Improve Your Offer, Improve Your Business

Too often we’re told to throw more of our efforts into lead generation, marketing and sales when you want your business to grow.

However, what happens if you’re selling a service equivalent to a Rolex where you’re up there with the world’s best at what you do, however your business success tells you otherwise? There’s much more to this puzzle than finding more clients.

A key foundational piece is optimising your offer/s, services and packages so you work with the right clients, they stay with you for longer and you have recurring revenue month on month.

In this article I’ll share seven ways you can optimise your offers for success, to make growing your business much easier:

1. Pricing

Would you rather work with more people to reach your revenue goals or increase your prices and work with fewer clients? 

Ensuring your prices are relevant to the value you provide and directed towards a target market that’s a great fit is important to help you help the right people, as well as grow your business.

2. Length of delivery

How you package up the length of your services are important. Unfortunately, many people will try to cram their services into small lengths of time (or commitment terms) because they’re worried people won’t say yes to working with them. 

Focus your commitment terms based on what’s actually required for your clients to receive the value they need - if they need a minimum of six sessions with you, package up six sessions. If they need the initial project build plus ongoing maintenance or training, package it all up together.

You can be doing a great disservice to your clients by shortening the length of time and commitment you work together.

3. Model

Integrating smart business models such as retainers and subscriptions are a great move for businesses to create recurring revenue in their business so you’re not having to go looking for new clients all the time. 

This is a big reminder why you must optimise your offers first before dialling up your lead generation and marketing, you could be leaving money on the table or setting your business up for a long and windy road to reach your revenue targets.

4. Payments and payment plans

How your clients and potential clients pay for your services can also support your business growth. Do they need to pay upfront, half now and half later, is it spread out over the term of your agreement, what if they would say yes to working with you when you have a great payment plan solution?

In episode 9 of the Good marketing, Good Business podcast I share all facets of how you can present payments and payment plans for success - listen here.

5. Create offers around results

Reminding you that you are brilliant at what you do… and with this in mind, what would be the best way for you to help your clients reach their intended goals?

What’s everything that would help them, what support and guidance do they need - and, what don’t they need that you might currently be doing within your existing services. 

Re-working your offering to create the expert solution can be the key differentiator between your business and others.

6. Don’t reduce your scope

Many businesses will often break off parts of what they do to help more affordable clientele - instead of offering the full service, they’ll sell a portion of it to them (the idea for memberships is often born from this). However, this is not your next step forward, or at least for the vast majority of service based businesses.

Instead of changing your offers based on a minority group, go looking for the clients who will buy your fullest and highest packages, that’s the way to grow.

Go looking for the clients who will buy your fullest and highest packages, that’s the way to grow.

7. Reduce friction

Are there clunky parts to your current service, this could be for you, your client or both. Reducing friction can often be done by creating more efficiency in your offerings.

Say you’re a web designer and it’s often a pain to gather photos from clients, they could be incredibly busy, have outdated photos, or any other array of (sometimes valid) excuses. You could package a branding photographer into your service, which gets booked in within the two weeks of your project.

Look for the pain points that cause you and your clients delays or frustrations and see how you can help speed up this process. This will help you to work much more efficiently with your clients and create space for you to work with even more clients - click here to see how this approach was a smarter way to grow my business.

Improving and optimising your offers are critical to making your time, effort and resources go further as it helps you to work with the best clients, at the best price, and keep them longer - not to mention the other amazing snowball effects that come with it.

→ If you’re a service based business and found this helpful, I invite you to join the waitlist for the Service Business Boardroom, which is a one-of-a-kind business program that helps businesses under $2million in revenue go from scattered and stagnant to profitable and sustainable.

✋ I'm Shannon Stone, award-winning business & marketing consultant and I specialise in helping service based businesses strengthen their sales, enhance their team and better manage their business.

👉 Connect with me on LinkedIn for more content to help you grow your service based business.