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Yeah. Part of the reason I see having a bo so when we think about product ladders, one thing I want to mention is the value in having a product ladder and different services available at different price points for the same audience. Solving the same problem is people have different amounts of cash at their disposal. Somebody might show up and say, I only have $50, but I need to become better at A-B testing. Great, here is a book that will teach you, you know, how to self-audit for an A-B test and which tools you should use, and a quick primer on how to get started. That’s enough to solve their problem, take their money, and they’ll be like, Great, I got value. Somebody might show up with $9,000 and be like, I need A-B testing, but my time is the most valuable asset to me. I don’t want to have to do this myself. Great. So if you only had the book, they’d buy the book, but be like, yeah, I still need somebody to implement this. And if you only have the $9,000 service offering, Some people will buy it, but there’ll be a ton of people who will be like, Yeah, I don’t trust you enough, Nick. You’re a wonderful man. I’d love to have coffee with you, but I don’t trust you enough to hand you $9,000 site unseen. Do you have like some evidence of this, something I could do, or give a more affordable offering because I can’t afford the $9,000 offering? That’s where the book comes in. And when we extend that out in both directions, we see the value in having some free offerings, a cheat sheet, a downloadable, an email course, some low-price offerings, a book. And some medium-price offerings, maybe a road mapping session, maybe an initial teardown, and some high-price offerings. I will do A-B testing for you for a monthly fee. And people are able to pick whichever spot makes the most sense for them today. And there’s a clear path forward for them as their business grows, and suddenly they have more capital available and they’re more willing to spend that capital on you. Yes, absolutely.

But it provides an easy, I love using the metaphor of a door here, but it provides an easy door into the service or the offerings. The best ways to work together. And for somebody with a lineage, it might be the best way for me to work together is to buy your cookbook and, you know, enjoy reading it or to try to cook something. For other people, it might be like, I’m going to buy the cookbook. If I’m going in for a $400 meal, what’s a $50 or a $100 cookbook really account to? Oh, cool, I could see they know their stuff I really want to eat here. My parents are the same way with this really well-known vegetarian restaurant. And I think the Bay Area Greens They have every single Greens cookbook. And every single time we’ve visited the Bay Area, we’ve eaten at Greens, and it’s been consistently the best vegetarian meals of my life. And the cookbook provides that. Entrance in and that reinforcement. And oh, hey, we’re in San Francisco. You know what we should do? We should eat at Greens. And the same thing applies to my business. I have two books focused on outreach, the outreach blueprint. And the traffic manual, which I’m renaming Podcast Outreach. And both of those are really focused on, like, hey, here’s how to get started with outreach. And people frequently show up. Say, like, oh, I’m interested in your stuff. I like your free articles. I like your newsletter. The next step, the next obvious step for me, I’m going to buy your book on Outreach. And I’ll get emails from potential clients, and they’ll say, Hey, I read your outreach book. This is exactly what we’re looking for. It’s given me enough to start asking questions. Let’s schedule a meeting to see if we’ll work well together. And just like we talk about putting speed bumps or roadblocks in place to prevent bad clients from working with us, having a book is a nice way to get past those same safeguards that a client Puts in place. When you publish a book on a topic and the client buys it, you aren’t going to be hit up with, like, well, are you good at this? Have you worked on something like this? They’re going to say, Oh, I literally read the book you wrote about solving this problem for businesses like mine. How can you help me? It changes the tone and tenor of that conversation dramatically.

I think it’s because you already know them for better or worse.

