Donna: In this episode of the She's In Business podcast, I am talking about getting your offerings right. A business won't last long if your offerings are fatally flawed, so what's an offering, it can be a product or a service that you offer within your business in the way that you make money, but it must effectively meet the needs and the desires of your ideal customer avatar and reviewing your offerings on a regular basis is a really important business practice.
And that's what I'm gonna outline for you in today's episode.
So as a business owner, obviously we are creating things to sell, to make money, be that products, programs, services, whatever it is, what we need to be really focused on is making sure that we are getting the offerings right within our business. For a couple of different reasons.
Firstly, we wanna make sure that they're profitable. We also wanna make sure that we are meeting the needs and the desires of your ideal customer avatar. We wanna make sure that those products, programs and services are manageable to actually deliver and, you know, making sure that we are positioning our product services and programs alongside other preexisting things and making sure that we are not cannibalizing the things that we've already created.
So, I'm gonna go into this in a little bit more detail. This is actually one of the lessons straight out of the Ready to Rise program and the reason I'm giving you this bit of a, I guess inside peak of some of the content is because I want you to kind of have a taste of what it's like, so this is one of the lessons out of module three, which is business pillars of success.
Now, reviewing your offerings on a regular basis is a really important business practice and when I first start working with a client, what we do is we list out all of the different offerings that you currently have within your business to ensure that the suite of products or services make sense to the customer and that each product or service compliments one another in the buying experience, this is really, really important because you wanna become the one stop shop for whatever it is that you do.
And you wanna avoid spreading yourself across multiple unrelated products or services because again, this comes back to honing in on your ideal customer avatar and developing products and services that they want and that they need, and that doesn't become confusing, so you wanna become that one stop shop for whatever it is that you do.
And if you've got random unrelated products or services just thrown in there. People will be like, ah, this is kind of confusing and you wanna keep your brand really clear. You can't be everything to everyone, or you'll be nothing to know one, so let's dig into this a little bit further.
Now, once you've listed out all of your current products and services, how would you describe the overall strength and performances of those products and services, and how would you rate the quality of those from the perspective of the customer for each particular product, service or program that you offer?
What is the experience that they're getting? What is the extension of their identity that they're buying when they decide to have that thing? And what do you feel your products and services are priced correctly like, are they priced correctly for your ideal client? We need to look at this from both the perspective of revenue for our business and are they priced correctly that we're actually making money.
And we also need to make sure that they're priced correctly for the value and the quality that we're providing to that customer, so reviewing your offerings on a regular basis is an important business practice and it really shouldn't be overlooked. It's one of the biggest mistakes that can happen when business owners either try to target too many audiences, too many ideal clients, trying to be too many things to too many people.
And that then leads to really murky messaging as well with your marketing and it means that sometimes as business owners, if you're doing too many things, trying too many things to too many people, it means that you become very thinly spread across your business and what results is burnout for the business owner, confusion for the customer.
And rather than being known as the go to in your area, people will just back away from that. You don't wanna be a hot mess, right? So this is where in the Ready to Rise program we go back to the question, which is what do you want to be known for? And as you review your offering while doing this activity, we need to see that the synergy between those two things, that what you wanna be known for is actually what you are delivering within your business.
When we are developing a new business, uh, sorry, a new offering within your business, there's often two ways that typically it happens, so it can be a slow process. It might be that there's a little bit more risk involved. It requires more investment, maybe sometimes when we are developing something new, the risk is not necessarily in the cost in developing something new.
The risk can actually be that we are taking time away from another area of our business. That's actually returning a really good profit, so just being aware of those things when you're developing something new, or you could be the opposite to that and you could be pretty risk averse and you can jump on things without really thinking it through.
Maybe that's more of the shiny object, the syndrome that we see so much of, so it really does pay to spend time developing your new offering before just getting in there and doing. To make sure that it fits firstly with your brand, that it compliments your current portfolio of offerings and that also, it makes sure that it serves a pain point or solves a pain point for your ideal customer avatar and is the solution for them, right?
So all of those things need to work together and of course, It needs to be profitable for your business and this leads me to my next point in the reasons for developing a new offering in your business and the first thing is that you wanna increase your earning potential, so look at your existing products to gain inspiration for what new things or new services that you know will compliment what you've already got there, but also increase your business' earning potential.
What is it about the products or services that you already offer that people like? Use those ideas to brainstorm some new products. The other main reason for developing new offerings within your business is to stay relevant, so the products and the services that people are buying from you now, could very likely lose their relevance down the road.
