Reliably Facilitate Results for Your Service- and Coaching-based Clients with AOM Alignment™

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt since starting WholeCo in 2018, it’s that our reputation is everything. I’ve been in business through the rise and ‘canceling’ (and re-rise?) of many of the online business industry’s “big names.” Watching this cycle has again and again affirmed for me that if I really want this business to “go the distance” with me and continue growing for years to come, how I serve the people who entrust their time, energy, and money to me has to be done with the integrity that comes with long-term thinking. It has to be done knowing that the impact of my current delivery will be felt for years to come, on both the client themselves but also on my business and, specifically, my financial reality.

Which means that the decisions I make today about who and how I serve and support my clients are made partially from an integrity, “I want to deliver on what I say I will because that’s something that is important to me,” perspective, but also from a profitability perspective. Because, said simply: if I deliver what I say I will to the clients I have today, I’m more likely to benefit from their positive word of mouth when, three years down the road, someone mentions on some online forum that they’re considering working with me and this client I have today can then share their glowing testimony. Multiply those glowing experiences by any amount, and now not only do I have the happy clients (a win from the integrity side of things), I have their happily-invested money and that of anyone they refer to me (a win in terms of profitability). 

This is why I say our reputation is “everything”: it holds the ability to either make our business growth significantly easier (as well as more enjoyable and life-giving, for all involved), or significantly harder. Both are compounding.

I think all of us know this in theory, but in practice, what does it really mean? How do we not just safeguard our reputation but proactively do things in our business today to build it up so that we can reap the inner and outer rewards as a result?

The solution to this is simple to say, but quite nuanced in practice: deliver on what you say you will. Which is why even many of the most well-intentioned business owners aren’t consistently doing so, and only a minority of their clients are consistently seeing the results that are promised in their messaging and marketing. (Past, and potentially even present, versions of me included. And I’ll be the first to say that I am always learning.)

Many people in the online business community are currently, at time of writing, talking about a “trust recession.” Essentially saying: so many customers have been burned by big investments they’ve made in recent years that now they’re highly skeptical to make any new purchases or investments as a result. Spend even a moment looking into said “trust recession” and you’ll see all sorts of different solutions for dealing with it. While I haven’t personally looked into any of the other solutions and offerings, and so can’t say how useful they are or aren’t, what I can say is this: 

The answer is quite literally to deliver on what you say you will (and of course to also learn to communicate that in your marketing). 

To do so requires several things, namely: that you bring Right Fit clients into right-for-them work using transparent and magnetic messaging.

Which means that in order to “deliver on what you say you will,” and subsequently ‘overcome’ said “trust recession” (or mitigate and/or preempt its effects from the beginning), you need three things:

1. A Right Fit client,
2. In an offer that’s built to reliably deliver results for that specific Right Fit client, that’s sold using
3. Messaging that magnetizes that specific Right Fit client and preemptively filters out wrong fit clients, that’s simultaneously transparent about what results you can reliably deliver on through that specific offer.

Bring a wrong fit or not-yet-Right-Fit client into your work, and they’ll struggle to succeed. 

Bring a Right Fit client into work they’re not yet ready for—even if they think they might be—and they’ll struggle to succeed.

Bring any type of client, including someone who would otherwise be a Right Fit, into an offer using messaging that promises results you can’t reliably deliver on, and it’ll be pretty damn near impossible for them to succeed.

Essentially: lose one component of this three part equation, and now you’re not “delivering on what you say you will.” Which means that, contrary to what some business owners unconsciously believe, “delivering on what you say you will” isn’t just about you doing your work, and doing it well. It’s not just about following through on the deliverables in a contract or laid out in your T’s and C’s. It’s about taking the responsibility that you have as the business owner—and therefore the person in a position of authority—to ensure that you’re bringing Right Fit clients (Audience) into right-for-them Offers using aligned Messaging. 

Here at WholeCo, we call that AOM Alignment™, and it’s by creating that that we can preemptively build up a reputation as someone worthy of trust, and therefore of the time, energy, and money real human beings are investing in our various offerings (and in referring others to us, as well).

How to align your Audience, Offers, and Messaging

Creating AOM Alignment—and therefore being able to reliably deliver on what you say you will—starts with understanding

1. the two different types of Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients,
2. the two different types of Offers, and
3. the two different types of Messaging.

By understanding and then aligning each of these correctly, we can reliably deliver the results we say we will through our work and reap the—inner and outer—rewards of having done so.

Note that when I say “two different types,” I mean foundational types. Yes, there are a myriad of different offer structures, for example, but all of them from VIP Days to courses to done-for-you services or 1:1 coaching packages fall into two categories of offers. Similarly there’s all sorts of different ways to create messaging, but all of them boil down to two different categories. The same goes for your audience.

