Should You Have A Signature Service?

It is generally accepted as lore that if you want to be a Very Important Coach Indeed – or, in fact, be able to purchase Christmas gifts for your loved ones – you must have a Signature Service.

A signature service, also known as “Off The Shelf”, “5 Step Program”, and a few other things that enterprising gurus have trademarked – basically means factory coaching.

The client comes in one end, goes through a prefabricated set of steps in a pre-assigned set of time and hocus pocus alakazam, comes out fixed, whole, and ready to refer rich friends to you.

A signature service needs at least one of two factors to be present. (Having both is better.)

1. The coaching topic itself lends itself to a prefabricated system in the first place.

Some topics lend themselves to steps. Others don’t. Yoga For Beginners – yes. Find Your Passion – maybe. Work Through Your Grief – probably not.

2. The coach is the type of person who likes that sort of methodical, prefab process. Not everybody does. Some people color code their file folders and have realistic to-do lists every day. (My esteemed partner, for example.)

Other people institute a paper-full office policy and officially only read written communication scribed in magic marker or crayon. (Moi.)

The former would be good at signature coaching packages. The latter, not so much.

* If you do not get this reference, you are required to Google it before you come back to this blog. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

A big part of your decision about what kind of coaching package to offer comes down to what your customers are looking for and how possible it is to give it to them. Just because they want it to be a simple process doesn’t mean it can be.

We’re talking about unknowns and x-factors here. Unknowns are the things you don’t know about the person coming in. Where they are in the process, for example. You may have a six-week program that your client may not be ready for.

If we offered a signature service called “Get Your Book Launch Ready in Six Weeks,” we don’t know where you are. You can give us your money and when we take a look at your product and list size, it may come out that you need a lot of work before you’re even ready for week one.

On the other hand, you may have already done so much that you don’t need the first two weeks of the signature program. Oops, looks like you’re not hiring us. Sucks to be me. You just don’t know what unknowns are out there.

Then you have the x-factors, the things that could throw that Spaniard in the works. There may be something unique about a client’s situation that actually means the process in the signature service doesn’t apply to them. They may legitimately not be able to use pieces of your process. They may have a more complicated situation than your easy-peasy, cookie-cutter process can handle.

Examples:

If you are offering something like l1">weight loss coaching, the process generally doesn’t change no matter how much l1">weight the client has to lose. You can also predict a range of “special cases” to factor into your process – wheat allergies, bad knees, busy schedules – and create a system that can accommodate them relatively easily.

In other words, the chances of being able to say “Just go do this” for the vast majority of your clients is high.

If you are counseling spouses of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder, the process can be anything but straightforward. The unknowns and x-factors here make this situation a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a taco.

So the chances of being able to say “Just go do this” for the vast majority of your clients is very low.

So that’s the basic guideline. The fewer the unknowns, the lower the chances that an x-factor could hose you, the better a candidate you are for an off-the-shelf program.

Someone suggests to you that you create a standardized system, a formula of sorts. 12 weeks, standard process, same for every client. What is your response?

1. This is my idea of heaven.
2. This is my idea of hell.

Read this blog post again, think about it, then do whatever you like. No matter who tells you that it’s a crucial, must-have-or-you’re-going-to-the-food-bank… they’re just plain wrong.

We have never offered a signature package and we are still alive and kicking. Other people would die without one. So much depends on what you like to do, what market you’re in, and what your customers want.

And that’s up to you to decide, based on all your unique factors, which neither your gurus nor I have access to. If it seems like a good idea for your topic and your personality, go for it. If it only seems like a good idea for your bottom line, think hard.

Now, speaking of coaching packages, tune in next week when we’ll talk about how many packages you should (could? might?) have. Enjoy your weekend in the meantime.

Further Reading can be found at Q&A Time! (Or, A Few Bits Of Advice For Coaches)

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How Many Packages Should You Offer?

Coaches face a problem that a lot of other business types don’t have to deal with – how many options to offer to clients. If you’re producing products, the answer is relatively simple – you sell the number of things you have available to sell. (It can get tricky when you start having too many things, but that’s not a problem you face at the beginning.)

But when you’re a coach, you get the tricky part right from the start. Your “product” tends to be something along the lines of talking to people one-on-one about a particular issue they’re facing. If you’ve got a wide range of experience, there’s probably a lot of things you can do for clients.

However, slapping up a page saying “There are a lot of things I can do for you” doesn’t exactly have a high probability of getting a Visa card out of a wallet. Your potential client is just going to stare at their screen with glazed eyes, wondering what in the hell that even means for them.

