Episode 416: How to validate your new offer

Have you got a juicy idea for a new offer that you want to get out to market as quickly as possible? Well in this episode, I’m going to encourage you to hold your horses for just a moment until you can validate your new offer…

How would it feel if you could release your new offer out to market already knowing that your audience will love it, that you’ve got great messaging behind it, and that it’s going to make sales?

That’s the difference between launching a validated offer versus launching a cold offer.

In this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I’m going to walk you through how to validate your new offer so that when you release it to market, you can be confident that it’s going to sell.

Let’s get validating, shall we?

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Before we go into the detailed strategy in today’s episode, I want to acknowledge that at the end of the day, the only way to truly validate whether someone will buy your offer or not, is to offer it to them and see if they buy it.

Ultimately, you can have as many people as you want say that the offer is great and they would definitely buy it… but if you’ve launched offers in the past having had people say they definitely would buy something like that, you’ve probably also experienced the frustration of those very same people not buying it.

True validation comes when people buy it.

That being said, there are different ways to make that offer strategically so that you can validate whether the offer is going to sell more broadly. And you can get partial validation in other ways to give confidence that when you do finally release the offer to market, people will buy it. We can get that confidence first before we release the product.

In this podcast episode, I’m going to talk about the different ways to validate by making sales… and then I’m going to talk about getting partial validation in other ways so that you can increase your confidence that people are going to buy your offer when it is finally released.

First: Let’s talk about validating by making sales.

In that instance, it’s going to be far more valuable to you that your first time making that offer is done one-to-one rather than one-to-many.

When I’m releasing a new product or service, if I want to validate that via making sales, I will first find ways to make the offer one-on-one.

That might be through doing market research, doing interviews, asking people if they would be interested in having a conversation about a potential offer, or reaching out to people within my audience who I think will be interested in the offer, letting them know a few details, and then asking them if they want to jump on a quick call to discuss it.

There are lots of different ways that you can make that one-to-one offer.

The reason why I think that’s so much more valuable is because you’re able to have that feedback loop.

I don’t pitch my offer to someone unless I have qualified (ie. ask lots of questions) and know that they are a good fit for that offer.

I do lots of qualifying when I’m making offers one-to-one – I’m asking plenty of questions to start out with.

Then if it does seem like a good fit and I make the offer but they decide not to purchase, I get feedback from that person about why.

They will often volunteer a reason why it might not be a fit for them. Otherwise, I can ask. I get feedback from them as to why they might not be purchasing that offer, and I can ask a few follow-up questions.

In a lot of cases when I make an offer one-on-one, if it’s a no, it’s usually just a ‘not yet’. Often they have something else to do first, or they need to bring in some money before we can work together.

I always validate people’s reasons. I don’t ever argue against their reason for not purchasing.

Their truth is their truth. Their situation is their situation. I’m not interested in arguing this current lived experience with them. But I might check if they are happy for me to follow up with them a few months later to see how it’s going.

If they have genuinely felt that that was a good fit for them, they will often say yes to that. And so I follow up with them later down the track.

Whilst it might be a “not right now”, I am getting lots of hot leads for that offer into the future.

I do love to validate via making sales. But when I’m validating via making sales, especially if it’s an offer more than $300-$400, I will do that with one-on-one conversations.

If I’m doing it one-to-many instead, I still do some qualifying.

I might do that qualifying (ie. asking questions) by running a survey in the topic area of the offer I’m creating. In that survey, I will often ask them to tick a box if they’d like to hear about my upcoming offer that may be able to support them in that area. I also provide them with the expected price point so that everything is transparent.

If they’ve ticked the box, I will let them know about the offer.

Therefore, they’re still a qualified lead. And because they’ve filled in the survey, I’ve got some insight into why I think it’s a good fit for them and I can incorporate that into the way that I talk about the offer with them.

If you have a super big audience, or you’ve got very high demand for the offer, you can take it straight to market and that will validate that offer via the sales of that offer.

It is a higher-risk strategy, but it’s less work.

It’s a little bit more work to set up a survey or do one-to-one calls first. But it’s far lower risk and far more market insight. And there are far more messaging insights that come from doing it in a one-to-one way or with some qualification first.

