Hi and welcome to Section two of Messaging Mastery - Offer Optimization! By now, if you completed Section 1 on Audience Alignment, you should be really clear & confident on who your ideal client is and some of the problems she is struggling with. You should also understand where on the journey your Right-Fit Dream Client is and you know how to do some simple & easy market research to stay plugged in to the needs of your ideal client.

This Offer Optimization section has three parts: In this section, you’ll learn what solution-focused offers look like as compared to transformation-focused offers, then you’ll plan your offer (or refine it if you already have one created) so that it helps your Dream Client get results as efficiently as possible, and then we’ll talk about the elephant in the room - how to price your offer

Then, once we have all that data planned, we’ll move into the Messaging Mastery section of the program!

Ok, so let’s start with some key considerations for your offer. In lesson 3 of the Audience Alignment section, I introduced the concept of the Transformational Buyer’s Journey. As a quick recap, the transformation journey is the path your Ideal Client walks to get from where she is today to achieving a full transformation in whatever it is YOU teach or coach on.

At 3 specific points along the journey, your Ideal client becomes ready to buy. At two of those places - stage 3 or stage 7 she will become your Dream Client, the person who fits the description of your Ideal Client AND is ready to buy YOUR OFFER, without expecting you to save her.

It might go without saying, but the person who is at stage 3 (solution-ready) and the person who is at stage 7 (transformation ready) are NOT looking for the same type of offer. So today, you’re going to learn the characteristics of the offers that would appeal to the person at each point on the journey, you’ll decide which type of offer you have or want to create, and you’ll start planning (or refining) your offer!

First, let’s look at what makes a good “solution-focused” offer.

If you’ll recall, the person who is at stage 3, solution ready, believes that the thing that‘s keeping her from success is a single problem with a single solution, and so, your Solution-Focused Optimized Offer will help your client achieve one single, specific, tangible result.

As an example, the result of a solution-focused offer as a postpartum coach could be “create a complete 6-page postpartum plan” or as a business coach could be “grow your mailing list to 1000.” See how those are specific and tangible? We can easily measure whether or not you walk away with a complete postpartum plan or you grow your mailing list to 1000.In the previous section, you brainstormed a minimum of 3 specific solutions your Stage 3 Dream Client thinks she has. Your solution-focused offer would solve just 1 of those problems, but you could create 3 separate offers from those 3 problems you brainstormed.

A transformation-focused offer, on the other hand, will serve the Dream Client in your audience who is ready for a fully-transformative, holistic change. This person, if you’ll remember, is ready to go all-in, to do THE WORK (whatever that work is in your area of expertise) to achieve the result she’s after. And the result she’s after is typically going to be something that resonates deeply in her soul, and comes with an identity shift or a deeply emotional transformation.

A transformation-focused offer will give an outcome that is broad, holistic, and probably emotional or identity related.

So, our postpartum coach from earlier would have a transformation-focused offer that promises the outcome of “transitioning confidently into parenthood” and the business coach’s transformation-focused offer would help clients “build a business that allows them to flourish”.

Do you see how those results are much more emotional and broad, and they’re not super specific? Now one thing I’ll elaborate on more in the Content that Converts section of the program is how to talk about the specific results of a transformation-focused offer that might appeal to people who are looking for different specific results.

For example, the person for whom “flourishing in business” means making $250k a year and having a full team to run the logistics of the business so she can focus on coaching AND the coach for whom “flourishing in business” means working as a solopreneur making $90k a year working 15 or 20 hours a week would both benefit from an offer that helps you Flourish in Business.

For now, I just want you to focus on the type of offer you have or want to create.

Here are some other considerations for solution-focused offers vs. transformation focused:

Typically, solution-focused offers are shorter, have less support included with them, and are at a lower price point. Solution-focused offers can be easier to sell. You’re probably thinking, well yeah, if they’re lower priced, of course they’re easier to sell! But that’s not the reason. When your pricing is in alignment with what your Dream Client expects the result to cost, price isn’t really an issue, even up to the 10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Solution focused offers can be easier to sell because more people are looking for them.

Remember how I told you earlier that most people loop back through Stage 3 & Stage 4 several or many times? One person will likely purchase several Solution-Focused offers while she’s in this part of the journey.

And the other truth is that many people don’t make it to the holistic-problem aware stage. Think of this from the perspective of the weight-loss industry - how many people struggle for their whole lives with trying solution after solution to lose weight and never succeed? I would say a majority of them! In weight-loss and in every other area of personal development, the pool of people who have the realization that they need a holistic solution (and therefore, who are ready to buy a transformation-focused offer) is relatively small.

As an aside, please don’t take that to mean that you shouldn’t sell a transformative offer if that’s what you are passionate about and that’s what *your* Dream Client NEEDS, but I do want you to consider ease of sales in your business planning. Transformation-focused offers typically are longer- at least 6 months if not a year or more, have a more fluid structure (there’s a flow that you take clients through but it’s much more customized to the individual client), include more support, and are at a higher price point.

And if you consider what the outcome of a transformation-focused offer looks like, you’ll see that these considerations make a lot of sense - achieving a full transformation is a more intensive process, and so it makes sense that your Dream Client for a transformation-focused offer needs more support and more time AND ALSO that the transformation is so much more valuable for them than solving a single problem is for the solution-oriented client.

At this point, I’d like you to consider which type of offer or offers you currently have, and which offer you want to create your Messaging for in the next section. You can always come back to this program for guidance on planning additional Optimized Offers and designing messaging them as you create them!

In Firm Foundations, you’ll learn how to plan a full offer suite that contains both Solution-Focused and Transformation-Focused offers that work together seamlessly to help you sell to both versions of the purchase-ready client to your Aligned Audience.

But for now, pick just one offer. In the workbook, in the Your Offer section of the Offer Optimization section, write down the type of offer you are creating - solution or transformation - and what the result is that your client will get from working with you. Then we’ll get to work in the next section on Optimizing Your Offer.

What Type of Offer Should You Create?

You must be logged in to access this course

Welcome to Master Your Messaging

Audience Alignment

Offer Optimization

Messaging Mastery

Content that Converts