Ep 91: Your Copywriter Can't Save a Half-Baked Offer
If I tell you, "We need to work on your positioning," there is a very good chance your brain immediately goes to the words.
Your sales page. Your elevator pitch. The way you describe your offer on Instagram. Maybe the sentence at the top of your website that you have rewritten 47 times and still hate.
I get why. We have trained ourselves to think positioning means messaging, so when an offer is not selling the way we want it to, we start looking for someone who can make it sound better.
And this is exactly where a lot of service providers start spending money in the wrong order.
Because your copywriter cannot save a half-baked offer.
Positioning starts way before the copy
Copy is part of positioning, but I would never make it the first place we start.
Before I care about the words on the page, I want to know who this offer is for. I want to know who your level 10 client is for this specific service, because "business owners" or "women entrepreneurs" is not enough information to build an offer around.
Then I want to know the number one result you are responsible for helping that client get.
Not every possible benefit they could experience. Not the giant list of things you technically touch during the engagement. I want the main result that makes this offer worth buying.
From there, we have to look at how you deliver that result. What is your methodology? What are you actually doing with your clients that makes the work yours, rather than a pile of calls, deliverables, and Slack access tossed into a package?
Only after those pieces are clear do I want to look closely at the structure of the offer itself. The delivery has to make sense for your capacity, and the financial side has to make sense for the business you are trying to run.
That is the work I mean when I talk about positioning.
Your specialist should not have to become your offer strategist
This is where the problem starts.
You hire a copywriter because you want your website copy rewritten, but you show up to the kickoff call unsure who the offer is really for. Now the copywriter has to pull that answer out of you before she can write a single useful sentence.
You hire an SEO expert because you want more of the right people finding you, but deep down you are sick of your current clients and want an entirely different type of buyer. You have not figured out who that person is yet, whether they want this offer, or whether your service is set up to work for them.
You hire a designer because you want a new website, but you are still questioning the offer itself.
Then everybody gets frustrated.
You feel like you spent money and did not get the result you expected. The service provider ends up doing strategy work that was never part of the project, may not be something they specialize in, and probably was not accounted for in the way they built their client experience.
We end up expecting specialists to perform miracles because we are handing them something that is still unfinished.
Ask whether your house is actually in order
Before you book the copywriter, photographer, designer, SEO person, or ads expert, I want you to look at what you are bringing to the relationship.
Can you clearly tell them who this offer is for? Do you know the main result you want the offer to produce? Can you explain how your methodology gets the client there, and is the service structured in a way you can keep delivering well?
If the answer is shaky, that is useful information.
It means there is work to do before you hand the project off.
I love hiring people who are damn good at their specific skill set. The entire reason I am paying them is because I want their expertise applied to something I have already done my due diligence on.
I want to be able to give a copywriter a clear offer and let her write. I want to hand an SEO expert a well-defined client and a service I believe in so they can research and build around something real. I want the designer working with an offer that is already solid enough to support the visual work.
That is how I think about being a good client.
Better inputs give your service providers a fighting chance
There is a very normal tendency to blame the person you hired when a project does not create the result you pictured.
Sometimes that blame is deserved. There are service providers who overpromise, deliver poor work, or create a terrible experience.
But sometimes the project was in trouble before they ever touched it.
If I expect a copywriter to define my client, reshape my offer, clarify my methodology, figure out the result, and then write the sales page, I have quietly hired her for a much bigger job than the one on the proposal.
That is where expectations get messy.
It also explains why some business owners keep hopping from one provider to the next. They keep thinking the next copywriter, strategist, designer, or SEO expert will finally be the person who gets them the result they wanted.
Meanwhile, the same positioning problem keeps getting dragged into every new project.
Know what result you are hiring for
Before you sign your next contract, ask yourself one question: If I only got one result from working with this person, what would I want it to be?
Be specific.
If you hire a copywriter, maybe the result is a sales page that clearly communicates an offer you have already defined. If you hire an SEO specialist, maybe you want qualified search traffic from the type of buyer you already know you serve well.
Then look at the work that has to exist before that person can realistically create the result.
This matters even more when you are hiring someone with a narrow specialty. A copywriter, designer, photographer, or SEO specialist is different from hiring a strategist, consultant, or advisor whose job is to look at the larger business problem with you.
Know which type of help you are buying.
And please stop making your copywriter secretly become your offer strategist because you did not know there was another step first.
Position the offer before you polish it
If you have a big project on your calendar in the next few months, this is the time to look at the foundation.
Do not wait until the copywriter is already asking questions you cannot answer.
Get clear on the client. Decide which result you want this offer to own. Put language around how you actually deliver that result, then make sure the offer structure works for the business you want to run.
When those pieces are buttoned up, the experts you hire get to do what you hired them to do. They have something solid to work with, and you have a much better shot at walking away feeling like the investment was worth it.
I go much deeper into this in Episode 91 of Sell the Damn Service, including the questions I want you asking before you hire your next service provider.
Chapters
00:02 What "repositioning your offer" actually means
02:11 Why we may be expecting too much from service providers
04:37 The pieces of positioning that come before copy
07:02 Why specialists keep getting pulled into strategy work
08:44 The pre-work to do before hiring an expert
10:46 Why hopping between service providers does not fix the foundation
12:59 Specialists versus strategists, consultants, and advisors
15:15 Why the right provider needs to fit the type of service business
17:37 Getting your offer ready before the project starts
20:05 Auditing what you are asking your service providers to fix
Ready to Restructure and Productize Your Service?
Inside Sold Out Services, I help service providers examine who each offer serves, what happens after someone buys, and where qualified clients are being left without a clear next step.
You do not need to create an entirely new business every time you reach capacity.
There may be more revenue, impact, and long-term client value hiding inside the client relationships you have already built.
If you’d like to see a library of all published episodes in a gallery with easy-to-find links to all listening platforms be sure to check out the Sell The Damn Service Episode Library.
