If you’re having trouble making sales as usual, trying harder is unlikely to help much. Just trying harder is inefficient at the best of times. When it’s hard to make sales in general, you’d need to do even more to see any more sales thanks to it.
If your usual target customers aren’t buying your usual products or services, you have to try something else. Or you can wait for the slow death of your business.
Assuming you aren’t ready to give up, you have two options: reposition your offers or create new offers.
Both have their own challenges. It can seem hard to decide which is the better option for you. But you must choose and take action.
Here’s how you make an informed decision.
Should you reposition your offers or create new offers?
Start by answering this question:
Do at least some people have acute frustrating problems/pains your normal offers (products and services) solve?
If yes, you should at least look into repositioning your offers, changing your messaging, trying different target customers, and other smaller changes.
If not, don’t “just wait out the crisis.” That’s not an effective way to use your time.
Instead of waiting and hoping your business survives, you have two options:
Create new offers and new sales.
Or prepare something that will more than make up for the lost time once things normalize. I won’t dig deeper into that here, but it can be a good option if you’re on stable financial footing and have a great opportunity to go after. For example, many businesses wait for the “right time” to build a scalable marketing and sales system. Now might be a good time to do that, so it’s ready when things normalize.
How to reposition your offer, so you make sales (again)
Some people still have frustrating, acute problems and pains your offers would solve. If that’s not the case, skip to the next section.
The first step is to get clear on who they are and what those problems and pains are. That informs your messaging and positioning.
The next step is to modify your offer (if necessary), so it feels like a great fit for them. For example, that can mean different pricing (not necessarily cheaper), service model, or even just new bonuses.
In many ways, how you reposition your offer is like creating a new offer. You just start with an existing offer, instead of a blank sleight. So, read on…
How to create and validate a new offer
If you already have a stable business, you’re usually best off staying as close to what’s made you successful as you can.
However, that can still mean going after a new target customer with a new offer.
There’s no way to jump straight to the best idea. It’s a process with many things to consider.
Staying close to what’s made you successful means many things. Here are a few of the usual questions to consider:
- What expertise do you have?
- What makes you credible?
- What sort of products or services are you good at building or delivering?
- What type of people do you understand best?
- What kind of situations do you deliver the most value in?
- What are you good at selling?
- What type of help are you known for providing?
Looking at these is usually enough to spark ideas of what new offer you could make while staying close to what’s made you successful in the past.
Finding the best idea is about balancing those with all the other considerations. Here are a few of the common ones:
- How easily can you shift to the new idea from your usual business?
- How many resources does trying the idea require?
- How quickly can you test the idea’s validity?
- How well does the idea support your long-term plans?
- How much profit can you expect to make with the idea?
- What up-sell and cross-sell opportunities come with the idea?
- What risks are attached to pursuing the idea?
You can never be 100% certain that you chose the right idea. But when you consider all the key factors, you can make a decision that gives you the best chance of success.
Now is not the time for grand strategies
It often takes months for companies to create and implement a new idea. They create a strategy based on their strategy on how to create strategies and start implementing it based on their implementation strategy.
If your business is struggling, you don’t have time for that.
It typically takes my clients 1-2 months to get all the fundamentals thought through (target customer, offer, and messaging) and build a conversion path (every step from first contact with potential clients to a final sale). But even that might be unnecessarily long in this context.
If you’re in uncharted territory, validating your ideas quickly is usually the highest priority. Once we find the right idea to go after, we can put more effort into it.
Unless you have a clear reason to believe a specific idea is the best one, it’s better to test a few and select the best based on results. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks.
In other words, rather spend a couple extra weeks on validating your ideas than risk spending a couple months on an idea that wasn’t great after all.
Feel confident you’re making the right decision
Finding the best way forward can be an overwhelming task. There are dozens of things to consider. And when it’s your business that’s on the line, staying objective is impossible for just about everyone.
If you want to feel confident you’re making the right decision, let me help. Send me an email (contact {at} petersandeen.com) and briefly answer these questions:
- What do you sell (normally)?
- Who are your target customers?
- What are your typical rates?
- What’s your company revenue and profit (last year)?
- How is your business doing right now?
- What ideas (if any) do you have for how you could reposition your offers or what new offers you could sell?
I’ll reply and tell if it seems I could help. We can then schedule a time to talk. During that call we’ll start looking for the best steps forward. If at the end of the call you want to know how I can help further, we’ll go through that.
Getting in contact is, of course, confidential and doesn’t commit you to anything, so send that email now—it only takes a couple of minutes.
