In today’s episode, I’m going to be busting some myths about signature offers!
If you’ve always wanted to have a signature offer, you’ve got one but it’s not converting, or you’re still in the throes of trying to perfect your signature offer, this is going to be a super helpful episode for you.
Let’s dive in!
First and foremost, what is a signature offer?
Your signature offer is the thing that you are known for.
It’s your deluxe offer, the big outcome you’re presenting, and the core of what you do in your business. It could be a group program, it could be one-to-one sessions, and it could change and grow as your business changes and grows.
But it’s your core offering. It’s the thing that you spend the most time on in your year marketing (hopefully), and it’s the thing that you are known for.
Today I wanted to bust some myths about signature offers… specifically, what it takes to have a signature offer, what you need in the signature offer, and how to sell a signature offer.
When I ran my Craft and Sell your Signature Offer workshop earlier this year, people were bringing some really strange beliefs to me, so I thought it’s time for some myth-busting…
Myth 1: Not ready to have a signature offer
“I haven’t worked with enough clients. I haven’t got all of my ducks in a row. I’m not 100% sure what my signature offer should be.”
This is actually a myth.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been in business for one minute, one year or one decade… you are ready to have a signature offer.
In fact, it should be the first offer that you work on and craft when you’re creating your business.
As I said, it might change over time.
My first signature offer was a six-month VIP mentoring package. My signature offer now is the Take Off program.
It doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with that signature offer for the rest of your business. It doesn’t mean that you’re locking yourself into something for a very long period of time.
It’s just that this is the thing that you are focused on – this is what you want to become known for.
It allows you to focus on core outcomes, transformation, and the big changes that you help your ideal clients achieve.
Don’t tell me that you’re not ready for a signature offer yet. There’s actually nothing you need, except to craft and start selling your signature offer.
Myth 2: Need to build things in advance before you start selling
This is not true. You don’t need a sales page to sell a signature offer. You do not need an audience to sell your signature other.
The first sale of my signature offer happened when I had about six followers on Facebook. And two of them were family members.
You don’t have to have a huge following on Facebook in order to be allowed to promote a signature offer.
You don’t need a mailing list, and you don’t need followers.
All you need is to know what the offer is and a way to get it in front of some people who might be your ideal clients.
That could involve emailing old work colleagues, it could involve posting about it in Facebook communities, or it could involve putting it up to your ten followers on Instagram.
You do not need a large audience.
You don’t even need more than three people in your audience.
In order to sell your signature offer, you definitely DON’T need:
- Email sequences
- Funnels
- Workbooks
- Modules
- Bonuses
Signature offers can be as simple as offering someone six one-to-one sessions that will take them from X to Y.
That’s all signature offers need to be.
It does not need to be complex. It does not need to be pre-recorded. And it does not need to be a perfectly sequenced thing that takes people through the perfect 108 steps.
There is not a lot that you need to build in advance in order to be ready to have a signature offer.
Myth 3: A signature offer has to be a leveraged product
This one was surprising to me because I talk so much about VIP one-to-one as being the first big signature thing that you do in your business.
When I was talking about this in my recent workshop, quite a few people said were talking about how they thought signature offers had to be a course, group program, mastermind, or some other leveraged product.
That is absolutely not true.
Your signature offer can be VIP one-to-one work with you that is completely bespoke to the individual who comes and buys it.
You definitely do not need to have anything built in advance. And you can absolutely deliver it one-to-one.
In fact, I would say that a lot of my clients still have a one-to-one offer as their signature offer.
They’ve got group programs. It’s not because a one-to-one offer is the only thing they have. It’s because their VIP one-to-one work makes the most money and it’s the thing that they most focus their marketing on.
They launch their group program or membership a couple of times a year. But otherwise, they’re focused on bringing people into that signature offer.
It’s the most profitable, it makes the most money, and it’s the easiest for them to sell. Why wouldn’t it be their signature thing?
Myth 4: You can only have ONE signature offer with ONE version of copy to sell it
I see this so often. People think they can only have one signature offer ever, and they use the same copy in their emails, in their webinars, in their posts on social media, and in their videos.