However, if you have limited time, and you have either a big audience or a small audience that have been begging you for this offer, then you might decide that it’s worth taking that bigger risk to go straight to market.

An example of this is my IPP Retreat.

The IPP is the Imperfect Post Project. It is a process that I have only previously offered as part of my programs.

I ran the first Imperfect Post Project in the Take Off program in 2023 to resounding success and amazing feedback. I ran it again in early 2024 for people who purchased my Heart-Centred Business Planner to resounding success and amazing feedback.

People who’ve done it through one of those programs, or have heard about other people doing it, have been begging me to do it in a retreat form.

I have had more than a dozen people who’ve asked me for that retreat. At this point in time, I don’t have a lot of capacity to do the one-to-one feedback loop. But I figured that I know the dates I could run a retreat, I have space in 2025 for them, so I may as well stick them out to market and see if there’s any interest.

And I can tell you that those people who begged me to run that retreat have absolutely signed up to have conversations about it or paid their deposit straightaway.

It was a big risk for me to do that. But I already knew there were many people interested.

I even have people who want to be on a follow-up list because they can’t commit to it right now, but as spaces dwindle, they want me to let them know.

Even though I’ve gone straight to market, you can see that it’s not all or nothing. It’s not buy or don’t buy it. It’s buy it, or let me know you’re interested in buying it.

Those people who are interested in buying it but can’t commit right now are on the follow-up list and I can follow up with them and let them know as spaces become more limited. They can make a decision a little bit closer to the time.

Even then I’ve got a little backup.

(If you want to find out more about the IPP Retreat, head to tashcorbin.com/retreat)

You can validate via making sales either one-on-one or with some kind of qualifying before one-to-many, or you can go straight to market.

There are different layers to that.

I want to talk about partial validation. This is something that we do very well inside my Leverage and Launch program and the Accelerator.

The two key ways that I would ascertain partial validation of an offer would be:

1. Do a market research survey

As I mentioned, there are two different types of market research sale that I do:

1. Get partial validation through a market research survey.
2. Qualify hot leads through one-to-one channels because I’m quite sure I have the offer nailed already.

They are two different approaches but it looks like the same strategy on the outside.

I did the market research survey strategy before I launched the Leverage and Launch program, as well as before a previous version of it, which was called Get with the Program.

What I did was I put a survey out to my audience, and I asked four questions about creating online courses:

1. What is your number one reason for wanting to create and launch online courses or leveraged offers in your business?
2. What’s the biggest barrier that’s getting in your way?
3. If I were to create a program that walked you through that process and helped you to get your product out to market and make sales, what would you want it to cover?
4. Do you have any questions for me about creating and launching online courses and leveraged programs?

When I did it for Get with the Program, I was testing to see if there was any interest in me teaching that.

It was a resounding success – over 100 people filled in that survey!

I also asked whether they thought that the price point was a reasonable price to pay to learn the process.

I got quite a lot of insight into the price sensitivity of my market, why they felt that way about the price, and what needed to be included for them to see it as valuable.

When I ask pricing information, I’m not asking for my audience to dictate what the price is that I charge for that offer. I know how to price my offers in a way that I think is a fair exchange for the energy that I’m putting into it, and the transformation that people are experiencing.

I will go through and calculate the return on investment that people will make from completing this process, and then I price my offer at about 10% of that.

If it’s reasonable for people to make $10,000 out of something that I’ve created, and I am confident that 80% of people will make $10,000, I will generally price that offer at around the $1,000 market full price.

I feel super confident with that price.

(I’ve got other content coming out in the future about pricing offers and validating the return on investment, so make sure to keep an eye on the podcast for that.)

I don’t ask questions of my audience about pricing for them to tell me what a reasonable price is for this product, because everyone will always underestimate a reasonable price.

Rather than having everyone’s underestimated price point (because everyone wants a bargain), I ask the question through a certain lens so that I’m getting price sensitivity information and value information as well.

A great example of this was when COVID happened and I was in the midst of a launch of the Take Off program.

I decided to abandon that launch because there was a lot of uncertainty and the biggest piece of feedback I was getting from people interested in the Take Off program was that they didn’t have the confidence to invest in a high-touch long-term mentorship program when they weren’t sure what the future would hold.

