6 reasons why your offer is struggling to sell

Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs, the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to uplevel your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator and business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams.

We are going to have so much fun together. Thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in.

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to my podcast. I hope you are doing so well today and having a wonderful, wonderful day. I am sitting in Belgium for about two weeks. And in this beautiful, beautiful house in Belgium house sitting and looking after the garden and stuff for my parents-in-law. And it is literally just giving me life.

The sun is shining, the garden is beautiful. I'm not big into gardening, but I'm getting involved. I'm getting some green fingers or I'm trying to at least, and it's very, very, very good. Anyways, today I am going to be chatting to you about the six reasons why your offer is struggling to sell. Say you've got some sort of course, group program any kind of offer, really even a one-on-one package, something that you've been trying to sell and you're not really getting much traction. You're not getting many bites and things like that. 

I'm going to share a couple of things that I think are really important in selling something online. I'm going to talk about three things that strategically could be reasons why your office isn't selling. And I'm going to talk about three reasons energetically, so I'm going into both the strategy and the energy because as you know, I think there are both so important.

Let's look at the strategy like strategically why your offers and selling. The first reason is that your offer has no clear transformation. So there's no program promise. There's no end goal, there's no clear end result. And when you're talking about your offer, people don't really know what the point is of them doing it.

Like what is that transformation? If you aren't super clear on your program promise and your AB transformation and where you're taking someone from here and then at the end of your program, there'll be here. So they started A, and then by the end of the program they'll be at B. And they've experienced some form of transformation.

They've gone from here to here. If that isn't very clear and you're not really painting that picture of transformation that is actually one big reason why your offer isn't doing so well. People aren't really biting at it. It's because they don't really know what it's going to give them. What is the end goal?

What is the point. One of the most important things with selling a course or group program online, is having a program promise and painting that picture of transformation so that someone can say, okay, yes, that's what I want. That's what I need. And that is something that a lot of people miss. All right. 

The second thing is, this is a big one, is your messaging. Is speaking to what people don't want or care about in your offer. An example of this would be, say you're selling a Facebook ads course, for example. This is the first thing that comes to mind.

Say you're selling a Facebook ads course and all you're talking about is the stats of Facebook ads and the cost per lead and their CPMs and the this and that and all this like Facebook ad jargon. You're just getting technical. You're talking about the course and that they're going to learn all these stats.

They're going to learn how to run Facebook ads. Like that messaging is not really speaking to what people want. People don't care about Facebook ad stats and they don't care about those kinds of granular things, that's just the vehicle. What they want is to grow an audience. That's actually what people want.

They want to grow an audience and they want to grow an email list. That is what people want, especially if you're in business. So they want to grow an audience, they want to grow an email list, and they want to make money. Those are the things that people want. So if you are selling a Facebook ads course, but you're just talking about the stuff and the nitty gritty details of ads, you're not speaking to what people want because people don't care about that.

All they want is to grow an audience and make sales. And so what your messaging is, really wanting to do is speak to what your ideal student avatar wants. What they care about and what they think they need. Even if you don't think they need it. If they think they need it, you want to speak to it because that's where they're coming from.

You want to meet your people where they're at. So that's another thing. I can give this example also with like a say it's an English teaching course, like you're going to teach them how to speak English. You could be speaking about you're going to get this amount of stuff, you're going to get this grammar, you're going to learn how to do present participle and past participle and you're going to learn all of these like, grammar things.

And people are going to be like, that's really not what they want. People don't want that. No one's lying in bed and just dreaming of grammar, just like no one's lying in bed, dreaming of Facebook ads. That's not really what your avatar wants. What does your avatar want? Find out what they want and if it is that they can speak confidently in English, like casual English.

If that's what they want. Then when you're talking about your offer and the messaging and everything, it should be speaking to that. It should be like speaking to that transformation. So you should be speaking about, you're going to get this grammar module so that you can learn the foundations of an English sentence with such ease that you can speak it with confidence. 

