TUNE IN:
APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | GOOGLE

Imagine your dream client: the one who refers you to everyone, will work with you as long as they can, and has no problem paying whatever you're charging. In this episode, guest expert Hunter Welling from The AgenShe leads us through five questions to audit your offer and attract premium clients.

The AgenShe helps high-end service providers book more clients with expert marketing strategies that put your body and nervous system first.

Website // Instagram

The episode:

Katrina Widener: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. This is Katrina, and I'm here with Hunter Welling from the Agenshe. Today, we are going to be talking a little bit about how to audit your offers so they attract more premium clients. Hunter, do you want to tell us a little bit about the agency and what you do and all that jazz? 

Hunter Welling: [00:00:18] Yeah, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Katrina Widener: [00:00:21] Thank you for coming. 

Hunter Welling: [00:00:23] Yeah. So my work is all around, I do marketing consulting and coaching for service-based business providers who want to attract more high-end premium clients so that they can work less and just be able to get better results with less effort. And so that's what I help them do, whether that's from full service marketing services, where I just do everything for them, or by helping them brainstorm and strategize how to do it for themselves. 

Katrina Widener: [00:00:49] That's awesome. So I know you mentioned you work with a lot of service providers. Are there any like different levels? Are there different like specific types of service providers?

Hunter Welling: [00:00:59] Yeah. Such a good question.  When I'm doing this and even when you probably know, like I say, the word high end, that means such different things to different people. So I'm about where meeting my clients, where they're at, as long as you want to be providing a service that is high touch and involves giving clients really good experience and involves a lot of relationship building. So by which I mean, like you're not just building a passive, creating some course, setting it out there and just not interacting with your customers, then that's who I work with. And that's at all different levels. Sometimes that, mid six-figure, multi-six-figure businesses that are really robust and I've been around for years and are scaling up. And sometimes it's newer businesses that just know that's how they want to operate out of the gate. And I work with both. 

Katrina Widener: [00:01:46] I love that 100% because that's exactly what group coaching is. It's I get people who ask all the time like, Oh, is that for newbies? Is it for this? It's it's more of your mindset and the type of work you do. So I love that a lot. How did you get started doing this? Did you have a big background in marketing or was it like immediately? I know I want to be an entrepreneur. 

Hunter Welling: [00:02:05] Yeah, no, I've been entrepreneurs since I was like in kindergarten, so yeah, I was in kindergarten writing short stories and then doing sales calls to everybody in my family. Please buy these from me. I will mail them direct to your door. It's always been, and I come from a family with a lot of entrepreneurs who have built large companies. So I always knew that I was going to work for myself. But when I was 17, I was actually offered a job as an executive assistant. And the person just said I know that you want to do marketing and writing. I'll let you do all of my copywriting. If you'll figure out how to do all the boring stuff too, all the behind-the-scenes and I did. And then I just parlayed that into all different marketing jobs with agencies and in-house before finally starting my own consulting business.

Katrina Widener: [00:02:51] It's really cool. I love that story. It's like the entrepreneurial bug really bit you young. 

Hunter Welling: [00:02:56] Oh yeah. I do. I always tell people I'm just a terrible employee. Like, I like to make my own hours. I like to do my own thing. I like to be the boss of me. So it was inevitable. 

Katrina Widener: [00:03:07] Yeah, totally. And I always say too, that entrepreneurship is one of the most self-aware careers you have to be in and you have to really know your own shit about yourself. So to be like a kid doing that or to be like 17 starting out, I'm just going to learn all of this stuff. That is amazing. And I commend you, cause that's crazy. 

You're so right though, 

Hunter Welling: [00:03:26] like it's like the best way to just get well acquainted with all of your inner junk. 

Katrina Widener: [00:03:33] Yes. Yes. So did you start out just really loving writing and that's what drew you to that job?

Hunter Welling: [00:03:38] Yeah, I like both. Like I love sales and I love writing, so I didn't grow up knowing what a copywriter was. Like. I found that out after getting hired by agencies, for different jobs. I'm working my way up. So I knew that I love to write first and foremost and, that's what a lot of my work boils down to is just helping people communicate what they're up to. And then I just found that there were other ways to apply that beyond writing. 

Katrina Widener: [00:04:02] So personally I started out loving writing and then was a journalist and was digital editor and writer for magazines. And went online and then became a marketing specialist. So it's I'm like feeling, feeling the comradery. I'm like, yes, I understand. 