Now, to be fair, if you’re already Very Well Known, you can do this. That’s because if you’re Very Well Known, you’ve got two things on your side.

First, people have heard of you, and they’ve probably heard specific things about you. You did X for this client, and Y for this client, and Z for this other client who had a really weird situation.

Second, at that point your reputation may be so established that a client can assume that whatever their problem is, you can handle it. That’s a good place to be.

But if you’re not at that place yet, you’ve got a job on your hands. You have to give your potential clients an easy way to figure out exactly what it is they’re going to give you money to help you with.

The answer to that question is pretty much the same answer we give to almost every question that comes across the desk – “It depends.” It depends on a lot of factors – the industry you’re in, how well established you are, how mainstream your coaching niche is (i.e., people’s preconceptions of what a coach like you should be offering in the first place), what your price points look like – and about a bamillion other factors.

Balancing a bamillion factors is hard. Fortunately, you don’t really have to think about every single one of them if you just fall back on what they all have in common – the experience that the client is going to have in choosing why they want to work with you.

In other words, the whole reason a coaching package, or offer, or whatever you want to call it even exists is this: to help the client feel more comfortable about a buying decision.

That’s the most important part of this post, so let’s cue up the red text and say it again:

A lot of coaches are taught that the way to get clients in the door is to make things as sexy as possible. Big promises. Tons of hyper testimonials. Sexy numbers and names dropped as often as possible. (Also, acronyms. And alliteration. See what I did there?)

You can certainly go that route. I hear that it can work, for certain clients. But I always prefer to fall back on things that would stand a higher than average chance of working with just about anybody.

And one of those things can be summed up as “make it easy for the customer to know what they’re getting without overwhelming them.”

People want to have as many decisions taken off the table as is reasonably possible. They may want a lot of choices, but they don’t want unlimited choices. Even if you’ve heard they do.

When a client considers you as a coach they might want to hire, what they want from your offers is enough detail to help them get their bearings, and not so much detail that they get overwhelmed.

If you’re not providing enough detail, it’s going to drive them insane. “We can talk about whatever you want” is not a coaching offer. It’s tossing them to the wind. When presented with limitless choices, most people make no choice at all.

Show them examples of payment options and payment plans. Let them know that you do one-off calls as well as three- and six-month packages. Don’t make them have to guess or choose for themselves, because the majority simply won’t.

Every piece of clarity and specificity you offer will help them get their bearings and think about what kind of thing they want. They need those bearings to begin getting comfortable with the idea that you’re going to take very good care of them.

The same goes for the types of services you offer. “Help in this area of expertise” is not going to get them past the vague, wispy space they’re in before they decide to commit to getting assistance from you.

But if that’s what you’re offering, you’re basically like a doctor who hangs up a sign that says “If you’re not feeling quite right, I can help you do something about that.” It’s a rare bird who is going to get off their couch and go to that doctor. There’s nothing to latch on to.

If you’ve made it clear which specific services you offer, and given them details – real details – about what each of those specific services entail, then you’ve got a much higher chance of getting and keeping their attention.

But it’s easy to go overboard on this, too. We’ve seen plenty of coaches who offer ten different kinds of services, and they end up shooting themselves in the foot there. Once you get into offering more than a handful of options, there can simply be too much to choose among.

You run the risk of having so many options they would like to get, that picking one would force them to give up on all the other ones that look so juicy. To protect against that feeling of loss, people tend to bail. You don’t want that.

When in doubt, offer three types of packages. People can easily wrap their heads around that number. If all three packages seem appealing, it doesn’t hurt as much to have to make the decision on just one. They can look at three ways you can offer you help and they won’t feel overwhelmed.

(Aside: Generally speaking, any individual person will always pick the same package, no matter what they’re buying. They’ll buy the entry level package, saying they can increase it later. They’ll buy the middle package, because it’s the safest route. Or they’ll buy the biggest package, because then they know they’re getting the best. If someone buys your middle package, the odds are good that they bought the middle package at the cable company and the gym as well.)

Same goes for commitment options. Three package types. One-off sessions, three-month, six-month – you can’t go too wrong with that. It doesn’t really matter what you offer as long as you’re keeping it manageable.

Keep in mind here that we’re talking about a “when in doubt” scenario. If you have a good, solid reason to break away from the rule of three, and you feel confident that the reason will make decision-making easier for the client, then run with that.

But in general, only having one option, or having more than five is likely to cause your potential client to have to think too hard about what it is they want to get from you.

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