Ep #166: How to Raise the Value of Your Offer

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey, coaches, welcome to episode 166. Today we’re going to talk about how to make your offer more valuable. So, we’re in Making Offers Bootcamp inside 2K for 2K. And so, I wanted all these podcasts, not only to give those of you who are not in 2K for 2K yet, to allow you to come on the journey with us. And give you value that you can go out and apply in your business to make money and come and join us. Also, to offer help for my current students, additional resources for the things that we’re talking about during the bootcamp calls and in the Facebook community.

So, it’s really a win/win for everyone. You get a sneak peek, you get to take these thoughts and take these ideas and implement them until you can come and join us. And then if you’ve already joined us, you get to use this as additional help and support throughout the bootcamp.

Okay, so one of the things I wanted to talk to you guys about is how to make your offer more valuable. The way that you often, many coaches that I coach often want to increase the value of your offer, the way you want to do that is by adding worksheets, and adding Voxer Coaching, or email coaching in between. Or you want to add bonus coaching days, or you want to add a group coaching for all your one-on-one clients to come together and get a group coaching call every week.

And some of you try to do it by raising the price. Well, I’ve had so many conversations with 2K students about this is you’re like, “Well, people will perceive it as more valuable if it’s more expensive.” I want you to notice that all of these things are you wanting to change the circumstance in order to create a new result. Making Offers Bootcamp and Offer Week that we started with is all about keeping the circumstance the same and changing how you present the circumstance because that’s what the art of selling is.

Selling, the skill of selling, the art of it, the people who are really good at selling, the reason they’re good at selling is they have the skill of presenting things in a compelling way. So, selling is presenting your offer in a compelling way to people who want to buy it. So, if you’re not selling, meaning you’re not getting sales it’s about how you’re presenting your offer, how you are presenting it to the buyer. So, you want to focus all of your energy on changing that, on solving for that, solving for presenting your offer, changing your presentation as a salesperson and as a coach.

I even want you to think about, I always say selling is coaching and coaching is selling. And this is what I’m just thinking about as I’m saying this is when you’re coaching a client the way that you present your coaching oftentimes can also influence how they receive the coaching and sell them. Coaching is just selling someone on believing something new or doing something new. So, your presentation, the offering you give them as a coach impacts whether they buy what you gave them and then go out and apply it.

So even if you’re like, listen, I doubt it if you’re at this point listening to the podcast but if you have a little bit of I don’t like selling, and listen, Stacey, I don’t want to sell, I just want to coach. Just know that everything I always teach you will impact how good you are at coaching too. Because that is the one thing, well, there are many things that people say about me as a coach and as a thought leader. But the many things that I am known for is being really good at selling and really good at coaching.

That is why I make the amount of money that I make for the size of audience I have is I have both skillsets very well integrated into my body. I am very good at coaching, and I am very good at selling. I sell you in a really big powerful way and then I deliver the crap out of my coaching and my offers. So, you get what you came to buy, and you feel that way. So, I just want to sidenote, side rant to let you know all this work we’re doing on offers, making your offer more valuable will also make your coaching more valuable.

So back to what I was saying is the question is really, are you presenting yourself as a valuable coach with a valuable offer that is worth what you are charging? Is it a hell yes for what you are charging? And when I say is it worth what you are charging, it’s not about your self-worth. We’ve talked about this before on the podcast, self-value versus business value. It’s about the worth of the value you are offering to another human being. Is the value exchange worth it to your buyer? Are you confident in what you will deliver being worth it to them?

If they spend $5,000 with you do you believe that in the depth of your soul that it will be worth it to them and they will end and they will think it was worth it to them, that they will happy they spent the $5,000? That is the question you need to ask yourself. If the answer is, I don’t think so, the answer is not to change the price. The answer is to change your thinking about it. So, if you want to increase the value of your offer, what do you do? Now, before I give you my answer I want to tell you that nothing I’m saying on this episode today is new information.

