What's your offer?

Sam. Hello and good evening, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, your practical business coach, and I'm coming to you live this evening on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and over here on my phone on TikTok. Hello everyone. Tonight, a little housekeeping first. I love this to be interactive. So if you have any questions or, you know, want to contribute to the conversation, then please feel free to post in the comments. Sometimes the algorithm or however the platform works does not show me all comments. So if you're commenting and I don't say hi or call you out, it's not you. I'm just not seeing it. And sometimes it just doesn't work. Anyway, hello and welcome. Hi, we're letting everyone arrive. Anyway, hi, Trivial man. Welcome. Tonight I want to talk about a very, very important topic when it comes to starting a business, and it's one that people overthink so hard. Okay, what is your offer? Whenever I talk to new business owners who are thinking about joining one of my programs or they're, you know, signing up for, to work with me for my one on one coaching, like, this is one of the hardest conversations to have with someone because usually they have created this like behemoth of an offer suite. And what ends up happening when you have a confusing offer, you don't have an offer is people can't buy from you because they don't understand it. And so you can have a gazillion offers, you can have like a really convoluted way to explain it, but like, that's not going to help your business. It's really tempting when you start your business and like you're thinking of all the different problems that you could help people with and all the goals you could help them reach to start playing the what if? Game in your head around like, well, if they need this and I'll have to offer this, and if they need this and I'll have to offer this, and if they need this and I'll have to offer this. And there's a, there's a saying that I learned early on in my career in sales, and that is that a confused buyer doesn't buy. And if you're the seller and you're confused about what you're selling, guess what you're going to create in that other person. You're gonna, you're gonna create confusion. And so your clients, your potential clients will not actually become your clients because they will get confused and they won't make a decision. It is so important to come up with an offer that makes sense for you and sense for your clients. And the tricky thing about this is that, like, the clients that I work with, it's not like they do massage therapy. It's not like they're personal trainers. It's not like they're installing roofs on houses, right? My clients are offering an intellectual service. They're offering their expertise, right? So they have to figure out, like, a question of, like, what is my hour worth? How much time do I need to spend with clients to be able to help them get the results that they want? How often should we be talking? And a lot of that, like, you're gonna have to figure out as you go. But what I can tell you that's pretty much, like, consistent across the board for coaches is if you're working with clients too much and. Hi, Vandeeper, Welcome. If you're working with clients too much, too frequently, they will drop off. I see a lot of coaches early, early on in their business thinking, okay, well, I want to give as much value as possible. I want my clients to get a transformation just like that. And so what they do is they offer weekly calls. And weekly calls sounds great to start, but, like, you're working with human beings who are busy and they don't have time to come to a weekly call. They just don't. And if they do, they're not going to have time to do the homework that you assign in between those calls. Therapy can be weekly. Personal training can be weekly. Coaching. No, it can't be weekly. It's too much. It's like drinking from a fire hose. And when people feel like they're overwhelmed, they don't do the homework. Guess what? They stop coming. Right? And I share this because I want to instill how important it is to not just have a solid offer that works for you and works for your clients so that you can, like, sell your offer and get clients, but you need a good offer that works for you and works for your clients so that you keep those clients once they sign up. Okay? So designing an offer doesn't have to be as complicated as we make it, and there's a lot that goes into it. So if you're working with clients one on one, you know, that's one process that you can absolutely have a standard offer for. If you're working with businesses, that's another process that you can have an offer for. Hi, Jo. Welcome. What's important is that you are super, super clear on what that offer is. Right? Because, again, a confused buyer doesn't buy. Now, obviously, a lot goes into Designing your offer. If you want to have coaching, free coaching on how to create your offer, then I invite you to sign up for my build your business five day challenge where in five days I will help you start your business. It starts on Monday. If you want to go and sign up, it's absolutely free. You want to go to the link in my bio either on TikTok or on Instagram. If you're watching this on LinkedIn or YouTube, then just go to the link that I shared in the description of this live. Day 3 we are going to go into exactly how you design your offer. You know the amazing thing when you have an offer that you're really confident with and that like you can just like spit out and it's simple to explain is you get clients very easily, right? Because people aren't confused. They don't need time to think about it. The beautiful thing of having a really like clean, like simple offer that you can just rattle off in a few sentences is clients don't need time to think about it, right? Because they understand it, right? And if you design your offer properly, then like whatever comes up for your client, you can kind of like bend and flex and offer that to them throughout your, your relationship with them, right? When you don't have that, your whole sales process becomes so much longer, right? So for, for a simple offer like the offers that I help my clients design, right. My clients will often get on a sales call with someone who's followed them on social media for, you know, a couple months, maybe a year. And on that