Welcome to the second (of 5) article of the behind the scenes look at how we overhauled our own client experience! Phase 2? Our offer suite! When we work with our clients to design their client experiences, we work through five specific phases. No matter the business, industry, target market or level of package – every single one of our clients works through all five phases. The 5 phases are: 

1. Market Research
2. Offer Design 
3. Brand Elevation
4. Experience Overhaul & Automation
5. Client Acquisition

For context on why we, here at Rebel Office, went through our own overhaul, make sure you check out the first article here. 

Preparing to Revise Our Offers

If I’m being honest, to revise our offers *yet again* was not an easy decision. All of 2021 was a huge transformation for us already, slowing moving away from our 1:1 retainer OBM work and trying to find balance with projects that brought us true joy. 

Working with what we had, I was constantly trying to find new ways to set boundaries so that our services were more fun for our team:

• Doing 3 month terms instead of infinitely ongoing
• Increasing our rates to create space for clients that were operating their businesses at a different level and approached the investments they were making a bit differently
• Introducing an “on demand” offer to take out client feedback almost all together and us setting up tech for businesses within a two week window using our best practices and validated approaches.

We had even played around with the idea of in-person retreats. In fact, we more than played around with it. For 6 months, we spent a TON of resources: time, money and energy into planning our very first Visionary Vacay, intended to be February 2022 in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we made the incredibly hard decision to walk away from our planning and rethink the retreat series.

Ultimately, our main goal was to introduce more FUN. After 5 years in business, we were finally starting to find our groove, experience real financial success — reliable financial success — but I kept feeling like our souls were being sucked out of us alive.

Don’t get it twisted: We LOVE(D) our clients. Making things easier, being there as a strategic partner, creating light bulb moments… all of it. But I couldn’t help feel like we weren’t reaching for our fullest potential.

We were settling for what was working.

And when I took off two weeks for my Christmas holidays, everything changed.

I finally had time to sit with myself and to turn off the day-to-day and figure out what it was that I actually liked (and what it was that I didn’t). The most persistent thought I kept having was:

There are so many businesses that DON’T struggle to make $30-60K months, so why the heck are we?

I couldn’t help but feel like it was time to stop convincing myself that it was so hard, take ourselves seriously and step the fuck up to the plate.

Before & After

To show you visually how we shifted some things around, I want to show you our offer suite December 2021 vs. January 2022.

And note that it’s easy to visually map out what you’re doing or going to do, but putting it into play, being intentional about building them out, and making sure you’re prepared to actually offer them are totally different things.

For context, your “offer suite” is your collection or eco-system of offers. To us, there are four key buckets or pillars of your offer suite, and we work with our clients to diversify as much as they can to make sure they’re meeting dream clients wherever they’re at:

1. Education (your free content and how you catch your audience’s attention and position yourself as an authority)
2. Entry-Level (your low-resistance and often lowest cost products and services as a way to build trust with your clients/customers without requiring a high level of risk or commitment for them so they can “test drive” you)
3. Elevated-Level (your mid-tiered offers that challenge your clients to invest a little more. It’s also usually the mid-way point between totally do-it-yourself and done-for-you).
4. Elite-Level (your highest level of offer that is generally one-on-one or the least scalable for you and therefore, you’re charing for that access)

Okay, let’s have a look:

2021 Offer Suite:

2022 Offer Suite:

Our New Offers

Building out our new offers was probably the stickiest part of this entire process for our client experience overhaul. I was so determined to do it right, which meant getting these offers right from the get-go.

Now, that’s not necessarily the best approach and I wouldn’t be surprised if things continue to shift as we settling into this new direction, but ultimately continuous improvement is key and I *probably* put too much pressure on myself.

Alas, we go on.