So you speak to what people actually want rather than speaking to the nitty-gritty stuff. The grammar is the vehicle. That's what gets them to the speaking. But they don't need to know about the vehicle as much. They just need to know that whatever you're going to give them is going to help them speak.

And your offer, your messaging should always, always just be about what they want. And at the end of the day, what people want, it always comes down to a select few things. They want more time, they want more money, they want more happiness. They want more confidence. They want more clarity.

They want more success. They want more connections, deeper connections. They want love. That's what people want. That's like human nature stuff. So you want to speak to those things. If you're teaching language like. It's so that they can build confidence so that they can connect with people so that they can make friends, so that they can get a promotion at work so that they can go study at their favourite university, whatever it may be.

You want to speak to that, and that's all about the transformation. Comes right back to the transformation. Your messaging should really speak to what people want. Often people are selling something and they're speaking to something that people don't actually want. They don't care about that much.

And that's why people don't pay attention is because you're talking about stuff that people actually don't care about that much. And so find out what your avatar wants, find out what their real pains are from the horse's mouth, and then speak to that. 

Now the third reason strategically that your offer may not be selling or struggling to sell is that it's an offer problem. And your offer just isn't strong enough. It's not juicy enough, and that could be down to the way that you are articulating it. So it could be just like the way that you're calling things the way that you're speaking about it. That's often what it is. Often their offers just don't sound desirable.

The way that people talk about stuff isn't very desirable. You're not creating desire. For example, a Facebook ads course. Yeah, I've got a Facebook ads course. Module one is on the Facebook ads algorithm. Module two is on statistics. Module three is on, data tracking like that is not desirable.

That's not going to get someone like, Ooh, yay, let me grab my credit card and pay for this because this is just totally what I want. I'm so excited to learn about statistics and data tracking. What a dream. Do you see that that's not very sexy. But you can take something that's not sexy and you can make it sexy and you can make it more desirable. 

Just in the way that you articulate it. So it's like: Hey, I've got this Facebook ads course. I know you are struggling with building an email list. I know the feels, I know how long it takes to do it organically. I'm going to help you in this program, go from what the hell am I doing on Facebook ads to building leads on autopilot while I'm sleeping. 

You're going to be able to build a hundred email leads in less than three weeks, and those leads are going to turn into paying customers later down the line, which is really great for your business. Module one is all about your Facebook game plan for success. Module two is about knowing the data so that you can crush your goals. 

Module three is all about running your first ads and building your email list. Module four is tracking and scaling your lead generation machine. The way that you say things like, guys, I'm doing this right on the spot. Honestly, this is like off the cuff, but the way that you articulate something is important.

Try and make it sound worth someone's time. Like speak to the things that people want. If you know that people want to build an email list, grow leads. To do it on autopilot. People join their email list all the time so that they can make sales later down the line so that they can have an audience later down the line speak to those things rather than like the nitty gritty details of Facebook ads.

So you want to meet people where they're at. Especially if you got like an expertise in something, you want to go and speak in like fancy jargon and like show your authority and use all these fancy words. But really that's not going to work. When you are talking about your offer, you want to be talking about it in the words that your avatar speaks in. So you can connect with them. So you they can understand you, so it's very clear. So they can resonate.

Your offer positioning is important. The way that you articulate your offer is important and also just what your offer is made up of. Sometimes your offer isn't strong enough. Meaning you just don't have any bonuses. The bonuses aren't very desirable, and your offer is so, so important, you guys. Most people don't actually know this, especially teachers who go into business. But creating a strong offer is really very, very important.

People are buying the offer. People are buying you, and the offer, meaning like you helping them through the thing because they resonate with you and connect with you and whatever. But the offer has to be strong. It has to be positioned well. It has to have a very clear program promise. It has to have these very core ingredients that the offer needs for it to be a strong offer. 

And that's exactly what I help you do in my Educators Income Booster Bootcamp, is I help you learn the skills and the ways of thinking in how to create an offer that is strong, that is desirable, that is positioned in a way that it can actually sell. Because not all offers sell, and just because you have a course or a program doesn't mean it's going to sell.

