Are you the kind of person who wants what they sell to look professional and perfect but end up simply wasting time? Instead, I want you and your clients to benefit from selling before you start creating.
Firstly, I am someone who is there for credibility. I’ve worked with many different coaches – including one who claims nothing needs to be pretty to make money. She is right to some extent. Yet, after your early adopters – your first buyers – have run through your product and know you so will forgive rougher edges, it needs to look more credible.
People will forgive you if they know its new. Things don’t have to look pretty to make money. But as you progress, you need to look credible. The aim is not to look tinpot. You need your website to look good and to have professional graphics else you will only be able to sell to your early adopters.
We all have to start somewhere. This shouldn’t be from perfect at the start as this can be to the detriment of your clients, which I’ll explain further on.
The Best Way To Do Market Research
The real market research of any programme or coaching product is always best by attempting to sell it. You can do so much market research to Facebook, your family and your dog to still what will stick. I’m all for asking your audience, you need to ask the rightpeople. But until someone puts their money where their mouth is, they will not give you a true answer.
For example, asking how much someone is willing to spend on something is not going to get you an honest answer. In fact, I don’t recommend asking this question at all. Things are worth what they are worth. There is a motive behind their answer. They’ll start putting their own price point on it when it’s worth far more. Then your audience needs to decide if it’s great enough for them to invest.
If you start asking question about pricing and what people want, it’s always subjective. There can always be ignorance behind the answers: people don’t always know what they need. Sometimes you need to educate before you sell it to them.
What people do is then gather this research, create a whole course, recording videos and fancy PDFs. Then they try to sell it and it flops. Then what happens? What do you do with what you’ve got?
You can possibly salvage the content but in my experience, is that it isn’t. This is because you can’t tell what someone is going to buy until you attempt to sell it. Start rough and ready, start selling it before you create it. Instead, be ready to work hard to get things together once its sold.
Mapping Out And Outlining
There is a huge difference between creation and mapping out and outlining. Mapping out and outlining is important. You need something tangible to tell people about and you have a plan to feel confident about. In fact, one of the reasons people struggle to sell something new is that they don’t feel confident in delivering it.
If you understand what you will cover, then you can start looking at what people actually want and the sales copy that will hit the right chords with your audience. Through the process of understanding what you’re selling people, the outcomes they want and what they want covered, you’ll then learn what you need to include in your programme.
You might find that your outline needs to change. And that’s easy to change rather than re-record new videos and PDFs. What you think people will buy is quite often not what people want. This is especially true if you’re not an experienced seller and have not have a great response to launches in the past.
Work on the sales first so you know what people want and design around that.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t know better than them. Sell them what they want and give them what they need. You can put in what they need to get their outcomes but we need to think in outcome-based scenarios rather than a roadmap. A roadmap should come afterwards.
Live Testing
I’ve also found that if you run though a course live three times – this is tested with clients – you get a better response. You get instant feedback and can improve. If you create a passive roadmap without live testing, you will get people going through the course without getting great results. People will not give you feedback on a passive course. They will get bored and disengaged.
This is the same for webinars. It doesn’t work putting a webinar on evergreen for the first time. You need the live feedback first before you spend a ton of money on ads that won’t convert. You need to do the live testing.
This is also true for courses. You need to run through it live first. Sell first and create as you go and then create something more sustainable and evergreen.
Getting the live response back will also tell you what they are excited to learn about. You can then realise what’s missing from your sales copy. You might also want to use the questions for another course and use that for an upsell.
Absolutely record as you go because you might teach perfectly the first time. You can also do some teaching live and cut the Q&A off at the end. But you will have to re-do something on your recording, no matter how well thought out. Think about what brings people in first so you don’t waste your time.
Have A Plan In Place
If you want to have the security of planning, put your efforts into week one because you’ll know what you’re doing there. Then you need time to make sure week two and onwards is created. You don’t need to do it the week afterwards but plan that time in.
It won’t be easy and you will need to work hard. The idea that you can pre-record and create a passive income is simply forcing through tripe. Work to make life easier but let’s not try skip important parts of the process that will leave you without money or your clients without results.
We need to sell with integrity. Market leadership comes with integrity. People need to fall in love with your product and share it with their friends. That is third-party integrity.
A good experience comes from your dedication to your clients learning and their outcomes, not how pretty things look the first time. When you are beta testing, people expect it to be less than perfect. You can provide a slight discount if you feel comfortable with that. Give people that 1-1 time after the teaching so people can ask questions.
Also consider the selling experience:
- What are people resonating with?
- What is being overlooked?
- What angles are working?
Then you know where you need to take this programme and where to focus your modules. You need to come from your customers’ perspective while you’re selling and teaching.
Understand Your Audience
When it comes to looking at your audience, you need to know what kind of help they want. My clients want 1-1 help and without that help they won’t get the results they need. My kind of teaching comes with extracting information and everything is tailored to the business. I don’t tend to sell passive income products as they are not right for my audience.
You also need to look at who you’re delivering to and what they want. It’s about making sure what you sell gels with your message. Look at who it is you’re selling to and the format people want to consume in.
Sunny Lenarduzzi sells YouTube training. I’ve bought her courses and it’s easy to take the information and apply it. I’m sure if I got a 1-1 I would get amazing results but I got great results from her course. Her audience responds to self-study programmes. It puts the foundations in place first to set up a YouTube channel.
This is different to how someone might work with me. I could sell an existing client self-study because I build the foundations with them while working 1-1. What kind of coach or consultant are you? What works best for your audience? And how do they want to consume it?
There will be something in your business that you can turn into passive income. There will be some part of your process you can upsell or get them started. But don’t try cramp 1-1 coaching into a self-study as it won’t work in many aspects. Don’t spend time creating a package and losing money, time and effort for it to not sell or get results.
Useful links:
Book a Call with Jen – bit.ly/claritycallpodcast
Download my FREE Seven Figure Market Leader Roadmap –http://www.marketleaderleague.com/marketleaderroadmap/
Send your emails to jen@jen-hall.com
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