Yeah. And I’d say like the audience is listening and saying like, well, okay, give it to me straight, guys. What should my product ladder look like? I think we’ve touched on it, but just to summarize it. Start with a freebie offering, something short, something educational, something that teaches at a high level like five things you need to know about A-B testing or five mistakes you’re making in blah, where blah is the thing you do or the target market you work with. From there, it should level up to an initial service offering, maybe a road mapping session, maybe an initial lower-priced engagement where you get on the phone or go through a short workshop with them. And teach them and learn from them, and suddenly begin to understand what their business is like and what the ramifications of the project are. From there, I recommend leveling up to a one-off higher price service offering. The metaphor I use here is we’ll want to go on a date before we get married. So before we do a multi-month engagement, let’s do a larger one-off engagement and see how we work together as client and consultant. From there, a monthly retainer engagement. And you could spread those out in a lot of different ways. I have people who where the product ladder sort of goes up and grows like a cone, where it’s like, okay, we have one entrance point. Then there’s two options from there, and each of those have two options out. That’s fine. The general form, though, of freebie offering to book to initial paid offering to larger paid offering to retainer offering. Is what I’m building towards and what’s worked well for me, and what I see working well for a lot of people out there. But it provides an entrance point at every level. Some people show up and are like, I just want to hand you money today. Solve my problem. And great, they’ve self-selected for the higher-priced offering. Some people show up and they’re like, well, I don’t know you yet. I’d really like to learn. Let me buy your book, or let me sign up for your email course and then buy your book. And they’re able to come in the door and be brainwashed by my worldview: why outreach is important, why relationship building is important, why you need to focus on these things. And that makes them more likely to work with me down the line. Some people will read a couple of my emails and unsubscribe. Great. Happy to not clutter their inbox. Some people will read a few emails and reply back and be like, I want to learn more. What’s the best next step? And I’ll say, I wrote two books on this. Please pick which one you’d like more. Use this discount code and you’ll save 20%. they’ve moved forward in the product ladder.

It’s true, it is, it is.

So, so we flashback two years in my business, and I was writing a lot of proposals. This was right when I switched to the productized consulting method. A week happened where I wrote five separate proposals. I was up till 11 every night. They were good proposals, and every single one of them was rejected. And I’m like, why the fuck did I spend so much time writing these proposals? And I realize it’s because, well, My product ladder would show up and Kai writes a proposal for you. And I’m like, this is bullshit. I need something better here. And so at the time, I basically had two service offerings: a website x-ray, I’ll look at your SEO and tell you what you need to fix. And an outreach package where I’ll go out and do outreach and relationship building for you, and we’ll get links and build relationships. And there was no feeder into there. So it’s like, okay, fuck it, I’m putting a wall in place. People show up and they go through a roadmapping session with me. That is the only way to work with me. And so I put that there. So when somebody shows up, they’d say, hey, we want to work with you, write a proposal. And I’m like, eh, it doesn’t quite work that way anymore. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do a road mapping session, read about it here. Here’s a welcome packet. This is the cost. We could get started. And so suddenly I had the prototype of a product ladder. It might only be two rungs long, but people show up at one point. And move forward to the next point. From there, I wrote a book. And now people show up and like, how do we get started? And I’m like, I wrote a book. You should read the book. Here’s a link to the book. Go buy the book. And they could come in the door that way. I’m working on a free email course right now focused on outreach. So when somebody shows up, it’s not $50 for the book. It’s, hey, Kai has a free five-part course on outreach and what we need to do for outreach. Great, let’s start there. And with each new rung I’ve added to the ladder, I’ve protected myself from bad clients. They have to go through a lot of different steps to work with me now. And I’ve provided more value for people who show up who aren’t necessarily the right fit for the larger tier offerings. There’s options for them that weren’t available before. I’m sure there’s hundreds of people out there who would be like, Kai’s writing a free course on outreach. I want to throw my email address at him. But because I haven’t made that available to the market, there’s no way for them to buy it. There’s no way for them to engage with it. So by filling in that rung, I’m suddenly providing more value to people out there. And some of those people are going to refer people to me. Some of those people are going to move up the product ladder or through the product orbit to my higher level services and start. Paying me more money.

