3 secrets to creating packages that people will buy

If you’re selling services as a life coach, health coach, healer, or other type of consultant, you should absolutely be creating packages for your services!

Creating packages is one of the best ways to earn more money in your business and get more consistent clients.

What is a package?

For our purposes, a package is anything you offer that is NOT charged hourly. It often looks like a bundle of sessions together over time, but it could also be just a single session, or a year of working with someone! The length of time varies depending on your business, your niche, and your preferences, but there are some common things that makes packages GREAT.

GREAT packages have 3 common traits:

• They are priced based on value, not hours
• They focus on solving a specific problem and they offer a specific result
• They have a defined start and end (vs. ongoing, open-ended coaching)

And each of these pieces are crucial to creating packages that sell, versus packages that simply sound nice, but that people don’t actually want to hand over the cash for. Let’s look at these in more detail.

 

Secret #1 to creating packages that sell:

Stop charging hourly

What’s wrong with hourly pricing?

Well, for one thing, you are putting a cap on your income when you charge hourly. You only have so many hours in a day, and you probably only feel comfortable charging so much per hour. Once you run out of hours, you run out of your ability to make more money in your business. Not cool!

Also,  your services are worth SO much for than just an hour of your time. It’s the value of what you offer that people are paying for, not the time it takes you (plus, most people don’t take into account the time it takes to pre for your clients, work you do in between sessions, and the mental energy is takes to get in the right space to work with a client. It’s WAY more than just an hour of your time!). By positioning your packages based on value, you can charge more than you would be able to hourly.

You also don’t want clients nitpicking over time – a few minutes here, a few minutes there. When you charge hourly, people will try to squirm their way into paying you less, or they may not show up for additional sessions, because each one is costing them and they will try to squeeze you for all you are worth in one session, when YOU know that it should take more sessions to get them where they want to go.

If you charge hourly, many clients will want to just do one session to “test it out”, and even if they commit to doing 4 sessions with you, it gives them leeway to miss sessions or delay them in order to stretch their dollar, which is not optimal for getting them results.

However, when you bundle your sessions together into a package (and you tell people the total price of that package), they are emotionally and financially bought into the WHOLE package, which means you get a higher level of commitment from the client (meaning they actually get better results, and YOU get paid more — WIN/WIN!)

This works for businesses like VAs, designers, and writers too! You can easily take the services yo do most often, and put a total price on them! This is actually way more beneficial to you — just because you work fast, doesn’t mean you should be penalized by making LESS. When you charge based on value, you will make more than your normal hourly rate, and clients will feel confident knowing the total price of the project, instead of worrying how long it will take and how much it’s going to cost them.

My students in Uncage Your Business loooove when they switch to value-based pricing, because they always get a raise!

 

Secret #2 to creating packages that sell:

Get super specific with what results the package offers

One of the biggest problems I see with my clients packages when they come to me (especially the new life coaches out there!), is that they are selling stuff that is WAY too broad.

Most new business owners start out thinking they can help anyone, with anything. And their packages reflect this. Most sales pages I read from new business owners nice, like the concepts are there and the idea sounds lovely… but they are not usually something I would look at and go “holy shit I need this, take all my money!”

The outcomes of what you are offering need to be SUPER clear and specific if you expect people to pay you. Think about the services that you invest in.

 

In fact, here’s a super clear example that just happened to me recently:

I’ve been having some hormonal health problems and wanted to find a naturopath here in Toronto. So I started Googling. There are 1000s of qualified, great naturopaths in Toronto. The problem with my search, was that all of them just listed a whole list of different stuff they could help with on their websites. And I’m sure any of them could have helped me.

But me, as a client? I truly believe that I am a special snowflake and my problems are different than anyone else’s (they are not, but this is how we tend to feel when we are searching for help). I really wanted to know that the naturopath I was hiring would GET me and understand MY specific problems. I wanted an expert in hormonal health!