Primarily I was looking for a way that would shift us from helping our clients with whatever they needed to being a trusted source of guidance. Okay, but what does that shift actually mean? Ultimately, we do know what’s best when it comes to systems and curating intentional and truly electric client experiences. We’ve been doing it for YEARS. And I was finally ready to advocate for our knowledge and expertise and stop being afraid to step on toes or challenge our clients to do better.

This was *obviously* a major mindset shift for me, but it’s seeped into how we’ve structured our services moving forward.

Our Client Experience Audits are the natural first place to start for those who know that things aren’t 100% but have no idea where to start or how to make things better. And using our 5-phase framework (like what we’re walking you through in this Walking The Talk Series), we audit 5 key areas of your business, give you actionable recommendations and supporting resources to tune things up or make any shifts needed, along with a 90-day action plan to support you in this DIY phase of growing your business.

To us, it was important to have an offer that supported our community even if they couldn’t make the larger investments of us designing and streamlining and elevating everything for them. It’s not always easy to do, and quite frankly, many of us entrepreneurs LIKE doing the work – myself included. And sometimes getting that third-party perspective is all we need.

Our In Demand Program is something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. Like, a while a while. We’ve tried launching programs and courses in the past, but with the rest of our offer suite always feeling not 100% aligned and cohesive with each other, our programs always felt like that too. We weren’t FOCUSED in one direction.

So as we shifted into this much more focused, niched and elevated direction, and as we refined our 5-phase framework for delivering transformational client experiences, the program quite simply came together.

Launching officially in May of 2022, at the time of this post, we’re running through a beta-version of the program to get feedback and refine the content and accountability features before putting it out to the world. Remember! Continuous improvement and market research are key!

Our Work Parties  existed before, and they exist now. I fucking LOVE our Work Parties. That said, they’ve shifted a lot. They started as one x 5 hour day that many clients left feeling like a LOT was covered, but they also felt overwhelmed and unsure how to move forward and take what we worked on into real life. So by the end of 2021, we were playing around with the idea of extending it to 4 x 2 hour consultations that span over a consecutive Monday – Thursday, plus 30 days of having us as support in your back pocket. The feedback from this shift has been undeniable validation.

Time to process in between consultations. More structure and clear goals for each consult. Week-long energy, motivation and accountability. I’m so glad we didn’t scrap them and have simply shifted their focus to elevating offer strategy & client experiences.

Our Custom Client Experience Design Packages were the big ones. They took SO much time refining and reworking and making sure they they felt right. We’ve never offered a fully holistic approach to business support and to be honest, this shift was intimidating.

Ultimately, I kept coming back to the idea that even if you elevate your branding, that doesn’t mean you’ll get results. Even if you get organized and automated internally, that doesn’t mean you’ll get results. Even with the most perfect offer in the whole world, that doesn’t mean you’ll get results. Even if you have your sales systems on point and are bringing new clients in non-stop, that doesn’t mean you’ll get results.

I know you’re like “okay, but getting new clients is literally the definition of results.”

I disagree. Keeping them is. Delivering and turning them into your biggest brand ambassador is. Ultimately, all of those pieces CONTRIBUTE to long-term and scalable success, and when they come together is where the real magic happens.

Now, selling the VALUE of this holistic approach to our new clients — and introducing a level of pricing that we’ve never proposed with this audience before — has been a whole other journey and I’ll break down how we’ve repositioned our authority in Phase 5 of this blog series, so stay tuned!

Overall, I took my time and followed my gut. I bounced ideas off my team, did a ton of market research and finally landed on offers that felt like they all clicked TOGETHER.

The only thing I’m hoping we add a bit later on is a redesign and second attempt at our in-person Visionary Vacay retreats 😉 of course with a spin on elevating our brands and ourselves.

Next Steps

We’ve done our market research and have shifted our direction, messaging, and offers. So now what? Next up is our brand. Stay tuned for the next blog in this Walking The Talk series because we’re going to talk through our brand evolution and how, after YEARS of rebranding and DIYing myself, it was time to call in the big guns and get it done right.