Are Your Offers Helping You Win or Holding You Back?

What you offer is just as important as who you offer it to. Water’s cheap when it’s flowing out of your faucet clean and pure, but if you’re dying of thirst out in the wilderness it’s the most valuable thing in the world.

We talked about who you serve and why those people choose you. This week is about making sure your offers align cohesively and provide value that is relevant to your specific clients. It’s a little more involved than that though.

Not too long ago I knew someone who had multiple offers spread across multiple areas of focus. He had three different categories he focused on, and within each category he offered digital content like webinars and courses. He offered group coaching, and solo coaching. All of it in triplicate. It ended up being this veritable smorgasbord of service offerings.

When he worked with his web platform he worried that the tool’s limitation of 15 products would be too constraining.

This is not the way.

Not The Way

He fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well known is this: If you have too many offers, or more generally if it’s not abundantly clear where someone should start … you’ll be actively driving people away from your business.

By the way, this person I’ve been talking about is me. I had over a dozen offers and it didn’t work at all.

Another folly, unrelated to The Princess Bride, is having offers that are either generic or don’t speak to the actual problems your clients have. You may find yourself in this position if you’re still offering the same thing you did a decade ago and it just doesn’t fit as well anymore. Or, alternately, this might result from accepting whatever business comes your way and letting your fears or your opportunism drive your offerings. You have dirty windows? I can help you with that.

Third on the list of common errors and missteps, thinking of your pricing as an afterthought. Your pricing does a lot of talking on its own, chatty little thing that it is, and if you aren’t the one providing the script who knows what it’s telling people?

If your service saves people hundreds of thousands of dollars, pricing it at $13 makes you look untrustworthy. Price tells a story. Make sure it’s the one you want told.

The more intentional your offers are, the more aligned with your specific ideal client’s needs and challenges, the more cohesive your overall approach and strategy in serving those clients … the more you will be the obvious choice.

To look at this through another lens, all of these mistakes (understandable as they are) also provide opportunities to set yourself apart.

The Way

Let’s use a fictional fitness coach as an example.

When Maria launched her fitness business, she tried to be all things to all people: drop-in classes, one-on-one sessions, meal plans, yoga, corporate workshops. If you could imagine it, she sold it. She said “Yes” and figured it out because that’s what all successful entrepreneurs do isn’t it?

This was not the way either.

So she realigned around busy professionals who wanted sustainable fitness without obsessing over the gym. She had three offers:

• Reset: A one-time assessment and starter plan.
• Build: A 90-day structured program with training and nutrition support.
• Maintain: Ongoing coaching for accountability and long-term results.

Now, instead of a Cheesecake-Factory-worthy menu of fitness options, Maria has a clear ladder that supports and serves her ideal clients and reinforces her positioning. Her ideal clients know exactly where to start, how to progress, and what long-term success looks like with her. And Maria gets to stop reinventing the wheel. Her energy and expertise are focused where they create the most value.

Her new focus allowed her to deliver each service in a way that she knows will work for busy professionals. The language, the workouts, the nutritional options, everything specifically tuned. There's an understanding that each step builds trust and prepares for the next.

She’s no longer charging $50/hour like every other trainer. Each offer has its own value, and clients pay for that value, not for her time. That shift means Maria keeps more of the upside when she delivers efficiently and her clients are happier, too.

Practical Reader Exercise

Coming back to you and your business, here’s how you can run a quick self-check to see where you might find some improvements.

• Which offers do clients love most?
• Which offers do you love delivering?
• Which offers actually drive profit (clarity around your cash flows is super useful here)?
• Which offers feel like “legacy baggage” or drain your energy?
• If you could only keep 2-3 of your offers, which would you bet your business on?

Evolution

It’s all about evolution. My own evolution brought me from “focusing” on all small businesses with something like 12-15+ offers trying to be as accommodating as possible to where I am today. I have an offer ladder that’s 2-3 steps and they are tailored to relationship-based businesses.

I’m not perfect and that’s okay.

But I’m evolving and I’m focusing.

I’ll leave you with this. Your offers are one of the sharpest tools you have to set yourself apart. If they don’t align with your strategy, you’ll always feel like you’re paddling upstream. But when every offer fits your clients and reinforces your positioning, the whole business pulls in the same direction.

Inconceivable!