They just say the same offer over and over again.
No way!
My signature offer right now is the Take Off program.
I have been really focusing my energy and attention on refining, rebuilding and promoting the Take Off program for a very long time.
It is my core thing. If I can’t launch anything else for the year, I don’t care as long as I can launch the Take Off program.
It is the highest income generator in my business.
That being said, I do also have other programs and offers of ways that people can work with me. Take Off is just the thing that I’m most known for.
It doesn’t have to just be one offer. You can have three signature offers if you really want to.
More importantly, don’t just use one version of copy.
The Take Off program has 34 different copy versions for social media alone.
Every time I relaunch the Take Off program, I write new promos.
I do repurpose some of the old ones as well, but I’m adding to my bank of different ways that I talk about the Take Off program moving forward.
That means that when I’m promoting the Take Off program, I can address different angles, different objections, and different desires that my ideal clients have.
I have eight different webinars and two different challenges that are used to sell the Take Off program.
I am refining down to which ones I use the most consistently, but I’ll often move one out and move one in, based on:
- The current trends that I see online
- The thing I’m most passionate about talking about at that particular point in time
- How it lines up to my podcast content at that time
It’s not about finding that one version of your copy that sells your offer.
Woman typing copy for her signature offers in business start-up
There aren’t magical perfect words that will do the job. That’s not how signature offers work.
Even though your signature offer is the one thing that you’re known for (or the thing that you’re focused on most consistently when you’re launching or promoting your business), you need to promote it from so many different angles.
This is because different personality types are attracted to different language, and you need to speak to different heats of your audience (ie. your cold audience needs far more information than your warmest audience).
On the sales page, you’ll focus on your warmest audience. Whereas on socials, you’re focused on a mix of cold, warm, and hot audience.
You need lots of different versions of copy to sell the same one offer.
Myth 5: You need to have a step-by-step perfect process mapped out in advance
If that were true, how would you know it was the perfect sequence? How would you know that you had it right and that you’d get people results?
No great offer was built in theory.
When I first started promoting my six-month VIP mentoring package, I assumed we’d work on certain things in a certain way and in a certain order.
I assumed that people would need a few key things set up for their businesses:
- Content
- Clarity on niche
- Clarity on messaging
- A great offer
- How to actually attract leads
- Sales conversations
I had a bunch of things that I knew people needed to have all sorted in order to have a successful online business.
But every single person came with different skill sets, different levels of experience, different niches, and different marketing models.
I needed to be able to adapt to what it was that they needed.
I also needed to make sure that I was flexible through the process if they got particularly stuck on something.
The reason why a lot of people don’t have a signature offer yet is because they don’t know what exactly they’re going to cover in the exact ten calls they’re going to have with their client.
All you need is:
- To know you’re getting people from A to D
- Some rough steps of what you think people are going to need throughout the process
- The ability to adjust and refine based on the individual in front of you (when delivering)
This is particularly important when your offer is one-to-one.
That’s why people want to work with you one-to-one. They believe that by working with you one-to-one, you will meet their exact needs, not just tell them to follow some random 13-step process.
You do not need it mapped out step-by-step in advance in order to have a signature offer.
Myth 6: Don’t tell people the price until you’ve got them on the sales call
BLEEHHHHH! I do not like this strategy.
If I don’t know the price of something, I will not book a sales call to talk to someone about that thing.
What if I expected the price to be $5,000, and I hop on a sales call with them to talk it through, and then it turns out to be $25,000?
I don’t have the budget for that.
There’s no amount of sexy pain-point tickling that you can do that will change my mind about how much I’m willing to invest in that thing.
In fact, wouldn’t you prefer not to waste your time having calls with people for whom they think the price is going to be something and then it ends up being something totally different?
I’ve actually also had the opposite as well.
There was a copywriter who didn’t have their prices clearly mapped out. They seemed to be very successful and well-known with a lot of testimonials, so I was assuming that I was going to need to invest about $3,000 for the project that I wanted to do with them.
