The Art of ‘Enough’: Build Offers that Deliver Exactly What Your Clients Need

Have you ever found yourself throwing everything but the kitchen sink into your offers, hoping to cover every possible need your clients might have while working with you? Maybe you’re adding bonus calls, extra resources, or more hand-holding—because you’re worried that if you don’t, your clients won’t get the results they expect. Or, even before that: that they might not see the offer as “valuable” enough to pay a sustainable-for-you rate if you don’t include [insert extra thing here].

How you structure offers and what you choose to include in them contributes significantly to your clients’ ability to achieve the intended outcome of the offer. But more is not always better. In fact, the most valuable offer is the one that only gives clients exactly what they need in order to achieve their intended outcome, no more, no less.

Said another way: reliable client success doesn’t come from giving more, doing more, delivering more. It comes from doing exactly enough—and doing that well.

The Foundations-Focused Approach to Building Coaching Packages, Done-for-You Services, and Digital Products or Courses

You may be someone who already knows not to “offer stuff” (which is a term for, “including too many extras in your offer”). But do you know how to structure your offers in order to create the conditions for reliable client success?

In my experience, most online service providers, coaches, course creators, and practitioners do not. Not for any fault of their own, but because the commonly available advice about how to build offers is strategy-led rather than foundations-focused. Business owners are taught WHAT to do—what type of offer structure they should build (“you need a membership!” “you need a VIP day!”) and what to include in those offers—rather than WHY certain decisions need to be made and then HOW to make those decisions for their unique business.

Of course, here at WholeCo, everything we do is foundations-focused, meaning: we teach you WHY certain decisions have to be made and then HOW to make those decisions within the context of your unique business. When it comes to building offers, that means that I’m never going to come in and say, “You have to have a [high-ticket offer, course, VIP day, etc.] in your offer suite,” because there’s no one specific offer or package that every Sustainably Successful business needs to have. What I do instead is teach you the Offer Foundations and then support you to make aligned-for-your-business strategy-level decisions from there. 

There are (5) Offer Foundations: 

1. Proprietary Process
2. Offer Structure
3. Offer Inclusions
4. Price Point
5. Offer Alignment

Notice that Offer Structure and Offer Inclusions are the second and third foundations, respectively, after Proprietary Process. That means that, before you ever begin thinking about how to structure your offer or what to include in it, you need to have first created a Proprietary Process for this specific offer. The Proprietary Process outlines the exact steps that your Right Fit client needs to take to achieve their intended outcome. Your Offer Structure and Offer Inclusions, then, are responsible for facilitating the client in taking those steps. (You can’t set an offer up to facilitate a client in taking certain steps if you don’t already know what those steps are or need to be.) This is how these two foundations—Offer Structure and Inclusions—contribute to reliable client success.

Once you have your Proprietary Process for this specific offer, continue forward with the steps below.

Determine Your Offer Structure

The Offer Structure is where you’re asking “big picture questions.” Think: how long will it take for my average Right Fit client to complete each of the steps in this Proprietary Process? What delivery format is going to support them in taking each of those steps? etc.

One common piece of conditioning that I see holds business owners back in this step of the offer-building process is the belief that they have to make their offer as fast or short as it can possibly be. They say things like, “No one wants a 9-month package! They want to achieve this as fast as they can!”

If expediency is a concern of yours, I invite you to consider who you want to work with. Do you want to work with people who want fast results at the expense of lasting results, or the people who want lasting results and are willing to put in the required time to create them? Don’t get me wrong: some results absolutely can happen quickly. But many results, particularly those which truly last—that create a transformation, rather than only a breakthrough—take time to develop.

As the business owner, you have the power to determine what type of people you attract into your work. Part of how you do that is through the very practical decisions you make about the structure of your offers or services. If you make longer time-frame packages, you’ll attract people who are looking for a longer time-frame package. The inverse is true with “fast” packages, and you can make assumptions about the “type” of people that will be attracted to each. (Of course, that’s assuming you’ve also created magnetic and transparent messaging for your offer.)

You don’t want to drag a process along for longer than it needs to take. But you also don’t want to rush the process, because while that might lead to initial success for your client, it likely won’t lead to lasting, sustainable results for them.

Determine Your Offer Inclusions

Once you’ve come up with the “container” for the journey your client is taking to achieve their intended outcome, now you flesh out the inclusions. This is where you get nitty gritty, asking questions like: how many sessions will they need, and how much time do we need to leave between sessions? Do they need an onboarding call or a welcome packet, or both? Does this training material need to be delivered live, or can it be prerecorded? Does the client need ongoing access to support outside of sessions? Etc etc etc.

