How to review your products to make bigger profit

Who doesn’t want to make a bigger profit?

Who doesn’t want to do it with resources we already have?

So you’ve made it to seven figures. You’ve had success along your journey. You’ve got pieces that are working. But a question for you, what if you could use what you’ve already got as the basis to make more profit from those things?

This is when we start looking at product suites and ascension ladders.

I’m going to explain what each of these things are and then I’m going to tell you how to use those to leverage to make bigger profit.

This episode shares:

 

• What is a product suite? It’s a fancy way of saying – The group of products or services my business offers. 
• What is an ascension ladder? The pathway your audience follows from purchasing one product to the next.
• The cost of not spending your time planning:  Even though you don’t see the impact immediately of planning, it’s worth it.
• Controversial opinion: Match your audience to your product. 
• The piggyback off vs multiples products creation: We want maximum leverage 
• Get help: It’s your business and you’ve likely been captain of the product ship since the dawn of time. You’re too close to see things objectively, you see the whole story and history. You need someone who doesn’t have that context to find the gaps, to highlight the obvious.

 

What is a product suite?

When I’m working with seven figure business owners, I’ll talk to them about their products and I’ll talk to them about how they got the idea for these products.

They look at me a little bit funny and then they start telling me the history of their services, which is great.

Then I ask them about their product suite and they look at me a little bit confused.

“What do you mean? I’ve just told you the history of my products. What is a product suite?”

Your product suite is a fancy way of saying the group of products or services that your business offers.

But it doesn’t stop there.

It shows the inclusions of each of those products or services and it shows the linkages between them. Which then helps you price better and helps you give you transparency in terms of planning what inclusions and what value each of those products play in your entire business model. When you put it all together, that’s your product suite.

What’s an ascension ladder?

Then we look at your Ascension Ladder, or your Value Ladder, or your Products Ladder. It has so many names. And what this means is the logical pathway that you want your audience to take to buy one product to then the next product. It’s that order piece that matters here.

What am I buying first? What am I buying second? What am I buying third? Now yes, this will look a little bit different for every human being, but what we’re designing here is a pathway that we believe the majority will take. And we start leading them down that journey. Because something that we know about human behaviour is we like to be told what to do next.

We want it to be really clear and really easy for us to understand the steps we need to take to get the results that we want. Even when it comes to purchasing a product or a service, tell me what’s the right one for me right now. And then once I’ve done that, tell me what the next one is. Tell me what to do.

Tell me where my money is best spent. You tell me, you know your service and your products better than anybody, so I can go and I can guess. Or I can go to the expert, which is you.

Something I’ve also noticed working with people who’ve ticked off their seven figure milestone is that very rarely have they sat down and looked at what their product suite is and what their value ladder is in comparison to that product suite and how it all ties together.

Which again, we might be thinking, hang on a sec, if we’ve made it this far, obviously our products are working, or we wouldn’t be here. 100%, you’re right. This isn’t about whether your products are working. This is about the way that they were created and with what intent they were created. Because something else I know is that we can make it to seven figures with products that are disjointed because they’re built based on inspiration or based on audience feedback.

People want them so you create them, your audience consumes them, they love them, voila. But if you follow that model as you continue to scale, you’ll be forever creating new things, which isn’t the aim of the game. We don’t want to have to be creating new, pitching in different ways to sell more stuff.

What we want is to capitalise on what we’ve got and create a really solid map for our audience. So we want to leverage the effort that we’ve already put in. Sounds good, right? So why don’t we spend time looking at product suites? I find that A lot of business owners are happy to map out a value ladder or a product ladder and go, Oh yeah, this is the order I think that people should buy these things in.

But when it comes down to strategically looking at that whole suite and how your ladder ties in, we jump ship. We don’t want to do it. So why not? One of the reasons is we like to be guided by inspiration. When we are guided by inspiration, things feel fun. They feel like we get something back. We have excitement around it.

It feels easier. So why not just follow that high and create? There’s nothing wrong with being led by inspiration, but what you don’t want to do is that be your only mode and never map your inspiration thought process with your logical thought process. We need the two to boost each other and so when inspiration guides us, we usually create something amazing. By jumping to the next thing that inspires us, at times we can cannibalize that first thing. We’re not actually letting the logical side do its work to create the most leverage from that first product. Is it getting in front of the right people? Is it doing the work it was designed to do? My guess is that product or service exists to help create your impact.