The problem that people had with the Take Off program was not necessarily spending the money on the Take Off program, it was committing to a long-term mentorship arrangement.

I decided to abandon the launch of the Take Off program for a little while and do a bootcamp.

It was a five-day event to help people pivot and make sales quickly.

I did some validation at first and a little bit of research on that. In that validation, I said that the price of the bootcamp would likely be around $200.

I had about 300 people comment and give me feedback. The majority of people said they would not pay $200 for a large-scale group program because they wouldn’t feel like they were getting enough feedback from me and it wouldn’t feel very personalised.

That wasn’t telling me that I can’t charge $200 for a group program.

It was telling me that if I was going to charge $200 for a group program, these concerns needed to be addressed.

I launched the five-day business boot camp. It was $195 early bird and $295 full price… and I had over 200 people buy it the first time around. I relaunched it and did it a second time and had another 200 people buy it.

Most of the people who said they would not pay $200 for a large-scale group program purchased it at $195. I didn’t do sneaky discounts or anything like that. They purchased it because they told me exactly why they were afraid of it being a large scale group program, and I addressed those concerns.

They thought that they weren’t going to get enough feedback from me, so I addressed that in the design of the program. I included feedback threads, and I made a guarantee that everyone would get my feedback on their offers. And I provided that feedback.

The design of the process included live training calls, a private community where people could ask me questions, and Facebook Lives where I went through and read out people’s pivot offers, and then provided feedback on those pivot offers.

I also provided structured marketing plans for everyone in that program. I said if that marketing strategy is not a fit for them, then they’ll be able to get my feedback on how to make it work for their strengths and skills.

Because I proactively addressed their concerns about why they wouldn’t want to join a large-scale group program, they bought it.

You can see there that when you ask for pricing insights in a very strategic way, you get great insight.

Don’t just ask what everyone would pay for something and then pick the lowest price.

Don’t derail your cash flow like that. Often you’re underselling, undercharging, and devaluing that program because you are just jumping to the lowest possible price.

Instead, if people lowball you and tell you low prices when you have explained your process and your program, that often is telling you that you haven’t got your value proposition clear enough.

If they’re not telling you why they would value it that way, then you’re not getting any meaningful insight anyway.

Circling back to the topic of this episode (just wanted to cover that point first), when it comes to doing that market research survey, you want to make sure that you’re asking questions that are still going to do some qualification for you.

If you’re doing it just to get that partial validation of whether people are interested in what you may offer, then make sure that you’re asking questions that give you insight into what they’re going to value, what’s important to them, what they need to achieve, and what they’re looking for.

That’s going to give you great messaging insight when you do release it to market.

When you do release it to market, for the love of all things, make sure you tell every single person who filled in that survey about that product when it’s ready.

If they’ve ticked the box to say they want to hear about the offer, then make sure you do that! So many people won’t because they feel like it’s been too long and they don’t want to bother them. They’re making up all these reasons about why they’re not going to follow through on their promise to do what they said they were going to do.

Please make sure that you contact them. 

2. Set up a waitlist

This is the thing that I think we do so well in the Leverage and Launch program and with my VIP clients.

It has actually spawned a new product that I’m offering because it is so valuable as a business owner to know that you’ve got a hungry audience ready to buy something when you’re releasing it to market.

When you do it well, it increases the conversion rate of the final sales that you get when you first launch it.

The way that you engage with your waitlist and the way that you get people on your waitlist is very important strategically.

A lot of people either haphazardly get people on waitlists who aren’t qualified, overcomplicate the process so they lose a lot of leads, or get people on the waitlist and then ghost them and don’t nurture the relationship with those leads.

I usually see a waitlist conversion rate of around 15-20% for students of my Leverage and Launch program, as well as from my own waitlists.

If you have 100 people sign up for the waitlist for something, 15 to 20 of those people will buy when you launch.

There are ways to increase conversion, and there are certain circumstances when it’s far higher.

An example of it being far higher was when I launched my first Udemy course, which was $20 when I first launched it. I had an 85% conversion rate from the waitlist, but that’s because it was super low-ticket and I did a very good job in the lead-up to launching that.

Plus it was a very hot audience who were on the waitlist for that course.

