Transcription
Stop selling services and start selling outcomes instead. This is absolutely one of the biggest issues that I see people making time and time again when it comes to running an online service-based business. Whether you're selling courses, or coaching programs, or agency services, or consulting, it is the same across the board.
Now, why should you listen to me about this? Because I rebuilt my entire business from the ground up back in September of 2024. And within 3 months of launching, we generated $145,000 in sales, starting that business from scratch purely because we set up our business in the right way. And the biggest part of that is we curated our offer to be selling outcomes to our ICP, to our leads, and our clients instead of selling services.
Now, I don't just run my business, but I help other people do the exact same. That's an element of my business, and this is one of the key things that I come back to with my clients time and time again to help them scale their coaching or agency-based businesses. Sell outcomes, not services.
In this video, I'm going to explain exactly why that's such a big issue. I'm also going to give you a free guide in the link down below in the description, which is just step-by-step advice and instructions on how exactly you should be building your offer to make sure that you are selling outcomes and not services. It's the only video I'm going to be advertising this on because it won't really be relevant for anything else. So, if you are interested, head on down to the description, click the link, and just put in your details, and then I'll email the free guide straight to you, no questions asked.
Now, what's the big mistake that 99% of agencies and coaches are actually making that's stopping them from scaling? Well, it's that they are selling active services, or they're selling their time. Let's take an example here like an online coach who's teaching people how to train for a triathlon. And that's a pretty standard offer. There's plenty of people out there. And inside that offer, you might be talking to your clients, explaining how you're going to help improve their swimming technique, how you're going to help them get fitter, how you're going to tell them what equipment they should be investing in and which ones they shouldn't, and then how to prep for a race the night before it actually comes. That's what you're actually going to be selling people, and you obviously want to make a certain amount of money. So, you're going to work out, okay, what do I want to be seeing for this to be a fruitful and successful business for myself? Or maybe you want to make $100,000 a year. You want to work about 40 hours a week, and you want two weeks off full every year. So 40 hours and 50 weeks by $100,000 gives us $50 US an hour.
The way most online coaches are going to be pricing their programs and selling their programs is they're going to think about how much time are they spending with their clients and how much do they want to be charging for their time. If they're spending two hours per week per client and each client is signed for a 12-week program, they might find themselves selling those $50 an hour sessions for $1,200.
Now, your clients, the people you're actually selling to are going to be thinking in that exact same vein as well, right? They're going to be thinking, "How many hours of coaching am I getting? How much does a personal trainer usually charge for an hour in the gym? Is $50 an hour reasonable? If so, then great. I'll go ahead and pay it." And you've signed yourself a client.
When it comes to agencies, people do things in a very, very similar way, but just slightly different. Again, you're going to be selling a service. And for this example, we've gone for a short-form content agency. So, you take long YouTube videos, you clip them up into shorter videos, and then you post them onto TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat and all these other platforms to try and drive more traffic for your leads. How are you going to price your offer? Well, you're going to think, what are our inputs, right? Well, we're paying a video editor to edit these clips together. That's going to cost us $10 per clip. And then we're spending our time to actually go ahead and upload those videos onto social media for our clients. Maybe that takes a total of 2 hours a week. And we're going to charge our time at $50 an hour. So, if we're selling a service to our clients, to YouTubers who want to put their content onto TikTok and don't want to spend any time on it, and they want 30 videos posted onto TikTok a month, that's going to be two a day. That will cost us $600 in editing costs and then $400 in our own time. So, all in all, it will cost us $1,000 to service our clients. Let's go ahead and charge $2,000 on a monthly retainer. So, we get to sit at 50% profit margins.
Now, again, our clients, our leads, the people we're trying to sell this to are going to be thinking about this in the exact same way. They're going to do some calculations, too. They'll do a little bit of research. They'll go on over to Fiverr and they'll see how much an editor is charging to clip up your YouTube videos. Then, they'll consider the time input of managing that editor and uploading the videos. And if it seems like a reasonable offer, sure, they'll go ahead; they'll pay the agency and they'll become a client.