half hour call they will sign them. The person will be like, great, I'm sold. I want to do this. Send me the agreement, send me the link to pay. Let's book our first call and in a half hour you have a new client. And mind you, my clients charge anywhere from $4,500 for a six month package of coaching, which is two calls a month to $30,000 for two months. A month of coaching for a year. I've also had clients who charge in the six figures for their consulting work. Of course that's more, more hours in the, in the month. But when you have a simple offer, it makes it that much easier. If you don't have a simple offer, if you over complicate it, if you make it like a 17 like point list of all the things that you do. Hi hats, welcome. Um, guess what? It's not going to be a half hour sales call. It's going to be a half hour sales call followed by a proposal that you'll have to, like, spend a few hours on to send out. And then it's going to be you doing follow up and follow up and more follow up and more follow up. And then eventually you might end up with the client, but also the client might end up getting confused in that whole process. And what do we say? A confused buyer never buys. Right. So we want to be very, very careful that we're designing an offer that is simple enough but customizable enough that our clients understand what they're getting and realize that, like, it will be designed to be bespoke for them, depending on what they need. Hi, Sherlingo. Welcome. If you have any questions on this, please pop this in the. In the comments. Just want to check Instagram. Okay. Beautiful. And like, the beautiful thing of this. Okay, I want to tell the story. So I had a client really, really early on when I started doing business strategy for folks, and he was a men's coach, and we were talking about his pricing. And by the way, day four of the challenge next week, I help you figure out exactly what your pricing should be. So if you don't know what your pricing is, then sign up for the challenge. The link is in my bio on Instagram and TikTok and in the description for this live on YouTube and LinkedIn. I'm going to help you figure out your pricing and your offer and how you attract your clients and everything. Okay. We're going over so much. You will have the basis for your business after those five days. But anyway, so I started working with this client, let's call him Ten Pack Jack. When he started working with me, he was selling 10 packs of coaching, and he was selling them for $1,000 a pop, which sounds great, right? A hundred dollars an hour. Like if. If you're, you know, doing the math and you. You're thinking, okay, well, he's working 40 hours a week. That's a lot of money. Yeah. If he were working 40 hours a week, it's not realistic. However, when you're a coach and you work for yourself, to expect yourself to do 40 hours of paid work week. However, typically a coach will sign between one and two clients a month. Right. And that's what he was doing. He was signing between one and two clients a month, which means he was selling packages for a thousand bucks once or twice a month. And if you do the math, that's $1,000 or $2,000 a month. Hi, Chris. Delicious. Welcome. That was not enough for him to live on. That was not enough for him to Even pay the mortgage on their house. Right. And what would ultimately happen during this whole process is like the clients would sign up for the 10 pack of coaching, they would use their first session, maybe their second session, and then they would just completely ghost because they figured, okay, well, I got over the hump, I got over the crisis that I had signed up for to fix. I'm just going to save the rest of these sessions for later when I have a crisis again when I need help. Right. And that A wasn't great for him financially because he was only making between 1 and $2,000 a month. It also wasn't great for his ego as a coach because his clients were just ghosting him and he had no feedback if they were having a good experience, experience, if they had a bad experience, or if they were just wanting to like bank the sessions for another time. We figured out it was that last one. They were wanting to bank the sessions for another time with this fruit fly. Okay, get away. Leave me alone. That's annoying. Anyway, hi. So what we did was we designed an offer that he was going to be rolling out for 18,000 for the year. So his clients would be working with him, I think it was two times a month. And they would pay $18,000 for the year and they would get access to him for the year. And that was it. There was no like rollover. They couldn't save the sessions. That was it. But when we designed that offer, he was very honest with me. He's like, listen, that sounds great. And also, I don't think I'm going to be able to say that, that I charge $18,000. I'm pretty sure I'm going to throw up if I try to say I charge $18,000 after only charging $1,000. So what we did was we came up with like a little interim offer that he could sell that would be easier for him to get out. Right. And so I think it worked out to like 4,000 for a six month engagement. So clients would sign up, they would pay $4,000, they would get two sessions a month for six months. And we were gonna kind of just go with that for a few months until he got a few clients at that rate and then we were gonna up his price. I talked about him the other night though, and you might recognize this story. He was on a flight from, I think Seattle or LA to San Francisco. It was a short flight and he got upgraded to first class. And he's sitting there and he strikes up a conversation with the guy next to him. And this guy asks him, him what he does. And because we had been working on his messaging and we figured out like exactly what he needed to say to get people to think, oh my God, I think I need to work with you. He said, here's what I do. And the guy was like, oh my God, I think I might need to work with you. And so they jumped into kind of a sales conversation right there on the plane. And when the guy said, yeah, okay, after talking to you, I absolutely need to work with you, like, what does that look like? My client panicked and he forgot the interim package that he was only going to be charging $4,000 for. And so in, in like a moment of like, holy, I don't know, this guy wants to hire me, what do I say? What do I say? What do I say? He