When you first start thinking about selling your expertise to corporates, it can be easy to worry about what’s involved in actually packaging your brilliance into some form of program.
You might think that it needs to be ever so smart to be seen as professional – swanky powerpoints, smart technology, maybe some fancy printed hand-outs. 👩🏫
But the reality is the programs that my students and I have sold for multiple 5-figures to individual large business clients were nothing like that.
In fact, a program that I sold recently that made me $20k for 1.5 days of work consisted of 5 slides, 10 pieces of flipchart paper with marker-drawn lines, some words and a ton of post-it notes.
This was the 5th time this client had hired me over the years, as well as recommended me to others in their organization. 😇
Similarly, I have seen my students create very successful corporate programs with just a few slides and simple word documents as handouts – no fancy graphics or whizzy technology insight.
The reason why these programs are so successful in terms of sales and repeat sales is that they focus on creating very specific, tangible outcomes for the client. 🎯
Ways not to package your corporate proposal
Here is what they don’t do:
They don’t create a standard templated program (I call them cookie-cutter programs) that address a *generic* challenge a client might have, such as “improve internal communication” and “leadership development”.
Or “building resilient teams” or “becoming a better manager”.
Those types of courses (and there are many, many of them) are the domain of training providers, individual companies, or sometimes associated with some business school or professional institute.
What these kinds of programs have in common is that despite their websites claiming that they are tailored to each individual client, they are really just templates with a “one size fits all” format and as a result, they are vague on the exact outcomes they provide. 🙄
Even though they are often delivered by highly skilled professionals, the very fact that there are so many of them that are all similar means that they become a commodity.
And as a commodity, they are open to the threat of being compared solely based on price.
Hence these companies need to use fancy presentations, technology and expensively printed materials to counter the tendency of HR and L&D departments to try to negotiate the training providers down on price.
But here’s the truth: if you don’t offer cookie-cutter solutions, if instead you are acting as a true expert and are genuinely tailoring your work to the specific needs of a client, you can sidestep this problem completely and don’t need any fancy materials to do so.
Does that mean you have to reinvent the wheel each time you create an offer for a new client?
No, of course not!
As an expert in your field, you will have a toolkit of methods and approaches that you know work to get results and you can use them again and again – just arranged and tweaked for each client.
(and yes, they often are the very same ones that you use with your individual clients!)
Differences between creating a weak and successful proposal
Let me give you a few examples of how this works if you are a wellness coach:
❌ You could offer a standard approach that gives employees some advice about nutrition, some tips for exercising and maybe a few ideas about using mindfulness.
❌ Packaged this way, you will be competing with all the other wellness coaches and companies giving the same type of advice – and struggle to charge more than a going market rate.
Alternatively, in my own case for example, I think of the various tools and techniques I use as a box of lego bricks – the basic foundation of the bricks are always the same, but I change the way I put them together depending on what my client needs from each session.
What successful techniques can you use instead?
So when you focus on providing specific, tangible outcomes for your clients, you might do this:
✔ Through your discovery call with the client, you know that your prospect wants to reduce employee stress to reduce sickness absence.
✔ In your conversations, you notice that their managers need to become aware of the daily stressors their people experience, so you facilitate an open dialogue between them.
✔ This takes the form of 3x90min sessions with minimal materials required (maybe a couple of simple slides, some flipcharts if delivering in person), where you explain approaches to stress reduction and wellness improvements, share some practical tips for quick help and at the end, you help them create an action plan to mitigate the biggest stressors.
✔ You then ask the participants to report their perceived stress levels before and after each session and report the improvement as the outcome of your work, together with an action plan.
(Where the smart money is in then following up on that action plan to measure the further improvements this company is experiencing and then offering more support where needed!)
What do these approaches result in for both you and your client?
So the outcome of your work is:
👉 Actionable insights – what’s causing stress?
👉 Reduced stress levels among individuals when they apply the quick help tips
👉 A detailed action plan to reduce stress for the long-term
Because this is highly customized and has a very tangible outcome, you can charge anything from $5k-$20k for those 3x 90min sessions.
More successful techniques to help package your proposal
Another example could be that you notice that this company offers to work from home but this does not seem to reduce their employees’ stress levels.
✔ So you offer an introduction to a mindfulness session to reduce stress based on what you know about this business, as well as some genuinely customized tips on how employees can implement them in their day.
✔ The materials needed for this are very simple and outcome-focused.
You measure the improvement via the reduction in self-reported stress levels and after a specified time, you check with HR to verify reduced sickness absence.
👉Again, these are very specific and tangible outcomes from your program and depending on how you structure this work, how many employees are involved and how fast you can create improvements, you can charge anything upwards of $10k for a day or two of work (obviously a lot more if more work is involved 💰)
This simple example shows you that you don’t have to limit yourself to the standard approaches to provide services in your field to corporates (aka templated solutions) but instead can create different offers on the same topic. In this instance, employee wellness is highly customized and thus highly paid by clients.
And because they are so highly customized, you don’t create them as a full program in advance, instead, you design your sessions based on the conversations you have with your client and keep it simple.
What I can offer you
When I work with 1:1 clients in my 3 months intensive coaching program, we work together on how to create your corporate offer and delivery program so that you can create highly customized offers in extremely short times (1 day or less), and invite repeat work from clients.
We do this after identifying the niche that is best suited for your business and that you are excited about working with.
I also show you how to find and approach ideal clients in that niche without cringy cold-calling or other sleazy tactics and how to have successful sales conversations and proposals that convert at approximately 82%.
This offer provides a full end-to-end system for landing 1-2 corporate clients at multiple 4 & 5 figure contracts in perpetuity, meaning a steady and reliable 6-figure from less than 10 clients a year so the investment is between $7k-9k (depending on when you read this post).
If you are interested in adding a 5 and 6 figure corporate income stream to your 1:1 business, send me a DM and I will ask you a few simple questions to check that your business is a good fit to get results with my method.
If yes, we can get started at a time that works for you.