I asked around in my community, and someone replied saying she knew just the clinic — they specialize specifically in hormonal health and had a package that was JUST what I needed.

So of COURSE I trusted them more than the others and immediately booked an appointment.

As you may be starting to see, having a rocking clear NICHE and creating packages that are suuuuuper specific to what they need, is mega important. If you don’t have a niche yet, you need to back up and go get more clear there, because you will be very hard pressed to sell packages without a clear niche.

I’ll add here too, that even if you DO have a niche, you absolutely must do good market research to figure out what they need.

If you have not done this yet, stop literally everything you are doing in your business and GO DO IT. I am not kidding. You won’t get very far without market research – otherwise everything you create is just a guess and will almost definitely miss the mark with not only your packages but all the rest of the content you create too.

 

(If you’re thinking “Becca, help! I haven’t done this and I don’t know how”, I’ve got you! My program Uncage Your Business teaches you exactly how to do killer market research so you can hit the nail on the head with every single package, piece of content, freebie, and social media post you put out there. Click here to learn more)

 

Secret #3 to creating packages that sell:

Tell them how long it will take to get results 

This is the one that most new clients fight me on haha.

Here’s the thing: it’s impossible to PROMISE results, no matter what industry you are in, because there are so many factors that come into play to determine results.

But here’s the other thing: your clients need you to take charge and be confident that they will get what they need when they give you their money

Your clients are vulnerable — they are struggling in some area of their life, and they are probably super nervous reaching out for support (not always , but often!). When they come to you, they need to feel assured that you understand them, and can help them.

Think about my naturopath example above. Before even talking to anyone, I instantly felt that she could help me based on her offers. But once I sat down with her in her office, she was able to tell me exactly what was going on with my body, assured me that it could be fixed, and gave me a timeline for when she thought I would be doing better.

SOLD.

This goes for every industry (yes, even you too life coaches!) — you need to be confident in telling your clients how you will help them and how long it will take.

I am not talking about giving a Money Back Guarantee. But I am talking about having a pretty good idea of how long it takes you to start to see shifts with your clients.

I totally understand why this is scary for most new business owners. If you haven’t worked with many clients yet, you don’t actually have any idea how long it will take, because you don’t have previous experience to use as a guide.

But the more clients you work with, the more confident you will get in what you are offering and how long it takes, which is why I HIGHLY encourage my students in Uncage Your Business to go out and work with clients for free to get started and get practice! It will help build your confidence like crazy!

Another reason this might be hard for you is that you probably haven’t narrowed your scope yet. This is a process I take students through in Uncage Your Business and it is amazing to see how much confidence it gives people (and how much relief, knowing that they don’t have to be everything to everyone, and they don’t have to work outside their areas of genius).

Narrowing your scope involves looking at alllll the things that someone would need to get from problem to result, and then zooming in on which of those areas YOU specifically want to work on.

Ahhh — can’t you feel the weight being taken off your shoulders knowing you don’t have to do it ALL for clients!? Once you have narrowed your scope, your ability to be confident in telling your clients a realistic timeline for results skyrockets!

Now, of course, life happens and not every single client will get the perfect optimal results. But assuming you had a perfect client who was SO ready for this and showed up and did all the work – what results could they reasonably expect? That’s what you want to show your clients is possible for them too!

 

Recap

Look over your current packages:

• Are the results you are offering specific?
• Are your prices based on value and not hours?
• Does your package have a set amount of time (not open-ended)?

If not, time to tweak! Small changes in how to you create your packages could have HUGE impact on your ability to get clients.

Creating amazing packages doesn’t just happen by chance! There is a lot of pre-work that goes into getting super clear about the foundations of your business — who you serve, what they need, doing market research, and testing things out – that needs to happen before you can really nail your packages.

That being said, all of that work doesn’t have to take ages! My students in Uncage Your Business get clarity on these things often in just a few weeks. Click here to learn more about the program.

xx becca