How to Create a Compelling Coaching Offer

3 insights from $700K+ in coaching sales:  1) Constant change kills consistent revenue. Doing everything keeps you from mastering anything.    It creates a self-inflicted maze of overthinking.  The point of testing isn’t to keep testing.  It’s to find what works for your offer.  Then to stick with it consistently. This makes you a coach of great depth. You only need 1 conversion protocol. Coupled with 1 traffic source. Inside 1 coaching offer. When you get this, focus on it for 12 months. Because when you find it, it won't be optimized. It will work well, yes, but you'll iterate.  12 months of enhancing 1 protocol... Is easier than 1 month of trying to make 12, good. 2) The "comparison trap" is your greatest enemy.   Comparing yourself keeps you anxious and unfocused. It’s mental clutter disguised as effort. What looks like someone “having it all figured out” is often just consistency.  They found their process.  They remained focused. They stuck with it.  When I stopped believing I needed to emulate every top creator who was ahead of me, my strategy improved. I attracted the right kind of buyers.  Converted larger deals, faster.  And enjoyed the journey. I found my own strategy to be equally effective (even though I doubted it at first). There's only one "you."  And that's enough.  Embrace it. 3) Slowing down speeds up the essentials. You don't need EVERYTHING to speed up.  You only need the right things to go fast.  But the kicker: why be speedy at all? When I stopped racing, slowed down and: 1) Assessed how clients found me:  ↳ (Content. Every time.) 2) Analyzed coaches who bought from me:  ↳ (Career and Business Coaches) 3) Studied why each coach bought my offer:  ↳ (They joined my workshop; got value) 4) Understood what made them successful with me:  ↳ (Adapted my process to their business context) Then I hit milestones in coaching sales. You can too.

Stop selling coaching. People don’t want it. They want insight into their challenges. They want a transformation. But they don’t want a lengthy explanation of what your coaching process looks like. Instead of making your whole message about it, illuminate the need for your ideal client to look deeply at themselves. Then the desire for coaching can emerge authentically. How do you do this? One of my favorite ways is to articulate the values your ideal client holds dear to them. And then to show them how most of the advice they are getting clashes with these values. And even worse, how their own actions contradict them. This leads to valuable insights that help them understand why they’re facing the challenges they are. These epiphanies hit a nerve and motivate them to look deeper. Which helps them recognize this contradiction won’t be resolved with surface-level strategies and tips. You’ve beautifully shown them they need to do some real work to create what they desire. Doing this one thing with your messaging positions you head and shoulders above 99% of coaches who all say the same generic spiel. You want clients ready to dive in instead of splashing around in the shallow end? Show them why.

I was totally wrong about my first coaching offer. When I launched it, I didn’t immediately get clients. But later I realized this is a common step in the journey for many consultants, coaches, and freelancers. So what do you do if you’re struggling with defining your first offer? In our Spring 2024 cohort, side hustlers are testing all kinds of service hypotheses like community management consulting, South Korea market entry consulting, and even English language coaching. I distilled my 5 years of coaching & consulting into bite-sized, actionable lessons. Here’s my 3 tips for side hustlers launching their first offer: 1/ Define 1 Offer Experiment First 🧪 You don’t need 5 offers to begin. Launch 1 offer to optimize for speed of learning. Nearly 100% of the time, actual client feedback will invalidate at least part of your assumptions. You can expect to iterate your offer many times. Having 5 offers slows you down or confuses your pace of learning at this stage. 2/ Talk to 3-4 Clients Expressing the Same Needs 💬 The reality is you’re likely to be wrong a few times—before getting it right. For example, I went into career coaching believing that clients wanted help with growing in their current jobs. After speaking to 3-4 potential clients, I quickly learned that I was wrong. Job search was the repeatedly mentioned pain. 3/ Re-Test Your Updated Offer 🎁 Once I gained this insight, I restructured my offer to focus on the job search pains I heard. I jumped on client calls and gauged their reactions. After over 10 calls, I could see peoples’ eyes light up. More clients signed up. These signals gave me confidence that my offer better matched the need. So those are my quick tips on launching your initial coaching or consulting offer. What's helped me is treating every offer I launch as an experiment. What tips do you have for defining your first offer? If you liked this, I write more on side hustles and money in my newsletter. Join over 6,000 readers here: https://lnkd.in/gQaQyyc6 Follow Dexter Zhuang for more content like this.