I have said all of these things on the podcast many times. I’m just packaging it in another way, in an effort to present to you another way of thinking about it that might click for you. So, I’m just going to say, I’m saying the same things over, and over, and over every week, just slightly different angles to approach it so that it’s going to hit everybody a little bit differently, chipping away at this making sense in a million different ways which is your job too. This is your job as a coach as well with your offer.

So how you make your offer more valuable is you up the quality of your thinking around your offer. So, you have more quality thoughts about your offer, yourself as a coach, your audience, or the best people for your offer. And you could exchange higher quality for more useful, more useful thoughts about your offer, yourself as a coach and your audience are the best people for your offer.

And when I say more useful what I mean is more compelling thoughts for you, more motivating thoughts for you about your offer and yourself as a coach and your audience, who are the best people for your offer. And then you direct those higher quality thoughts to your thoughts about the quality of your coaching, your thoughts about the quality of life results your offer brings to your clients. Your thoughts about the quality of people who want your offer. And I know that’s a little tricky, but you have to have more quality, useful thoughts about the quality of your offer.

You have to have a higher level of thinking that is directed at why your offer is so valuable. So, I just said the same thing a different way. So, for me I might think 2K for 2K is a no brainer. That’s motivating for me. But then I also need to explain to you why because you either make 2K or we give you your 2K back. And the coaches in this program actually do make money. You can scroll through the page every single day and see coach, after coach, after coach making money

No one in the group talking about, “I’m not making money.” And if they are they’re troubleshooting it, they’re evaluating it, they’re in the work of it. It’s not a program where you’re buying, where lots of people are unhappy. They’re making money. You have access to hundreds of thousands, and actually millions now at this point of dollars of experience through the modules, the life coaching, ask a coach. And coaches want to join this program. They are dying to join.

So, I have high quality thoughts about my program for me. And then I’m able to explain and articulate to you why it is of quality and value to you. My coaching works because I tell you when you join 2K or 200K, I tell you what to think and what to do to sell coaching and make money. So, you don’t have to make any of it up on your own. I tell you exactly what you need to think and exactly what you need to do. And then I help you troubleshoot when you fail at that because you’re just not proficient in it yet.

And if people don’t buy and then I help you get back up and try again in a really useful way. I teach you the next effort you need to make, what’s the most useful effort to make so that you don’t have as much failure as most people. You don’t go through as much of the purgatory. You get making money sooner. And once you figure it out your conversions go up for life in your business. You make money easier than other coaches with less people in your audience and less of your effort. So, you don’t, literally you don’t have to spend as many hours selling as other people.

You get back those hours each week of your working life and you scale much faster. So, the hours that you do work you make money, you make more money in those hours. You get more out of your effort. And the coaches who are in our community are so resourceful. They often make their money back in the first 30 days or less, but they also never give up. And they’re always willing to help others. They’re so coachable, it’s the reason we have the best online business space for coaches in the industry.

I want you to think about if your thoughts are powerful for you like this because when they are powerful for you like this they come out powerful for other people. And then from that place here’s what will happen. You will make more offers, number one. And number two, in making more offers with higher quality thinking you will present your offer differently. Your offer will get simpler. It will sound simpler to other people. It will sound more clear to other people, and it will be more compelling to other people. It will feel more doable to more people.

The more comes out of your mouth the better you get at explaining what you do, why it matters and how it affects people. So then people feel safer to make a bet on you and themselves, and on the idea of coaching. They believe they can get results deeper, they believe that more. They believe you will help them when it gets tough.

I remember, I often had a thought about my coach, and I’ve thought this a lot over the years is I’m just grabbing onto her coattails and I’m never letting go. She will lead the way. And that thought came from so much trust. I really genuinely thought all I have to do is follow her lead. That’s it. Because she knows what she’s doing. That came from how she articulated her offer, her coaching. Everything she said was simple, it made sense, it felt doable.