In fact, you know, it can happen in the blink of an eye, but by constantly developing new ideas, your company won't suffer when the inevitable occurs and people no longer need those things, as we evolve as human beings and trends and all of that kind of stuff and then another reason for developing a new offer within your business could be meeting your customer's evolving needs.
Just like what I said, right? But you know, having a look, keeping your eyes wide open to what things are coming up in your industry, don't rest back on your laurels with the products and services that you already provide. Find out why your customers like your offering, and if there's anything else that you can do to meet their needs and almost like looking ahead, like, you know, predicting what your client might need five years from now and that's a really great way to get inspiration for new products and services too.
Also, you wanna be always reaching new audiences. In addition to retaining your existing customers, your company, or your business needs to be continually attracting new ones, so what better way to do that by adding new products or services to your portfolio?
After all, at a certain point, there will be a limit to what people can benefit from your current line of products and services and so you can build on those, right? And then finally it's about creating buzz, so think of the excitement that occurs, anytime apple unveils its latest creation, and you can create that kind of buzz within your business too, and the best way.
And sometimes the easiest way to do that is by coming up with new offerings for existing and prospective customers, something new and exciting, but of course still align to your core values and still really speaking to your ideal customer avatar in say, uh, solving those pain points for them and this is really where you can stay ahead of your competition too, with all of these things that I'm talking about, because it is important to innovate and, you know, dreaming up some new ideas.
Improving or diversifying your existing products and services is really important and what will result from that is increased loyalty, so when your existing customers know that your company or your business is constantly working to develop newer and better products, they're more likely to stick around and try them with you.
Customer loyalty is one of those key ingredients to long term business success, so your efforts will pay off in spades in the long run when you are continually developing new ideas and offerings within your business.
Now, how will a new offering compliment your existing offerings? This is an important thing that I wanna just touch on here because we don't wanna dive in without carefully evaluating the true potential and how it might have potentially a negative effect on what you're already doing and I don't want you to scare your weight from developing new ideas, obviously I've just sold that to you in everything else that I've been talking about, but the idea that might sound great on paper, when you test it out with potential buyers.
You may save yourself a big investment of hard earned cash and valuable time that will go to waste, so first of all, I just wanna, I guess the easiest way I can start to explain this to you is to consider how adding that new offering is either gonna compliment or not compliment cannibalize, your existing offerings.
So first of all, looking where it fits within the ascension of your products and services, so say you already got some things happening within your business and you're creating something that could become an upsell, so here we're selling a superior or a more expensive version of the product or service that they're already buying or that they've already bought, or that's already in their card.
So, I'm going to use fast food examples. If you've got a small soft drink, you're upselling to an extra large soft drink. If you've got a 30 minute mini facial, upsell it to a 60 minute deluxe facial, right? So there's your upsell offer. Then we have a cross sell offer, so a cross sell offer is where we are creating a, uh, product or a service that's related to something else that they are buying or have already purchased but it's related. It's a cross.
So again, let's do the fast food example, a burger. You want fries with that? Like they go together, it's a cross sell. A centered candle, you could cross sell that to adding bath salts, right? A down sell. This is one that might be unfamiliar to you, but a down sell is if a customer is maybe not in the financial position to buy your core offer, perhaps they have something available for them of a lower value or a lower quality that you could suggest to them.
You're still getting a sale from them. They're still getting their needs met but it's in a way that would otherwise be that if they couldn't have the down sell well, then they would walk away from your business and go and get it somewhere else.
The last thing that you need to consider here is the cannibalizing risk.
So ,if you introduce a new product, is there a risk that it may actually change the selling performance of another product or service that you already have that is earning you a really, really good profit margin. Does that matter to you? If it's earning you a good profit mountain, it should matter to you, but it's about looking at if your best selling offer is X and then you introduce Y and Y starts to outsell X, but you're making less profit out of that.
It's going to affect your bottom line and is that the smartest move?
So, these are all things to consider when you are creating that new offering, which is why it's so important to map all of this out before you just jump in and start doing it. The other side of this, which I won't have time to, uh, go into today, I don't wanna completely overload you here.
But is actually once we've mapped out the ideas and we've looked at the profitability and you've broken down the feasibility in how much it costs to actually do that service or source that product that you're going to sell like there's so much more that we can go into there, but it's also about going.
How is it going to benefit the customer? What objections are they going to have in the buying process? How can you overcome those objections and all of these things, including looking at how it might affect your employee morale, which, you know, you may not even have considered that before, but if you do have a team and you introduce a new product that I don't know has a really long delivery period, or is super complicated to provide, maybe that might have an impact on your employee morale.
