How to create a coaching offer people buy when you can do a bit of everything

When an expert asks me how to create a coaching offer, they almost always bring five products instead of one and want my help fitting them all into one nice sentence. That won't work, and better wording won't fix it.

To create a coaching offer people actually buy, pick one client and one pain they're willing to pay to fix. Then spell out four things: the result they get, by when, why it feels safe to take the risk, and what they get on top. Nobody recognizes themselves in an offer "for everyone," so they put the purchase off.

I have twenty years in business and more than two thousand in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and experts behind me. Back in 2020 I wrote that about half the people in my programs got stuck on the very first question, "What makes you different?", and the most common offer I saw went something like "Leave a request and we'll give you a free consultation." Below, in order: why a menu of products doesn't sell, how an offer differs from positioning, how to pick the pain, a full offer example and five steps.

Too many offers? Why selling everything means nobody buys

I often explain this with a restaurant. Picture an owner, let's call her Olga, describing her guests: schoolkids drop in for a chocolate bar, two retirees order mashed potatoes because chewing is hard for them, for a wedding she made potato salad and a layered herring salad, for Easter she cooked traditional Easter dishes, for some Americans she somehow tracked down a turkey for Thanksgiving, and at lunch office workers run in for a quick bite. "So I have no idea what to promote."

There's only one answer here: just pick already. Pick one dish, make it the tastiest and the best-selling, and build all your marketing on it, because you can't compete on everything at once. Restaurants don't become great with a twelve-thousand-page menu. This place has the best steak, that one has the best blueberry pie, across the street there's great Chinese food, and that's easier for people. They know what they're coming for.

An expert's menu looks the same, only instead of dishes you get "sessions," "breakdowns," "ongoing support" and "a beginner course." Why this kills the sale shows up nicely in a study marketers love to quote. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam tasting stand in a grocery store. With twenty-four flavors on display, 60% of passersby stopped; with six, 40% stopped. As for buying a jar, 30% of those who approached the small stand did, against 3% at the big one.pdf). The wide choice grabbed attention and killed the urge to buy.

To be fair, the effect doesn't always replicate. A 2010 meta-analysis of fifty experiments found an average effect close to zero. Five years later, Alexander Chernev's group at Kellogg reworked the data and showed the conditions under which choice overload does kick in: when options are hard to compare, when the decision feels complex, when people don't know what they want, and when they want to spend as little effort on choosing as possible.

The experiments used jam and chocolate, and nobody tested services, so what follows is my own conclusion: those conditions describe the client of a coach, psychologist or consultant almost word for word. They can't tell a "transformational session" from a "strategy breakdown," and when they see a long list, they skip the choice and go off to think about it.

Business clients are the same. Any entrepreneur's business is like a leaky boat: accounting leaks, marketing leaks, the sales reps don't pick up the phone, and the owner is bailing water all day. "I'll help your boat sail" means nothing to him. Say "I plug this particular hole" and show him how. One Excel plugin that makes life easier for every accountant will earn more than fifty different features.

The most striking case of spreading too thin in my practice is one I already covered in Why Clients Don't Buy Even When Your Product Is Good: an expert with fourteen products and a ceiling of three thousand dollars a month. The money started coming when one offer was left out of the fourteen, built around what her own clients wanted.

Offer vs positioning: what's the difference

People mix these two up all the time, yet you write them differently and measure them with different numbers.

Positioning is the description a stranger uses to decide in a few seconds whether to follow you. Imagine your video goes viral. I watch it, think "cool, what else has he got?", click through to your profile, and decide from three lines of bio whether I need this. Positioning is measured by the conversion from profile visit to follow. In one review session we opened a participant's stats: 1,700 people visited her profile and 178 followed, about 10%. That's a lot. I consider 1–4% a good follow rate.

An offer is the specific proposal you put out to the market in order to sell. Its conversion is counted in money: how many people heard it and bought. It has different requirements, and here you need very high value. If you sell three thousand euros of ongoing support, the person should feel like they're getting it almost for free: "Seriously, you'll do all of this for three? I'm in."