Conversations with you and consuming content from you will start to become more and more valuable to the people watching and will start attracting the attention of new people when you focus on your presentation, on the quality of thinking that allows the way the words come out of your mouth to present confidently. People will start feeling more certain of you when they arrive on a consult. And you will start feeling more certain of you when you get on a consult.

I want you to just stop for a second and think about that concept right there. Having someone show up to a call who is more certain of you and what you’re offering, the idea of coaching, them coming to the call that way. And then you coming to the call feeling more certain of yourself and of coaching and how you’re going to help the person on the other end before you even know what their problems are.

And more certain in your ability to present your offer confidently and clearly, and more certain of yourself to get a yes, to sell someone in believing in themselves, and coaching, and you. That’s all you’re doing when you get a yes. When you get a yes you sufficiently sold someone on that. So, you will start then getting more certain outcomes on a consult, meaning more yeses that certainly lead to someone actually paying and showing up.

I talk about the eight phases of a coaching business a lot. And I talk about how seven of them, I think six or seven of them are failure. And how you finally, so the last couple of phases of the failure in the phases of a new coaching business is you finally start getting yeses but then they back out. And then you finally start getting yeses and they pay, and they show up, and then they quit. That’s normal. It’s part of the process. And you will exit this stage and into the stage where clients just pay and show up more quickly when you do this work.

And what will happen then is you’ll start feeling more certain of your marketing efforts. They will start to feel less like shit you’re trying to do to get clients that may or may not work. And it will feel so certain that you will just be, it’s what you do to make money and sign clients. That’s genuinely what you believe. So, you show up more consistently.

You start signing clients more consistently all from raising the value in your brain of your offer. But not by offering Voxer Coaching to people, not by lowering or raising your prices to make something seem more valuable. That’s still just changing the circumstance. The way that you have to raise the value of your offer is by believing in your offer, being sold on your offer. And then coaching yourself and getting coached into the highest quality thinking around your offer so that you can get out there to work on, to practice, to develop the highest quality presenting of your offer.

It’s literally how you think comes out in how you speak. I’m going to say that again. How you think comes out in how you speak. I’m only trying to tell you all this because – and it’s not even just in the words you’re saying but it’s literally in the fluidity of what you say and the energy of what you say. Sometimes you guys think that your thoughts don’t come out in your speech. You think you’re hiding them and sometimes they’re hidden to you, you don’t realize.

I was just telling someone on Making Offers Bootcamp that for the good or bad, no matter what your client says about your pricing or your offer, the terms, how long you coach. So, for example for her it was 12 months, she was offering 12 months coaching. And she was like, “I have evidence that people believe in this value because I have had a client say, “That’s a really great time period to work with you.””

And I said, “Be really careful of that. It’s always good to seek evidence for things you want to believe but be careful of ever using what your clients say as evidence to support your belief or your disbelief.” I want you to think of what a client says as just mirroring what you believe. What they say is the effect, what they say to you is the effect of the words you said to them, literally the articulation of what you said and the energy behind it. That impacted, that influenced, that affected how they thought about what you’ve said and what you offered them.

So, if you have lots of thoughts about this is a lot, people don’t have this kind of money lying around, this is a big investment. It might be a little too much for what I know I can deliver. I’m afraid that they’re not going to think it’s worth it. What they’re going to say to you is, “I don’t think I can afford it. I’m going to have to check my budget. I have a house renovation coming up. I’m going to need to finish that.” They’re going to value their freaking house renovation over their mental health.

This always baffles me when you guys can’t overcome that objection. I’m like, “What? So, you can live in your beautiful house and still feel the exact same as you do now. Nothing’s going to change. So, you need to just decide, does that feel like a good bargain? If it does, great. But just know that that’s what you’re bargaining.”

Because a lot of people think they’re going to complete the house renovation and that’s what’s going to make them feel better and be happier. And it’s not. They’re going to live in their pretty, beautiful, renovated house and still have all of the same problems, all of them. Or they can work on their mental health now and regardless of what happens with the house, they can wait to renovate the house. And when they do get to renovating they’ll be much happier, it will go much easier for them. It will take less of their energy.

