As a Speaker, Author or Coach, your job is to make it easy for your customers to understand what you can do for them.
As a self employed entrepreneurial type, the onus is on you to ensure that you present yourself and your offers with clarity. Your product range and how you enable your customers to flow through it must make sense.
As business managers for Speakers, Authors and Coaches, one set of questions we get asked all the time is about products & services and how best to present them. You might resonate with some of the most common questions:
· how many products should I have?
· what price point do I choose?
· what/how many do I display on my website?
· how do I get people to buy!?
The simple catch all answer is to build a customer journey that your ideal client can move through effortlessly. The key is to link all your products so they form an experience and provide clarity on just where someone might step on or off your product path. You must make it easy for them to understand how to work with you.
We want to highlight upfront that creating products is always a second step and should only happen once you have your positioning, avatar and message absolutely nailed — as all of these elements dictate the content of your products. Our other blogs here on Medium will help with some of that, and we also provide a bunch of training on that inside our FB Group.
You must build your ‘Product Range’.
We outline the Product Range as 4 stages of the journey with you. Each stage has it’s own purpose and strategy and set of products. We’ll outline these below so you can decide what you have and have not got. Then you can get to work on filling in the gaps or at least understand why people may not be buying from you with ease or the frequency you’d like up to now.
Stage 1: Getting them on the journey.
The first stage in any product range is to have assets that mean people can try before they buy for FREE. These should always be digital products so they involve no 1–2–1 time with you. This enables you to reach an unlimited amount of people. It’s all about growing your reach and their awareness of you. The content needs to be about what they are googling — the problem they know they have… not what you know is what they need as a solution (trust us, they are NOT looking for that!).
All you do at this stage is raise awareness of why they have the problem, bust some myths and give them some suggestions of the next steps to resolve it…. you DON’T (and CAN’T!) solve the problem completely.
It should be something short and easily consumed within a few minutes. This is where you must put the majority of your efforts when marketing to get LOTS of people into the top of your ‘funnel’.
This is your chance to build trust and demonstrate your expertise to your new customer. A key thing to do at this stage is to make it all about them, rather than promoting yourself… all they want at this stage is to solve their problem.
Stage 2: Educating & engaging them & getting them committed
The next stage is where they get really specific about their problem & get a plan on how to change it. There are various ways of doing this — creating some form of assessment/diagnostic is a great way as they tell themselves what needs to change. You can set something up that does this digitally, or it could be a 1 day workshop (on or offline) where you train in depth what the problems they are facing are. The key is to get them sharing & connecting with other people in a similar situation and giving them a taste of the solution.
It could also be a short how to online course / book. But it shouldn’t teach them everything! So if you are a social media expert — the course would be social media 101 for entrepreneurs… it would be how to create images to grow & engage your FB audience using Canva. You get the idea — make it really specific, solve one problem. That will give them a taste of you.
Ideally you want to be reaching masses with this step & charging a no brainer amount (anything under £100 / $100), so either create something digital or have 100+ in your events. The small courses and introductions serve to get them to know you more, trust your expertise and understand your style. The purpose of this stage is to create a connection between you and your customer.
Stage 3: Rolling up the sleeves and really helping them get results!
Because of the work done by the products in the second stage, you are finally at the part of the journey that for you is the “juicy part” — it’s where you have ‘earned the right to teach, where you can share your IP, your frameworks and processes and where deep dive teaching and transformation happens! You still want to be able to reach the masses but this is the point where they get real access to you.
These kinds of products should be priced between £500 — £5,000 (or dollars etc).
For example, this might be that you have created a 3 hour online course (broken down into chunks of course — no-one wants to listen to you solidly for 3 hours!). This course can be accompanies with monthly webinars / weekly Q&A sessions etc so they get a ‘live’ element to increase the value. You may offer the ‘course only’ version, or the higher priced version that has access to you.
It could be a coaching package that they are on (either group coaching or 1–2–1). It could be a 2–3 day workshop. It could be a membership programme like ours that includes a 90 day kickstart course to get that positioning right, professional interviews, hands on accountability and weekly Q&A and feedback sessions. You can check out more here — we always give a month for free using the VIPCHANGEMAKER (so this doubles as a ‘stage 1’ product too — you can get clever with how you share your product range with people 🙂 )
Stage 4: The bit you might not even tell everyone about!
The final stage is for your #1 clients — those who have been on the complete journey, all the way to the top and who want to have direct in-depth access to you and your inside knowledge and insight. Here your clients need to ‘earn the right’ to get accepted into working with you, rather than the other way around!
By this stage they will have the practical know how — on how to resolve their problems — what they want know is to learn and mirror directly from you. You can achieve this by running a retreat or having day-long intense coaching sessions with you.
It could also be a mastermind group that you run and introduce the members to your little black book of contacts who have helped you to get to where you are, so they can learn from both you and your mentors. This is completely you swapping your time for money for a small group max 10 people. So this is why these products should be priced at £5,000 and above.
Where are you at and what do you need to do ?
So take stock — have you got a gap in your user journey… have you got at least 3–5 free products to help with lead generation — are you asking for people to jump from a £29 to a £5K product?
The key here at the action stage is to keep it simple! You don’t have to have a product at each stage and you might have more than one at each price point…. The thing to ensure is that you can clearly map out a journey for your customers. If you don’t know what they should move onto next, then they may not even choose to do one thing with you. The more transparent you are and clear about laying out your Product Range for them, the easier it is for them to know, like, trust and choose you.
Some final words to help you.
Don’t just create products on length and price point! The key to creating a successful user journey experience is for you to know where your avatar is when they come across you — what is their pain point, what they are searching Google for — AND what is their ultimate aspiration is. Identify, make and promote what specific problem each of your products solve. Create the products that make sense to your avatar, and put them into a sequence so they stay with you until you can’t help them any more!
As always, let us know how you get on — comment, reach out, connect with us in the FB group, join us in the membership — let us help you build the Speaker, Author, Coach business y