Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:

There is so much pressure online to find the one perfect offer and go all in on it. But the truth is, there are many ways to build a sustainable business that works. And this episode will help you trust the path that fits you best. Welcome to the Soulful Sales Show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. So today I’m going to talk about something that I know a lot of us wonder about, which way we should go, and that is deciding whether to go all in on one signature offer or to create a whole suite of multiple offers and products. And I know that just like anything in business, we can often question our decision even if we have already made it. So I hope that this conversation will help you feel confident in the route you have chosen.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:02]:
Now, I’m sure we’ve all seen those business owners that have the one signature offer. The one that always comes to mind for me when talking about this subject is Denise Duffield-Thomas, who has her Money Bootcamp. She has been running that Money Bootcamp for years and years. I mean, I joined it in 2017, I think, which feels like ages ago in internet terms, and it had already been around for a few years before that, and she is still selling it. She has updated it, but the core content is the same, and she launches it on a regular basis, the same offer all the time. One of the things that I have heard Denise talk about, and I really admire her as a business owner, by the way, is her guiding mantra, which is, ‘All roads lead to bootcamp,’ which means that she knows that however she is showing up online, whatever other offers she is putting out there, she knows that ultimately what she is selling is her money boot camp. That is what she wants to get people into. And I feel like there’s something really, like, really compelling about that, isn’t there? About the simplicity of that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:15]:
Just having your core offer, knowing what you are doing, and launching it and relaunching it, working with people in it for many, many years. Like, wouldn’t it be the dream to have that signature offer that just works in multiple ways. It works for the clients and it works for you to sell it. However, I don’t think it works like that in reality for many of us. I think that also it requires a lot of focus. It probably gets to be feeling kind of boring as well over time, and it’s not always easy to know which one offer is gonna work, and that really is the key thing. Now, when it comes to the multiple offers approach, I think that this is actually more common behind the scenes for business owners. The reason we may not see it as more common is that— is the key point that I want to make around this is that so many of our offers don’t do as well as we think, right? But it’s really important actually to have offers that don’t do well Well, it’s not necessarily important that they don’t do well, but it’s important to test multiple offers.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:30]:
And that, I think, is the reason why I am still really, really encouraging of all my clients, and I practice this myself, to have multiple offers, because that is how we test the waters. That is how we figure out what our audience wants. That is how we learn the best messaging to sell our offers, the best positioning, what our audience needs and desires and how we help them best and what we enjoy doing in our work as well. It’s also a way to make more money from each customer because we have multiple ways for them to work with us, and it is definitely true that it is easier to make sales to existing customers than it is to make sales to new customers, which obviously, of course, involves constantly growing your audience as well. So I do think that there are many, many benefits of having multiple offers in our business, and I’m sure that even people like Denise Duffield-Thomas who very visibly have one core offer. And when I say one core offer, I’m not even meaning that literally, because she does have a couple of small offers that I’ve seen her do, um, but ultimately she leads people into her main, uh, money boot camp. But when we see people like that, what we don’t see is all the behind-the-scenes journey of how they got there. And I’m sure that she sold multiple things before she landed on her money boot camp.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:54]:
I am sure that she did. And I think for me it’s really important to also acknowledge that we all have different brains. We all have different ways that we prefer to work with our clients. Some of us have the right kind of brain to focus on one offer and sell it for years and years, like Denise Duffield-Thomas. And obviously, when an offer is selling well, it definitely gives you that boost to keep showing up to sell it. But there’s a lot of people in my world with ADHD or different ways of thinking that means we want to be creative, we want to play, we want to get distracted sometimes. I think the key question to ask yourself is, do I really want to only do one thing? It can be tempting if things are not going the way you would like them to, to think it’s because you’ve made a big error in one key decision like this, like, oh, I shouldn’t be doing multiple offers, I should just focus on one, or vice versa. When the thing is, it’s not about one or the other.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:52]:
There are clear examples of business owners who are making it work either way. There business owners with the one signature offer, and there are business owners with a bunch of offers, and they are making it work because they’re choosing the business model that is right for them. And I think that is the key for me in my business. I know that working behind the scenes for ages on one signature offer would not have allowed me to create what I have created in my business. Putting out smaller offers, creating a bunch of different offers, experimenting, playing doing it all imperfectly is probably the only way that I could have made it work for my brain. And when I think of it that way, it’s not a choice of should I have gone down the one signature offer route or should I be doing all these multiple offers? It’s more a choice of which is the way that is going to work for me. And that’s not to say that things might not change for me over time. Of course things might change, but I would not have been able to get to where I was now without allowing myself to create multiple things and also retire multiple offers over time when I’ve realized they’re not right for me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:03]:
Either they’re not right for me or they’re not selling or both. Um, that is a huge part of the journey as well. Now, there is one specific area where I see people getting trapped that I don’t think is working for them when they have the multiple offer type business, and that is when you are focusing on very, very low ticket items. Like $9 offers. I’ve seen a lot of people— I guess it feels safe for whatever reason to charge low and to churn out $9 products, but it is very, very hard to make a sustainable income if that is the only kind of price point you have for your offers and you’re churning out those kind of low-ticket offers. Very, very hard. Those offers have a purpose. They’re kind of like, they’re kind of like a lead magnet, except you can get paid for them, but they’re not the main core of your business unless have a very, very, very large audience, it is very hard to build a sustainable business when you are pricing that low.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:08]:
