Irresistible, Effective, and Sustainable Offers: The 5 Foundations Every Consultant, Coach, or Service Provider Needs to Know

So you want an offer that’s irresistible to your Right Fit clients, effective at delivering results, and sustainable for you to deliver. That should be completely doable…so why isn’t it happening yet?

You’ve poured time, energy, and expertise into crafting your offer—so why isn’t it selling the way you’d hoped? Or maybe it is selling, but it’s not delivering results as effectively as you’d like. Or it’s working for your clients…but at the cost of your own sustainability.

Creating an offer that is irresistible to your audience, effective at delivering results, and sustainable for you to run is a balancing act. If you optimize for just one or two, the third often suffers. If your offer is falling short in one of these three areas, you’ll start seeing signs like these:

• Your offer isn’t irresistible. Potential clients hesitate, ghost, or say, “This sounds amazing, but…” You might feel pressure to lower your price, throw in bonuses, or use heavy urgency tactics just to close sales.
• Your offer isn’t effective. Clients sign up, but they struggle to complete the process, don’t see the promised results, or need more hand-holding than expected. You’re constantly tweaking the delivery to try and “fix” it.
• Your offer isn’t sustainable. You’re stretched too thin, over-delivering to ensure clients succeed, or constantly launching to keep revenue flowing. Even if it’s profitable, it doesn’t feel manageable long-term.

In an attempt to fix these problems, most business owners make small (or major) changes to their offers. But often, those changes improve one area at the expense of another—leaving them stuck in a frustrating cycle that feels a lot more like whack-a-mole than real, lasting Sustainable Success.

Common Mistakes Business Owners Make When Trying to “Optimize” Their Offers

When something isn’t working in an offer, the natural response is to tweak it. Yet a tweak to fix one issue, without taking the larger context into consideration, might solve that problem, but will inevitably create others.

Here’s what this can look like:

Trying to make an offer more irresistible → comes at the cost of effectiveness and/or sustainability.

• You lower the price to remove objections → but then attract misaligned clients or aren’t paid a sustainable amount for the work you’re doing.
• You add more bonuses or extra content → but now you’re overwhelming clients with too much information that either slows them down or leads to them giving up.
• You use aggressive urgency tactics → but any conversions in the short-term come at the cost of long-term trust amidst your community.

Trying to make an offer more effective → comes at the cost of irresistibility and/or sustainability. 

• You extend the delivery timeline → but now prospects don’t seem to want to commit for “that long” and clients who were already moving “slowly” keep going at the same snail’s pace.
• You increase access to you with more 1:1 calls, extra Q&As, or unlimited access between sessions → but now you’re feeling depleted and ‘used’ by your clients (even though you were the one who agreed to or even proposed this).
• You add more accountability like progress tracking, milestone check-ins, or other incentives for taking action → but now you feel like you’re parenting your clients and resenting their growing dependency on you.

Trying to make an offer more sustainable → comes at the cost of efficacy and/or irresistibility.

• You raise prices → but now you have even fewer people booking sales calls or making purchases.
• You shift from 1:1 to group or self-paced work and/or hire team members to deliver for you → but now prospects see the offer as less valuable (and you have to relearn how to position its value in this new format).
• You remove personal access and/or automate some of your delivery → but now when your clients hit a roadblock, they feel stuck and disengage rather than navigating through it (leading to lower completion rates and less or weaker testimonials).

“So, wait, can offers actually be irresistible, effective, and sustainable all at the same time?!”

Yes! But not simply by adjusting the price point, adding more support, or tweaking the structure. These are quick fixes that, while they might momentarily make things better, don’t lead to lasting positive effects in your business.

What actually makes an offer work—and be irresistible, effective, and sustainable, all at the same time—is not tweaking it to be one of those things, but designing it (from the start!) to be all of them. To do that, you need to know and build your five offer foundations. Let’s explore those now.

The Foundations of Irresistible, Effective, and Sustainable Offers

Offer Foundation #1: Proprietary Process

Your Proprietary Process is an outline of the exact steps that your Right Fit client needs to take to go from where they are, to where they want to be, thus achieving the intended transformation or result of your offer. 

We have to start here, before even deciding how to format the offer (“Is it a VIP day? A membership? A hybrid group program?” etc.) because the structure you choose needs to support the process—not the other way around. You have to determine what the client needs to do, practically, so as to achieve their intended outcome or result before you can determine what delivery structure is going to best support them to do those things.

Note that a Proprietary Process is not the same as an overarching brand “framework.” A framework is a visual aid to explain the overarching philosophy of your work as a whole, while a Proprietary Process is the steps required to achieve the intended outcome of a specific offer. Which means while you might eventually choose to create your “signature framework,” you need to have a Proprietary Process for every single individual offer you create (free and paid). 

For a step-by-step process to create your Proprietary Process, check out this blog post.

Offer Foundation #2: Delivery Structure

Once you’ve mapped out your Proprietary Process, the next step is choosing the best structure to help your Right Fit Client reliably complete the steps of your Proprietary Process. This is your Delivery Structure, or the “container” of your offer.

Your Delivery Structure could be a group program, done-for-you service, consulting package, coaching container, membership, or a course (prerecorded or cohort-based), among other formats. You don’t need to decide every detail or inclusion just yet—that comes next!—but at this stage, you do need to define the core structure that will best facilitate the transformation.