	Positioning	Offer
Answers the question	"What are you about, and who for?"	"What do I get if I pay?"
Where it lives	profile header, first line of your bio	post, live stream, DMs, sales page
How we measure it	profile visit → follow (1–4% is normal)	heard it → paid
Main requirement	simplicity	a concrete result and value above the price

Why is an offer so hard? People try to cram a whole treatise on the meaning of life into nine words, because they're so deep and can do so much. So the offer ends up describing the process: "sessions," "support," "working with your request." The client needs to understand one thing: what they'll get. Positioning has to be simple, the offer has to be concrete, and in both anything extra gets in the way.

How to niche down your offer: one avatar, one pain they pay for

Business is solving a client's problems for money. People pay most easily for four kinds of pain. The first is a lack of resources: money, energy, time. The second shows up when someone doesn't want to do something but wants the result, like food delivery: I don't want to cook, I want to eat. The third is when they're on their fifteenth attempt and it still doesn't work. The fourth, and the most powerful, is the desire to grow: in income, in role, in status, to become who they want to be.

Notice what's missing from this list. There's no client lying in bed at night thinking, "What I really lack is clarity. If someone showed up with clarity, I'd give them ten thousand dollars." When I see an offer like "I'll help you find clarity," I understand why it doesn't sell. Nobody buys clarity on its own. People buy it as a road to something: money, a new role, a decision they've been putting off for three years. That "something" is what goes into your offer.

Next, take your topic and break it down into pains. Take teams: hiring, retention, motivation, inefficiency, the owner drowning in management, people leaving fast, everyone needing training. I pick one pain, say onboarding new hires, and build a whole line of work on it. The question to the client writes itself: "How much money do you lose while a new person gets up to normal productivity? Right now it takes five months. If we get it down to one, how much do you gain?" And it doesn't matter who you are, an IT service, an LMS developer or a coach, the pain is the same.

To see the pain, you need a specific person. "Entrepreneurs aged 25 to 45" won't do. Say, Stepan: he's twenty-eight, runs a manufacturing business making seven to twelve thousand euros a month, he's single and drives a Toyota Camry. When a client is described like that, you can think about his life: most likely he carries the production himself, hires people himself and can't take a vacation. That's the pain an offer gets written for. One offer, one avatar. I covered how to choose the niche itself in detail in How to Choose a Niche for Your Business.

Sometimes choosing the client and the pain changes everything. One of my clients held at three to four thousand dollars a month for almost eight years and wrote to me: "Igor, I just want to earn what you earn." There was no magic on my side. I looked at her business and told her this product didn't fit that scale: here's your client now, here's the offer you need, and we rebuilt her business model. She launched to her existing audience, the same four hundred followers, and in four months we made her $200,000 in total. She kept the same audience. The person she was talking to and the offer changed.

The coaching offer formula with a full example

The formula is short: client + one pain + measurable result + deadline + risk reversal + a bonus that costs you almost nothing. Let's take the same onboarding pain and build an offer from it:

"For owners of manufacturing businesses whose new hires take five months to get up to speed: in ninety days we'll build an onboarding system that gets a new person to full output in one month. If you don't see a plan for every role within the first thirty days, I'll refund your money. As a bonus, I'll review your current job posting and rewrite it."

This is a teaching example, so plug in your own numbers. Look at what's missing: no "sessions," no "transformation," no list of five directions. There's one person who'll recognize himself in the first line, and the cost of his pain, which he can calculate himself. Compare that with the typical "I help entrepreneurs build an effective team and reach the next level": anyone could sign up under that, and so nobody does.

In a soft niche the logic is the same; only the measurable result changes. A coach who works with burnout in executives could write: "For leaders who've been running on autopilot for three months and snapping at their team: in eight weeks we'll get you back to a routine where you sleep seven hours a night and don't take work home on weekends. If it's not a fit after the first meeting, you don't pay for the rest." This is a template too. Everyone's result is different; what matters is that the client can check it without you.

In services, a guarantee rarely means a refund. More often it's a promise to keep working for free until the result is reached, or the right to walk away after the first meeting and not pay for the rest. Pick the one you're ready to honor without gritting your teeth.

What makes an offer irresistible: result, guarantee, bonuses

Soft niches are very afraid to name a result. We love the process, that easy vibe of just working with a person and helping them, and a process is hard to sell. An offer is about the result: what we focus on, what we'll do and what the person walks away with. When you read your offer out loud, it should fire you up, otherwise it won't fire up the client either. On top of the result you add guarantees and bonuses.