The other thing that definitely can sometimes lead to employee morale when we are not only developing new offers but when we are discontinuing offers, which is another thing that I'll briefly talk about here is that you could be taking away somebody's job by removing something from your products and services.
So when to know, it's time to discontinue a product or service is also something that we cover in the Ready to Rise program as well, because it doesn't matter what type of business you run as small business owners sometimes we can fall in love with our own ideas, but you need to be able to see when it's not working when you need to be holding back, because it's one thing and getting the messaging right to your ideal customer avatar but it's also another thing.
If your sales figures and your profitability is plummeting and so when looking at what's working within the things that you sell and provide within your business, we're really wanting to maximize the business's profitability and you need to be equipped. You need to have the templates and the resources and the knowledge to make objective decisions.
And it's not always bad when you discontinue, uh, product or service. It can, if that product or service is failing, it can feel, I don't know, you lose a little bit of your heart, that you've put all of that energy and effort into, but what it can do is create an opportunity for you to pursue more profitable ideas within your business.
So, though everything that I have spoken about today is just like the tip of the iceberg in the depths that we go to in the Ready to Rise program, when talking about creating a sustainable business for the long haul, not only do we talk about the core business pillars of success, which briefly touched on one, like a small part of that, there's so many others.
But also, we talk about really getting clear in your purpose for what you do, the why behind you're in business, why you do what you do and get really clear around what your core values are in delivering, whatever it is that you deliver through your business and the reason that we do a lot of work in that area is because if ever in your business, there are times where it gets tricky.
There are times when you wanna give up, there are times when something goes drastically wrong. You come back to those values, you come back to that business purpose and you revisit it, and sometimes just revisiting it is enough for that extra little push of resilience to keep going.
But it's also a line in the sand to go. I'm building a business for this purpose and if my business isn't growing in that direction, or I've kind of morphed over the years and it's become something else. Then that's your opportunity to bring that back because we, what we wanna do as a business owner for the long haul is develop a business that is heart centered, that lights us up every day.
It is inspiring that we wanna get up and go to work because we don't have a boss looking over our shoulder, tapping us on the shoulder and getting back to work. We have to be self motivated every single day and not only that, but sometimes we're also motivating our team and we need to know what our purpose is.
We need to know what lights us up. We need to know what our core values are, what behaviors we expect of yourself, what behaviors we expect of our team and even down to what behaviors we expect of our customers and clients, because there's nothing worse than working with assholes, by identifying your ideal customer that you wanna work with, that's gonna make your business so much more enjoyable and that's who we market to.
That's who we target. That's who we create our products and services for and that's who we make sure that the experience is amazing for because we want more and more of those coming through the door, and then another side of the Ready to Rise program is the self care side, so, again, really important that as business owners, we're looking after ourselves, we're managing our energy and we're managing our mindset.
And so ,the beautiful thing about the Ready to Rise program is it's holistic approach, so it's about really embracing the fact that yes, you are a savvy entrepreneurial, ambitious woman. We're also caring, loving in the moment parents, which we need to nurture and we're also, without all the hats, a human being that deserves self care, it is not a luxury, it's an essential part.
And so, that's why the Ready to Rise program incorporates all of those things. The information, the little snippet that I gave you today is directly out of the content that I provide in the online self-paced learning modules and alongside that, there is the small group coaching sessions where every week we get together over 12 weeks and we spend an hour together.
And the group is fabulous in being a sounding board for your ideas, for your struggles, to celebrate you, to pick you up. If you're having a bit of a shitty day and then we also have the online Facebook group, which is the community outside of that weekly group coaching session. Where again, you can share your ideas, you can throw up.
An example of a product or service that you're working on and get feedback on that, that we can celebrate you and support you that if you are having like an icky day or you're wanting some advice in how to handle a customer, or maybe even a complaint within your business, that we are there to support you as a community to lift you up and empower you on your business journey.
So that's it for me today. I feel like I've rambled on enough. Please, if you're interested in joining the Ready to Rise program, get on the waitlist now ,you could spend hours of your precious time creating content for social media from scratch, or you could take my content ideas and 50 Canva templates and personalize them to your business, which is gonna save up, save you so much time and allow you to do more of what you do best.
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You'll get me walking you through how to personalize the Canva template to align you with your business branding. I've created a tutorial video to show you how. You'll also get 50 story templates because social media stories are super hot right now and these free templates are going to be your way of attracting audiences to watch your social media stories like a crazy stalker.
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