And then they’ll be living in the renovated house happier, more fulfilled, more whatever with better mental health. When any human, this is just another rant, when any human values material things over their mental health, I’m concerned. And this is what we’ve been taught. So, for me it’s like, for all of you, you have to understand the value of mental health. That’s what you’re offering, of living intentionally, however it applies to you and what you’re offering. Maybe if you offer business coaching you have to find a different way.

But even for me, I offer business coaching, I still believe this. I’m like, “What? Why would you renovate your house? Why would you buy a new house? Why would you go on vacation instead of buying 2K?” It makes literally no sense to me. I’m like, “You could go on all the vacations, and buy all the homes, and do all the fun things when you invest in yourself, and you get making money quicker.”

So literally the way that you think about the value of your offer is directly translated through your speech to your client and then what they say about your offer is just a reflection of the end of that mechanism, the end of that chain reaction. It’s never evidence for whether you should change bits of your offer, your circumstances around your offer and change what you’re selling. It’s an indication of changing what you’re thinking about what you’re selling and how you explain it to someone else, and the way you feel explaining it to someone else.

I can say tough shit like that because I feel so fucking amazing when I say it. I’m like, “This is the most brilliant stuff ever. This is so important, I have to tell you this. I have to tell you it makes absolutely no sense to spend money on a house, on buying a house, even if you live in the tiniest apartment ever it makes no sense to buy a house instead of buying 2K if you’re a coach and you haven’t made money yet, and you need to learn how to sell, no sense.”

It makes so much more sense to spend all of your money and invest all of your money in learning how to get good at making money so that you can have plenty of money to do all of those things. I can say those things with ease, and with energy, and with confidence because I believe them. We get the mathematical equation wrong. We’re like there’s this offer and all the bits and components, whether it’s 12 months or six months and 1,000 or 5,000, and whether it’s Voxer Coaching, and a group coaching, and one-on-one coaching.

All of that is what affects what someone says or all of their circumstances, the amount of money they have, the way that they’re allocating their money, the way they’re allocating their time, if they’re shopping around for other coaches and they’re being diligent in their decision making. You think all of those things are directing what they say. It’s not true. How you think comes out in how you speak, in the fluidity of what you say, the energy of how you said it and that impacts what they mirror back to you, what they experienced.

Their words are the sum result of the experience they had with you on the call. You have to take responsibility for that. So, raising the value of your offer is you getting better at explaining more simply, more clearly, and more do-ably what it is you do, why it matters to others, how it affects them. And why it’s a sure thing for them. This automatically makes your offer seem more valuable to others. It’s kind of like food. If I make something, I used to be really good at this actually, but I’ve never been quite as good as my husband, never on this level but I used to be even better.

But if I make food and I take a photo of it and I post it on Instagram. You might think it looks good. And maybe it looks enticing. You might give me a like. But if my husband makes food and he posts it on Instagram and you see a photo of his food, you’re going to drool a little. And you’re going to want to run to our house immediately. And you’re going to want to message him that you need the recipe stat. When you see photos of his food it’s like, what is even happening over there?

And it is really about, I’ve paid attention to people who make food look enticing and it is all about how they present it on the plate. I don’t even think to take time to present. I’m one of those people, I just throw it on the plate, throw it all together. But he takes time to actually, every cilantro leaf, where it’s placed, matters. The angle of the photo, the lighting, the way that he’s articulating, the way he’s presenting what he has to offer, it automatically takes – I might create the exact same recipe and mine would be a four and his would be a 12 on a scale of one to ten.

You see those people who post their food online mostly on Facebook and you think, bless their hearts. That fried chicken and mashed potatoes on that paper plate was not something I would have posted. Do you all know what I mean? My husband and I laugh about it all the time. It’s so mean but we’re like, “Who thought that was enticing?” But that’s your offers. Who cares? It doesn’t even matter what my husband’s cooking, what the actual food is.