There's a rule about bonuses that surprises almost everyone. Everyone has an ability that costs them practically nothing and is very valuable to the client. It comes so easily to you that you discount it and don't even notice it. I'd start the list of bonuses right here: what do I do in passing that people later thank me for most?

Can I copy a competitor's offer? Where to find the wording

In practice you have two paths. The first runs through a big idea you want to bring to the world, and if you don't have one, don't go there. The second works almost always: take the offers already on the market and improve them. Find someone in your niche who has already tested an offer and is selling it, look at the meanings they build in, the way Samsung and Apple build meanings into their phones, and build those same meanings in with your own charisma and your own twist. You take the meanings from the market, since they've already been tested with money, and you stand out through delivery, your story and a bonus only you have. When offers look alike, people choose the person. Copy the logic, write your own text.

The second hint is right under your nose. Ask yourself whether people have come to you through referrals. Almost always they have, which means somewhere there's a person who managed to describe you to someone else so well that they came. He hardly built a landing page or polished bullet points; he just said something very precise and simple. Call the people who came through referrals and ask what exactly they were told about you. That phrase is often better than your bio. And people tell me: "Igor, if I don't open my jacket and flash all eleven medals, nobody will buy."

How do I know if my offer is working?

Test your offer on clients. Friends will say "great" and buy nothing; clients vote with money. My partner Sasha Turubarov calls a product with no demand "trousers for sparrows": a well-made thing that nobody needs. There's one way to avoid it: throw the offer at people and watch the reaction, and the reaction is the conversion. How many people heard the offer and said "oh, interesting," how many asked the price, how many paid. If it doesn't work, you rewrite it, add value and throw it out again. I guarantee that a couple of days after you write the offer, you'll stop liking it, because your eye gets tired. That's normal. Go by conversion; taste is a poor advisor here.

Afraid to narrow down: what if I lose my other clients

This is the main objection, and it's an honest one: narrowing down means giving up money that's already coming in. I wrote about this fear in detail, with research, in the niche article; here I'll talk about the offer. You make a choice: of all my clients, these are the ones I find most interesting to work with, I earn more with them and they don't drain me, and I say no to the rest. Then the old ones come knocking: "Will you take me? I need the money." Those aren't your clients anymore.

Matthew McConaughey spent years playing charming leads in romantic comedies, and at some point he wanted dramatic roles, while the market wanted rom-coms from him, so he started turning them down. By his account, he didn't work for two years, and over that time the fee for yet another comedy grew to $14.5 million, and he turned that down too. That refusal, he says, is what showed Hollywood he wasn't bluffing. Then came Mud, Dallas Buyers Club and Interstellar.

In 2023 I had my own, far more modest version of this fork. I had several offers out at once, and I wrote in my channel that I needed to focus on what had landed best and make an offer ten times more valuable: I combined group work at 350,000 rubles (about $5,000) and the community into one offer at the same price and cancelled the other lots. That autumn I wrote: "I won't spread myself thin, I don't want to do the old stuff for money." Turning down some clients costs money at the start, and it's better to be ready for that in advance.

How to create a coaching offer: five steps

1. Write down every client from the past year and mark the ones you find most interesting, who pay more and who leave you with energy afterwards. Describe that person the way I described Stepan: age, income, family, car, what he dreams about.
2. Break his problem down into pains and pick one that's easiest for you to solve and costs him the most. Check it against the four kinds of pain. "Clarity" on its own doesn't count as a pain.
3. Phrase the result with a number and a deadline: what the person gets, by when, and how they'll measure it. If promising feels scary, look at what competitors who already sell are promising and improve their wording.
4. Add a guarantee and bonuses, starting with what costs you nothing and is valuable to the client. You're aiming for "seriously, all of this for that price?"
5. Throw the offer at real people and count the conversion. Call three clients who came through referrals and ask what words were used to tell them about you. If it doesn't work, rewrite and try again.

Back to the restaurant with the schoolkids, the retirees and the turkey. First choose who you're feeding, say office workers at lunch, then make the best quick lunch in the neighborhood for them. An offer works the same way: one person, one pain, the best solution, and then the marketing writes itself.