The way that you position that course in that program is. Everything. The way that you articulate it to the world is everything. That's what's meant to sell the offer, right? The way that you speak about it. And Often people are just creating really weak offers. And that's just how it is. And so it's a skill, it's a skill that one has to learn.

It's a skill that I've learned over years and years of doing it myself. I know what my people want and I know how to create offers that speak to what they want and give them what they want. And that's really key. If your offer isn't positioned to speak to what it is your target customer will, avatar wants, and there's no clear program promise, the modules are just sounding very undesirable. 

You're speaking about it in a really undesirable way. Like just statistics or just grammar. That's not really going to sell it, right? And so there's so many things that go into a offer that makes it strong and makes it like, wow.

You want people to look at that offer and be like, wow, that is exactly what I want. That's exactly what I need. That's a no-brainer for me. Like, you're giving me what I want and the pricing as well. The price is part of the offer, all of that. 

Having decent pricing. Not to say that it's cheap, never should be the cheapest in the market. But to have something that's like so much value and you really articulate that value well and then you have a really solid price for it. That's powerful. And it takes skill and a lot of people just like, oh, let me just create this offer and charge nothing for it and hope that it sells.

But you're copping out in the sense that you're not learning the skill of articulating yourself. And selling and positioning and all of these things that are important when you're trying to make money online and creating offers and wanting to sell them. Right? Okay, so those are the strategy things.

Number one, there's no clear program promise or transformation. That's important. Number two, your messaging is speaking to what people don't want or care about. And number three, your offer isn't positioned in a juicy way and your offer just isn't strong enough and the way that you're speaking about it is just not desirable.

So those are like three strategy things. Now let's look at energy. Energetically it's very important that your energy is on board as well when you're selling stuff. Let's just say if you don't believe in what you're selling, you're going to have a really, really hard time selling it and people are going to have a really hard time buying it.

So energetically you want to get on board. One of the first reasons that people are struggling to sell their thing is because they have no confidence in the offer itself, and they don't have confidence in the transformation that they are selling. And this is when you're not very embodied in what you're selling and you're sort of selling something in the hope that someone will take it, even though you just don't even have faith in it.

So say you are selling something that you just aren't confident in. And say you're selling this transformation. Let's give an example. Like a plant-based weight loss program and say you've only been plant-based for like, three months of your life. And you're not fully like embodied in living that plant-based lifestyle, but you're passionate about it, but you're not fully like living it.

And say you create like a plant-based weight loss program and that's the thing you're selling. And then the transformation you're selling is: in two months you will be fully plant-based and you would've lost five kilograms, or whatever. Let's just say for example. This is not a really a good offer, but I'm just coming up with it on the spot. 

Now if you don't have confidence that you can help these people reach that end transformation at all, you're just not confident, you're not embodied in it. You're not living that truth yourself. Say you haven't been able to lose weight, but you're selling it, then there's going to be this like clash subconsciously.

And energetically there's going to be a clash. So what you're going to try to do is sell something and have people buy it, but your subconscious isn't fully on board with what you're selling. And then energetically you can just feel that there's no confidence in the offer. And you need to be confident in your offer and the transformation, because that's how people feel, trust, and feel like, oh wow, I can trust this person. I'm going to work with them. I'm going to buy their stuff. 

Another example is if someone makes some money and then suddenly creates a money program, but they are living in anxiety and fear around money, and they're very like triggered by money and their reality isn't so great with money.

Their relationship isn't so great with money. But then they create like a money program and then their whole transformation is like, I'm going to help you overcome your money blocks and heal your relationship with money so that you can make more money, but they themselves aren't living that reality.

So you're not embodying what you're teaching. That is the second thing. So the first thing is you have no confidence in the offer and the transformation you're selling. The second thing is you're not embodying what you're teaching. So if you are teaching something. Especially in the coaching space, especially if it's coming from your own lived experience, then you have to embody what you are teaching and you have to embody the transformation.