What I’ve always done, and the way I’ve approached it in my business, is use my engagement with clients to discover more expensive problems that they’re experiencing or in sort of the thirty by five hundred methodology. Figure out Other solutions to the same problem that people are experiencing. So if somebody hires me for an outreach engagement, well, what else does that reveal? So in recently with a number of clients, We’ve been chatting and been doing like outreach focused around podcasts. And we realized, well, hey, there’s a lot of value here in doing the same outreach thing, but What if we focus it on joint venture webinars? And what if we set up these opportunities to promote it to a new audience? And so, by having conversations with clients, I discovered there’s an there’s A deeper area of the expensive problem, we could work in there, and that would provide a lot of value to them. And so, by having these conversations, I’m able to build out new service offerings. Targeting the problems that my existing clients are experiencing. And if I want to work with more people like my existing clients, chances are down the line, New clients who come in are going to have those same or similar problems. So, with all of my offerings, it actually started with the website X-Ray, the SEO teardown. And I realized, oh, this is too big of an offering. Let me split this into a couple of different offerings and position them at different levels. And so somebody comes in and is like, hey, I need help with SEO. Okay, we’ve. Tackled on-site SEO. Oh, we need help with link building. Let’s do a link building blueprint to find out strategies. Let’s do a link building engagement to earn those links. Let’s do an outreach engagement to build relationships with people who will return the favor with links to us. So I really focus on understanding the expensive problem a client is experiencing and figuring out different solutions to that singular expensive problem and then figuring out where those solutions lie on a price spectrum. Some might be $50 things, it’s an e-book. Some might be $5,000 things. It’s a one-off consulting engagement. Some might be $20,000 things. We’re going to go through a proposal for this, and it’s going to be a long process.

Agreed. Agreed. Whenever I’ve split my audience, or even to a lesser extent, split the expensive problem I’m focused on solving. It’s led to dissonance within my business, confusion on my part, since I’m not sure who I’m talking to, and confusion on my customer’s part since Well, is he working with us or some other type of client? What’s going on here? And it’s something I’m in the process of fixing and honing in on. A more specific audience. But yeah, it’s incredibly effective and incredibly important to just be thinking about a singular target market, a singular person, in Sean DeSouza’s word. You have an idea of the buyer, and you’re writing the sales page and making the offering for that buyer.

You touched on one example of a service that I wanted to echo back to that I think is really valuable, sort of a boutique strategy engagement where it’s like the custom e-book. I think that’s incredibly valuable for consultants to have as a productized offering or as just an offering they make available to clients, where it’s not, I’m going to go do This engagement for you, but it’s not, hey, this is off-the-shelf information. It’s a blending of the two. Maybe you go through a research workshop, you put together some deliverable. It’s a beady deliverable, and maybe it draws on a lot of existing information you already have. But it’s presented to the client as like, hey, I’ve taken some off the shelf information I’ve had, research we’ve done, conversations we’ve had, and put together something unique for your business that you could use as a strategy plan. I sell things like this as digital outreach plans for $1,000 and Clients are really receptive to them because it gives them a strategic path forward that they could begin implementing on and answers their questions of like, what do I need to be concerned with? What’s my timeline? What’s my roadmap look like? And it gives them enough to get started. But at a lower price point than retaining me to do it for them. And I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing that you could leverage in the sense of, well, If you’re, in my case, like I’m writing about outreach. So I’ll write about the different tools and strategies you could use for outreach. That’s going to be 90% the same between clients. But still provides the same amount of value to each client who receives that report. So even though some portion of this report is repeated information It’s still valuable for everybody that reads it. The rest of the report is unique to that client’s business. This is how this strategy impacts your specific positioning and your specific products. And from there, it provides a dump truckload of value. But by having this sort of boutique one-off, I will write the guide for you, I will write the e-book specific to your business. It could be a nice higher value offering that builds trusts, serves as a level up into a retainer engagement where you’re enacting the plan. but also makes people feel more comfortable because, okay, great. It’s a lower priced engagement and the first step is we’re defining the strategy. Wonderful.

My number one regret right now in life is I ended up getting an econ degree instead of a creative writing degree, if that answers the question. I in no way regret the time I put into my writing skills. I wish I had spent more time writing 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, it’s paid off dramatically since all I do is make words. I make words on sales pages. I make words in e-books. I make words in client reports. I make words in emails. I am very grateful for the writing skills I have, and I am constantly seeking to improve those skills.