While your impact is going to stop short, if you don’t give that first product and service the tactical pieces it needs, to expand its reach. And if you’re consistently just moving to the next exciting thing, those things might still be very successful, but not as much as they could be. The other reason that we tend to shy away from reviewing our product suite and putting in these pieces is because it takes time.

The cost of not spending your time planning

It’s another thing that we have to do where we don’t see the impact immediately. With anything that is strategic, we spend our time and our energy up front and it can take a while to get the pay-off from that. There’s no instant gratification, but when we do get the result, usually it’s a much better one than in the scenarios where we get an immediate result.

So it’s worth it, even though it feels like it’s taking up more of your brain space, it’s taking up some more of your time that you’ve been wanting to use somewhere else. This has the potential to save you more time because if you get this balance right and this mix right, you won’t have to work as hard.

Your impact and your reach will grow. Your profit will grow because it’s like a mathematical formula. All the pieces of the equation are there for it to succeed rather than for some things to fall through the cracks because we’re missing some pieces. And then the final thing is we won’t spend the time doing it because we don’t know how to do it.

This is an interesting concept because it’s not complicated. It can be. But at its simplest form, I think that anybody can do this. When we don’t know how something is meant to look, we tend to shy away from it. It goes in the too hard basket. It goes in the I don’t really know what I’m trying to achieve here.

I don’t know what it’s meant to look like. I don’t really know what the result is that I’m going to get for it. I just know that someone told me I should do it. So I’m just going to park that and I’m going to do this thing instead. Because that, I feel more confident in. Which is all valid. But instead of not doing it, maybe we can just get a little bit more education and information around what it is and what it can look like so it doesn’t feel so hot.

I like to do it in a visual manner, so I’m big on the whole, you know, visual versus analytical. I have this conversation with clients all the time too. Which way do you think? How do you learn? Because you’ll be one or the other. If you can work to your strength, this can be done really easy. You’re analytical, put things in a list, get a spreadsheet and start there.

If you’re visual, put things in a map, use colored blocks and build on the blocks until you see a nice picture of how everything fits together.

Now, what is the cost of not doing this? So I’ve given you some reasons why we tend to not do it and the things that hold us back. But why should we push past that? And the reason is, without doing this, we’re creating silos.

In the same way, that we want to create communities and have groups of people that are all connected together or create one to many communication models so that we’re not saying the same thing over and over again to all these different individual people or in a community where we want to open a conversation up so everybody can share their perspective and their opinion on one topic.

Eventually, everybody gets the benefit of seeing that opinion or feeling validated because somebody else has seen it the way they do. And they’re not alone.

We spend a lot of time trying to build these connections and networks, and we understand its role in that place. We see the value. So we put the effort in. The same thing happens with your products. If you don’t spend that effort in connecting all the pieces. You just end up creating silos and you’ve got all these pockets of product silos, things that serve a certain person for a certain purpose to a certain person at a certain time.

And then another one over here that does a different thing for a different person at a different time. And another one over here that does a different thing for that same person at a different time. And we create these silos. But we’re never leading people to see how they connect together, to see what the benefit would be for them if they had access to all the different silos.

The same way we wouldn’t be showing them the benefit of being in a community. We wouldn’t be saying to them, hey, you can actually get more support in a group of people. There’s different benefits here. Maybe it’s worth it. Same concept. We don’t want to silo everything. Because then we have to work harder.

Because then our impact is stifled. Because then, Our audience is confused. It’s not easy anymore. Now, what I’m not saying is that we can’t have lots of different products. You 100 percent can. What I’m saying is how can we connect them and what might be missing to be able to connect.

Controversial opinion

You do lots of marketing courses, you watch masterclasses, you go to workshops, you watch webinar after webinar of all the gurus who say to you, create your thing, then find the audience that it suits.

How we do that is by first looking at the audience. It’s all about the customer. The customer is always right. Who, what does your audience want? What do they need? Who is it that’s listening to you already? You’ll find oodles and oodles. For people telling you this is the way, the only way I actually think it should be the opposite. And I’ve said this for a while and it wasn’t until I was watching a training by Aaron Fletcher.

The reason that then I have gone, okay, I really like this guy, was because of his whole approach to product.

Audience and marketing. when he talks about starting with a product and the problem that product solves and how that problem becomes the audience that you pitch to.