I feel like that goes a long way energetically. Because people can see, oh wow, she walks the talk. If you are selling mindfulness and mind management and this and that, but you are living in anxiety and fear and panic every day. It's not very appropriate that you're trying to sell something that you aren't even able to do, right? 

And I'm not saying you have to be perfect. But you should at least have some result in the thing if you're trying to sell it. if that's the case. Or at least your students have results in the thing. If you're like a language teacher, for example. At least your students have results.

And then so you can get confidence from that and be like, cool, this is what I've helped other students do. This is what I can help you do. So I think that's important confidence in your offer and the transformation you're selling. So you actually truly believe that what you are selling is very, very good.

What you're selling is transformational. What you're selling can change lives. You just believe in what you're offering and you believe in the product that you're selling. To have pure belief in your product really goes a long way. If you do not have pure belief in your offer and your product, how can you cultivate more belief in them?

How can you start cosying up with your offer a bit more so that you can develop more confidence and belief in it. Because a lot of people are selling stuff that they are not confidently backing themself, and then they wonder why it's not selling. And it's an energy thing because people can feel the energy behind what you're doing. 

People can see it when you're selling something. They can see if you're not wholehearted. If you're wholeheartedly lit up by your offer. And you're like, this is the shit. This is a no-brainer. And you just speak from your heart and soul about how amazing it is. That goes a long way, and it takes time to cultivate.

I'm not going to say you're going to feel that in your first launch or the first time you create an offer, but I want you to know that that goes a long way. And the more that you can cultivate confidence in your offer, the more that you can cultivate confidence in the transformation that you're selling.

Whatever that looks like. And the more that you can fall in love with your offer and the change that it will make in the world. The easier it is for you to get up and like talk about it and sell it. Because it's going to be like such a no-brainer for you, you're going to be like, guys, this is such an amazing program.

It's a no-brainer for you to come into this offer. It's a no-brainer because of how amazing it's, that goes a long way. I promise you, you can have very little strategy and have full, full confidence in your offer and make sales. Energy wise, it's magnetic. Obviously the second thing was embodying what you're teaching energetically. That is very attractive. 

If someone who has really walked the journey and is really living what they are talking about. So say they have gone from being like in debt a hundred thousand dollars and then now they've got a profitable business and is doing exceptionally well and they're investing and they've got this amazing relationship with money and they're living that truth.

For them to create a program on money and sell it and say, look what I've done. Look how I can help you. That's embodied and that's magnetic. If you can see that the person is just putting on this front and pretending you can see it's inauthentic and you can feel it energetically, and it's a much more of a struggle as well. All right, so that's number two.

And now the third thing, energetically. Is you have a ton of guilt, shame, and weird energy around promoting and selling and making money. So this is when it comes into your money work, which actually plays a really important role in your offer. Is you feeling guilt and shame and weird vibes around making money from your offer.

Selling your offer, receiving money. So a lot of people are really good at spending money and paying for things, but people really struggle. And I know a lot of educators and teaching business owners struggle with just receiving money and charging for their work. There's a lot of money blocks and a lot of money wounds that are living in that space of just charging appropriately for your work.

Selling your work and then receiving money for your work. That sounds like a simple thing, but in reality, people struggle with it. And I used to struggle with it myself back in the day when I had very little self-confidence and very low self-worth. I was only making $20 an hour. That was what I was making.

That was like the most I was making is $20 an hour. And I went from that to making like, I don't know, 300, $400 an hour, depending. Sometimes even more. And so you need to work on your relationship with money. You need to work on the shame and the guilt and the weird energy around promoting and selling.

And you need to start clearing those channels and that sticky energy. You really want to come into a healed place around being okay with putting a price tag on something. Valuing your work, valuing your hours. And then being okay with promoting and speaking about it and selling. And saying, hey, I've got this thing that can really help you.

This is how much it is. This is what we're going to work on, and this is what's going to happen. And if you can clear your weird guilt, shame, and energy around promoting, selling, and charging for your work. People are not going to feel into it. You're going to have a much easier time selling something. Because you're not going to be going up against such resistance the whole time.