Really, really important to consider all different price points in your offer ecosystem, even if you have multiple offers. So having a multiple offer business is not an excuse to undercharge. Very, very important. And the way that I see it in my business, because I do have a lot of offers, and I definitely will retire some of them and probably bring it back down a bit just to make it feel manageable in my head and just to trim out the offers that aren’t really doing much for my business anyway. And I will decide that based on facts and numbers, very importantly. But the way I see it in my business is that I have multiple offers and I have multiple ways in, multiple ways that people can become a customer of mine, can get an experience of working with me and then that’s kind of like, if we’re thinking of like a pyramid or, you know, a funnel, the broadest part of it is all these different offers and the probably the lower cost ones, and then it gets narrower and narrower towards the top, which the way the place that I funnel people to is to my membership, the Soulful Sales Society, which is a low-cost offer but it is recurring income. And then right at the top, I now have an all-access pass, the Soulful Business School, which has been really key for me in bringing all of these offers together under one roof and having a higher-priced offer that I can sell on the back end. And I think that was the missing piece for me in my business ecosystem for a while, because in the past I would have these lower-priced offers and I would funnel them into the membership, and I would have more coaching clients, which was the higher ticket.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:50]:
And then when I stopped working with as many coaching clients deliberately for my own health and energy reasons, I really felt lack of a higher priced offer, it made it a lot more, a lot harder to reach my income goals. It meant that I had to reach a lot more people with my lower priced offers. So knowing that I can funnel them into something higher priced is a very, very helpful and kind of essential for my business ecosystem. So I really want to be clear, you absolutely have permission to have a multiple offer business if that’s the way that works for you, but what I don’t want you to do is hide behind $7, $17, you know, low cost offers thinking that if you just churn out enough of them, you’re going to make thousands and thousands a month, because it’s very, very hard to get there unless you have a really, really huge audience. Okay, so what I would suggest is instead of obsessing over finding your one right offer, the one offer that’s going to make you millions and it’s going to do everything for you, and that’s the one thing you need to focus on— instead of obsessing over finding that, be open to it happening, of course, think more about a direction that you want to take people in. So if they do come into your world through one of a variety of lower ticket offers, where would you love that next step of them working with you to be? Would you love them all to go to your membership? Would you love them to become one-to-one clients? I mean, there’s probably multiple steps on the way to becoming one-to-one clients, but if you’re really clear on that direction, that’s how you can bring what can sometimes feel like a bit of a random assortment of offers, that’s how you can like bring them together under one umbrella and be more strategic about the way you’re inviting people to step up and work with you at every level. And that’s also where you have opportunities to bring in what I call soft selling. This is something I talk about in my Soulful Sales Society membership, to link one offer to the next in a really natural way, not a pushy way.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:48]:
But, you know, if someone’s just done a workshop with you about one specific strategy, you say, hey, by the way, ‘Hey, if you want to go deeper on this, or if you want to do the next, like, the complementary strategy, or, you know, or you want my eyes on your work and to work together one-to-one, here’s the next step.’ And you want to be soft selling between your offers so that each, each of the offers in your ecosystem does become part of a true ecosystem. Like, in my mind right now as I’m speaking, I’m kind of imagining like a spider’s web actually connected by all these different strands. All the offers are connected in a certain way. They all do a very specific individual thing. Each one has a specific boundary, tangible outcome that helps the overall promise of the work that you do with your people. So let’s say in my business, I help people to sell in alignment with their energy, personalities, and values. There are many, many different ways in which I can help people do that. I can help people write emails without stress.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:50]:
I can help people sell softly in their offers. I can help people do laid-back launches. All of these are points on this spider web and they’re all connected. And then at the inside is my membership, my all-access pass, my one-to-one coaching. The, the kind of places where I would love to lead people to from those outer offers. Yeah, hopefully that metaphor makes sense. But yeah, think of it like a spider web. I actually hate spiders.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:15]:
So I was actually just gardening before I recorded this episode and I had a real jump scare where there’s a spider crawling around my seed tray. Um, yeah, hate spiders, but definitely going for the spider web approach in my offer ecosystem. So yeah, that is the goal. The goal is not to force yourself to have one offer that does amazing and leave everything behind, because in reality, like, none of us can predict which offer that will be without trying, without putting things out there and gathering data. If down the line you have enough data and you want to go down that route, then that is fine, although I always think it’s good to not have all your eggs in one basket. But totally, yes, you can go down that route based on data. But for now, do what works for your brain, do what works for your business, and, and set the goal to link together all your offers in a cohesive ecosystem that leads to a higher priced offer in the back end that will make your business sustainable in the long run. And by the way, the Soulful Sales Society membership— my Soulful Sales Society membership is the place to be to create the structure that links all these offers and ties them together in the ecosystem and helps detach your sales from the specific energy that you are putting into showing up at any given moment.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:34]:
So if making more sales with less direct fixed energy to show up sounds good, go check out the Soulful Sales Society at ruthpoundwhite.com/sss. And yeah, I hope that this episode has shown you that you get to do it your way. It’s totally okay to do it imperfectly. And once you start tying all those offers together, they won’t feel so messy anymore. They are all an important part of the overall ecosystem. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community at ruthpoundwhite.com/community.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:18]:
Community, or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/membership. And keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.