Instead of looking at the people first, the people that are already interacting with us and going, what do you want? What do you want? How can I help you more? We look at the products that we have. And then we go, what problem does this solve? Who else has that problem? Who are the people that would get the most benefit from this problem being solved?

And I loved it because it’s something that I’ve been talking about for so long. I never wanted to build a business that was completely created and driven by other people. You know, I want to make an impact on the planet. I want to make an impact on the world. I want to do my bit. I want to see life be better.

But I want to do it in a way that makes my life better at the same time. I want to do it in a way where my business feels fun and easy and profitable. And if I’m constantly trying to stretch myself too far or think like another person or create something just because somebody else wants it. Even though I really don’t like it or disagree with it, it’s never going to be fun and it’s never going to be easy.

Always going to be that stretch. And so from the minute that I started my business, I always had this factor when looking at this whole, but what do the people want? Now I am a people first, always kind of person. So I care about people a lot, but there had to be a way that my business could include me.

It’s mine! Why can’t I be a factor here? And then, when I looked at why can’t I leverage the things that come naturally to me and the products I find easy to create or the service I find easy to deliver and then find the people that get the most benefit. To find those people, you work out the problem that you’re solving.

And who’s going to benefit most. Now, here’s the beautiful thing. When you’re looking at your audience first, and then building for them, you’re looking at one type of person. This fits one little group, one avatar. When you flip it, you’ve created something that can work for all different kinds of people.

So let’s take a look at bookkeeping software, for example. There are all different kinds of businesses. There are people who are tradies. There are people who are marketing agencies. There are people who own cake shops. Something that they all have in common is that they need a way to track their finances, to be able to interpret them easily and make better decisions.

If I create a bookkeeping software that does that, I now have the opportunity to enter three different markets. I can go with tradies, I can go with marketing and agency and service based, I can go with product based, brick and mortar, e commerce, and serve a whole lot of different markets. Because I’m not focused on who I’m creating it for, I’m focused on the problem it’s going to solve and what it gives.

And it’s the same for you, which means we can look at the products that we’ve already created. And change the way we think a little bit and go, who does this product really benefit? And it might be more than one kind of person and that’s okay. But it means that then we can create different maps. And the first thing that we do is plot our products on our map.

What have we already got and how do they connect? We have to be objective. And sometimes. It’s our lack of objectivity that makes this hard for us, because we know exactly what went into creating each of those products and services. We know the emotions that went into it. We know the time, the money, the energy, the questions that we asked.

We know the inspiration and why we created that thing and we’re really attached to it. And that’s totally okay, but you need to be able to be objective at the same time to go, what have I missed? And it’s those missing bits that are going to give you the maximum leverage. So when we’re creating new thing and new thing and new thing, it takes us more time, more energy, more money, more effort to market.

The piggyback off vs create multiple product

When we piggyback off something that we’ve already created and create a stepping stone, we’ve already set the foundation here. So that’s how we can really get more bang for our buck.

When we’re doing this, we want to start with one of our products and then we want to look at the next step that someone would take. If this is this product and this is point one, what problem does this product solve? And once that problem is solved, me as a consumer, what’s the next problem that I have now that I’ve solved that?

Because very rarely do we ever have no problems, or do we ever not have a bigger desire. Once we’ve got that first thing, what’s the next thing that we want? And we start to think of it like this. We go, okay, and what I think will happen is when you start mapping your products out and then you try and draw these connecting lines, you’ll see that maybe you’ve missed a few steps in the middle.

Or maybe you’ve created some things that solve a problem in this category and a problem in a different category and they don’t quite match. You can’t connect them. And again, that’s okay. That’s because you create them for different purposes and different people. So they become their own mini maps. And that’s something I see a lot as well.

We create multiple product suites or multiple Ascension models based on the most likely pathways that people are going to take and how we can fill those gaps to make it a smooth transition. Because when we can create these clear pathways, it’s easier for people to make decisions. It’s easier for people to see what we want them to do next.

They can self serve, solve their problem, and you make more money. We’re making it easier for them to buy. But if we never look for those gaps, we won’t be able to do it.

A key thing to remember here is not to overcomplicate it. I can create a product suite that could take 50 hours, 100 hours, and could have so many pieces. Probably isn’t going to have. The same level as impact, as if I simplified it. And for you, how that looks, is just pick one thing. Get two of your products, put them next to each other, and go, what’s the piece in the middle that might be missing?

