[00:00:00] Fiona Johnston
This is the objection I hear the most. Every client that I work with is different. How could I possibly package what I do into three neat labels? And what you are telling me is that every single job you do is so different that you could never in a million years ever package your services into three.
Okay, let's think about this for a moment.
Intro
If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets to making money in small business. The more we talk about money and the secrets that usually. Stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money.
My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money, secrets of successful small business owners. Let's go.
Acknowledgement of country
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Warri people of the KU Nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present, and note that sovereignty has never been seated.
This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
Has somebody given you the advice that you should package your services, but you're still not convinced? This is the podcast episode for you my friend. I am Fee Johnston. I am the host of the Money Secrets podcast. I'm a chartered accountant, a money and business trainer, and somebody who is obsessed with getting money into the hands of good people.
So let's talk about the reasons why packaging your services into offers that can easily be presented to your [00:02:00] clients is a really great idea. Let's start by unpacking something that is a, an objection that a lot of, especially creative business owners tell me when I suggest that packaging their services into three beautiful options is not gonna work for them.
This is the objection I hear the most. Every client that I work with is different. How could I possibly package what I do into three neat labels? Great start. Okay, so let's think about this for a moment. You're a creative service provider, or you could be a professional service provider, and what you are telling me is that every single job you do is so different that you could never in a million years ever.
Package your services into three. Here's why I think that you can. Number one, you are the expert and you need to treat yourself like the expert that you are. Your [00:03:00] client does not know the best way to do X, y, or z. You do. So the reason why I want you to consider packaging your products and services is because it should not be your client leading the discussion around what you are going to do for them.
What we should be doing is finding out from our clients, what are their business goals, what are the challenges that they're having right now? Or if you're working with individuals, what are their challenges or what are their goals, or what are their desires right now? Finding out a little bit about them and what they've tried so far, any other things that they're considering as a potential solution to solve this problem or meet this unmet desire that they have.
And then what we wanna do is make a recommendation. Let's pretend this is a conversation you are having with a client. Hi client. Um, you are a small business owner who's wanting to brand your business, and I'm a [00:04:00] graphic designer. What is it that you would like me to do for you? Of course, your client who is not a designer, doesn't actually know what they want.
Even if they're really experienced in business, and this is their third or fourth or fifth brand that they've created, you should still be the one directing them as to what your process is and how you give them the most value. Through the way that you do things. Here's how a discovery call would go in the instance where you actually have packaged your services.
Hi, small business owner. I'm a graphic designer. I wanna hear all about your goals, the challenges that you are having, and anything you've tried so far to solve that. Now what I wanna do is I wanna explain the different ways that I could help you with that, and then at the end I'm going to make a recommendation about which of those options.
Is the best one for you? How does that sound? What we are doing in that [00:05:00] scenario is we are helping our potential client to feel like we know what we are doing. We want them to feel safe to invest in whatever it is that we wanna do for them, and we want them to feel confident that you can solve their problems.
If you are having to create custom quotes and trying to ask them 2000 million questions before you can actually get to even a rough indication of how you might solve that for them and what the price is likely to be, you will have actually lost them. A savvy client wants a service provider to be really clear and confident about how they solve their client's problems.
So that's the first reason why I think that packaging your services is a really smart idea because it helps your client to feel like you know what is the best way to help them, and it gives them that safety and security to be able to move forward. [00:06:00] The second reason why I really think it is possible to create three packages for your services.
I know that every client you work with is different, and I know that the outcome for each client is different, but the way that you approach it can actually be streamlined. You can actually look back through your client work for the last few years and say, what is the most common way that I have been able to solve the problems of my clients?
What's the process that I went through? What were the outputs or what was the outcome or the kind of. Desired goal at the end of the project, and what was the best way for me to deliver that? Now, once you have these three packages, it doesn't mean that you can't ever deviate from them. You can always have a little bit of customization or add-ons or would you like fries with that when it gets to an individual [00:07:00] client.
