What is an offer suite? An offer suite is a portfolio of products and services that your company offers to your clients and customers. In this article, were’ covering
- what makes a great offer suite
- the 4 elements of a great offer
- how you can design your offer suite
- what different offers you should have in your suite
- what is the first offer to create
Let’s go!
What makes a great offer
A great offer suite is most importantly – well-defined. Your offer suite would have a clear pathway toward the results that your clients expect from you. Your offer suite can consist of services, products, events, or happenings. It can have tangible and intangible offers, and it should also have offers at different levels, both regarding pricing and deliveries.
Your product is not (necessarily) an offer
You might have tons of products, for example, if you sell physical goods in your e-commerce store. Not all of them are offers. Your offer, on the other hand, could be a bundle that you use to get your clients to come into the shop and buy from you. So not every product is necessarily an offer.
If you sell services, your offers could be your customized service delivery, a workshop, and maybe a few other products that you sell to your clients. It could also be a furniture package consisting of several items for their homes.
Offers vary a lot depending on your business. Here’s a definition of an offer:
An offer is a conditional proposal made by a buyer or seller to buy or sell an asset, which becomes legally binding if accepted. An offer is also defined as the act of offering something for sale, or the submission of a bid to buy something.
A great offer has these 4 elements
Results
Your offer deliver a specific result for your clients. To be really interesting, you should define the exact results your clients can expect, of course, as long as they engage in the delivery, or take part in the milestones that your offer has.
Scope
Your offer should have a pre-defined scope, detailing what exactly is included in the offer and what it takes to deliver the results. The cleared you can be with your scope, the easier you will have to define the next element, and sell your offers.
Price
A great offer has a price pre-defined. The price doesn’t have to be the same for all, but it’s important to be able to answer the question: “how much is it?” with a specific answer. When the results and scope are clear, you should be able to set a price for your offer.
Delivery mechanism
Lastly, your offer always has some kind of delivery mechanism. Once your customer has purchased your products / services, or at least signed a purchase order or contract, you will deliver it according to your unique process.
How you can design your offer suite
When you design your offer suite, you need to first know who you’d like to become your client. The second step is to identify the complete customer journey; all the steps your customers take to get from their starting point to their dream destination with you.
After that, you can start breaking down the journey into smaller milestones and deliverables.
- What needs to happen first?
- What do you need to do?
- What does your client need to do?
- What happens then?
- When are you done?
A great Offer Suite has an offer for the different milestones on the customer’s journey towards their end results; the dream destination.
Front vs Back End Offers
Some offers are perfect to be sold at the front end, and some others are perfect for the back end.
So what’s the Front vs Back End?
The front-end offers are the products / services that you want to sell at the start of your relationship. We can them the Essential Offers, they are the most critical offers you have, the starting point towards the end results. When I was in IT & Management consulting, our front-end offers were strategic workshops that we sold to companies. These offers were perfectly time-bound, had a clear scope and price, and were easy to deliver.
The front-end offers can be divided into two categories: Get-foot-in-offers and signature offers. Your GFI offer is, just like in my IT & Management Consulting example, something we sold just to get the foot in the door. Then, oftentimes, the workshop resulted in a longer client engagement. But not always. This was simply a method for making sure that the requirements and expectations were as aligned as possible before we entered a multi-year (and multi-million Euro) deal.
Your signature offer is what you want to be known for. This could be a program or a full-house transformation, but the key is this: it needs to be scoped so it’s easy to sell, easy to buy, and easy to deliver.
The back-end offers are offers that might be a bit more complex to sell and require more time. The sales cycles for back-end offers are often long, which makes it reasonable to sell front-end offers to cover some of the costs. For example, for our IT company, the sales cycle could have been years. So that’s why we sold great workshops at the front end to be able to shorten the sales cycle and recoup some of the costs.
Back-end offers can also be divided into two categories: The Brand Culture Offers that require that the clients have purchased your Essential Offer. This could be, for example, a maintenance package for the website that your firm just completed as the Essential Front-End Offer. Alternatively, these could be offers that can be sold as the first purchase but are oftentimes expensive and take a lot of time to sell.
On top of these offers, you should also have a few Lead Offers, which are also called freebies, or lead magnets. You use them to get the first yes from your clients, and these are often free of charge.
What is the first offer to create
The best offer to create first is your main profitable offer, so you know that you are ready to start enrolling customers into your services as soon as possible. So, with that in mind, I’d start by creating the Essential Offer and focus on selling that, and then continue adding the back-end offers to your offer mix.
If you need help defining your offer suite, get in touch!
