The Black Girl Business Bar | When it’s time to change your offer

Have you been having a hard time selling your offer and you’re starting to wonder if it’s time for a change? If so, this episode is for you.

Show Notes

Have you been having a hard time selling your offer and you’re starting to wonder if it’s time for a change? If so, this episode is for you.

I’m discussing the signs you need to be aware of before changing your business and how to make that change seamlessly.

Other resources

The RELEASE Method - 7 steps to releasing your biggest sales blocks + attracting your next client
Book a sales call with Khalida

Creators & Guests

Host

Khalida DuBose

Business + Mindset Coach

Producer

Zuri Berry

Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

Hey friends, Khalida DuBose here. Welcome back to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast.

So I wanna ask you, have you been having a hard time selling your offer and you're starting to wonder if it is time to change it? Or maybe you're a person who has been selling it and you just no longer feel connected to your offer, and you're thinking, you know what, it might be time for me to change this?

If so, if either of these are you, I want you to listen up. This episode could help you to kind of work things out and make sure you don't cause yourself an unnecessary headache.

So what I see a lot in coaching is that my business owners feel like something isn't working, right?

So they're not selling, they're not growing fast enough. Their audience isn't responding. And they're just not sure what they want to do. And so they start to panic and try to fix things that aren't necessarily broken in their business. In other words, they start tinkering and it distracts or confuses them about what the real problem is.

So what they generally do, I see a lot of different tinkering, but one of the main ones that I see is people tried to fix their offer. They think, all right, I got on a call, somebody said no, so it must be my offer. Okay.

So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that today. Quick disclaimer, your offer might be exactly what you need to work on here as well, especially if you're new and you might be doing something like stitching together, your offer on the phone or on the sales call, or you don't really have the exact offer. So every single person you talk to, you offer them something different, right?

So that's gonna drive you nuts because you're gonna be offering everybody something different. Okay. You may need to work on your offer. You might need to sit down and think that through or talk to somebody about that.

So I wanted to make that disclaimer. But for everybody else who has a offer, they're out there marketing it. They might be taking on clients. I want you to think about these things.

Okay, so first off, what do I mean when I say offer? What I mean, I like to make sure we're on the same page. What I mean, when I say offer is I am talking about the service that you are offering people. That simple. So copywriting, editing, coaching, designing, your VA, right? That is the service that you're offering somebody.

Once you determine what you're going to offer people, that broad umbrella of what you're offering, that's when you then usually select a niche and then you create a container. Okay. I wanted to just make sure we're clear on that, right. That that's kind of, those are like three different steps.

Because a lot of what people mean when they say I'm gonna switch my offer or I, I think it's the offer I need to change it is they really mean they want to switch their niche or they really mean that something's up with the container.

So, and for those of you who might not understand the word container, what I mean there is just how you're going to serve the customer. So for instance, me as a coach, when I sign a client, then they work with me for a specific amount of time. I give them certain resources. Et cetera. Right. That's my container. That's what I'm, providing for them in my offer.

All right. So in general, I think people don't really know how to identify when it's time to think about, you know, maybe I should switch this offer up. Right. So I think it's, it's pretty straightforward and straight to the point. When you no longer feel like you wanna do that type of work, that's probably when it's time to change your offer.

Okay. And I'm talking about offer from its broadest point, right? I no longer wanna be a coach. I wanna be something else. Okay. if you're talking about switching your niche, then it would be, I no longer want to work with this type of client or do this type of coaching or this type of copywriting. I wanna transition into something else. So wanted to put that out there.

Or if you wanna work with clients in a different capacity. That would be another time to think about switching around what you're doing. And that could be the niche, or that could be the, the, the offer, depending on what you want to do.

So really some real signs to think about when it's time to change your offer is again, you no longer feel called to do that work. Your priorities have changed. You wanna work with clients in a different capacity. Or if you found out that you're in like a niche or you're in and like kind of an industry where it's really obscure, is super new, and not that many people are doing it. So it's really hard for people to understand what you do.

You're constantly educating people. You know, you're constantly attracting people, but it's the wrong people, because it's really hard to figure out like who this, this client base is for, because it's not your industry's not saturated enough. That might be a time where you want to step back and refine what you're doing and say, you know what, this offer needs to change.

Okay, but there are other times that I see that it's really something else and it's not the offer and people again, they're tinkering and thinking, okay, this is what I wanna change because it's, it just seems easier to switch, switch your offer. Right? So sometimes people are like, it's just not resonating with my audience. I don't think that people understand. They're not able to close their sales. Maybe they're getting people to talk to them, but they're not able to close sales. Or maybe they just think there are not enough buyers because nobody is getting on the phone with them.

I think a quick check on this is to look at your industry. Don't look at what's happening with you, but look at your industry. So I'm in the coaching industry. I would look at coaching. And I would say, okay, the coaching industry is thriving. There's definitely people who work with me. So it's probably not my industry. Then you can look at your niche if you want. Business coaching also is thriving. There's a lot of business coaches out there. People understand business coaching. Okay, so it's probably not my niche either.

You might wanna start looking at things like your messaging. Or look at, do you understand what your clients want? Are you giving them that? Are you educating them? Are you solving their problems? Before you start thinking, okay, I'm gonna switch away from this.