remembering the eighteen thousand dollar package that we had put together that he told me he was too afraid to ask for because it's a big number. He just leaned into it. It was the only thing he could think of. So he said, you know, my clients all work with me for one year. You know, he's like trying to hold it in. And you get two sessions a month. Hi, Q. Welcome. You get two sessions a month and it's $18,000. And the guy said yes. And as soon as my client got off the plane, he called me up and he's like, holy shit, you will not believe what just happened. I was on a plane and this guy and I started struck up a conversation and he thought, said that he thought he needed to work with me. He asked me what I do, and I completely forgot, like, the interim baby offer that we had designed that was meant to get me over the hump so I wouldn't vomit asking for the bigger money. And so I just asked for the bigger money one, and he said yes. And that is what is possible when you have a really simple offer, right? You don't have to go to the drawing board every single time you have a sales conversation with someone. You don't have to create a proposal. You don't have to do all the mental gymnastics to figure out, what does this person want? What can I sell them? Justin, Hello. A great mentor told me a long time ago, don't sell as if they're buying with your wallet. Sell as if they're buying with the wallet of the US government. Changed my whole view on qualifying or asking for what I was worth. Oh my God, that is such great advice. Yeah, I was given and I'll be talking about this more Tomorrow night, because we're gonna be talking about pricing. Because on day four of the challenge next week is all about pricing and how to figure it out. But the advice that I was given early, early on in my sales career is don't count the money in someone else's pocket, right? Because you have no idea how much they can afford and what their money story is. You know, if they come from money, if they have access to a wealthy aunt, like, people can generally find the money if they want something, you know, bad enough. Hi, Lulu. Hi. Thank you. Hi. U.S. navy guy. Welcome. Anyway, so you can design an offer and make it very, very simple. Just like that guy was able to say, this is how one of my clients work for me or work with me. This is how often we talk, and this is how much it costs. You can have that too. Of course, like, with each client, you're going to be doing different things, right? With one client. So for instance, like with my one on one clients, I have one on one clients who need a lot of support when it comes to writing their copy, right? And so I've had clients who every morning at 8:00am, I tell them, like, call me at 8:00am and we will plan your content for that day. Or I will help you come up with two ideas of content that you can write as we like, create a bank of content for them for the future. And that's what we work on. And then later in the day, they send me the draft of what they've written and I edit it for them. I have other clients who really just need to really work on their sales call. They get really flummoxed when they get on a sales call with someone and they have to talk about what they do and they have to ask all those questions, questions. And like, they kind of lose the plot somewhere in there. And so we have to do like a lot of work on that. And I'll give them feedback and we'll do role play and I do a lot of support with that. Again, I have other clients who are working on building their team. And so they need help developing themselves as a leader. They need to understand how they, like, outsource things and how they delegate and how they give feedback and we work on all those skills. Now if I tried to make a different offer for each different problem that all my clients had, I would go bananas. It would not work. I would go insane and I would get confused and I wouldn't know what I was selling in any, any given sales call. You. So. So I don't I don't do that. I have one package that I do with my clients and that's that. Right? I have one package. If someone wants to work with me one on one, it is very simple. Hi, Abby. Welcome. And that's that I don't try to find, I don't have. Try to create like different sub offers underneath the bigger offer to help people in different ways. Right. Because I can do that within the flexibility of my main offer. Right, you can do the same. And in the challenge that I am doing next week, the build your business in five days challenge, the link is in my bio. If you're watching this on TikTok and in on Instagram, you're watching this on LinkedIn or on YouTube, then go to the link in the description of this live and you can sign up there. It's completely free. On day three, we are literally going to design your offer together. You are going to know exactly what it is that you sell. You're going to get an email every single day that's training you on the thing, on the little thing that you're going to do that is foundational to you having a success, successful business. In the evening around this time at 5pm, you're gonna hop in a zoom room with me and you're gonna be able to get free coaching and feedback on what you did that day so that you can literally start your business next week. So I hope to see you there. I'm so excited for it. It's gonna be so much fun and really it'll help you, like, make progress on your business, especially if you feel stalled out and like, overwhelmed by all the things. We're going to simplify it and make it so simple for you and easy. Anyway, so go and register for that right now. I have to go and feed my dog, so I'm gonna go. We're gonna keep this super short and sweet tonight, but I cannot wait to go live with you tomorrow. We're gonna be talking all about the fears people have when it comes to pricing and what flips people out, what gets in their way, what, what happens when you have really resonant pricing and what makes what, like, opens up in your business when you're really firm and what your value is. And I can't wait to talk to you then. Anyway, Justin and everyone over on, on TikTok, thank you so much for being here and anyone else who's been watching that I didn't see come through, thank you. I hope this is really useful. And I'm Katie McManus. Your practical business coach. Looking forward to going live with you again tomorrow. Okay, bye.