes it hard to sell because when you are going out there and saying, hey, I've got this massive program and it's gonna take you really long to get through and it's gonna kind of make you a little bit better. A whole bunch of stuff that's just really not as desirable or not as, you know, what I call like it. You know, it doesn't give people that hell's yes as going to them saying hey, you know that one big painful pain point that you have, that one big problem that you know, you really wish you could solve. I'm gonna make it really super easy for you to solve it and it's not gonna take that long. Which one of those two things do you think people would prefer? Do people, you know, they're not wanting to do a university long course here and necessarily become experts unless you know, that is what you are teaching people how to do. Most people out there teaching online programs, you're teaching a specific outcome or a specific step and the best, you know, we often don't stop and think what is the fastest, easiest way to do it. We often create it and leave it and we don't come back and refine and refine and try and constantly be making it better and easier for our clients and our customers. And I think really fantastic example of this because I know some people, they go, oh, but I can't take stuff out of my program. It's all important, it all needs to be in there. But I think if we really stopped honest with ourselves and you know, looked at how people are moving through the courses, you know, looked at, actually looked at the analytics. Like if you use something like teachable or thinkific, like you can often see which lessons are people even opening, which ones are they completing, where are people dropping off? The fact is that when you are fire hosing people in the face with information they are also way less likely to complete your program which means you are. You don't get them that result, you don't get that then for that testimonial, you don't get that raving fan going out into the world and you don't get that, you know that that goal for yourself which is going out and helping as many people as possible. So there are so many reasons why this over delivering and giving so much value in this way is actually not serving the people that in the way that you want to serve them. And I know that you generally coming at this from a really generous either a place of generosity of like I've know so much, I've got so much to give, I just want to give everything, you know, which is lovely. Or the flip side is often it's actually from a place of low self worth where it's like oh, to be able to charge the price I want to charge. I've just got to put so much stuff in there so it seems valuable which is less lovely. But either of these are not actually serving either you or your clients. So that's mistake number one. That is the kitchen sink course. And I have a fantastic example of this. A good friend of mine actually she. Her very first program like it was quite, you know, it sold actually quite well and people seem to like it, you know, it was get good B plus kind of grade course and she stopped and she you know, spent a bit of time going through her program. So seeing those points where people getting stuck, where they were dropping off really, you know, re looked at every single element and module that was being taught and in the end she removed over 50% of the course work and you know, and the trainings and teachings in the program, she made it literally less than half the size. And when she did that it became more clear, it became more concise, it became more focused. She started selling more, more people were completing it, they were getting better results. And her solid BB plus course went to an A and people loved it and her business blew up. So it does, you know, less is more people. The what is more important is the outcome and that you are helping people to get there as easily and quickly as possible versus just going in there and being like hey look how much I know. So I. If you said, if this is sounding familiar then there is a strong possibility that you also have a kitchen sink course. The second reason why I see so many people's sales no not living up to anywhere near the potential that they should is that their pricing is all wrong and not necessarily in the way that you would think. So the thing with trying to, you know, find the right price and there's a bit of an art to it and it's not necessarily what you would think. So quite often people think, oh, you know, you just, just put your price up or just slash your price and that's, that's going to increase your profit or it's going to increase your sales. But there's, there's a lot more to it. And I'll give you another example just to kind of, you know, really show you what I mean. So again, I had a client and they were trying to sell a high priced offer. So I think it was between four and five thousand dollars. This offer was really one on one, heavy. I think it was eight to ten one on one sessions when they sold it. And they had to sell it or they thought they had to sell it by sales call. And it wasn't converting, it wasn't converting at all. And when we started talking about it, you know, they were like, oh, maybe it's, I've got the wrong target market, maybe it's this, maybe I need to add that. And it didn't really seem to matter what things they tweaked or changed that, you know, or how many sales calls they did. It just wasn't converting. And when we sort of dug a little bit deeper, started talking about what they wanted, how they wanted their business to be, how they wanted to be able to show up in their business, it became really, really clear that this offer was completely out of integrity with what they wanted. Was actually going to give them the opposite of what they wanted. Because what they wanted was actually they were burnt out. They were, you know, they were stressed. What they wanted was something that was going to be a lot more hands off. Wanted to actually have more time in their business because there were other things that they were wanting to, other projects they wanted to work on, they wanted, you know, they didn't want to have to do sales calls, they didn't want to have to do more one on one. But they thought that that's what you had to do. That's kind of the, they were modeling models that they'd seen other people doing successfully. And they're like, well, that's how I grow. I have to have a high priced offer, I have to do sales calls, I have to do one on one. That's the only way I'm going to be able to grow my business. But can you see that how out of alignment that Kind of is because what they wanted was less one on one, less sales calls, you know, less putting time time in their diary. So of course they're never going to be able to sell this easily or well because every time they make a sale they're doing is giving themselves more work and even the process of making that sale is doing something they don't want to have to do. So there was a real inner conflict here of and whether you believe in the woo woo or not, but you're never going to be able to put in the work that you need to put in to make the choices that you need to make to do things that need to do to grow. If the way that you're trying to grow is not giving you what you want, in fact it's giving you the opposite of what you want. So of course your intuition and everything is going to be screaming. Of course you're going to