Forget Irresistible, You Need to Become INDISPENSABLE!

Read Time: 10 min
Implementation Time: 1hr

I don’t give ‘recession’ a lot of thought because in business things change all the time anyways.

Who remembers the iOS changes and how that wreaked havoc on digital businesses?! (I’m still processing that!)

Now the big issue with economic recession is that our CLIENTS and STUDENTS change their buying behavior very quickly, hence the

very real need to pivot your OFFERS in a downturn

Ok, so the question remains…’do I need to scrap everything I’m doing and create brand new programs?’

YES and NO (what?! Am I not being helpful?)

You do need to evaluate your offers (not just your programs) and determine if you are positioning them as INVALUABLE or DESIRABLE.

Let me tell you how I realized that when the economy shifts you need to be

invaluable, not just desirable

Back in 2008 I moved to the US for my MBA. If you’re old enough to remember, a little thing called the financial crisis started that year.

Traditionally, finance and marketing are like 90% of the MBA graduates since in a ‘normal’ economy, they are the ‘shiny, glossy, make a ton of money fast’ corporate jobs.

Well, not in a recession!

Coming from a country in which ‘recession’ is just a normal Tuesday (hello to all my fellow Brazilians) I knew that when things get tough, people (and companies) default to doing the bare minimum.

So, the closer you are to the CORE of a business money making operations, the more ESSENTIAL you are.

I then audited my options…

I had a degree in genetics and I was in Boston – one of the hubs for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

So niching and focusing only on those companies made sense since I had a pretty big advantage over any other MBA candidate.

While hiring a finance or marketing position can wait (not essential to most businesses), making production more efficient (reducing costs) becomes more of a priority.

So getting my concentration in Operations Management and positioning myself as the person they need to run manufacturing faster, better made me a ‘NO BRAINER INVESTMENT’.

By the time we graduated (early 2010) I was one of 2 people in my entire class to get a full MBA position (and they even signed my work visa!) getting paid almost 6-figures as a foreigner, right off school, with zero experience in manufacturing.

I did it by becoming…

INDISPENSABLE to a very specific NICHE in the industry

That’s exactly what I suggest you do with your offers to be the one business people are happy to invest in!

For the past month, I have been ‘auditing’ my coaching and agency clients’ offers to REPOSITION them.

Case #1: High Volume Offers

My Business (Roberta West – Evergreen and Launch Mentorship)

The problem: Only have paid offers for businesses starting out or shifting from service to digital (highly desired, not absolutely needed).

When the pandemic started a flood of businesses ‘discovered’ digital programs and there was plenty of cash going around to invest in the ‘dream’.

I missed the first ‘gold rush’ but for the past year, I focused on teaching how to leverage digital offers with evergreen – I entered the market with a ‘level up’ offer and that's how I made my first quarter of a million.

For most people, starting something new (the ‘dream’) becomes a risk when in a recession – so my business focus is how to offer more ‘core results’.

The fix: Create a high touch, high result program geared to digital businesses that need a second/third revenue stream (needed for businesses to grow or maintain their level of sales).

I will show you how I came up with that idea in a minute, but the main solution was to change and not change my offer.

While I’m still focusing on evergreen and launch strategies, I create an implementation program to give a big result to a very small segment of my clients. I call it hyper-niche.

Here’s how I differentiate the offers:

GENERAL NICHE

Average results
Comprehensive training to support more people
No support
Individual-focused
Course only

HYPER NICHE

Bigger results ($100K+ on autopilot)
Reduce training content (no time to consume/learn)
1-on-1 support to give specific feedback weekly
Include teams
Service/Program hybrid

Now, let’s look at an example from one of my clients…

Case #2: The $1K in-betweener

The problem: If you only have a $997 or $1997 program, you might be falling between the 2 core needs businesses have…quick result (small offer) and big result (high ticket offer).

The fix: Create an offer suite. Quick-win product at $297 or less (in evergreen) AND a VIP offer if you already have students

Up to a few months ago, having a $997 program in evergreen was the going advice for any digital creator looking to scale to $1M.

This month, we created at least 1 new offer for clients that had $1-3K courses.

A ‘quick-win’ offer to present right away when someone subscribes to their list or listens to the podcast and a ‘VIP hybrid’ offer ($3K+) geared toward their customer list (internal launch only) to give even bigger results.

The whole idea is to maximize the IMPACT you can make for your clients IMMEDIATELY after they come in contact with your content.

Quick warning: don’t confuse impact with sales! The focus is to maximize your CLIENT’S money and time investment, not yours.

To pivot, I created this simple framework:

AUDIT (what can you truly help and do for people that they need right now)
HYPER NICHE (the smallest group of people you can make the most impact on)
YOUR INDISPENSABLE VALUE STATEMENT (if someone could only invest in one thing, what would make you the best option)
LIMITED TIME OFFERS (create new short term offers to support immediate needs)

After making your offer ‘indispensable’, you should evergreen it!

Evergreen programs or hybrids are essential in this economy, not to make a million dollars while you sleep (that’s so 2020) but much smaller niches require converting people when they ‘find you’.

So now is your turn…how are you planning to make your offers INDISPENSABLE?

Pivot mode, activate!

Roberta