It’s hot garbage. Buddy, but and like, I’d say it’s hot garbage, but Don’t let, dear listener, don’t let the fact that your first thing might be hot garbage dissuade you from publishing and sharing and getting it out there. My first sales page was a steaming abomination. My first report was a steaming abomination. It was good enough to move me forward. It was good enough to satisfy the client and let me see: okay, here’s three things I could do better next time. And then the next time I figured out three more things I could do better. And I slowly leveled up over a few years to. Getting to a slightly better point. And it’s the same position now. Every time I finish a project, I’m like, okay, cool. I identified three things I can do better. Now let’s go do them. And like, that’s how you really get better at something. You don’t show up in your magically good at table tennis or weightlifting. You show up and you lift a heavy weight and you fail and you drop the heavy weight on the floor and it makes a clanging sound. But at least you’re trying. At least you’re showing up and putting in the work and getting better. And that, I think, is the important part. When it comes to writing, and when it comes to developing these productized services, or your product ladder as a consultant, figuring out where the holes are, where the problems are, where you need to improve. And then working on improving it. And the first solution you jam in there might not be the best solution possible, but at least it exists as a stopgap. And you could always work on it, iterate on it, and refine it to get to be something better. You and I had a conversation a few weeks ago about One of your offerings and like, oh, does it fit best as a precursor or does it fit best after this offer? And you have a vision for it that’s different than how it’s currently positioned, but That makes sense because you’ve shipped that offering more than a dozen times, a couple dozen times, and you’re able to see, oh, this is how it best provides value. This is where it should fit in my product ladder.

On the info product side, there’s this great example that I love sharing. Ramit Sethe owns I Will Teach You to Be Rich. It is a very, very successful business. It is making him a lot of money. Ramit’s first product, Ramit sells courses that range between $500 and I think $15,000. Like we’re talking serious big boy money here for a single seat. And his first product was Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass. It was a $7 e-book. And he’s written about it and spoken about it before, and he’s like, It was so dumb. It was $7. I had no idea how to put value on it. Why did I call it 2007? As soon as the year hit 2008, suddenly it was obsolete. I thought I’d write a new one every year. Why didn’t I make it evergreen? But he started from a position of just shipping something, and it wasn’t the best thing possible. And there were a ton of problems with it. But he shipped it and people bought it and he continued moving forward. And now the man’s selling $15,000 courses. Like you start somewhere and you level up. Practice, practice, practice.

That’s it. It’s showing up and it’s doing the work, and it’s being okay with where you are, and it’s figuring out where you could. Sort of move forward? What new things, what new lines of service can you add on to your business? I mean, I think let’s continue referencing him on every episode. Our friend Brennan Dunn just released a new course. Mastering project roadmaps. And he came up with a project idea because he saw so many of his students starting to use roadmaps in their consulting offerings. And he was like, okay, this is something that I know well that I could teach that there’s demand for. Let me make the product. And he expanded his product offerings by one iteration by understanding what people are looking for, by seeing there was a hole, a hole he might not have been able to identify a year, two, or three years ago. And creating a product that satisfied that need. And it’s the same side on consulting offerings. You could look and say, like, oh, wow. There’s a sudden jump here where I’m selling a $500 offering, and the next step is a $5,000 offering. That might be a big leap for a lot of my clients. What’s something in the middle that both Is highly leveraged for me, so I make a good rate doing it, but highly valuable for the client. So they’re like, oh, wow, yeah, the $500 project went great. Let’s do the $2,500 project and then let’s do the $5,000 project. So looking and seeing where those holes or those problems are.

Doing all of that.