Hunter Welling: [00:04:18] I worked as editor for a long time and then I didn't go the journalism route, but my academic background is in writing too. So yeah. 

Katrina Widener: [00:04:26] Yes. Yes, a woman after my own heart!

Hunter Welling: [00:04:29] We can always find each other.

Katrina Widener: [00:04:30] Yes. That's like another thing with the entrepreneurial world. I like feel like I'm like, Oh my gosh, you did that too. Or like we have this similar story. It's I dunno. I'm also really big on community and connections. So I love being able to be like, that's crazy. 

Hunter Welling: [00:04:43] I have a friend. If you could only do two things like to move your business forward, to focus on what would the two things be? To me it's just like connect with people and write. If I had to just ditch everything else that I'm doing on my to-do list. 

Katrina Widener: [00:04:58] Such an interesting question. I'm thinking of what I would do. I would like to talk to people and talk to people. 

Hunter Welling: [00:05:04] It's so good. I feel like it helps you get your light lenses back, and in focus from all of the busy work that we get distracted with.

Katrina Widener: [00:05:11] Yeah. That's amazing. I'm going to, I'm going to like, be thinking about that for the next week now. Okay. So one of the things that you were going to come in and talk about today was  how to audit your offers so they attract more of those kinds of high-end premium clients. So I wanted to pass the baton over to you and have you talk a little bit about that so that anybody listening can get that information and really be able to walk away with some really great nuggets of info.

Hunter Welling: [00:05:36] Yeah, so what I'd recommend doing, if you're listening, is just grab a notebook and a pen and jot down, I'm going to go over five questions that you can ask. And then later when you're unhurried and you have space, anybody listening could go through each one of your offers and pass it through these five questions cause they'll just work with whatever you're working on. And like I said, I have clients who are new to business who come to me. And so they're just starting out. So high end to them, it means getting to charge a hundred dollars an hour, and then I have clients who are like, how do we come up with the $20,000 offers? So wherever you are, you can use this to like level up from where you're at now. 

Katrina Widener: [00:06:12] That's really cool. Cause I also love that it's the exact same five questions, no matter where you are at.

Hunter Welling: [00:06:18] Yeah, and you can just keep coming back to them over and over. Okay. So I'll just walk through them and I'll give a little bit of like context for each one. The first question to ask is does this offer reflect my zone of genius? That's the space you want to be operating. So what do you want to be looking at is is this something that is what I'm excellent at, it's so effortless to me, what lights me up that I really want to be doing. And not just something that you can do. Will get tripped up a lot is they make offers because they're like, "Oh, I can do that". People would pay me for that. And then you offer stuff that's not really at your highest level, not at that like genius level that people are just going to be desperate to work with you about. And that's where you get a lot of really mediocre offers cluttering up your business. Yeah. That's the first thing to always check.

Katrina Widener: [00:07:04] I love that so much. I love the idea that it's talking about not only lights you up while you're doing it, as opposed to just I finished this task and now I feel good, but also just when something's really aligned with you, it helps you really narrow down who you're helping too, like, okay. So I could do all of these things, I don't necessarily want to do all these things. So then I'm going to get not ideal clients coming in because I'm offering this thing I don't really want it. 

Hunter Welling: [00:07:28] Yeah. And then I'm sure, even as you're saying that you can start feeling like the resentment, like building up in your body like I feel up here on my chest. And then as soon as you feel that you don't want to get on Instagram and do stories to get people that you're already resenting before you've met them or sales calls or whatever. So you will push them away. A lot of times when people tell me that they suck at sales, this is the first thing I look at because usually you don't suck at sales, you're just making offers you don't actually want to sell. 

Katrina Widener: [00:07:55] I love this so much. 

Hunter Welling: [00:07:57] So the second one is just, is it easy for my client to understand what their quick clear win is going to be from getting this? You might know that like when a client works with you, that they're going to get all of these deep benefits, I know you like help people with group coaching and in their business, they're going to learn more about themselves and like probably change their whole mindset. But a lot of times what we know clients are going to get out of it is like more than a prospective customer can wrap their brain around. It's distracting. So is all of your messaging making it really clear to your client? What one quick clear win is going to be? And when you really simplify that messaging, you create more value because you create a better experience.  You make it  easier for you to understand, you make it easier for them to navigate and make decisions. And all of that increases the value of your offer. 

Katrina Widener: [00:08:48] Oh my gosh, these questions. I'm like, I'm going to go journal about these when we're done with this podcast interview. 