Let’s explore further so that you can align your Audience, Offers, and Messaging.

The two types of Right Fit, Purchase-ready Clients

Recently here on the blog we explored the two types of Right Fit, purchase-ready clients, so I won’t go too in-depth on these in this article. The short of it is: there are two phases of a customers’ Transformational Journey in which they are both a Right Fit client and are purchase-ready. Those two phases are when they are:

1. Solution-Oriented: or, looking for a single solution to what they perceive as being a single problem
2. Transformation-Ready: or, looking for a holistic solution to what they understand is actually a core problem with many surface-level manifestations of said core problem

The type of offer we are selling determines which of the two types of clients we are intending to attract. The type of client we are intending to attract, based on the type of offer we are selling, determines which of the two types of messaging we will use. Which means we next need to understand the two types of offers and be able to categorize what we’re selling correctly.

The two types of service-based offerings (this includes coaching and consulting!)

In order to meet our Right Fit, purchase-ready clients in the moment when they are best-positioned to succeed, physiologically ready-to-transform, and ready to buy, we need to create two different types of offers:

1. Single Solution Offers: which provide a single, specific solution for a single, specific problem
2. Full Transformation Offers: which provide a holistic solution to fully solve a core problem

Solving a single, typically more surface-level problem naturally is less complex and takes less time than solving a core problem. This is the difference between, say, helping a people-pleaser set boundaries versus helping them figure out what they really want and live their life all out. You could “solve the problem” of not setting boundaries through something like a self-paced course, whereas it’s very unlikely that someone could fully overcome their people-pleasing tendencies and live their life “fully” through a self-paced course or even a couple of 1:1 coaching or healing sessions.

Thus Single Solution Offers tend to be “smaller” and/or “shorter” offers, with varying levels of “hands-on support” from a qualified practitioner or service provider, while Full Transformation Offers tend to be “larger” and/or “longer” offers, with significantly more “hands-on support” from a practitioner.

Already, you may be seeing how difficulties could arise if you bring the wrong type of client into the wrong-for-them offer. To continue our example from above, let’s say you’re a life coach who works a lot with self-proclaimed “people-pleasers.” If you had a sales call with a Solution-Oriented version of your Right Fit, purchase-ready client, who was talking about “not being able to say ‘no’” and/or taking on way too many responsibilities, at their detriment, but you chose to sell them a Full Transformation Offer, such as a 6-month 1:1 coaching package, it’s very likely that they’d have a lot of objections to signing up. This is the type of situation where you’d often hear the somewhat feared phrases such as, “That’s too expensive,” or “I don’t know if I have the time.” Not because your work is, indeed, “too expensive” or “too time consuming,” but because this specific person hasn’t, on their own, realized that their issues with boundary setting (and maintaining) are actually related to a deeper, more core problem. Said another way: they’re seeing the problem as being about boundaries, and so they want to solve the boundaries problem, rather than seeing the boundaries as a surface-manifestation of a deeper problem. Or, if they are aware that the boundary issue is related to a deeper problem, they might not yet see that problem is solvable, and so they simply want to solve the problem that does seem solvable: getting better at setting boundaries.

Alternatively, if you as this life coach happened to find yourself on a sales call with a Transformation-Ready client, but you chose to sell them on a “boundary setting workshop,” many would say ‘no’ simply because they’ve already tried a lot of these single, specific solutions and they’ve realized that that’s actually not what they need in order to evolve or transform how they wish to. This is true whatever the price point of the “boundary setting workshop” is and no matter how “affordable,” by the way, because for this person, they’re not shopping on price. The Transformation-Ready Client in particular is shopping on whether or not this offer will help them achieve the result or transformation they wish to achieve.

Side note: I hesitate to use the word “achieve” in the context of personal transformation, simply because—as many of you know—personal transformation is a journey without a final destination. Therefore there isn’t something that can be “achieved” in any sort of “final” way in alignment with the typical definition of the word.

Now, if you were this life coach and were getting a bunch of Solution-Oriented Clients onto sales calls, I’d tell you that it’s likely you need better, more clearly differentiated messaging for both your Full Transformation Offer and your Single Solution Offer. This is because your messaging should preemptively filter the Solution-Oriented Clients out of the sales call process—a process typically best reserved for Full Transformation Offers—and directly into your Single Solution Offer (in this case, a boundary setting workshop). To do that, you need to understand and utilize the two types of messaging.

The two types of messaging

You know your messaging is doing its job when it’s preemptively filtering your prospects into right-for-them offers—or into the aligned sales process, prior to stepping into your paid offer/s—and when it’s so readily understood by your Right Fit prospects that they begin offhandedly repeating it to you. The purpose of this article isn’t about facilitating that repetition, so we’ll focus on creating messaging that filters your prospects into right-for-them offers.