You brought up the question before the call: how to upsell people effectively on product offerings? And what I found to be the most successful is a combination of two things. When somebody approaches me to work together, I offer them a choice of yeses. So typically, let’s say it’s unwashed masses emailing me and they’re like, hey, we want to work together. And I’m like, great, here’s three options. We can do a paid call. It’ll be $300 for a paid call. You get to ask me anything for an hour, and at the end, you’ll have strategic advice on how to grow your business. We could do a road mapping workshop or a marketing growth workshop, as I call them now. Where we do a 90-minute workshop, we talk about your business, we identify the opportunities, and at the end you get a written report. Or we could do a digital outreach plan, which is the same thing as a marketing growth workshop, but focused entirely on outreach. Which of these makes sense for you? They’re at different price points, so the client is able to pick the one they have the budget for, but they’re also slightly different service offerings. So the client is able to say, Oh, this one satisfies my need the most, and that gives me an indication of where the client wants to head. On the backside of those service offerings, whenever I deliver that report, if I want to continue working with that client, if I have capacity or if we had a good relationship together. I’ll say great. At the end of the report, I’ll say something like, great, it was so exciting to work together. In terms of next steps, here are the three best options for you. Option A, paragraph describing it. Option B, paragraph describing it. Option C, paragraph describing it. Here are the prices. I’ll I’ll follow up with you in a week to make sure this report answers all of your questions, and we could decide on the best next step for your business then. So Instead of the client saying, like, I’d love to work with Kai, we better figure out how, I’m coming to the table saying, here are three options for us to continue working together. I’ve Narrow the scope of like, what can Kai do for us? It could be anything. Let’s imagine Neeric to, hey, great, here are three things Kai Davis can do to help your business grow. Which option would you like to move forward with? It makes it so much easier for a client to pick.

I often run into consultants who say, well, I’m afraid of productized consulting because it limits what I’ll be able to do for my client. I’m just doing, you know, A, I’m a black box, money comes in. Something comes out, or I’m afraid of positioning because it limits what I’m able to do if I’m only focused on a specific audience or a specific expensive problem. From my own experience, what I’ve discovered is after an initial engagement with a client. you have such a deeper knowledge of their business that there’s an opportunity to test out a new line of service then and there. I’ve had a recent client where we worked on an engagement together. At the end, they said, like, oh, we really need some help with like X. And I’m like, hey, that’s not something I’ve tackled before, but I have a lot of knowledge on how to tackle it. I’d love to add that as a line of service. Here’s what it will cost for us to prototype it together. It’ll be a discovery process. Here’s a general outline. We’ll go through it. We’ll talk. We’ll communicate with each other and figure out Along the way, what needs to change to make it a better fit, but does this seem like something you’d be interested in? And if it’s solving an expensive problem they’re already experiencing, chances are they’ll be willing to go for it. And if it’s an ability for me to test out a new line of service that I wouldn’t have thought of before, or wouldn’t be advertising on the front end but would love to have on the back end of my business. It’s a perfect match because now I understand the client’s business and I could effectively propose a solution that minimizes my risk and lets me say, Okay, great, here are you know, here’s an option on how we could work together. It’s new. But I benefit by seeing, like, oh, this is what the SOP will be like to do something like this. And they benefit from having an expensive problem solved.

I think solving the same problem in a different way is a very viable strategy. It’s something that Amy Hoy recommends in 30 by 500. When you’ve identified the problem that a target market experiences, well, She advocates people going through a process called fix storming, where it’s saying, okay, I’ve identified this problem. What are 30 different ways I could solve this problem? And I think that could be really effective because it lets you identify different solutions at different price points. So you might have identified, let’s say, A-B testing as the expensive problem. Well You could have a book, you could have a course, you could have a masterclass, you could have a coaching program, you could have a do-it-yourself version, you could have a I’ll do it for you, you could have a series of videos, you could have, you could develop a software as a service application to help with A-B testing. So I think that there’s value in identifying different fixes for the same problem, but there’s a lot of risk when you split your positioning to focus on a separate Problem or a separate target audience exclusively. I’ve started saying that the word and or or in a positioning statement is sort of a death tone for your business. Because all it does is confuse your customers and confuse you on your marketing. So if my marketing says, I help consultants and software as a service product owners, do blah. Well, the chances of the overlap in the expensive problem in those two target markets is very, very low. So suddenly I’m automatically focusing on two separate expensive problems. I’m talking to two separate audiences. It gets messy and difficult.