Now, unfortunately, this really doesn't work to build a big successful business. This is fine if you just want to be a freelancer and earn a couple of grand a month, but if you're wanting to get to that 100-grand-a-year mark, you're just not going to succeed like this. And that's ultimately because you are marketing and building your product entirely wrong.
There's a quote here from a guy called Theodore Levitt, a very, very famous Harvard marketer who said, "Sell the hole, not the drill." What does that really mean? It means you sell the outcome that people get from the product, not the features of the product itself. And I'm going to take a really wild example here, like a private school. They're very, very expensive. Usually around about $30,000 a year to send your kid to a private school instead of a state-run one.
Now, why are parents sending their kids to school costing that much? Is it so that they can study Shakespeare and get a really solid understanding of how it works and why the plays are so meaningful and effective and famous? No. It's because the parents want those kids to get better grades and then go to a better university, get a better degree, get a better job, and have a better life. So, what do we see private schools do when they're talking to new parents, prospective customers of theirs? Well, they don't talk about how effective their education is for their kids and giving them a well-rounded life. They focus on the grades that their kids get on their standardized tests. In the UK, that's going to be GCSEs and A levels. In the US, probably SATs or whatever else it is. And then they're going to be talking about which universities their students end up going to. Why do they focus on that? Because that's what the parents actually care about. They want to get their kids the best head start in life possible. They don't actually care about whether or not they have a well-rounded education. Basically, these schools are selling the hole, not the drill. They're selling the outcomes that the parents are looking for for their kids, not the features of how they get them those outcomes. Don't tell people how ergonomic the drill is; tell them how it will put a hole in the wall exactly the right size that they wanted so they can get their achieved outcome.
Now, another really big mistake that I see a lot of people making is they focus on pain. Right? There's this famous bit of advice that you see everywhere. If you want to start a business, find someone who has money and who has pain. Work out how to remove that pain for them and then turn that service into a business. But there is a massive problem with this: this idea of just fixing a single pain point or fixing someone's problem that doesn't always get people to what they actually want because 99% of the time there isn't just one thing that's holding people back from removing that pain or getting to their desired outcome. There are many aspects to it. And so if you're only removing one pain point from someone, you're only fixing one problem. Your client more often than not will still not get the desired outcome that they're actually looking for. They won't be satisfied and happy because they won't be getting what they're actually paying for.
Now, a great example of this with a short-form content agency that we just mentioned earlier is the problem is that YouTubers, right, they aren't making content for TikTok. And so, they're missing out on potential social media growth and potential income for them there in the future. And the desired outcome that that client has is really simple. It isn't actually to be posting videos onto TikTok. It's to make more money. And so, the service that these agencies are providing doesn't actually match with the outcome that the clients want. Right? Just putting clips of a YouTube video onto TikTok isn't going to make you more money. It'll get you views on TikTok without working more hours, but it isn't necessarily going to make you money. And that's ultimately because the agency is selling their service and not an outcome. So, what we're really looking to do here is to sell those outcomes instead.
Let's go back to that triathlon coaching example here. At the end of the day, no one cares if they're swimming in the most efficient way or if they're doing the transition between, you know, getting out of the pool or the lake and going onto a bike in a really efficient way. What these triathletes who are paying coaches are actually looking for is usually they want to either just complete a triathlon and have that as their achievement or they want to complete a triathlon in a certain amount of time. They want a picture of them at the finish line with a big clock saying a certain number above them. So, as a coach, that is what you need to be selling them, right? I will get you a sub-13-hour Ironman triathlon time. Yes, I will get there by focusing on these three core tenants, which is going to be the pre-race prep and the optimal swimming technique and whatever else we want to sell. Those are the features, but our marketing and when we're actually trying to close that deal, we need to be focusing on the outcome we're going to deliver for them. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how you get that client their desired outcome of a sub-3-hour time. All they care about is getting that time. And so the client is buying a sub-3-hour time, and the coach is selling a sub-3-hour time. So there's a perfect synergy between what your clients actually want and what you are selling. That makes it literally 10 times easier to sell these clients, to keep them happy, to make sure they make all their payments or they make it to the end of the program, and for you to get new clients and build a successful business. On top of that, it actually makes your service more efficient as well. Why? Because you aren't wasting your time helping them do something that won't get them to their desired outcome. And they aren't wasting money buying a service that isn't going to get them to their desired outcome.
