How can you be of service? This is the question I ask myself every day before I meditate, I let it guide my decision making and it keeps me in alignment with myself and my business. A hierarchy of service pyramid is a way of organising your services from low-ticket to high-ticket items, and can be super valuable in understanding how to value and price your online programmes! Below I’m going to talk you through an example of how to create your own hierarchy of services, and what that might include.
Diagram of hierarchy of services
1) Free content
Free content can include a huge variety of services, including podcasts, Youtube videos, social media posts or blog posts to name a few. This would make up the base of your pyramid, this kind of work requires the least amount of individualisation on your behalf, and relies on the client to guide themselves through the information.
It is still important to make sure the free information you put out is valuable and helpful! This will not only mean you are providing a valuable service, but it will also keep people engaged in what you are putting out online! If your free stuff is irresistible, you best believe people will be falling over themselves to gain access to your paid services!
This is the first stage of any good organic (no ads) sales funnel. Giving away highly valuable information, training, workbooks and resources for free activates the rule of reciprocity. The rule of reciprocity is a rule from social psychology that says that in many social situations, we want to pay back what we received from others. In other words, if John does you a favour, you're likely to return it to him.
If you give free valuable content that solves problems for your ideal client, they will feel much more inclined to buy from you. Have you ever seen someone handing out free samples of a product in a supermarket and felt more inclined to buy it afterwards? This is the exact psychological principle that makes this such an effective marketing strategy.
Another benefit of giving away highly valuable free content is that it allows your ideal client to increase your know, like and trust factor. They get a chance to see you as the expert and the right person to solve their problems. If you give away highly valuable information that resonates with your ideal client, it builds a positive relationship and familiarity with your free content that is released consistently over time develops a feeling of trust (especially when your content is on-brand). This is important because your ideal client feeling like they, know you, like you and trust you is essential for sales.
2) Information Products
As you go up to the next tier of services, the services you provide will become more increasingly more individualised, requiring more input from you, the more input a service requires fro you, the higher the price. After free content, the next thing on your hierarchy of service is information products, such as DIY courses and E-books. Whilst these offer more support than say, your Instagram posts, or Youtube videos, their DIY nature still makes them pretty easy for you to produce and share.
This is great for creating passive income and allows you to stop trading time for money. Once you are fully booked with 1:1 clients and group programmes, how do you continue to scale your business and create an even bigger income and impact? Passive income products focus on a one to many approaches and the price is low enough that they are normally quite easily accessible. These are potentially unlimited resources so you can sell hundreds of them, but remember price is perception so don’t go too cheap or the client may fail to read and implement the content in the ebook).
3) Workshops, Group Coaching & Masterminds
Workshops and group coaching are a great next step in the client journey once they have gone through your pre-recorded courses and are ready to take their results to the next level. These can be higher ticket products that are more individualised, but you can still offer them to groups. These types of online programmes usually rely on your clients giving investing more time and energy into them, and usually more money. The results clients will get at this stage will often start to increase too as they are able to check their understanding with you and ensure they are going about implementing the knowledge in the most effective way.
For some many clients, having a community of others going through the same programme is particularly motivating and can help increase the levels of accountability. In higher-level masterminds, such as my Soulful Success Mastermind, part of the programme is learning from the other high-level people in the same containers, and collaborating and supporting one another, as much as it is about the transformation facilitated by the coach.
When you are ready to take the next steps and really map out your own signature offering so you can start selling out your programmes and courses with ease online then here is my signature offering workbook, it’s FREE for a limited time only!
4) 1:1 coaching
Towards the top of the pyramid are services that require more 1-1 services, where they are highly individualised and require you to invest more time into them. These are those high ticket programmes that give your clients a really supportive and in-depth service. This is almost always the service that will get the best results for the client as it is completely bespoke and tailored to their specific needs, goals and pace of working.
If you are charging less for your 1:1 than for group programmes or courses, it shows that you are not valuing your time. Time is the only limited resource we have, and so for someone to have access to your knowledge bespoke to them 1:1 that will mean you need to charge a premium price. I tend to think it is best if this is the first one you should start with when you are selling your services, and then build out your product suite underneath this offer. If you want help with this, I can help you map out your entire product suite in a single call.
5) Your Pinnacle Offer
This is something incredibly exclusive, and unique to you. This could be something like a VIP day, an in-person retreat, or something else that is even more expensive and time-consuming for you to deliver than 1:1 work. I have worked with some coaches who allow you to work with their team to support you and that is another way you could potentially go above and beyond working with someone 1:1.
Each level of this diagram contains really valuable information to truly serve your clients in a soul-aligned and informative way, but it’s important to make sure you are using each step in a way that maximises your ability to serve and also improve your income. For example, your free content is such a powerful tool to serve a much larger community, but it’s also incredibly valuable in bringing people into your sales funnel and widening your potential client pool.
If you want to learn more about creating organic sales funnels, mapping out your full range of services, and selling them with ease join the waitlist for Let’s Get Leads here. Just so you know, waitlisters get incredible special gifts and bonuses you will not want to miss out on (including the ability to work with me 1:1 for FREE)!