Welcome back, nice to see you again…
In the last blog post, I very quickly went over a rough idea of what my product suite was going to be.
Since the last blog post, I’ve had my head down and worked on figuring out my MVP and figuring out ways to package the things we do to deliver results for myself, so we can sell it to clients. That work is what I want to talk about and delve into deeper in this blog post.
In the next few paragraphs, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into these products, and for clarity’s sake, when I say product, I’m referring to the things that we are going to sell to our people. In continuation to my previous posts, this is also kind of still part of doing the work before the work because, at this point, no real consistent effort has been put yet into promotion.
Some effort has been put into customer acquisition as a way to prove concept and develop the basic blocks of the offers we will take to market and they’re paying yields already.
I will put this down to how I am going about my business. Rather than creating and thinking of something to sell, I listen to what my people(audience) needs and then create something to solve that need.
This has resulted in building some nice momentum early on, and allowed us to move a lot quicker and get a whole bunch of activity happening that proves concepts and proves that basically, we’re on the right track.
The MVP and Core Offer
Let’s start with the idea of our core offer.
The reason we’re starting with this is that the core offer is the foundation that the business is going to be built on. That’s where all traffic is going to flow and as traffic flows there, we then determine what upsell, downsell or cross sell path to send people through.
In terms of the core offer, I decided that this was going to be kind of like a hybrid DIY (do it yourself)/DWY (done with you).
I chose this path because, for my core offer, I want to walk around building a community of business owners that can get access to the tools that I use for myself and for my clients. They can then use those tools in their business and, as a part of being a member of the community, they get access to live coaching and live hot seat sessions.
At the moment, the core offer is something I’ve decided to call the Delegation Mastery Academy (DMA). This is going to be where we will send traffic to, which will be both organic and paid.
Every social media platform that I’m active on will have a link to that or there’s going to be a link to a sales page explaining what that is and why people should join up.
In terms of how everything else is built from this point on, let’s go back to the customer journey map from our previous blog post.
Revisiting The Customer Journey Map
Here, you have your “Convert” stage, you have your “Excite” stage, and then you have your “Ascend stage”. I think of these three as interrelated units.
The reason I’m saying that is because when you get people up the “Convert” stage, you naturally want to find the people who are going to be suited to take to the second stage, and the way you find those guys is to “Excite” them.
Now the Excite step really is just a bridge between Conversion and Ascension, in my opinion.
Looking at this map, and how this relates to the core offer, you can see that we have the DMA
located in the Convert stage. And this core offer is what we use to convert subscribers and prospects into clients. The difference between clients and customers here being that a client is someone who buys something from you once and the customer is somebody that buys something from you multiple times.
Now the good thing about the DMA is the fact that because it’s going to be like a membership or recurring product, this creates customers. Exciting those customers will make the upsell a little bit easier.
A big majority of the people that join in will have to be excited before they will want to learn about the higher levels of service. And then there’ll be people who just want to sign up for the DMA, and then just stay there.
Speaking from experience, this is what I’ve seen based on the work that I’ve done for the last four or five years. So when it comes to creating clients and creating customers, we need to have something else that we use as the first point of conversion and one that’s not going to be asking for too much.
The current idea for this first point is to start with a very special launch price for the DMA. Then once we hit a certain number of people, the price will go up. The marketing function there is playing on the fear of missing out and then also rewarding the people to take action.
In terms of other client generation methods, we’re going to have front-end products which are just going to be little products that prove to people that as a business/service provider, I know what I’m talking about.
Then we have the “Subscribe” stage that is going to be taken care of by the newsletter, which I haven’t actually named yet. This newsletter will talk about topics centred around building a team, delegation, automation, and setting up processes and systems in your business.
Once we have people on the newsletter, and we’ve built a relationship with them, then we will try to get them to convert. That’s where the low-priced, front-end products come in. They come in the sense of giving my newsletter subscribers or social media followers a chance to actually get a feel for what it’s like to work with me or what it’s like to pick my brains.
And that’s the core offer.
The Product Ladder
In terms of upsells, and cross-sells, when I originally thought about this, my mind went to recruitment because that’s what I’ve specialised in. That was my line of thought whenever I was thinking of how to organise this and how to set this up so that there’s an ascending ladder of products and prices for people to work with, or for people to basically interact with my business.
When it comes back to the idea of the MVP, this is what the product ladder looked like.
In the process of actually trying to prove a concept, I mentioned in the previous blog post that one of the ways that I was going to build awareness was through doing guest expert sessions.