Now, my favorite example for why this is so difficult for agencies to understand and why it's so detrimental to their performance is actually a real-life agency that I worked with years and years ago. It was actually the first agency I ever worked with. And they made this exact same mistake. I had a YouTube channel with 200,000 subscribers. That's where that is from. I was making about $30,000 a month from it back then, but I was making like a 10-15 minute YouTube video every single day. And I didn't really have time to, you know, move into TikTok to make videos for TikTok or Instagram to grow there. But I had seen that TikTok was blowing up and short-form content in general was blowing up. And one day a random agency guy emails me and he says, "I'll clip up your YouTube videos. I'll post them onto TikTok and Instagram. That will get you more views, more followers. You can send those followers to your YouTube; you'll get more sponsors and bigger sponsors and more YouTube AdSense and you'll just make more money." And so I went ahead, I signed with this agency, I became a client of theirs, and I paid them upfront. But it failed outright, and I got a 0 return on my investment. Why? Because the agency I was working with and I, we both had misaligned goals. The agency sold me a service, clipping up my YouTube videos, putting them onto TikTok and Instagram for me. I, though, didn't actually want the service. I wanted an outcome that I thought the service might get me, which was to make more money from the videos that I was already making every day. Now, actually, the agency fully fulfilled on their promise. Sure, the clipped-up shorts were really bad and they didn't perform well. They didn't grow my following on TikTok or Instagram, and I didn't make any money from them, but that was a short-form agency; nothing else mattered to them. They gave me the service that I bought, and they couldn't really understand why I wasn't happy with the service after two months when I finally churned and I stopped paying them. And even if the agency had done a really good job, which in fairness they hadn't, even if I had been getting millions and millions of views, I still wouldn't have cared about that unless it made me more money. So why, as an agency in that agency, that specific niche in particular, why would you sell anything to your clients that they don't actually care about?
Identify who your ICP is, what their desired outcome actually is, and then get that outcome for your clients using your method. If you're not an agency, maybe you're an online coach or a course seller or a consultant, it really doesn't matter. You still need to be following this very basic, simple principle to sell outcomes to your clients if you want to build that successful business.
Now, unfortunately, it isn't quite as simple as that. There is a very specific process that you do need to follow to get this right. And if you just pick a random outcome right now and you start claiming that you'll get that for your leads or your YouTube videos or your meta ads or your cold outreach or whatever it is, that isn't going to fix your problem; your offer won't actually get people to that outcome because your offer is still focused on the service. All you'll be changing is your marketing. So, your guarantee will kick in, refunds will get sent out, you'll lose money, you'll get bad reviews, you won't be signing many clients, and you still won't grow as a business. And the worst part, you'll come back to this in 6 months and comment on this video saying that I was wrong, but in reality, you just didn't follow my actual advice. You just followed one tiny aspect of it. You didn't put the whole picture together.
And so, to do this successfully, we really have to follow a process, a specific step-by-step process. It starts off with identifying our ICP, our ideal client profile. Then, it comes with identifying our ICP's desired outcome. Then we go on to delivering that desired outcome as efficiently as possible. And then, and only then, do we focus on the marketing, on telling people about this opportunity and how we will get them that desired outcome. Obviously, most people out there do want a shortcut. They want to fix things overnight within 10 minutes, but they aren't even willing to spend a couple of days to do this all right. So they put on band-aids on a sucking chest wound, and it just doesn't fit their business, and then they wonder why their business isn't growing and scaling.
So, if you want my step-by-step free guide teaching you how to effectively sell outcomes, it's 100% free. There's a link down below in the description and in the pinned comment; all you got to do is go down there, click the link, follow the instructions on the next page, and I'll email you the guide 100% for free. You can follow the step-by-step process and you can start building a business, an online coaching business, consulting business, course-selling business, or an agency that actually scales. If you don't want that, then go check out one of my other videos here. I don't know which one's up there, but it's probably a good one because it's recommended to you based on your personal interests.