But what we wanna do is really think about what is the best or most successful way for me to solve this problem for this type of client, and how can I put that into a document that shares three different ways that we could do that? Now I'm gonna tell you why I keep saying three options, right? So when we are presenting to a client, when we don't have any prices or packages, our client or our potential client will be feeling quite anxious because it's like when you go into a dress shop and there's no prices on anything.
Maybe for you, that's a perfectly reasonable experience, but for me, I would probably just walk out of that shop because I don't wanna have to go and ask the person working there what the price is of each particular item. And to be honest, I actually think this is why a lot of people like shopping online because you have to have a [00:08:00] prize.
On an e-commerce website in order to do business in that way, and customers really like having that clarity right from the start about what the price is going to be.
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So when you ask somebody who's still trying to do a bespoke [00:09:00] or custom quote for every single client you work with, your client is feeling anxious about that. They probably feel anxious long before they book a discovery call with you or get in touch with you.
And you might find that because your potential client has no context around what your price or your process or the way you do things looks like, they might not even contact you. So you will be missing out on leads. That could actually be really good for your business because you are not being transparent about your pricing.
So. When we are in the bespoke world bespoke, we'll send you broke. As I like to say, you are wasting a lot of time for you and you are wasting a lot of time for your clients. And you are potentially losing a lot of leads because people don't know how to put context around what your pricing and process looks like.
[00:10:00] So back to why I keep talking about three prices. This is something that we talk about a lot in Good Money Club. So I'm sharing a little bit of a. Insider's secret for you here. The reason why we wanna have three prices for our client is because we're looking for the opposite of that overwhelm of the bespoke, right?
We don't want any overwhelm for our clients when they're making the decision to work with us. When we give them three options. It's just enough options for them to feel like they have some choice and they have some agency. But it's not so many choices that they're overwhelmed and confused. It's like when you go to a restaurant and there are so many things on the menu and they span different cuisines, different specialty.
There's like a tired dish alongside an Italian dish, alongside a Norwegian, you know, whatever it is. It makes it really hard to [00:11:00] decide what you want to order, whereas when there's a small amount of options. We have this idea that particularly in restaurants, the less things on the menu, the better each of those items must be.
It's a really cool psychological thing, and it works with all service providers too. When you put three options in front of a potential client, they have enough choice and agency. And if you do a good job of how you're presenting it, you'll also be recommending which of the three is the right choice for them, and you'll be giving them the opportunity to really feel not only like they have agency and choice, but like they can actually make a decision and they can make a decision fairly quickly because you've explained which of these three options is the best for them and why Another reason.
Why we wanna have three options is because it's the perfect psychological mix for [00:12:00] somebody trying to make a decision. And what you'll find is that something like 80% of your clients will choose the middle option. 10% will choose the top option, and 10% will choose the lower option. And part of that is kind of an optical illusion around how we present those three offers on a page or on a document or on a webpage.
Part of it is that psychological thing of not wanting to get the most expensive, not wanting to get the cheap one, and so then thinking, cool, I can see myself positioned in that middle ground. That's the one I'm going to choose. The same applies when you're buying wine. When you go to the bottle shop and you're looking at the different bottles of wine on offer, most of the time at a bottle shop or at a restaurant.
A lot of us will go for the mid-priced option because that suits our kind of spending habits and how we want to position ourselves in relation to the bottle of wine. Our [00:13:00] clients are exactly the same as service providers, so our clients want to be able to position themselves somewhere within your business.
Sometimes it can actually be really exciting for a client to realize that they can actually invest in your middle option. It might be a really big milestone for them that they can actually choose that option. And the reason why we have the top option and the bottom option is because not only do we want to focus people's attention on the option that's in the middle, but also there might actually be people in your community, potential clients of yours.