start self sabotaging if you don't realize that you are. Because you're trying to, yeah, you're, you're trying to create something that is complete, that is not going to serve you. So with that, you know, she was able to take a portion of the outcome that you know, she was promising in a higher price offer, change that around from being a 4 to $5,000 offer that had to be on sales calls to a $500 offer that could be sold by Evergreen Webinar and went from struggling to make one or two sales a month to making up to 40amonth. And if you want to do the maths on that, it's you know, this more than, you know, five, four to five times her, her income and she was able to do it with while working less. So obviously it just worked better for her. And this is obviously why I love funnels guys. But it's not just about, you know, going and reducing the price. It's about figuring out what do you want, how do you want to be showing up for your people, what kind of people do you want to be working with, how many of them and how do you want to work with them? You need to ask yourself those questions. And then the way that you set up your offer, the pricing of that offer and the way that you deliver that offer, they all then have to match. And that's when you will have this, you know, this great synergy and this really profitable price. But if your price is out of alignment with either what you want or even what your market wants and values, it's going to be hard to sell. And we go deep on this guys, inside the Sort Out Success challenge. So if you haven't saved your seat, go do that now because we've got a bunch of exercises in there that we go through that is going to help you to find your perfectly profitable price. And it is a game changer. So now the third reason why courses are so hard to sell for so many people, even though, you know, they're just a tweak or two away from being best sellers, is that people are using their bonuses all wrong. So I think when he, when it comes to bonuses for so many people, these are an afterthought or they're just a way of falsely inflating the value of their program so that they can have this amazing big value stack like they've seen people do. And they're like, it's worth $10,000 and today it's $20. I can have, you know, that big crazy thing at the end. But the problem is quite often the way that people, the bonuses people are using, the way they're using it is they, rather than doing what they think they're going to do, which is help you to make more sales, they can actually repel a potential buyer if you use them wrong. And there is a really specific strategy around how to use bonuses. We'll cover it a little bit today. I've said we'll cover it in way more detail inside the challenge, so make sure you come and join us in there. So a couple of really common problems I see or common mistakes I see people making when it comes to their bonuses, first of all is they use confusing bonuses. So, and what I mean by that is a really common bonus that people will have is they'll add in an extra program that they have. Like, they bundle it up as whether it's a fast action bonus or early bird bonus, whatever it is. The problem with that is most programs require a little bit of explanation. And when you know, you're, whether you're sending out an email or it's a webinar or wherever it is that you're, you know, you're making your offer, you're making your invitation, usually when it comes to the bonuses, they get like a sentence or two of airtime max. And people need to fully understand what that is and how it's valuable and how it's going to help them to get a better result with this program and this outcome. If there's at any point they're like, oh, what's that? Or even worse, they go, oh, I didn't know you did that. Maybe I just want that. I'm going to go check that out. And then you've lost them. So if you confuse them by them not understanding either what this program is or how valuable it is, or how it's going to help them, or introducing them to another program that maybe they might want to consider instead, you've confused them. You've added too many options and you've lost them. Another really common problem is when people just add in things that actually seem like more work to your clients. So, as we already talked about, these days especially, people's time is one of their most precious assets. And, you know, really what they want is things that are going to make their life easier. That's going to make them achieving the outcome of your program easier, faster, better, more likely. And when you start to add in things like extra courses or extra masterclasses, extra trainings, you know, again, it's like, oh, I'm not even. You know, for a lot of people when they're thinking about joining a program, they sort of have that little voice at the back of the head of like, oh, I don't know if I'll even finish this. I hardly ever finished, you know, programs that I buy, which is a fact most people don't.

And then like, oh, now this extra stuff, I definitely won't get around to watching that. So all you've done is you've added more work, you've added to their overwhelm. You've made something seem heavier rather than lighter. And again, you've repelled them rather than it being something that's really enticed them. And the third problem, and this one is, you know, this one is going to be a real invasion killer, is when you add in things that just seem phony. So you seem phony. Like, I don't know how many times I've seen people say, oh, and you get this one PDF and it's worth $2,000, and you're like, well, how is a PDF ever worth $2,000? But, you know, they're just throwing random things in, assigning random completely unrealistic price points to them so that they can have their big sexy price point at the end and talk about how much value something really is if you come across as phony. If you start lying and falsely inflating stuff in your bonuses at any point, even if you see any other people doing it, that a lot of your clients are going to smell that and they are going to run for the hills. So really, all you've done with these bonuses is You've confused them, you've overwhelmed them, you've scared them off. And it's obviously not the intention of bonuses. When you do bonuses properly and there is a set, there's a really specific strategy for bonuses that will help you to make more sales rather than less. You know, when you do it properly, it's, it really, really helps to increase your sales. Combine that with nailing your pricing. Combine that with, you know, having a really clear, concise course and outcome and promise. That is when you created a sold out success offer. That's when your, your offers and courses and programs fly off the shelves. And like I said, we go into this in so much more detail with, you know, specific actionable steps you can go through totally for free. In my soul, that success challenge which is starting on December 8th. So if you want to come along and save your seat, it's going to be so fun. I can't wait to see you in there and chat with you and how to give you critiques and feedback and advice. Just go to Kate's challenge.com or you can grab the link out of the show notes. It's going to be epic. But guys, I said it's live. It's only three days so you don't want to miss out. Grab your seat now. And until then guys, keep on doing what you do and I will see you all next week. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.