Of course, this is the phase where many business owners find it easy to accidentally verge into “offer stuffing.” You want to remember that your goal when determining Offer Inclusions is to give your clients exactly what they need, no more, no less. It’s easy to think that including more makes it more valuable, but the truth is exactly the opposite: including more than your Right Fit client actually needs ultimately distracts and/or detracts. The extras distract them from what they truly need to be doing, and/or detract from their overall experience and therefore also from the effectiveness of the offer. (I give a simple exercise for how to determine what to include, without distracting or detracting, below.)

Another thing that happens when business owners are determining Offer Inclusions is that they inadvertently make decisions about their offers based on some future vision of their business rather than being based on where they and their business are presently at. This is especially true when you’re an “impatient visionary” who can see the long-term game plan, but who wants it all to happen right now. 

As I often remind my clients at this stage of offer development: there is a version of each of your offers that is downright AMAZING. It has all the bells and whistles. You’ve got the support coach, or the pre-recorded curriculum, or the client dashboard, or the automated onboarding, or the bustling digital community full of hundreds or thousands of humans supporting each other, or whatever it is. Then there’s the version that you could get up and running, serving your Right  Fit clients, in a reasonable time frame from today.

“Tricked out” offers with all the bells and whistles can absolutely be amazing. They also often aren’t necessary for the first several iterations of the offer. In fact, for many businesses, their offers never need to be “tricked out” because their clients are already being served really well without all the bells and whistles. Not only that, but to “trick out” your offers effectively—in a way that adds rather than detracting or distracting—you must have a thorough understanding of exactly who your Right Fit client is and the exact journey they must take in order to reliably achieve the intended outcome of the offer. Without that clarity, you’ll end up with awesome resources and assets…that your clients never use and that get relegated to some random folder in your drive, never to be seen or used again.

The Simplest Way to Determine Offer Structure and Inclusions

The simplest, most effective way I’ve found to determine how to structure your offer and what to include in it is to go through each step of your Proprietary Process and ask, “What does my Right Fit client need in order to facilitate them in taking this step?”

As an example, I recently guided a travel agent through the process of building out a Proprietary Process for what would ultimately become their signature course. One of the steps of their Proprietary Process was, “Experience the trip you’ve planned.” After building out the Proprietary Process, we determined that it could be structured as a self-paced course (check!), so we moved onto inclusions. When we got to this step, we determined that in order to facilitate the Right Fit client in taking this step—to truly experience the trip they’ve planned—we needed a training video talking about the mindset of being present when traveling, a training video on how to preempt and/or deal with obstacles as they arise throughout the trip, a PDF checklist to ensure they’ve prepared everything they can in advance, and a workbook to help them set an intention for how they wanted to show up for and what they wanted to get out of their trip.

Of course, this was aligned for this travel agent and their Right Fit client, but a different travel agent who has different Right Fit clients might treat this step entirely differently (or not even have this as a step in their Proprietary Process!). 

“How do I know if I structured my offer correctly?”

You’ll know that you’ve structured your offer effectively if, when you bring Right Fit clients into it, they not only reliably achieve the intended outcome of that offer, but they do so with minimal unnecessary friction. You’ll likely even hear clients say things such as, “It’s like you knew exactly what I needed at each and every step!” 

Yes, that means that the only way to really tell if you’ve structured your offer effectively with the correct inclusions is to bring (preferably paying) clients into your work. As I often remind my clients: you can only ever get this to 70-80% “done” on your own. You have to go and use what you’ve created here in order to complete and/or finalize it. 

Your Next Steps

Once you’ve determined your Offer Structure and Inclusions, you’ll then move onto the final two Offer Foundations: Price Point and Offer Alignment. From there, you’ll want to craft messaging which magnetizes Right Fit clients into this specific offer, and then build a Demand Generation System to bring a steady stream of Right Fit, purchase-ready clients into it.

We do that—in full or in part—together across our core programs here at WholeCo:

The Aligned Niche, our 6-week authority accelerator which guides you through the exact framework to position yourself as the go-to expert in your industry so that Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients immediately recognize the value of your work and choose you—regardless of the competition.

EXPAND, our 9-month business incubator which equips you with the skills and self-trust to embrace your role as CEO, systematically setting your business up for long-lasting Sustainable Success.

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