• Related Post: What is messaging?

Note, this “filtering” is somewhat different from what people mean when they talk about “segmentation.” Segmenting your audience is the actual act of you assigning prospects or leads to smaller “groups”—or, segments—typically within your CRM and/or email list, based on shared needs, priorities, characteristics, etc. Segmentation is something that you actually do—either manually or through automation—often “tagging” a prospect as being in this or that segment. 

The “filtering” that your messaging does—or needs to be doing—on the other hand, is a process that happens within your audience-member, themselves, often without them even realizing. It often happens prior to any actual segmentation, allowing the segmentation to even occur in the first place. It’s the audience member reading or hearing your specifically-chosen words—e.g. in your content marketing, or sales page copy—and making a subconscious decision that what they’re consuming either is or isn’t “for them.” When this filtering is happening successfully via your messaging, you’ll find that the prospects you’re meeting with—or, depending on your sales process, directly purchasing an offer—are consistently “Right Fits” for the specific offer you’re selling. Subsequently, you’ll very rarely deal with true “objections” in a sales process, and when you do, it’s almost always a sign that you’re speaking with a wrong fit or not-yet-Right-Fit client.

To achieve this “filtering” effect through your messaging, you need to ensure you’re using the right kind of messaging for the audience you’re intending to attract into the specific offer you are selling. (Yes, this means that you’ll have individual messaging for each individual offer that you create, free and paid.) There are therefore two types of messaging, one to align with each type of Audience and Offer:

1. Solutional Messaging: tangible, specific, clear, and sometimes time-bound words, phrases, and perspectives
2. Transformational Messaging: words, phrases, and perspectives that are as broad and holistic as they need to be in order to fully convey the result, transformation, or outcome of the work

One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll hear in this online business world is that you need to “be specific” in your messaging. This is only true in your messaging (which is not the same thing as your marketing, despite many using the terms interchangeably) if what you’re selling requires Solutional Messaging because it is a Single Solution Offer for a Solution-Oriented Client. If what you’re selling is in fact a Full Transformation Offer, intended for a Transformation-Ready Client, they’ll actually often be turned off from buying an offer that uses too specific of messaging. They’ve already tried seeking out specific solutions and discovered through the process that specific solutions solve specific, more surface-level problems, and that’s no longer what they’re desiring. Whereas Transformational Messaging—while necessarily being less tangible, specific, clear, and absolutely not time-bound—is broad and holistic enough that they get to determine exactly what that means for them, individually. Based on that understanding, they’ll then enter into your sales process as a way to ascertain if you are actually the mutual right fit for them and can actually help them to achieve their desired outcome or transformation as your messaging says that you can.

As an aside, I hear from many service providers, coaches, and other practitioners that they don’t believe there is actually someone out there in the world who wants, or is willing to do what they need to in order to achieve, the full transformation. However, when I then audit these business owners’ messaging, they are almost always using, near-exclusively, Solutional Messaging for all of their offers (including for their Full Transformation Offer/s). Because of that, they’re near-exclusively attracting Solution-Oriented Clients, who either don’t want—or feel like they “need”—the Full Transformation Offer (obviously!) or who can be convinced into purchasing it, but who then become a bit of a nightmare client to work with. Not because this client is innately a nightmare human being—I’m not confident intimating that anyone is innately a “nightmare” lol—but because they thought they only needed a single, specific solution to solve a single, more surface-level problem. You convinced them that they needed the whole thing—enough that now they’ve purchased the Full Transformation Offer—but now you’re trying to “make” them do all of these more in-depth things to achieve an outcome that they, themselves, hadn’t already decided was worth—or even possible—achieving. No wonder they have resistance to doing those things, and/or need you to go above and beyond in order to “make sure” they succeed in this particular offer.

Transformation-Ready Clients absolutely do exist. The reason you haven’t met m/any is because that’s not who you’ve been speaking to. Which hey, is actually great news, because that means your messaging is working (AKA it’s attracting the type of people you’re speaking to!). Now all you need to do is ensure you’re using messaging that’s aligned with the person you intend to attract into the specific offer you are selling.

Bringing it all together to create AOM Alignment

There are two types of Right Fit, purchase-ready clients, which align with the two (core) types of offers, which require one of the two types of messaging based on the client you are intending to attract into the offer you are selling.

If you’re selling a Single Solution Offer, you want to use Solutional Messaging to attract Solution-Oriented Clients into said offering.

If you’re selling a Full Transformation Offer, you want to use Transformational Messaging to attract Transformation-Ready Clients into said offering.

How do you know if your audience, offers, and messaging are aligned correctly?