The guest expert sessions have been going well. From the first session I did, I sold someone a recruiting package and I helped them find an admin assistant, and I used that result to refine my processes even more.
For the second guest expert session that I ran, I didn’t push or promote anything at the end, but what I found was one of the people in the group where I did the guest expert session actually reached out to me and said, “Hey, I attended the live training that you did. And as someone who runs a business and is quite busy, I actually haven’t got the time for you to recruit someone and then for me to go train that person. Is there anything that you can offer that would help me create some space and help me buy some time while I take time to organise my business house to get me ready for recruitment?”
And on further conversations with that person, it turns out that they just needed support in doing some of the things that my team and I do on an almost daily basis. So a new package was born.
It’s currently called the Coaches Tech Buddy. And the components of this basically leverages my team. I leverage mine and my team’s time and experience in doing the things that you don’t want to do. As an added bonus, what we’re doing here is we’re actually building the processes and systems through the tasks that we complete so that this person can just transplant them into their business.
Those processes and systems will also form what will be the bulk of the content for the Delegation Mastery Academy in the sense that they’re going to be getting access to SOPs. And those SOPs are the ones that are working for us, getting results for our clients.
Finally, we have the recruitment agency.
Now, the reason why there are all these little bits attached to the recruitment agency is that when I started doing the recruitment agency, all I did was find people and hand them off. I didn’t do any training whatsoever.
I eventually got asked the question, “Hey, I need a person that does x, can you help me?” more and more. And it came to a point when I did a recent guest expert session, the guy who I ended up recruiting for said he was looking for someone to do a specific thing.
I was about to decline, but then I thought to myself that if I can offer to recruit someone to solve a specific problem in somebody’s business, train them up, and give them the SOPs and the processes that they need to carry out their job, then that offer becomes more valuable and harder to say no to for he right prospects.
Not only is that person getting someone to take things off their plate, but they’re also getting access to proven SOPs which become the means of assessing the work that person is doing, all while making it so that you do not have to get involved.
So I thought long and hard about the most refined processes and SOPs that we have.
This is when I decided to offer the following things as a starting point:
- Podcast setup & management
- Advertising setup & management
- System & automation builds
- Blogging & content repurposing
And because I have systems around those, I figure that those are the first four things I can offer to someone.
The idea here is when a prospect says “I’m so busy with my business, I don’t know what I need to do,” we can have the conversation around what they actually want to hand off.
And if what they want to handoff fits into one of the services above, it then becomes a case of “Okay, we can recruit someone for you, but not only are we going to recruit them for you, we’re going to also get them trained up and give them and you the SOPs that they need to do a great job. That way, they work for you and work with you, you have to spend less time training them and spend more time just thinking about the things that you are going to do to grow your business while the thing you’re hiring them for is taken care of to a really high standard.”
And those are the products.
Current Product Situation
As of writing this blog post, in terms of the minimum viable product, Coaches Tech Buddy and the recruitment agency are two products that actually have customers and people my team and I are currently serving.
For the Delegation Mastery Academy, the front-end products, they’re going to take a little bit of work and time to build. But once they are set up, they become a funnel that generates prospects and clients that then become customers, who then go on to become high ticket purchasers.
We then have the newsletter to build that know, like and trust.
The big thing to be aware of, really, is the fact that based on what my team and I have in the Customer Journey Map, we have actually created an ecosystem or a business model that feeds almost directly into this ecosystem or ladder.
This is probably not going to be the final version of everything, however. I am currently still in the stage of doing the work before the work and I just wanted to document everything for you.
When working on your systems, processes, and business model, you have to think about how everything works, and how everything is connected to each other. That way, you can actually make offers like I have and build things to prove your concept and then obviously, grow and scale from that point on.
So that was everything as far as the product is concerned.
In terms of the next steps, I think what needs to happen next is I’m going to be working to figure out the numbers of everything.
There are some preliminary numbers in the ecosystem as you have seen in the images above. But more than the numbers of the products and services that we are going to sell, I also have to think about the number of customers I can serve.
This is in terms of what my stretch point will be and what my breaking point will be so that as we start marketing and establishing baselines and targets that we want to work towards, the reality of the situation will actually give us the real life numbers so that we know clearly what levers to pull whenever it comes to growing and scaling this bad boy.
And that is it for this relatively short blog post.
I hope you enjoyed reading this and I will see you in the next one.