For ten minutes I had been asking questions steadily of someone who had filled out one of our Readiness Assessments. I learned about many different aspects of her business fairly rapidly, and there were a few points I gave her about how to make her business more profitable, fairly easily.
The one I want to share with you today has to do with making longer offers. Meaning, make your offers last longer. Instead of a single session, make it 8 sessions, for instance. Instead of a 4 week class, make it a 4 month class.
This is a surprisingly simple thing that people ignore, avoid, or just don’t think about, but it can make a HUGE difference in how sustainable your business is.
In fact, there are three reasons you should make longer offers. (1) For your clients’ benefit, (2) for your own benefit, and (3) for profitability.
Why Longer Offers Help Your Clients
The poor clients! They are struggling with something you can help them with, and, with few exceptions you know, deep in your heart, that it’s going to take awhile for them to make real progress.
Health, business, relationships, work, whatever you’re helping them with, it’s rarely a one or two shot deal.
So why be so parsimonious in handing out the help? I remember a health care practitioner I was seeing, and I asked, “So, what’s it going to take?” And she said, “Well, you can come in again if you want.”
I shook my head, “I don’t know what it’s going to take. You’re the pro. What’s going to get me healthy?”
She took a breath, looked right at me, and without pausing said, in a much stronger voice, “I want to see you weekly for two months, then twice a month for awhile, and we’ll see where you are.”
Ahhh… relief. There’s a mistaken belief that you are “empowering” your clients if you give them the choice of when and how often to come in. The client doesn’t experience it that way. The client experiences it as abandonment. You know what I need, but you’re not telling me. And it feels miserable.
Why Longer Offers Help You
You get to work with clients for longer, more consistently! You get better at what you do more quickly, because you are tracking progress and working with someone more long-term.
I can help clients make progress more rapidly than when I was a beginner at this, because I’ve worked with folks for months, years sometimes, and seen how they progressed. I learned the “shortcuts” and other insights.
Plus, it’s so much more relaxing when you have longer-term clients or course participants. Instead of spending all your time every single week enrolling new people who come for a session or a one-day workshop, you can relax, knowing your schedule is full for awhile, and bring your creativity to both your client work and your next steps in developing your business.
Why Longer Offers Are More Profitable
Profitability comes from repeat business. Because it takes a lot of trust-building to have someone new feel safe enough to start with you, it’s so much better when someone who already trusts you just keeps coming.
A client, a holistic health care practitioner, was working just one session at a time with clients. She would manage to enroll 3-4 new clients at a talk she gave- which is amazing, by the way. But they stayed such a short time, that by the time she gave another talk a month later, all those clients were gone. So she never had more than 4 clients at a time.
Instead, when her clients started to stay for 4-5 months, because they needed to and she had them make the commitment, the marketing built on itself. The first talk yields a few clients, the next talk yielded a few more, referrals bring a few more. They trickled in, but because they weren’t leaving, within a few months she had 14 regular clients.
WAY more profitable, more fun, and less exhausting than only 3 or 4 clients. And the help she was able to give was so much more effective for folks. Do you think that further helped her referrals?
Are your offers long enough to be profitable and in service to your clients? Are you reluctant to have longer offers? Let’s discuss it below in the comments!
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It’s rare to see a combination of spiritual healership AND deep understanding and excellence in business operations AND a top-flight team builder and manager.
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He has the exact same spiritual healership training that I’ve had. He’s also one of the nicest, big-hearted people I know.
Although he has deep experience helping business owners with big visions make those visions real, he’s new in his role as a practitioner working with clients here at Heart of Business. The only thing that means is that his price for individual coaching is lower, compared to me, Jason or Yollana, who have much longer tenure here in that role.
He has a few openings. He doesn’t take on a full client load because we need him in his position as Business Director of Heart of Business. But I bet he could help you and your business a whole lot.
Why not take a look at his profile, then if it resonates, schedule a conversation to see if it’s right to work with him?
Check him out: Lincoln Wachtel
11 Responses
What do you suggest offering as the 4 months comes to an end…a retainer? Ideas welcome! Thanks Mark.
Hi Nancy- it so depends on your business. It could be a repeat of the four months. Our individual clients work with us sometimes for years, in 6 month increments. It could be a retainer- and again, for a set period of time. What are your thoughts about it?
I work with people over 6 months and most renew, then when the second period is up I would love to offer them something fresh but really they do continue to evolve. I have been thinking of a retainer, but not really clear on how that would look, and work.
Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks Mark!
I don’t know if it needs to be “fresh.” I would recommend setting up expectations with them from the get-go that clients sometimes stay with you long past the six months. If they want to continue working with you, make it easy- and not necessarily complicate it with another offer to consider. When my clients and I reach the six month mark, there’s often a 2 minute conversation that consists of, “Yes, let’s keep going!” 🙂
I don’t know your business well enough to offer advice on how to create a retainer package here in the blog comments. 🙂 The thing to do is to look at what your client needs and how you can provide that. I know that sounds very simplistic, but really sitting and looking from the client’s point of view is something many people miss.
Thanks so much, simple is best and your suggestion makes sense, the six months doesn’t need to be a line in the sand, rather an easy way to get deep work done.
Thank you for this timely topic, Mark, it’s totally what I’m up against right now. I’m planning to offer new patients a package of 4 sessions at a discount from my per-session price, as a way to set the intent of commitment to each other and to their healing process, but I’m struggling with the logistics. It seems to make good sense to ask people to make these appointments in advance so we have them on the calendar, but should they pay upfront for any of them? I see this is conflating two issues a little but do you or anyone else have any guidance around how to go forward with this plan? Thank you very much.
Hi Liz- great question! I think it’s okay to conflate logistical issues, like scheduling and payment- just details to handle. The big issue is the commitment, not the payment as much. If people think, “I’m committing to this, and I get to pay in payments.” Is different than someone thinking, “I just paid for a session, and I get to/have to decide whether I’m going to pay for another one.”
Offering payments can make it much more accessible to folks, so that’s something we do in our business.
Great article as usual Mark! Have you any examples of copywriters/designers using longer offers? My work is very much project based/ad hoc but I’d like to make it more sustainable. Thanks!
A great question! If clients have ongoing copywriting needs, you could create a retainer. Or you could do a “copywrite” review of all their materials and make a proposal for a clean sweep through everything that they have and things they might need over the next six months to a year. If you really get into their business with them and do an assessment, you could probably find lots of places you could help beyond the original project.
Excellent idea. TBH this happens anyway but I love the idea of formalising/packaging it. THANK YOU!
This article is VERY helpful Mark. I’ve been having great success with offering deep discounts for 2 lessons a week, my students are CLEARLY retaining skills much more quickly when I work that way. The interesting thing is that they can’t, or don’t end up, sustaining that effort and scaling back to once a week. They stop studying after about 30 lessons. Their life changes drastically, they are overjoyed, and leave a LITTLE too soon (in my opinion). This is a new offer for me – just the last 6 months – so perhaps I will see them returning when they need more support in the future. Just curious any thoughts you have about this offer and how I can let them go joyfully, yet make sure they know they are always welcome. I really DON’T want them to be dependent on my, I want them to fly away free if you know what I mean. In the past my practice was really more like this: someone would come, purchase 4 lessons, and then just keep coming for 7 – 10 years! Now that batch of long-term students has all left my practice, a few of those folks come back for short 1 to 10 lesson refresher courses of study.