We got on the sales call (this was before I swore off sales calls when I didn’t know the price), and I had a chat with them and was getting really excited… but then I started to think that they didn’t really know what I was talking about. And then I found out the price was $555.
I realised that we obviously weren’t on the same page about the scope of this project, so I didn’t purchase.
I felt like my time had been wasted.
If I had seen when they were advertising that their copy packages were $555 for this particular project, I wouldn’t have signed up for a sales call.
It was far too low for the comprehensive project that I wanted them to help me with.
Sometimes it works that way as well. But in all cases, just be upfront and transparent about your prices for your signature offer.
Talk about your offer price proudly.
What is the reason for keeping the price a secret? Generally, the motivator is fear.
You’re afraid that if you tell people the price upfront, no one will book a sales call with you.
To that I say that if the price is stopping people from booking a sales call with you, you don’t have a price issue, you have a value proposition issue.
Be transparent in the pricing of your signature offers.
Just tell people what it is upfront.
You can tell people before they book a call to discuss it with you, you can share it when promoting the offer, or you can put it on the sales page.
Put it wherever you’re promoting your VIP offer.
You don’t always have to say the price, but I do say the price as much as I can. If I don’t have the price on an offer, it’s usually because I’ve forgotten to put the price on that offer.
As soon as someone asks me what the price is, I realise I’ve missed it and just edit that content to include it.
I love transparency in pricing.
I think it’s really empowering for me, and it’s really empowering for my audience.
If at any point I feel like I need to keep the price a secret, I have an issue, not my audience.
Myth 7: You need to bridge the gap with a low-ticket offer
Often people think that since a signature offer is generally high-ticket, they have to bridge the gap by getting people to buy a low-ticket offer before upselling them into their signature offer.
This is a really big myth that I want to bust today because it’s something that I hear a lot.
They think that the jump between coming to a free webinar and investing $5,000 in their signature offer is so big that they need to sell their potential client something for $500 first.
In my experience, not only in my business but also in my clients’ businesses, when there’s a low-ticket bridging offer, it delays people committing to the signature offer.
In the Take Off program, I used to have a lower-cost program called Lean Startup School.
If someone joined Lean Startup School, it took them four times as long to join the Take Off program (if they ever did), compared to someone who just came to a webinar and saw the Take Off program as the offer.
Before I started Lean Startup School, I already had the Take Off program.
My webinars for Take Off were converting at about 9%.
After starting Lean Startup School, my Take Off-specific webinars, which a lot of Lean Startup School students were attending, had conversion rates below 3%.
That is no coincidence.
Think about it: If you’re interested in achieving an outcome, and you see that they have a signature offer that costs $4,000, but they also have this stepping-stone offer for $400, which one are you most likely to buy?
Let’s be honest, most people will go for the low-ticket offer. There are some of us who would just jump straight to the big thing (#me), but the majority of your audience will probably go for the low-ticket thing first.
But then if they’ve bought the low ticket thing, and they don’t have the outcome because they haven’t finished it, what barrier do they put between themselves and buying the high ticket offer? They’ll say that they won’t buy the high-ticket offer yet because they haven’t finished the low-ticket offer.
See how, by introducing a low-ticket bridging offer, you’re actually delaying and sometimes stopping conversion into your signature offer?
There are times when a bridging offer may be a good idea. There are times when there it’s a good opportunity to have a step up.
I’m not saying it’s a hard and fast rule.
But in most cases, the reasons for wanting to add a low-ticket bridging offer will not fix the problem that you have.
Many people have a conversion issue with their signature program, and they think that they need to nurture with a low-ticket bridging offer.
The problem is often not that the price is too high. Usually, the problem is that you’ve got a value proposition issue. You’re not demonstrating the value effectively enough, and that doesn’t get solved with a low-ticket bridging offer.
If you’re thinking that you need to add a low ticket bridging offer, I want you to ask these questions:
1. Why do I think I need this?
2. What evidence do I have that this will increase conversion into my signature offer?
3. If buying this low-ticket bridging offer delays people purchasing my signature offer significantly, am I okay with that if it’s solving the current problem I have?