My God, for Valentine’s Day which was yesterday, at the time of recording this, Valentine’s Day was yesterday. And I wanted to stay home, it was my dog’s 10^th birthday. And we are never home. We’re always traveling on Valentine’s Day. And we are actually leaving this week and going after Valentine’s Day for our babymoon. But I wanted to be home. I didn’t want to go out. And he made a homemade from scratch, clam linguini, linguini with clams. He actually buys, not canned clams. He buys the actual clams from Wholefoods.

And he bought this fancy pasta, hand makes everything, the sauce, everything. And he posted, I mean just his [inaudible] his set up was so phenomenal. It looked appetizing just to see the way he had it set up. You’re like, what’s he making? And then the actual presentation and it was deeply good. But anyways, we posted it, he posted it on Instagram. And sometimes I share his food.

But it doesn’t even matter what it is that he makes, he will make you crave whatever he’s making because of how it’s presented, how it actually looks. And if you did ask my husband for the recipe which do not, I would tell him not to respond. He doesn’t have time for that. He’s taking care of his pregnant wife. But if you did ask him to give you a recipe, if he sent you a two page epicurious recipe you might be like, “Eff that, never mind, I can’t do that. I don’t have the energy for that. That feels like too much work.”

But if he sent you simple, clear directions, like Hello Fresh directions you’d be like, “Okay, let’s try that this week. Let’s go. Let’s go to the store. Let’s get the ingredients. I can do that.” That’s your goal. But many of you, the way you start out is you have doubt, and you have confusion, and you have indecision. And many of you just flat out disbelieve in your offer, you don’t believe anyone’s paying attention to you. If they do, you don’t believe they have money to pay or they’re not the type of client you want to work with. And you don’t believe in yourself to deliver results.

So, then you get out there with all your thoughts on top of that, on top of all that disbelief about selling and marketing, and how you’re bothering people. One client used the word ‘smothering’ this week which I thought was such a brilliant description. I bet a lot of you feel like that. She was afraid that she was offering too much, and she was smothering her people with content.

And so, you have all of those thoughts and then because of all those thoughts swirling in your head as you’re attempting to do a live stream, or write an email, or make a post, or talk to another human at a networking event. You stumble and you struggle to articulate what matters to the client. What they care about is how will you help me? What will that look like specifically? How does it work, very clearly? What if it doesn’t work? And what can I expect after?

And that is the reason people aren’t buying, not because you don’t offer enough support, or worksheets, or because you raised your prices. Someone recently asked, “How many no’s do you get before you change your offer?” What? You never change your offer based on the no’s. They didn’t say no because of your price. They said no because of how you articulated how you presented your offer. You have to change that, how you articulate your offer, how you sell it. The number of yeses that you get determine your proficiency in that.

And it’s okay to not be proficient, you work on it every day. I asked my students today, “How long are you willing to work on it?” You really need to answer that question for yourself. Now, here’s what I will say. Here’s my caveat is, when do you know whether you should change your price? In the beginning the only reason to change it is if you don’t believe in it. I taught this at Offer Week, because you have to spend your time thinking about articulating your offer, presenting it as savory to the client.

Because the value of your offer is determined by your thoughts about your offer, literally the quality of your thinking when you think about your offer and how you value your offer. You don’t want to add having to coach yourself up into a higher price into the mix. Why would you do that to yourself? You’re adding so much work for yourself.

And I said this in Offer Week, “You can do two kinds of work. You can work to believe in a higher price without clients, while people say no, just keep working and self-coaching on believing in your higher price. Or you can get to work with clients and get paid at a lower price and be working with clients the whole time until you create demand and naturally raise those prices.” Which would you rather do? I think the answer is pretty simple. Yes, we are coaches, we work to believe new things, we challenge our brains.

But you’re doing enough challenges with selling something often for the first time, and coaching people often for the first time. We can take breaks for ourselves in our brains. We can do that. I think it’s always better to give your brain a break, focus on the hardest things and get making money and coaching clients as fast as possible. So, the only time you ever change your price to a lower price is if you don’t believe in it and you’re actually spending more time working to believe it than selling it. That’s the only time, hear me.