It's going to feel much more clean energetically for other people to work with you or to like be sold to from you. Because they're going to see that you're very boundaried. This is a hundred percent worth it. That if you have shame and if you have guilt, you can see it, right? You can see it. 

Say you're in a sales call and you're talking to someone, and then as soon as you start pitching your offer or talking about your offer, your voice drops down and you get quite quiet and then your body language shows it and you get like quite like uncomfortable. And that is okay.

You're going to have to get through that like the first couple of sales calls, you're going to have that. The first couple of launches when you're promoting, you're going to probably have that, you're going to feel uncomfortable. It is going to be uncomfortable. You have to just push through that and you have to just learn that this is one of the most necessary parts of selling something. 

Is fully being okay with it and being okay and like accepting of just promoting and selling and not feeling guilt around it and not feeling shame and not feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm a dirty car salesman. If you can really heal that in your relationship with promoting, selling and charging you for your work. And start really working on your money blocks and looking at why are you feeling guilt and shame, where is the source of this?

And really go into it and try heal. Through just different ways of doing it, right? Just acknowledging it, doing some forgiveness work. Like journaling on it, really coming into your space of this is selling a service. And this is what I want you to do, is I want you to think of selling a service.

The more that you sell your product, the more you're serving the world. The more that you promote what you have to offer, the more that you're serving the world. And there's nothing bad about it. There's only empowerment, on both sides from it. It's only a clean energy of empowerment on the buyer's side and on your side.

They're going to be served and helped, and problems are going to be solved on their side, and you're going to receive money in exchange for it. And so I want you to really get into that space of it is safe for me to make money. It is safe for me to receive money, it is safe for me to promote my offer. It is safe for me to sell.

Because selling is service. And if I don't sell this thing, I'm not going to impact anyone. No one's going to be impacted by me, I'm not helping anyone. If I keep myself broke, I'm not going to help anyone. This is the work. And I mean, this is like the real work. So many people, especially teachers who move into business. Oh my gosh, selling is like the most stickiest point for people.

The discomfort that people get from it, and energetically it does affect that offer selling. Energetically, it means you're not a hundred percent on board and you can feel it in the energy when you are selling your stuff. And you don't think so. You think it's all just strategy, but really your energy is so important.

Have you seen people online where you just like magnetized to them. You're magnetized to their beingness. The way that they are, the way that they believe in their stuff. If someone's just selling something online, but they're selling it from their heart, out of pure excitement, out of pure, like, this is the shit energy. 

This is such an amazing course. This is such an amazing offer. It's really magnetic as opposed to seeing someone who's not confident at all. They're very quiet in the way that they promote their offer. They're kind of forcing it. They're not really rooted into the offer themself.

They're just selling it for the sake of selling it. They're just trying to pretend to be excited. You can feel into it. You either love your offer, and think it's good or you don't. And if you don't think your offer is good. How can you get so on board with your offer so that it's like easier for you to sell it?

How do you need to change your offer to make it a full body yes for you to talk about it. That's what you want to be doing. How can you cosy up with your offer, so it just feels like this is amazing and I can't wait to talk about it. That's powerful. So energetically three things.

You have no confidence in the offer or the transformation you're selling. Number two, you're not embodying what you're teaching. So it's not coming from an embodied place. You haven't lived it, or it's just something that you think is going to sell. And so you're trying to sell it. And then number three, you have a ton of guilt, shame, and weird energy around promoting, selling, and making / receiving money. 

That's all money stuff. That's all healing that you need to do. And that as a business owner, you need to do it. If you cannot sell something and you are like in shame and guilt around receiving money, that's going to be a problem for your business. That's going to be a problem.

You're going to sabotage, making money in ways that you don't even realize. By like procrastinating. Like all these other things are going to show up as just pure sabotages. You're going to try to keep yourself safe. You're not going to get out of your comfort zone. Another way of sabotaging. And as a business owner, it is your job to sell.

