Brief Overview

Recently, I had clients who were trying to increase their sales, but for some reason everything felt difficult, stressful and exhausting. As hard as they were promoting, nothing was moving the needle like it should have been. Why? Simply because they had too many offers. Chances are, you might be making the same mistake, and in this episode I’ll tell you how to fix it.

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Big Ideas

Are You Confusing Your Audience?  [0:46]

Let’s imagine you are sitting right across from a perfect potential client or customer who has a problem that you can solve. What do you direct them to buy to solve their problem? You might be thinking that it’s a tough question to answer because it depends on the way they want to solve that problem. However, it’s probably a tough question for you because you’ve got a whole bunch of different products or services to offer. And the truth is, you might be confusing your audience if you’ve got way too many offers.

Creating a Clear Path [1:42]

Recently, I had a consulting client who flew in with two of his teammates. We were mapping out their entire product calendar and strategy, but we ran into a problem. It was really hard to keep the calendar clean and simple, because they had too much clutter and too many offers. And having too many offers is not only stressful for you and your team, but it’s also confusing for your customers because they don’t know where to direct their attention. And when they don’t know where to direct their attention, they stay there, not buying, like a deer in the headlights. When there isn’t a clear path to buy, it creates a ton of friction, and people stall. You have to eliminate that friction to make it easy for people. They should know exactly what their next steps should be.

When Everything Is On Sale, Nothing Is On Sale  [3:10]

This happened again when I hosted a mastermind last week. We had Michael and Dez here from Ireland who serve accounts and have a whole bunch of frontend offers. Michael finds himself in a constant promotion mode because he’s trying to get these offers in front of his audience all the time. We were trying to help him simplify the strategy, because when there are too many offers people don’t know what to do and what path to take.

Similarly, friends of our family, Jenn and her husband Keith, run an online ginseng store.

One day Jenn asked me to give her some pointers. I went to her website and I saw that she had a whole bunch of products and everything was on sale. When I asked her whether people are actually buying, she said even though they are, she feels like it could be so much better. I told Jenn that she feels that way because there are too many items on sale, and people don’t know where to put their attention, so it’s not giving her the results she’s expecting to get.

When everything is on sale, nothing is on sale. It’s the same as having too many offers. When people don’t know where to direct their attention, they freeze, and that’s not good for generating sales. I told Jenn to take everything off sale and focus on one thing to promote per week. I also advised her to follow that up with an email campaign that highlighted that one product that was on sale. While she was scared to follow my advice, her sales exploded after she did that.

Identifying Your Primary Offer and Your Customer Path [5:51]

You need to identify your primary offer. What is the primary way that you help your audience? Your primary focus would be the product that you would hang on to if all else were to fail.

After you’ve identified your primary offer, you need to build your product path. This is where you get clear on the path you want your customers to take. What is likely going to be the next offer that will serve your customers in the next stage of their journey?

How We Do It at Tribe [7:12]

With Tribe, we have a clear product path. First, our primary offer is Tribe. But once our customers have experienced Tribe, they experience this incredible community that we have. One of the things we do is encourage everybody who joins Tribe to come to our Tribe live event, because we have this incredible connection during Tribe, and those relationships go to a whole other level. And when those relationships deepen, the community strengthens. And when the community gets stronger, our business gets stronger. You’ve heard me talk about this – deep relationships lead to a strong community, and a strong community leads to a strong business.

After Tribe and Tribe Live, the third offer for us is Tribe Connect. Tribe Connect is a year long program and community for people who want to get their membership sites to the next level. For us, it’s about extending the experience of Tribe from 8 weeks to 52 weeks, and the progress that people make when they’re in that environment is invaluable. With Tribe Connect, other community members hold you accountable, coach you through, and provide you with resources that reinforce what you have learned in Tribe. They help you implement the changes easier and faster all year long.

Nevertheless, there are other offers that are going to be coming off of that. I’ve shared with you that we’re in the midst of our biggest project ever right now, which is the building of our new membership platform called membership.io. We will have that being offered simultaneously, but it will be treated like an entirely separate business. Both people in Tribe and people outside of Tribe will be able to buy membership.io. However, from a marketing perspective, all focus will be driving people to Tribe, our primary offer.

Building Strong Momentum [10:48]

After you’ve identified you primary offer and built your product path, the next thing you want to do is stack the momentum. Nothing frustrates me more from a strategy standpoint than seeing somebody who does a phenomenal launch, phenomenal promotion, builds up all kinds of excitement, and then offers the very next product in a totally different direction.

What you want to be thinking about is how you can carry that momentum you built from one launch into the next. Some of our other offers like membership.io or Tribe Savior, the service that helps recover failed payments, have gone phenomenally well for our clients. And that is a direct result of carrying forward the momentum from Tribe. All of those offers happen on the backend. On the front end, the focus is clear – it’s Tribe.

3 Simple Rules To Reinforce Your Customers’ Buying Journey [12:41]

During that consulting day, it was fun to watch the energy of my client and the team pick up once we identified the primary offer. We began structuring the product path, and finally the calendar started to make sense. It started to get clear in terms of where we should direct the energy and promotional offers.

To sum up, number one, identify your primary product. Number two, build your product path. Number three, stack the momentum. Make sure that whatever that next offer is, it’s going to leverage the momentum that you created before. Get rid of all of those offers that make people wonder where they should go and what they should do. Make it really clear – what is your primary offer? That is where you want people’s attention. And when that happens, you’re gonna see your momentum pick up.

Memorable Quotes

“When there’s no clear buying path, it creates a ton of friction and people stall.” – Stu McLaren

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