Really consider a low-ticket bridging offer. I’ve seen people break their signature offer by introducing something low-ticket in between.
I just really, really want you to consider it before adding it in.
It’s built on so many false assumptions.
It’s a sexy strategy for marketers to sell to you because they can sell you low-ticket offers. However, they’ve got a significant ads budget to be able to make thousands of sales of those low-ticket offers.
Part of the strategy with a lot of those marketers is to make sure that the low ticket offer is a 30-minute completion rate that doesn’t necessarily get you the outcome so that they can do the hardcore convincing sales as soon as you’ve purchased it.
The only reason they put a price on their bridging offer is so that it can fund more and more of their Facebook ads.
For most people that I work with, that strategy is not accessible to them because they don’t have the initial Facebook ads budget to be able to make it work, AND it makes them feel so yucky in creating a low-ticket product that doesn’t actually deliver the outcome that it promises.
They also don’t want to create seventeen spammy follow-up emails to send in the six days after it’s purchased.
Some of those low-ticket strategies are all-or-nothing.
You need to use the entire system in order to make it work. You can’t just pluck and choose the bits that you think are going to work for you and that feel comfortable for you.
In a lot of cases, it’s the heart-centred entrepreneurs who end up damaging their business cash flow in the short term and reducing the conversion rates of their signature offers by introducing this little part into their strategy.
Myth 8: Signature offers have to be over a certain price point
I have a client whose signature offer is $500.
It is a semi-connected delivery in the process of doing that program with her, but she makes $20,000 to $30,000 a month with a $500 product.
It’s her signature thing, it’s what she’s known for, and it doesn’t have to cost over a certain amount of money.
There are people whose signature offer is a membership for $29 a month. Or their signature offer is a self-study program that costs $197.
It doesn’t have to be a significant amount of money.
It doesn’t have to be over a certain amount of money.
When I was running my signature offer workshop, so many people kept saying that another person said their signature offer HAD to be at least $5,000, and if it wasn’t, then it wasn’t worth their time.
That’s not true!!
It’s this all-or-nothing thinking that can sometimes stop people from getting their first signature offer sold. It stops people from getting those clients in the door and refining and making sure their value proposition is nailed so they can increase the price over time.
My six-month VIP coaching and mentoring package was $2,500 when I first started offering it. That included twelve one-to-one sessions working with me (some of which were two to three hours).
It was more than twelve hours of my time. Nowadays, if people want to do that same level of work with me, it’s over $50,000.
Just because it started at $2,500, doesn’t mean I’m stuck there forever.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been able to deliver that offer and sell it to people at a much lower price when I first started out because it’s those people that I got the opportunity to really build my strengths and processes with, and really see what the common things were that people got stuck on.
In the first couple of years of my business, anytime my VIP clients asked me for a template or training, I would create one. It was my content fodder.
It was how I created freebies, podcast episodes, and content.
If they needed it, chances are that my ideal clients who aren’t working with me yet need it too. Why not make that part of my content and the way that people get to know me online?
You can absolutely start at the smallest price you want to. There are no hard and fast rules with this.
Do not buy into some of those weird blanket rules that people seem to be throwing out there on the internet.
Lots and lots of people are picking it up and carrying it around as though it’s gospel. It is totally not a thing.
You can price however you want to price.
You have a big permission slip from Aunty Tash to price your signature offers however you want!
There you have it… those are eight BUSTED myths about signature offers:
1. Not ready to have a signature offer
2. Need to build things in advance before you start selling
3. A signature offer has to be a leveraged product
4. You can only have ONE signature offer with ONE version of copy to sell it
5. You need to have a step-by-step perfect process mapped out in advance
6. Don’t tell people the price until you’ve got them on the sales call
7. You need to bridge the gap with a low-ticket offer
8. Signature offers have to be over a certain price point
Please feel free to slide into my DMs on Instagram or Facebook and tell me: Which of the eight signature offers myths have you bought into? Which ones were you letting stop you from having the signature offer that you really wanted to have?
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast where we busted some myths about signature offers.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
