Well, we’ve almost reached the end of this series of posts about positioning.
I know that some of you have been into it and have been applying everything I’ve been sharing to your business. Go, you!
And I know that others of you are thinking, “Thank God! I didn’t really need any help with positioning, so the sooner we move on to other things, the better.”
If that’s you, It’s all good. I know that not everyone needs everything I share in this blog.
But for those of you who HAVE been following along (thank you, BTW) and applying the tips I’ve been sharing, I have one last trick that will make your business and the services you offer appear 10X the value of your competitors…presenting each of your offers as a product bundle.
And here’s the great news: It’s as simple as packaging your offer differently.
Why Most Educational Consultants’ Offers Are Meh
Most educational consultants have one name for their workshop or consulting package on a particular topic.
For example, a consultant might be an expert at showing middle school and high school teachers how to better engage their students with their reading.
Such a consultant might name their training in this area, “Engaging Secondary Readers” or something else equally generic and boring. This is, unfortunately, extremely common.
Now, if this fictional consultant read my last post about the power of names, he might call this training something else, like “The 3E Reading Method for Engagement, Empathy, and Enlightenment” or something like that. Much better.
But that only addresses the title. Most consultants also have extremely generic and boring descriptions of their offers on their websites, as well.
For example, this consultant’s “Engaging Secondary Readers” workshop title might be followed by a description like this:
In this lively workshop, the presenter will share research-based strategies for getting your secondary students interested in and excited about reading. You’ll learn how to capture your students’ attention with read alouds, how to get them emotionally invested through relevance and real-world applications, how to hook them through engaging drama activities, and how to raise retention of nonfiction reading through brain-based memory strategies. You’ll end the day with multiple strategies you can apply in your classroom tomorrow!
That’s a very typical workshop description. Does it get you interested and make you want to attend?
Maybe. To me, it’s just meh.
But there’s a much better way…
Why a Product Bundle is so Much More Enticing
You see, the workshop described above is billed as “one thing.” It’s a workshop about secondary reading instruction.
But think about what this consultant is going to teach during this workshop. Here are some of the possibilities we can glean just from the workshop description above:
- There will be a portion of the workshop about read alouds
- Another part of the workshop will cover how to make relevant connections between students’ reading and their day-to-day lives outside of school
- Another part of the workshop will demonstrate several ways to have students act out, using drama activities, what’s going on in a text
- And another part of the workshop will talk about increasing retention of nonfiction material through brain-based processing activities that engage the brain in multiple ways
Sure, it’s all under the umbrella of increasing engagement in reading, but there’s a lot of mini-topics hiding underneath that umbrella.
Plus, 99 out of 100 consultants doing a workshop covering this range of material will include all of that material in a single massive handout (physical or online) with the title of…you guessed it….”Engaging Secondary Readers.” Yawn.
But they’re missing a HUGE opportunity to set this training apart from everyone else out there doing similar trainings–and it takes almost no effort to do so!
All they have to do is organize their materials a little differently, give separate names to each part of the material, and then market the total package as a product bundle consisting of a core product plus several bonuses. (BTW, this is another strategy I got from Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers, so credit where credit is due.)
Here’s what this might look like, using our example above…
“The 3E Reading Method for Engagement, Empathy, and Enlightenment”
Lack of engagement with reading is an epidemic in secondary school classrooms. Everybody talks about the continued decline of test scores in reading, but it seems like the only solution people want to talk about (especially all those on the “Science of Reading” bandwagon) is better decoding instruction.
Well, I’ve got news for you. Most of the secondary students who are reading poorly are doing so because they almost never read! Like anything else, you only get good at reading by reading. And the key for getting secondary school students to read more is to make the entire process more engaging.
If you teach secondary school kids, you know that they don’t do anything unless there’s some kind of pay-off. “Is it going to be fun? Is it going to involve me and my friends doing something together? Is it going to be about something relevant to my real, outside-of-school, life?”
If you can answer “Yes!” to those questions, it’s amazing how much more reading your students are willing to do–and, as a result, how fast their reading skills improve. That’s what this innovative workshop is all about.
You’ll learn how to take any subject you want to teach and create units and lessons involving highly-engaging reading activities. Your students will enjoy the instruction so much they won’t even realize how much reading they’re doing!
But wait (as they say in the infomercials), there’s more…
If you attend “The 3E Reading Method for Engagement, Empathy, and Enlightenment,” you’ll also receive:
- “Once Upon a Time in a Classroom: Using Proven Storytelling Techniques to Incorporate Captivating Read Alouds into Almost Any Lesson”–This guidebook will show you how to tap into the human brain’s insatiable hunger for stories by using short read alouds as engagement “hooks” for your lessons.
- “‘When Will I Use This IRL?’ How to Foreground Relevance Through Problem-Based Learning and Service Learning”–If something you’re asking students to read isn’t relevant to their lives in some way, you shouldn’t be teaching it. But just because YOU see the relevance doesn’t mean your students will–unless you show how the reading material connects to their lives. This PDF will show you exactly how to do this.
- “‘Netflix It! and (Don’t) Chill’ Using Drama Activities to Make Reading Visual and Emotionally Engaging”–Everybody bemoans the fact that students spend much more time in front of screens playing games and watching TV than they do reading. Well, bring the two together! By using simple drama activities to make the reading visible, students comprehend the text much better and have a ball while doing so! This handbook walks you through the process of incorporating these activities into your lessons, as well as 35 engaging drama activities to pick from, along with step-by-step directions.
- “Magnetic Memory: How to Read Something and Never Forget It”–This manual explains how input (reading or otherwise) is turned into long-term memories in the brain. There are ways to greatly increase the likelihood of this happening, and this little book will show you how to incorporate these processing activities into your lessons and homework assignments.
Now, doesn’t that workshop description sound a whole lot more interesting and value-packed than the first one I shared above? Of course!
But here’s the thing…
The material the consultant will be teaching is the same.
THE. EXACT. SAME. MATERIAL!
All the consultant needs to do is to take the one mega-handout from the first example and break each sub-topic into a separate deliverable with its own title and cover–in other words, present it as a product bundle.
Then, in the marketing material on the consultant’s website, all they have to do is present the topic as a bundle of valuable products that attendees will get during the workshop.
Now, the consultant knows that the material covered is the same for both versions. And yes, there is a little bit of extra work to split the material up into separate deliverables, come up with titles for each deliverable, and create a separate document with its own cover page for each topic.
But once you’ve done that (and you just have to do it once), that’s it. You simply teach the workshop as you would have previously, but give attendees access to each sub-topic’s materials when you get to that part of the training.
Just imagine that your main competitor and you teach basically the same material, but your competitor uses the old vague, boring description for their workshop, while you use the “bundle and bonuses” version I just shared to describe your workshop.
Who do you think’s going to get the lion’s share of the speaking gigs?
Yep, YOU, that’s who!
And with that, this months-long series of posts about positioning has finally come to an end. 🎉
I hope you’ve received tons of value from this deep dive into the topic. Hopefully, even if you only picked up a few “Ahas” from the material that you can apply in your business, it was worth it.
In my next post, I’ll wrap it all up with a summary of the entire series and an offer to work with me to overhaul your business’s positioning using the strategies I’ve been sharing.
Till then…
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–If you don’t mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions about positioning. Out of all the material I’ve shared on the topic…
- What has been most helpful?
- What wasn’t helpful at all?
- What did I not cover that you wish I had covered?
…Or any other question or comment you have.
Please share in the comments. I respond to every comment.
Willy