That would be an example of where you see super high conversion rates. But generally speaking, we’re looking at about a 15-20% conversion.

If you promote your waitlist well and you cannot get people to register for the waitlist for whatever that offer is, that tells you immediately there are some issues with the offer.

That is powerful and helpful insight.

And now you can sort that out before you launch it. It’s better to launch a waitlist and get low registrations than to launch a product straight to market and make no sales. (Or worse yet, make two sales of a membership program that brings in $58 a month that you’re running several calls for.)

Having a waitlist, especially for group offers, can be a huge differentiator between a successful launch that’s validated and you have confidence in the numbers that you’re going to get in the first launch, versus having no idea.

An example of this is a VIP client I have who was thinking about releasing a train-the-trainer offer. Let’s say for the sake of the story that she teaches yoga and was thinking about teaching some of her students to teach yoga.

She was considering moving into this in her area of expertise. But it would be a $10,000 offer.

She would need a minimum of around four to six people the first time she taught it.

She was just going to go straight to market with this offer. But I first asked her if she was certain people would be willing to pay $10,000 for this offer, or whether it was just whispers. She acknowledged that it was just whispers at this point.

We decided to set up a waitlist first.

This was for a $10,000 offer. On the waitlist signup page, it said that it was likely to be $10,000. She sent one email to her mailing list of people who had done this other training with her before, and from that one email, she had 46 hot leads register for the waitlist of this teacher training.

I want you to think about the different energy that comes with launching that offer knowing you’ve just got whispers that people might be interested… versus having 46 people already waiting for the offer.

Think about the energy and attention that goes into that launch.

Think about the speed with which that sales page went up. Because it did – it went up so fast once we had those people on the waitlist. We haven’t even finished promoting the waitlist yet she’s already had the first two people sign up for it for next year.

It is by all measures a very successful opening of this offer. She will likely sell out her first teacher training. And it’s really exciting at a $10,000 offer.

This is huge.

I don’t think the same level of energy, enthusiasm and focus would have been applied to this offer if she’d done it through the lens of not being certain how it would be received.

This is where having a really well-executed waitlist that is nurtured effectively and then presented with the offer comes into play.

There’s also one other thing that I do when I set up a waitlist that I think makes a huge difference to my waitlist conversion rate. Whenever someone joins the waitlist for a new offer, I immediately ask them a question.

What that does is it engages them in telling me what they want out of the offer.

They’ve signed up for the waitlist of it so they’re clearly interested. They know what the price point is because I always put the price point on the signup page for the waitlist, and they’ve signed up for it. They’ve given me something very precious to them: their private email address.

As soon as they’ve signed up for it, I ask them a question so that I can ascertain what is it that they want. I ask a different question depending on what the offer and the price point is.

Now the waitlist are actively involved in helping to shape that offer to be something that they want, something that they’re hungry to sign up for and that delivers for them.

That’s very, very powerful.

What a deep and thorough episode on validating your new offer!

A quick recap for you:

There are two core categories of validation:

The first and only true validation is getting people to purchase from you (validating via sales). You can do that one-to-one, you can do that one-too-many with some qualifying before, or you can do it one-too-many straight to the audience.

The second category of validation is partial validation. The two strategies that I talked through today are doing market research through surveys, or setting up your waitlist.

If you are itching to set up your waitlist for your new offer because you can see how valuable it would be for your motivation, as well as getting that valuable insight we talked about today, I have a new exciting offer I want to share with you…

The Waitlist Kit.

I have developed a kit that’s going to help you set up, promote, validate your waitlist and get them on board with helping to shape your offer so that when you go to market, you have an in-demand offer, a hungry waitlist ready to buy, and you know that you’re going to make sales straight out of the gate.

I am launching this at a ridiculously affordable launch price. But here’s the kicker: only for the waitlist!

It’s a waitlist for The Waitlist Kit.

You can jump on the waitlist and lock in the amazing waitlist offer here: tashcorbin.com/waitlist

That kit will be under $100 for our first launch. It includes step-by-step training on how to set up your waitlist, some of the market research insights, and more.

If you’re reading this podcast episode months after it’s released, fear not! That link will take you to the most up-to-date offer.

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.

Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.