All right, so I'm gonna give you an example of what it looks like to do a niche switch versus a offer switch. So I was a crowdfunding coach for two and a half years, and then I transitioned into my own business and I worked as a crowdfunding coach for another year.

And in that time, I would attract people who really just did not understand what my offer was, even though it was, you know, I put it out there clearly. I told them how I worked with them. I was attracting people who wanted to raise money for all the wrong reasons. I was attracting people who were struggling in their business and they just wanted some capital to pad them while they built their service-based business. And it just wasn't like really conducive for crowdfunding.

I was aiming to work with entrepreneurs who were launching products and they needed money. Another problem was that you need a huge team. And a lot of people just didn't have that resource. And my real why for doing this was that I wanted to work with specifically women who were launching businesses and helping them flourish. And I couldn't figure out how to do that where it was making sense for me and the customer.

So, I looked around my industry and I noticed that nobody was coaching the way I was. People were just doing quick consults because it was really, really difficult to coach in the way that I wanted to coach for crowdfunding. And I looked around and I looked around and I saw, like, people really just weren't picking up steam. I talked to other crowdfunding coaches and I heard what they had to say. And that's when I decided to do a switch.

So I switched my niche to business coaching, business and mindset coaching because it was more related to what I wanted to do, what I'm passionate about, my why and, you know, allows me to help more women.

So that was a niche switch. Now I have a client who worked in the physical product space for years and years and years. Great at sales. And he would do a little bit of, business coaching on the side as well. And he decided that he needed to move away from that industry for many reasons. And he decided that he wanted to switch his offer to real estate. Now that's an offer switch because he's doing something completely different.

So he switched over to real estate. And now he offers his services as a realtor.

So when we are determining our offer and pricing, so let's talk about that. Okay. So for those of you out there who might not have a solid offer you what you're typically gonna just be thinking about when you are making an offer, when you're deciding what you're gonna offer people is your skills and your desire to do that work.

So, do you have skill to do this or are you willing to gain the skills to do it? And do you have the desire to do this work? Right. For instance, if you're a VA who loves setting up funnels for other businesses, or maybe you've done that work in the past as an employee and you're like, you know what, I wanna start my own side project or my own side business. And so you, you know you're skilled at this. You can offer this as a service. So that's the, that that is the most straightforward and smartest way of doing it. When we talk about pricing, I don't like to get into pricing on the show because pricing is nuanced for everybody, but in general, there are gonna be many factors that are going to influence your pricing. So things like personal demand, how many people are demanding your service. Skills and experience. The container that you're offering them and your industry. What is kind of the going price for the level that you're at in your industry?

And of course personal demand is going to fluctuate throughout your career doing what you're doing. So as a business coach, early on, maybe maybe I don't have as much demand. And then over time I've gained the demand. Right. So then that might push my prices into a different bracket, right. Or I'm offering different services, I'm offering a couple different offers. And so then that I have different pricing.

So the most important thing to determine when you're determining your offer so that you down the road are not doubting yourself is again, make sure you have the desire to do this, make sure you have the skill level to do it. And then also that it resonates with the type of client that you wanna work with. Right? It's not something obscure that people don't understand. Kind of like the example that I gave about crowdfunding, right? People understood crowdfund from kind of a more GoFundMe, lens, where they just, you just raise a bunch of millions of dollars and then you get a bunch of millions of dollars.

But that was more from like a charity standpoint, rather than build my business and actually launch this and be responsible to the people who contributed to my campaign. So make sure people understand what you're doing, make sure there's a need for what you're doing so that it's a little bit easier of a path for you to start marketing to people and bringing them on board.

All right, so finally I just wanna talk to you. If you are that person who has determined that you're going to change your offer or your niche. And you're now worried about how you're gonna talk to your customers about that, I think this can be easy breezy if you do not overthink it.

So as soon as you're sure that you're ready to make this change, let your current clients. That's it. Let 'em know. For me, what I did was I told all my current clients, hey, we're gonna work. I'm gonna work with you in the same capacity until the end of our contract. And then this is how I think that I could work with you as a business coach moving forward. I gave them some ways and, you know, let them make the determination if they were going to resign with me.

For my audience, who was not working with me yet, but I had some potential clients out there. I let them know that I was making a change, why I was making a change in how excited I was about it. And nobody even said much. In fact, for about four months, I still got people booking calls with me, even though I changed my call form asking me about crowdfunding. And I just held my ground and said, hey, you know what, I don't do crowdfunding consulting or coaching anymore.

And after a while people stopped booking on my calendar and everybody who booked was somebody who was interested in business and mindset coaching. And it was a very smooth transition. Just in case that's something that you were worried about.

All right, friends, thanks so much for hanging out with me this week. I will be back in a couple weeks with another episode. If you like this episode, make sure you email me at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com. And let me know what you're interested in hearing about so I can bring it on a show or I can talk to you about it on social media.

If you love this episode, do me a favor and take a screenshot of it and make sure you tag me so that I can say hi. Share this with a friend who might also love it.

Again, we're dropping episodes every other Tuesday this summer, and I can't wait to see you back then.