Who actually want the top option, and when they see it laid out with these three options, they can easily make a decision about is this top option actually the one that I'm looking for? And that's why we want to put that option there. If you don't put that option on the page at all, you're actually losing the opportunity to sell that [00:14:00] offer in to a client when we have two choices.
We actually are only giving people the option for yes or no. One option is a yes or no. Two options means we're really putting someone in a bit of a bind around, do I want to be the cheap one or do I want to be the more expensive one? Whereas when you add three, you are giving just that perfect Goldilocks amount of choice for someone to actually decide what it is that they want.
Everything that I've discussed so far is about helping. Your client to have a great experience working with you and to help them make a decision about what is the right option amongst your three packages that's going to help them to reach the goals that they're looking for or have their needs met.
But I also wanna talk about why having packages is so good for you as a service provider. One of the reasons it's so good is because it [00:15:00] just simplifies your marketing so much. Once you've actually spent the time to clarify what your three offers are, who they're for, and what kind of goal, outcome, or need will be met with each of the options, it means that now you've got this super clarity about who you wanna work with and what you want to do for them.
The other thing that's really cool is you can actually plan how you wanna run your business. So if you think about that middle one as the one that you really want to sell to people. That's what you can be thinking about when you're planning out your capacity, right? Planning your capacity as a service provider can be so difficult.
It can be a real nightmare, especially for neurodivergent people who just find it difficult to work out. How much work can I take on and how do I know when it's time to say no? How do I know when I'm gonna be able to tell a client that I can finish a project? Right? When you have scoped out what your three [00:16:00] different service offers are, then you can start to get a lot clearer about how much time or effort or how many hours or whatever it is that your service looks like.
You can actually start planning that out. The other thing that you can do is start to build templates and systems inside your business to match. The middle offer that you want to sell to people, and that actually allows you to get more work done in a shorter time, right? When we're, every single quote that we're working on is bespoke, we never get the opportunity to really fine tune our processes and our systems and the way that we do things.
Which means that every bit of income we earn comes with some level of having to be organized and structured. And I know all the neurodivergent people's brains will be melting right now because processes and systems for a lot of people can just be, I don't know, it falls into that [00:17:00] big swamp of annoyingness.
But yeah, when we have really structured packages, we can start to build out templates and systems. They can be really simple from Google Docs to email sequences that you send out because you know exactly what you want from your client at different stages through the project. So yeah, to recap, I really think that if you are a service provider, you should consider creating three different offers to meet the needs of your ideal clients.
Some of the reasons why this is great for your client is because it stops that anxiety of not being clear about what does this project look like, what will the cost be, et cetera. It also means that your client can actually feel like you are the expert, which can be really soothing when you are looking to work with a service provider to feel like that service provider has got this.
We wanna feel that there's service providers we're working with are [00:18:00] experts in their field and that we can rely on them to do the project for us in the best way that is gonna get us the best result. Another reason why having three options or packaging your services in general is because we want to give our clients enough choice and agency to feel that they are empowered in their decision about how to work with us, but not so many that they are overwhelmed by the choice and the reasons why it can be great for you as the service provider is because having three clear offers makes your marketing way more streamlined.
It makes it easier for you to showcase what you can do for your clients, and it can also mean that planning out your capacity and looking towards the future of your business becomes much easier because you actually understand how you're gonna deliver your services. So what do you think? Have I convinced you that looking to [00:19:00] package up what you do is a good idea?
Have I just scratched the surface here and maybe you are wanting to dig deeper into this topic. I'd love to hear from you. Maybe you could send me a DM on Instagram at Money dot Secrets podcast, or you could contact me through the show notes. You'll see a link to an email address there. But yeah, I really wanna hear how have you gone about putting your services into packages?
Are you still yet to be convinced? And if. So I wanna hear from you. Hope this has been helpful, and I'll see you next week.
Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast, but leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends.
I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective. And I really hope you enjoyed the [00:20:00] listening experience.
