Recently a client and I had started to develop a program for her coaching business.  We’d identified a specific problem her ideal clients struggle with and she was going to work on the program details. Between sessions, I received an email asking “Can I add a second program?”

The question comes up more often than you would think. On the surface, the answer is easy. Yes, you can have as many programs as you want, and you think will offer your clients the right amount of support and ways to interact with you.

However, early in the development of your business, it’s best to focus on having one offer to start, at most two.  Promoting and managing programs or offers takes time. The more offers you add, the more time you need to spend promoting them.

When you’re just starting out, it’s critical to focus your marketing efforts on creating an audience, and spending time planning, preparing for and promoting several different offers at the same time can detract from those critical first journey marketing activities.

Avoid Overcomplicating Things

But even more importantly - you want to make it easy for people to hire you.

Have you bought paint lately, maybe to redo your office or a spare room in the basement? There’s a lot to choose from. There are three different kinds of paint: oil, latex, or water-based paints – each with its own set of advantages, disadvantages. There are generally five different types of finishes (although for some manufacturers it’s more): matte, eggshell, satin, semi-glass, gloss) And this is all apart from the color. Benjamin Moore alone has 10 color collections and over 3500 different colors to choose from.

Wow – who knew that wanting to paint your office turquoise would require so many decisions.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Which is NOT how you want potential clients to feel when they come to your website. Maybe they’ve been looking at solutions for a while. Following podcasts, reading books, following inspirational leaders, attending programs. They have a lot of information swimming around in their heads.

If you add to that, the fact that they then need to decide which of your coaching offers is the right fit for them, if there are more than one or two initially, it can be too much. Add that to the fact that when clients are dealing with problems that require coaching, healing or other creative solutions, many times they’ve been suffering for a long time and it feels especially risky to reach out and ask for help. Potential confusion or perceived difficulty in determining what they need could cause them to decide it’s not worth the risk to reach out and get clarity.

Your potential clients need you to make asking for help feel as simple as possible.

How to Keep it Simple

So as your building your practice, how can you make sure you’re keeping it simple for people to ask for you help? Here are three tips to help you keep your offers as uncomplicated as possible.

Start with one or two

Take a look at your current offerings and see how many you have. Do you have a three, six and 12 month healing program, plus an online group program. And a video class, and a single session offering? If so, that’s too much to start out with.

You should have one or two programs at most, excluding free resources/offers. If you need two offers, make sure the difference between the second program in the first one is both discernable and significant to make a clear choice.  

Target your offer

Make your program target a solution most people struggle with - not too specific For example, if your clients suffer from burnout and overwhelm, and time management issues, along with worthiness, and negative thought patterns, pick which one seems to resonate the most and build your initial offering around that.

Remember, you might be making some guesses initially, but its better to target something you think most of your ideal clients struggle with than to create an offer for every problem they might be suffering from.

Find a good enough length

When you design your program or offer, be sure to design it to be long enough (or in depth enough) to have a positive impact on clients. Don’t offer single sessions if you know single sessions will provide only a momentary sense of relief but the client will only end up needing more.

On the other hand, don’t design your program to make sure it’s long enough for every single one of your clients to heal.  Recognize that clients will move at their own pace and make it ok for people to renew with you. You can always change the length if needed once you have more data.

After you have an offer you’re happy with, focus your efforts on getting it out there and sharing it.

Once you’ve been working a while and have reached a number of clients and have a solid audience, you can gather information from them about what they need more of (group support, community, written resources.) You can then figure out if there are more programs that will help you increase your ability to help them while also growing your business.

So, if you’re in the early stages of business development and have the urge to make a new offer instead of refining and promoting your main program, avoid making things confusing by adding multiple offers. Instead, start with one or two at most, target your program and find a good length. You’ll make it much easier for your clients to hire you.

 Photo by Patrick Connor Klopf on Unsplash

Do you need to be braver in your marketing?

If you know you need to become more visible marketing your business but aren’t sure how to do that in a way that feels good, I invite you to come talk to me.

In this free assessment, we’ll spend time talking about your business, what's emerging for you and what might be holding you back. I’ll let you know what I think is going on and where you can focus your attention next and help your business get the attention it deserves.

Zero pressure - just lots of clarity, witnessing and affirmation that you can do this.