What’s the question that people keep asking? And that’s the reason they drop off between one product and the next product. Start small, and then test it. See what happens when you implement it. See what happens when you ask people, hey, have you ever wondered about this? And see what people say. And then, once you’ve made those connections, do it again.

Look at another product on the end. Are there gaps there? Does that product even fit in this suite? Or does it need to be pulled out and put somewhere else? And then what is the little map that we’re creating around that? And then after we’ve done that, that’s when we can start creating funnels that actually can fit.

That’s when we start getting recurring revenue. That’s when we start getting more sales for things we’ve already created purely because we’ve bridged that gap and we’re losing less people. So we spend all this time and energy marketing and getting people to be aware of what we’re doing and then we lose them because we haven’t made those clear pathways.

So what if we plugged the holes? What if we built those bridges? And usually, it doesn’t take a lot to build those bridging products. Because they’re usually a hybrid of something you’ve already done. And that’s where it gets fun. You get to be creative and you get to look at different ways that you can solve these problems without it being too much effort.

You’ve already done the foundation work.

Another thing would be to focus on consistency. Once you have a pattern of how you’ve done something once, so let’s say you do this for a few products, Follow the same steps that you took and do it for the others. If you created a mini course for something to fill the gap somewhere and you have another map that has a hole, fill it with a mini course in that same similar spot in that client journey on your product ladder.

Try to keep things consistent because that’s how things become easy. It gives you that starting point and it takes the unfamiliar element away. And it means that you can get things up faster to a higher quality because we’re not guessing. We’ve got a tried and tested method now and we’re going to redo it, but for something else.

And then you test a new shape and you tweak rather than trying to consistently start from scratch. Thanks. Gives you the starting point. Starting point is everything.

Get help

My final piece of advice for you is to get help. So, like I said before, you’ve gotten your business to this far. It’s been successful.

And my guess is it hasn’t been successful in spite of you. You have been captain of your product ship since the dawn of time. You’ve been fully embedded and invested in that and you’re proud of it and you should be, like I said before, you know, and you feel the emotion that went into it, you know, the history, you know, the different choices that led to those decisions that created these things, you know, the feedback you’ve gotten good, bad and ugly, everything is all there.

So how can we be objective when we’re looking too far into the picture? And so if you have trouble looking for any of these gaps, ask someone else. Because the other thing that I have noticed with my clients is that for me, it’s really obvious where the gaps are because I haven’t walked each step with them.

And so I can see this picture starting and I can go, hang on a sec, how does someone get from here to here? If that was me, I wouldn’t know how to do that. As a user, just as someone in your audience, I wouldn’t know which way to go. I wouldn’t know what that term meant, or I wouldn’t know how to choose which way, this way or that way.

Or, I would be wanting this type of thing to consume now. Or my brain has been so overloaded with this awesome in depth training that now I need something lighter. But you, as the creator, likely miss all of that because you’re in the depths of it. So get someone else to help you do your math.

Someone who doesn’t have that much context. And then once you’ve done that, Then you add the context back in. So we’re not saying that we need to remove all of our knowledge and expertise and all of the information we have. But what we want is for somebody else with fresh eyes to be able to look at it and go, hang on a sec, have you thought of this?

More times than not, you know the thing, but you’ve discounted it. No one will ever really want that because it seems simple. But the truth is, it’s simple for you because you’re you. It’s not simple for your audience. And you need somebody who’s not you to be able to give you that perspective. And find some quick wins.

And look at these gaps. And reflect it back to you. And then you create. a really, really solid plan and you start to plug those gaps and build those bridges and then watch how people move through. That’s how you can do it in its simplest form. It doesn’t have to be over complicated, but if you put in the time and effort into doing it, you will see the result.

Wrapping it Up

I encourage you to give it a go. If you’ve never looked at your product suites or if you just haven’t looked at it in a long time, do it see what happens. Play with it. If you try it, please send me a DM because I want to know about it. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re enjoying it and you’re finding it useful, please leave me a review. So you notice how I’m giving you the exact next step I want you to take. To make it easy.

Please give me a review. That’s how I know I’m on the right track. If you have other topics you want me to cover, again, send me a DM – @audaciousempires – on Instagram or Facebook. Send me an email audaciousempires.com and tell me. Because I would love to spend my time creating content that actually benefits you where you are now. 

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