That's one of the most important things, is to sell. And to build the skill of selling. And so selling is not a sleazy thing. I sell a lot and I don't have any, I used to struggle a bit, a bit in the past, but I never actually struggled too much with selling. I was always pretty good salesperson. Because it's from an authentic place. I sell with my heart, and I just keep integrity, and I think that's important. 

And I definitely think I'll create some podcast episodes on selling because I know it's such a point of pain. All right, so that's it. Those are six reasons. We've got three strategy things that could be the reason for not selling, and then we've got three energy things that could be a reason for it not selling. 

There's obviously a lot of things that can go into why your offer isn't selling. But these are some big ones that I see. So I hope you found this helpful and gave you some food for thought to simmer on. And I just wanted to mention again. I think I've mentioned it a couple of times, but I've created a new freebie.

It's like the first freebie I've created in years, and I think it's amazing. It's called the Scalable Digital Course Roadmap. The links in the show notes, and basically it's for online educators, freelance educators, and teaching business owners who are currently just doing a lot of trading their time for money.

So a lot of active teaching hours and one-on-one classes, but they're feeling burnt out. And they want to learn how to trade value through selling a digital course or group program. So you can grab that. It's amazing. It's going to give you the roadmap. I've given you the six-step roadmap that I think is just one of the best ways to sort of see, okay, how can I go from teaching these classes to teaching groups and courses?

And then just FYI. My live version of my Educators Income Booster Bootcamp is opening on the 6th of July, 2023. So at the moment I am selling the pre-recorded version of it all year round, and that's fabulous for people who want to dive into the recordings, but the live version is like on steroids.

You'll have so much energy in the live version that it would be unreasonable for you to not build momentum and it's one of my most favourite live events to host. And yeah, it's going to be amazing. It's about five days of actual training and then five extra days of implementation and added bonuses.

So it's like a 10-day live event. It's not something I do often live because of how much energy it takes to facilitate this kind of event. I'm going to do it in July. The doors are opening on the sixth. It's 37 euros for a ticket. It's one of the most abundant ways to work with me so closely for like 10 days essentially.

And I've got a wait list. If you're on the wait list, then you're going to get access to an early bird bonus, and the doors will open up two days earlier for you. And this bonus is available just for people on the wait list, and it's only available for two days. So if you want to get in on this bootcamp, you've been waiting to do it.

Now would be the time on the 6th of July doors are opening. I'm not sure if I'm doing it again live this year. I'm still feeling into it, but it's happening. It's going to be amazing. You can get on the wait list underneath this episode and then you'll get that early bird bonus as soon as doors open.

And then if you have purchased and done my pre-recorded version of my bootcamp, or you've been in a bootcamp in the past and you want to join again. For the people who did the pre-recorded version, I definitely recommend you joining the live one because it's just on another level, being together and co-creating.

And the ahas are just so much more profound in the clarity in the live one. Okay? So you will be invited for 50% off the ticket price to the live version. So keep your eyes peeled on that email. It's going to come in a couple of weeks. I'll talk about it and let you know about it when it's happening.

But basically you get 50% off the ticket to come join the live version, which is amazing. And I hope will be seeing some of you there. Otherwise, go get on the wait list. Go grab the roadmap. And just start taking some massive action in the dream of creating scalable courses, scalable group programs that can free you from the teaching treadmill and that can really change your life as it has changed mine.

I hope you've have an amazing day and love this episode, and I will connect with you again next week. Bye. 

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you are a teaching business owner, freelance teacher, or online teacher, and you are interested in creating a digital course or group program to scale your income and impact without teaching more hours, then I have just the thing for you.

Grab my free Scalable Digital Course Roadmap and it will walk you through the six steps of turning your one-on-one classes into a scalable offer that frees you from the teacher burnout trap. Creating scalable courses and programs have allowed me to 10 x my hourly rate hit. Six figures in my business and impact hundreds and hundreds of people around the world without having to be actively teaching all day. If this is what you desire, grab my guide in the show notes and let me help you. 

I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.