You’ll know that your Audience, Offers, and Messaging are aligned as a business owner when your clients are consistently achieving the intended outcome—as stated in your messaging!—of the offer they have invested in. You get to decide what “consistently” means, but I’d say that, at absolute minimum, that means that 50% of your clients are completing the program/offer/package and undoubtedly achieving—no conjecture or stretching of the truth needed—the primary result you promised in your messaging. Personally, here at WholeCo, we aim for much higher: at least 90% in our Full Transformation Offers, which naturally are “higher touch” meaning we can more accurately measure this data point. Single Solution Offers are more difficult to measure, for a variety of reasons including that many are self-paced/no-touch. (e.g. some people might complete a course but not complete the offboarding survey, and so we have no data points on whether or not they achieved the specific outcome as stated in the messaging.) However, we still aim for at least 75% of paying students completing 100% of core course content (e.g. excluding any sort of bonuses or extra trainings), as this data can be measured through our learning platform regardless of whether the individual student completed the offboarding survey.

• Related podcast episode: What do you do if clients aren’t utilizing the support that’s available to them?

This is where it’s really important that your messaging is both magnetic to the Right Fit client and transparent about what can be reliably achieved in a specific offering. If you make a promise in your messaging that you can’t reliably deliver on, then you’re automatically diminishing your ability to deliver on what you say you will. “Shooting yourself in the foot,” so to speak. 

A common example of this that I’ve seen over the years is website designers who say that they’ll make you a website that’s a “money-making machine.” Another is business coaches making specific money outcomes the core of their messaging, such as “create your first 6-figure year.” A website designer cannot reliably deliver a website that’s a “money-making machine,” because a whole lot more goes into making money through your business than the actual design of a website. To list just a couple: the business owner investing in the website needs to know their audience, needs to have offers that are positioned and priced correctly, needs to drive aligned traffic to the website consistently, etc.—all things that are beyond the scope of the website designers’ work. Similarly, a business coach can equip you with certain business strategies, approaches, etc., but cannot ensure you go and do the thing, let alone do the thing in a way that will be profitable or otherwise financially successful. 

These examples, and many others, are rampant in this online business world, in part because we’ve been taught that “specificity sells”—and it does, though I’d argue that it is often used to sell to the wrong person for the offer it’s accompanying—but also because we’re not often taught to think specifically about whether or not the messaging we’re using can reliably be achieved, directly through our offerings. I, myself, am guilty of this—being someone who used to rely on specific money milestones as the primary outcome of my work—so I’m certainly not judging. Simply saying: if you want to proactively build up your reputation (and reap the inner and outer rewards for doing so), then you need to be able to reliably deliver on what you say you will. AOM Alignment is what empowers you to do just that.

Work with Me

Building AOM Alignment is precisely what you do inside our course, The Aligned Niche. Though—and here’s a lesson in the necessity of messaging that’s both transparent and magnetic—we focus our messaging for the course on your ability to clearly express who you help and how so that you can confidently showcase what makes you and your work unique everywhere that you’re marketing and selling your stuff. (As that’s what people know they want; very few people, unless they’ve read this blog post, know that what they want to create is AOM Alignment, or that creating AOM Alignment is what will allow them to clearly express who they help and how, showcasing what makes them and their work unique.)

Our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND, goes even more in-depth on AOM Alignment and then takes it a step further by supporting you to build a Demand Generation System that moves prospective clients through each stage of the buyer’s journey and into your paid offerings with even more ease and efficacy. This is the practical, “what you’re doing” throughout your journey in EXPAND, but the true result of this program is that you’ll walk away with embodied business-building acumen that empowers you to lead your business to and beyond the heights that you KNOW it can reach.

(Notice how we use Solutional Messaging for The Aligned Niche, and Transformational Messaging for EXPAND? It’s almost like I’m practicing what I preach 😉)

If you’re reading this blog soon after I first published it—AKA October 2024—then we also have a live virtual retreat that might actually be your most aligned place to ‘start’: Clearly Magnetic Messaging. In this 2-day retreat, we’ll go over a “light” version of AOM Alignment after which you will craft repeatable and resonant messaging for your upcoming promotion—e.g. Black Friday, January launch, etc.—that you’ll use to attract and sell to Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospects. Happening October 23 and 24, 2024 with global-time-zone-friendly sessions. Whether you’ve already tried a bunch of messaging stuff and it just hasn’t really ‘clicked’ for you or your audience yet, or you aren’t even sure what the difference is between ‘messaging,’ ‘marketing,’ ‘copy,’ and other similar-seeming things, this live retreat will equip you to clearly communicate the results, inclusions, and process of your offer in benefit-focused language so you can differentiate it from alternatives and position it as the obvious-yes for your Right Fit person. Join us!

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