Notice how different Delivery Structures work best for different types of Proprietary Processes:

• Memberships are best for Proprietary Processes that need ongoing repetition to achieve a specific result (e.g. supporting habit-building, completion of a recurring task or project, or some other form of continuous skill development).
• Courses are ideal when a client needs to follow a specific, relatively straightforward set of steps to achieve a specific outcome. This Delivery Structure works well when taking the steps of the Proprietary Process can be done without frequent customization or feedback.
• 1:1 packages and done-for-you services are best for complex or highly specialized journeys where a client would need months—or years—of knowledge before implementing the steps of the Proprietary Process themselves. This is also ideal for deep transformation work.
• Group programs work best when you’ve systematized and refined your Proprietary Process (often through prior 1:1 work) into a repeatable journey that delivers consistent results for every client.

Choosing the right Delivery Structure for the relevant Proprietary Process is absolutely critical to making the offer irresistible, effective, and sustainable.

Offer Foundation #3: Delivery Inclusions

Now you can get into the details and “flesh out” the offer by deciding the Delivery Inclusions. In this foundation, you’re asking: what do I need to include in the offer to support my clients in taking the steps of my Proprietary Process with relative ease and simplicity?

This is where you’re exploring questions like number of sessions, Voxer access, specific deliverables or project phases, curriculum, accountability supports, and more. A lot of business owners accidentally have too many inclusions or not enough—both of which limit the irresistibility, efficacy, and sustainability of the offer. 

To learn the “art of enough” in offer-building, check out this in-depth blog post.

Offer Foundation #4: Price Point

Ahhh the most-feared offer foundation. There are a lot of different strategies for pricing your services, packages, courses, templates, and the like, but all of them need to take into account one foundational question: What price point is equitable and sustainable for both you and your Right Fit (for this offer) client? 

We want your price points for each offer to be equitable, meaning that they create a sort of “win-win” situation for you and your clients, where your client receives the transformation, support, or results they need, and you are fairly compensated for your expertise, time, and effort. 

We also want your price points to be sustainable, meaning that you are paid what you need in order to deliver the offer well, and your client is not overextending themselves in order to make payments. (We don’t want clients overextending themselves in order to make payments because it’s physiologically impossible to do what’s required to achieve a lasting transformation or result when your very basic financial needs aren’t met.)

All of this together means that your pricing needs to reflect:

• The true value of the outcome, not just the time spent delivering it.
• Your level of expertise and the depth of transformation your offer provides.
• The financial realities of your Right Fit Client, what they can—on average—invest without compromising their basic needs. In some cases, a “stretch” can be ok, but a “strain” never is.

On the strategy-level, you also want your price points to “make sense” within the context of your overall Offer Suite. That’s a much deeper conversation that we’ll have to save for a live workshop or something in the future.

Offer Foundation #5: Offer Alignment

Finally, Offer Alignment, or: do you actually want to sell and deliver this offer?

You now know the steps your client needs to take to achieve their intended outcome, you’ve designed the offer to facilitate them in taking those steps, you’ve named your price point for the offer, ensuring it’s both equitable and sustainable—so is this an offer you actually want to start sharing with the world and welcoming clients into?

A sort of rite of passage as an online business owner is selling an offer that, when you go to deliver it, you realize that you really do NOT want to be selling or delivering. And so when it comes to trying to market that offer, sell it, talk about it, invite people into it, you’re met with so much internal resistance. This can often take the form of:

• Avoiding marketing, procrastinating on content creation, or feeling uninspired when talking about your offer.
• Constantly “tweaking” or reworking the offer instead of actually selling it.
• Feeling a sense of dread or resistance when a new inquiry comes in.
• Over-delivering or over-complicating the offer in an attempt to justify its existence.
• Secretly hoping no one buys so you don’t have to deliver it.

We end here, with this final offer foundation, because you have to actually want to sell and deliver an offer in order for it to be:

• irresistible to your clients (who can feel your lack of enthusiasm)
• effective at facilitating results (since you aren’t going to do your best work if you dread delivering that work)
• sustainable for you to deliver (need I say more?)

Of course, there’s a difference between momentarily not wanting to sell and deliver an offer and the offer actually being entirely misaligned. Whenever a client shares with me that they’re dreading selling and/or delivering an offer, I’ll typically encourage them to run it through their foundations first before deciding to entirely throw the offer out. Often what they’ll find is that there’s something off in their foundations causing them to dread the offer as much as they do. Alternatively, it can also be a mindset issue or a fear, such as a fear of being seen in their true expertise. Yes, there are absolutely times to let go of an offer! But we want to do so with intention, rather than accidentally throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a heated moment of frustration.

How 5 Offer Foundations Make Your Packages, Containers, and Programs Successful

By building out each of these foundations of each of your offers, you are setting the offer up to be a “success” in every sense of the word.

They’re sustainable because you’ve actually designed an offer you want and are ready to sell and deliver. They’re effective because you literally began the process by exploring exactly what your Right Fit client would need to do in order to achieve their intended outcome, and designed the offer to facilitate those steps being taken. And they’re irresistible because you’re excited to sell and deliver them and they’re set up to reliably deliver the results your people are ready for.

Now there’s one final piece that makes your offer truly sustainable, effective, and irresistible, which is that you’ve designed this offer within the context of AOM Alignment. AOM Alignment is the process of bringing Right Fit clients into right-for-them offers using messaging which accurately conveys the expected result, transformation, or outcome. Learn how to build AOM Alignment in this blog post.

Offer-building—and all that’s included with that!—is a significant portion of our most popular course, The Aligned Niche. If you’re ready to clearly express who you help, what you do, and why it’s valuable so that you can confidently showcase what makes you and your work unique everywhere that you’re marketing and selling your stuff—I invite you to join us for our upcoming 6-week live cohort. Starting in April, you can save $100 on the program through March 31, 2025!

Want more posts like these? I send them out most weeks to my email list; get on the list in the form below.