How Adding More Offers and Services Can Actually Harm Your Business — and What to Focus on Instead It's tempting to add more offers to your small business, but it comes with downsides to your positioning and operations.
By Makena Finger Zannini Edited by Chelsea Brown
Key Takeaways
- You may think adding new offers will increase your conversion rates and boost your revenue. But adding offers too frequently and too quickly dilutes your marketing and confuses your audience.
- Instead, focus your effort on one core offer that solves a big, specific problem and then refine it.
- Before launching a new offer, ask yourself if you've fully optimized your current offers, if you can actually handle another offer right now and if you're solving a real pain point.
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If you've ever thought, "Maybe I just need another offer," you're not alone. Many entrepreneurs, especially in service-based businesses, get stuck in the cycle of adding more services and more packages to try to capture different types of clients or boost cash flow quickly.
Unfortunately, more offers is rarely the answer.
Related: 5 Ways to Tell If Your Company Should Start Offering a New Product
The allure of adding more
It makes sense in theory to add a new offering — if you add another offer, surely that widens your net, right? You figure you'll meet more people where they are, increase chances of conversion and maybe bring in more recurring revenue.
But instead, if you're adding offers too frequently and too quickly, your marketing becomes diluted and confusing to your audience. Your average consumer may end up spending more time trying to decide what to buy instead of having a clean, smooth sales funnel.
Then, once you've sold a few of each of your offers over time, it becomes really complicated to service those offerings. Your time gets split, billing gets confusing, and in my experience, service quality usually declines.
What starts as an effort to grow can quickly become a trap, draining your team's energy and your business's momentum.
Instead, your best marketing asset is a clear message and a confident sales process.
The power of fewer, better offers
Here's what I'd do instead. Focus your effort on one core offer that solves a big, specific problem, and refine the hell out of it.
When you refine offers instead of replacing them or adding to them constantly, you have a chance to get the same benefit of tweaking your offer to meet the market — which you absolutely should — with less confusion to your audience.
Once you launch that offer, start A/B testing messaging with your audience. See what resonates, and then slowly move your messaging more towards that. Monitor how long clients stay with the offer. Ask them what they like about it and what they wish it included, and maybe create an add-on to address the needs that surface.
Don't get me wrong — I still recommend you try lots of new things and iterate quickly, shedding things that aren't working and doubling down on things that are. Just use those learnings to iterate on what you already have, instead of launching something new every other day.
This also doesn't mean you can only sell one thing forever. But if your core offer isn't selling, don't assume you need a second one. You may just need to optimize the one you've got.
Related: Is Your Offer Not Selling? Try These 3 Fixes to Make It Irresistible.
What to ask yourself before launching a new offer
If you're tempted to build out yet another service, take a pause and ask yourself a few things.
First: Have you fully optimized the marketing, pricing and delivery of your current offers? Do you have enough volume to even know where people are dropping off in your existing conversion funnel, and to know how clients feel about their experience with you?
Next: Can you actually handle another offer right now? Do you or your team have the bandwidth to service it? It feels nice to sell something, but it won't last without proper servicing.
Lastly: Are you solving a real pain point, or are you projecting what you want to sell? Why do you think this offer will resonate? What data do you have to prove it?
If your answers don't point clearly toward expansion, it may be worth hitting the brakes.
What to do instead of adding a new offer
Let's say you decide to hold off on that new offer idea. If things feel slow or stagnant, there are other ways to generate momentum without creating an entirely new service.
Audit your client journey, including every single stage of your funnel. Look at where people are falling off, and what that tells you about opportunities for your pipeline to be improved.
You also may just need a pricing refresh. Take a quick look at your margin in the last few months. Are you actually bringing money home? How do you compare in pricing and value to your peers and competition? I've seen businesses be underpriced far too often — in fact, nearly 50% of small businesses in the U.S. aren't making any profit, and in many cases, that's because they are afraid to charge more.
Look at re-engaging audiences you already have. Reach out to past clients personally to say hi or congratulate them on their most recent milestone. Offer them an incentive to work with you again or to refer someone new to you. Sometimes, simple, personalized touches can get you the same amount of attention that yet another launch would, without the messaging confusion for your audience.
Related: How to Evolve Your Core Product
A bloated offer suite might feel like you're "doing more," but often it just muddies the waters for you, your team and your clients. Instead, get obsessed with making one thing irresistible going into this fall. Track the data, refine the messaging, and build the systems to deliver it efficiently — then revisit expansion only once that's humming.