It doesn’t mean if you change it, and you lower it suddenly you’re going to have no’s and all of a sudden selling is going to be easy. That’s not what happens because it’s just the circumstance. But what it does do is it frees up one thing less to coach on so that you can get out into the selling experience, be making offers more often. And get coaching on the other things, on the presentation and the articulation of your offer. So, it doesn’t mean you’re going to magically lower your price and then get yeses all the time.

It means you’re allocating your energy to your coaching to believing new things on selling and marketing, and the articulation and the presentation of your offer. You’re just allocating the energy. And I always tell people, so if you join 2K and you say, “What should I charge people?” I tell, “If you don’t know what to charge, charge what comes out to be $100 an hour.” But this is the beautiful example of this is even if Stacey tells you something, if you don’t believe it, it won’t serve you.

So, my client, Charlotte Smith, she was on the podcast recently so you can look up that podcast. She didn’t believe in $100 an hour so she charged $50 an hour. She believed in that. She had high quality thoughts around that. She believed her people would buy that. So, she had enough energy to focus on presenting her offer and explaining its value. And she sold a ton of it until she had enough demand to raise her prices. People was like, “Well, how do you know if you have enough demand?” Until you’re getting lots of consults, and lots of yeses, and running out of spots to sell. It’s very simple.

That’s when you will just know, I’ve got to raise my prices. So how do you raise the value of your offer? You get better at explaining the value of your offer, period. There is no other way. I’m going to say it one more time. How you raise the value of your offer is you get better at explaining the value of your offer.

Now, the last thing I will leave you with is throughout Offer Week and Making Offers Bootcamp I have asked my students to believe one thought, and I’ve said this on the podcast too. That there is no right offer, only the offer that you make right. This is why it’s so important not to go around changing the circumstances to try to add value, to increase the desirability of your offer and to get people to buy. That’s what you guys do, is people are saying no and then that’s why you decide, I need to raise the value of my offer, is it valuable enough for people to say yes.

So, I have to increase its value or people’s perception of its value by adding things, by changing things. When you do that, I’ve said this already, but you’re solving the wrong problem. It was never that you were offering something at a price that didn’t match its value. It’s that you weren’t articulating it and presenting it with language, that matched its value because of how you were thinking about it. You didn’t make it sound valuable. So, you always want your problem solving to be in this direction.

What you said clearly and simply, and how you said it with the energy and the confidence behind it. That is the only way you could ever increase the value of your offer. There’s no offer that just inherently doesn’t match the value of the price you’re charging. It’s always that you aren’t articulating it and presenting it with language that matches its value. You’re not making it sound valuable. So, get your problem solving in the right direction. I’ve given you many ways to approach this just in this podcast.

You can go back and relisten, you can grab the show notes. If you go to the website, staceyboehman.com/podcast/podcast. You can get the episode show notes. You can go through it. You can go through and do all of the activities I’ve offered here, answer all the questions I’ve asked to all the thought prompts. You can really dissect just this episode but also you can join us in 2K. And you can start applying this work with a group of coaches who are doing it at the same time and immerse yourself in it. And you will be so much closer, I promise you.

There is no other investment you can invest and put your money in that will be more useful than learning how to articulate the value of your offer, nothing. I feel confident that there is literally, whatever you are thinking of spending your money on, I’m 100% sold and confident that it’s not better than learning how to articulate the value of your offer. That will make you more money than anything else ever, I promise. And then you can use the money you make to go invest in other things that you think are missing.

But I’m telling you, this is the thing, between you and another human there is only your ability to articulate the value in a way that makes that other human agree and say, “Yes, I will pay you.”

Alright, have an amazing week, ladies, and gents. I love you all so much. I want you getting out and articulating the value and making so much money from the bottom of my heart. I will talk to you next week.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.