I sort of cheat on this, and I have three separate businesses running off of the same product ladder. And for people who are saying, like, well For people who are looking for an exception to this rule, I just want to share my business as a case study and how it works and how it doesn’t work. Right now, I have W Audience, which is my outreach-focused agency. I have W e-commerce, which is outreach for e-commerce companies running on Shopify. And I have Eugene SEO, which is a local SEO agency for businesses in Eugene, Oregon, which happens to be where I live. Come say hi. It’s beautiful. So those are really three really, really separate businesses, three really separate target markets. But in each business, I’m actually just selling the same services. Eugene SEO. All it does is sell SEO roadshops or workshops where we show up for 90 minutes and talk about your business and I put together a strategic plan. And then SEO optimization for your website. That is it. That is a product ladder. Those happen to be two exact same things that I sell at W e-commerce and W Audience. And between W e-Commerce and W Audience, they sell the exact same services. Show up. Free course, marketing workshop. Buy one of my books. I’ll do outreach for you, or I’ll put together an outreach plan. That’s out of order, but those are what the services are. And It’s let me. I run into the same problems of pitching and marketing to three separate audiences, but I’m, like we mentioned, in the process of consolidating down to a single audience there. In the meantime, By selling the same products under these sort of three different brandings or these three different business names, it’s made it easy for me to do fulfillment. So when somebody shows up and is like, hey, I’m a Eugene business, I need some help with SEO, I’m like, great. It’s not starting over from square zero. I already have an SOP that defines all of this that I’ve been doing for e-commerce businesses or businesses that come through WR Audience. It’s very easy for me to change the 5% necessary and have it work for a local SEO or a local business that needs help with SEO. So that’s one sort of way to cheat your way through it. But I will say I’m not focusing on marketing WECommerce or Eugene SEO at all because I know that as soon as I start focusing my marketing attention there, I won’t be focused on W Audience. And W Audience is the most successful of the three businesses. So the other two really exist just to catch people who Are you searching Eugene SEO and Eugene, or have heard me on a podcast talking about e-commerce and show up there, and they serve as a door into the business where I’m selling them on the same product ladder, but it’s slightly different positioning. Am I explaining that well? Does that make sense?

I thought it was a documentary. It’s a mockumentary. But yeah, I mean, product ladders are really valuable for consultants because consultants are anybody who’s selling something because you’re taking You’re taking the need to ask questions away from the people who want to work with you. They don’t show up and say, Great, how can you help me? They show up and say, Oh, great, this is how you could help me. I want to start here. And Product ladders are really effective at helping you build out your business and offer higher value offerings. Alan Weiss refers to these as accelerant curves. We think about like the leverage you could have in an offering. Well, if you’re selling an hour of your time for $100, you can make $100 per hour. Congratulations. But if suddenly you decide, like, well, what if I run a workshop? It’s a two-hour workshop and I charge $100 a head and I get 10 people, we’re going to make You know, $1,000 in two hours, and suddenly you’re making $500 an hour. And that could become another entry on your product ladder or your accelerant curve or your product orbit. So By starting to view how your different offerings connect together, you could start to identify your most profitable offerings in terms of people buy this a lot, this is cool, or wow, when people buy this, I make a shit ton of money because it’s really, really highly leveraged. That’s cool. And figure out what direction you want to optimize further in. Do you want to sell more of your things? Great, double down in one direction. Do you want to sell some things that make you more money in an effective hourly rate? Great, double down in that direction. But just by taking that first step and laying out what your offerings are and seeing how they connect to each other, how they feed into each other, if any of them are like weird and orphaned out there and need to be brought back in or remixed into something new, great. The first step starts from just on pen and paper or in a mind mapping tool, lay out what your different offerings are. What the flow should be between them and how you want a client to progress. And you might suddenly say, Oh, wow, I’m asking people to show up and just hand me $500. I really should, you know. Slap together a $29 ebook that explains what my process is, or put together a free course, a freebie offering that educates them on why they need this certain thing. And then pitches them on the $500 offering. But just by taking a look, taking that time to analyze what you’re offering and what you’re selling, you will see if there are holes in your offerings or not. Or if there’s opportunities to expand your offerings, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it’s a good view up here, right? Top of the ladder, top of the ladder, nothing to do but jump into the swimming pool.

That we have. How’s the weather in Chicago today?

That’s hot. That’s hot. That’s swimming weather. It’s weather.

Go down to the swimming hole. You have a small pool or a small pond near Chicago, if I recall correctly.

Yeah, I’m slightly familiar with it.