Thinking of creating a course or some other more passive offer in your health or life coaching business? You’re not alone, many coaches are now creating courses, memberships and group programmes to sell alongside their 1:1 coaching offers so they can help more people and make more money in less time.

But creating a course – especially one that actually sells – requires a lot more than just a good idea.

In this post I’m going to share how you can utilise pre-sales in your coaching business for more successful offers. Let’s dive in!

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What is Pre-selling?

Pre-selling is where you sell an offer before it’s actually created. That might sound a bit odd, but there’s lots of very good reasons why pre-selling makes sense.

Many coaches, including myself, have spent lots of time creating an offer like a course to then offer it out and it does not sell.

Pre-selling, in part, solves this problem.

What can pre-selling be used for?

• Courses
• Memberships
• Group Programmes (these may or may not have a lot of content)
• Small Digital Products (although these shouldn’t be super time intensive to create)
• Paid Live Trainings (these are pre sold by default)

All of these offers can be pre sold in different ways.

Why is Pre-selling a Good Idea?

Pre-selling can help your business and sales in a few different ways

Idea Validation

When it comes to selling these kinds of offers – especially ones that require you to create a lot of content, making sure your idea is validated – i.e people actually want it, can save you a lot of time and resources. When you pre sell and people buy, that’s obviously a very good indication that people are interested in your offer and indicates that it’s going to be worth investing your time and energy in creating the thing in the first place.

Funding your work upfront

Pre-selling also enables you to get paid while you’re creating the thing. Depending on what your overall business model is and how your cash flow looks, having that income essentially funding the time you’re spending creating it can be helpful.

Create a buzz around the offer

Pre-selling can also help to create more of a ‘buzz’ around your offer that can help people make the decision to buy it. As part of your pre-sale, you can also offer a discount or special bonus that will also help you sell more.

Allows people to influence the offer itself

If you pre-sell something it also gives you the opportunity to get feedback from participants on the offer itself such as what topics you might cover or specifically what you teach. This is a benefit for you and for them as they get to help shape how the offer comes together.

It motivates you

If you’ve pre sold an offer you’ve basically promised people that in exchange for their money you’ll be giving them a product in exchange. For some this can feel like pressure, but it can also be really motivational in keeping you going through the content creation process.

What you’ll need before Pre-selling your offer

The good news is that you don’t need to create a lot when you’re pre-selling something. You just need enough to let people know what the offer is and then take the payment.

A sales page or mini sales page

Depending on the offer you could even just create a Google-Doc or a Notion Page (I’ve recently done this for a new offer) but basically you’ll want a page that shares what the offer is, what you plan to include, an outline and it might also be a good idea to include the key outcomes people will gain from the offer if they purchase it.

A method of taking payments and collecting participants information for updates

Just like with any other offer, you’ll need a way to take payment and a way to collect email addresses for updates. Depending on your tech stack, the way you take payment could be linked into the platform you deliver your offer on (like Teachable or Kajabi) or you might need to connect together different systems.

How to deliver on a pre sold offer

There are two key ways you can deliver on an offer that has been pre sold – you either communicate a date with your buyers as to when the offer will be available in its entirety or you drip out the content.

Dripping out the content module by module if it’s a course, can mean that you space out the content creation and delivery which can feel more sustainable than having to meet one single deadline.

The difference between pre selling an offer and just doing any other kind of launch

The difference between a pre-sold offer and any other kind of launch – especially for products which aren’t an online course, isn’t super clear cut. However the rule of thumb for me is that you decide on a minimum viable number of participants or sales at which you go ahead and create the offer, or you refund people and go back to the drawing board. If you’re going to create the offer no matter what and unless it’s a course, then I’d say it’s probably more a standard launch.

My experiences with pre selling

I’ve successfully pre-sold two different offers in my business. The first was a large course called Rock Your Brand and Website that I have since retired (although I am tempted to bring it out of retirement!). This course taught you how to create your own branding and design your own website, and because it was such a large course to create with several modules I wanted to know people would be interested in it before I created it.

I offered a pre sale with a discount and it sold really well so I then delivered it over a couple of months, releasing new modules as I went. It wasn’t a ‘live’ programme, but because of the nature of the materials and what people would need to implement, having gaps between each module being released worked really well.

The second offer I launched as a pre-sale was my course Blog School. To be honest this was a bit of a live round launch, but I hadn’t created any material before I offered it for sale, and I was only planning on running it if I hit a minimum viable number. Again, with Blog School I realised a new module each week over a couple of weeks and dripped out the content so the content creation felt more sustainable rather than having to work on it all at once.

If you’d like to explore getting started with courses, or any other passive income / scaled offer then do get in touch.

My course Super Simple Passive Income is a great place to start if you’d like to create a small digital product. If you’re a more established coach who’s ready to go bigger with a course, group programme or membership, do get in touch and we can have a chat about how I might be able to support you.

Let me know in the comments if this has inspired you to try a pre-sale!

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