Hunter Welling: [00:08:53] That's what I want, I want everybody to just be going through these. Okay, third is, and this I think is the biggest one for making impact of really being able to jump up into the premium arena: Is this the most simple and streamlined version of this offer possible? Here's why this is important. A lot of times what we do is we go, "Ooh, I want to get into the high ticket game, or I want to have more high end clients. So I'm going to now jam-pack this offer full with every single thing possible, because I don't want somebody to hand me a check for $5,000 and then feel like they didn't get what they're paying for. Like you were talking about with entrepreneurship being a real big lens into your own issues. That's always like an "us" issue that we have to work though not a client issue and adding more actually decreases the value of your offer. So think about it, like the difference between walking into a big box store, like Target. You can get anything you want, like Target sells anything and everything pretty much that you want. Just go grab it. And it's all pretty affordable, like 20 bucks, whatever you can get, whatever you want. I'm wondering about in your city, like your favorite high end boutique. Here in Fort worth, I can think of a clothing store that I love to walk into. They have three racks, they sell one kind of shirt, one brand of denim, and then like a line of golden diamond jewelry, like that's, it's so curated. Everything in that store costs about $700 a pop there's so little there, because what they're telling me is we've already made the choices to ensure that you're only being presented with the best of the best. Whatever you get out of this store that only sells, say a hundred things, you're getting the best of the best. So the more streamlined, the more simple your offer is the less decisions your perspective client has to make, the less energy they have to spend, the less time they have to spend. And those are things that they spend money for. They're going to spend more money to save that time and energy. Yeah. So this is a big one. And there's usually a lot of self-work that you have to do on this one, because what usually comes down to is you're feeling a little bit insecure about the price tag or your offer, and so you're adding more on. And so you just gotta take the time to do that work so you can simplify and streamline your offer.

The next one is just: Have I anticipated my client's needs? What's great about these questions too, is they all build on each other. You can see now why you can use these on a hundred dollar offer, a 20 dollar offer. Cause you can always be tweaking. There's always something you can simplify. There's always a way you can better anticipate your client's needs. I was just talking to a student of mine who put together an offer and she's in the really newbie status of her business, and this was something really simple. If she just put together Acuity, like for her booking, branded it, and she put the pretty on-brand images and she made sure the emails like had guides and follow-up steps, and somebody who referred a client to her was just like, "Oh my goodness, this is so fancy, like you've thought of everything. I feel so much better about referring clients to you." That's such a small thing. It doesn't take very long. It takes 20 minutes to set it up one time for the life of your business, but it makes such a difference. You can't, be charging really high end prices and then having a cobbled together experience. 

Katrina Widener: [00:11:56] Yeah. Customer experience, I think is like key to really being able to deliver on the promises that you're making.  If you want to have a good customer experience, give them something to expect so then you can deliver on it. So whether that's okay, I will follow up within the next 24 hours. Or that's, I'm doing this free webinar, at the end I'm going to be letting you know some ways you can work with me. That subtle shift of telling some at the beginning of a webinar versus just selling to them at the end -- it completely changes the energy.

Hunter Welling: [00:12:26] Yeah, absolutely. I love that. That's such a good way to frame it. And you know what I always like to remind people of is you know, my business  has evolved a lot. I've owned my own business for six years when I got started listening and talk about what I was charging. There was points where it was like $70 to hop on an hour consult with me. And now it's $400 or more for the same thing. And yes, I invest a ton in education and learning and being the best of the best every year. But you know what, at the end of the day I don't tell people anything, all that different out of $400 an hour call than I did on a $70 an hour call. Like the bones of it are still the same, but the experience is changed for sure. And the experience that my clients get while working with me, is a lot of what they're buying. Like people pay part of what they're paying for is it easy to get around your website? Is it easy to get ahold of you when they have a question? Does it all look and feel good? So they get the warm fuzzies instead of the little, I can't believe I'm putting my credit card on this website. These little things are things that people actually pay for. So you have to think about your experience. 

Katrina Widener: [00:13:27] Yeah, I yes. I wish everyone could watch me cause I'm just like, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.

Hunter Welling: [00:13:32] And I think people sometimes overlook how easy it is to outshine your competition when you do that. Because even though what I'm saying right here, maybe isn't super mind blowing, so many people don't do it. So many people skip these steps. They don't think about what their customer needs. They don't take the five extra minutes to  brand the experience, it really does matter. 

And then the last question, cause like we're already at the end , is there anything you can adjust about your offer to give your clients back more time and energy? People generally, are spending one of three resources when they're doing something time, energy, or money, and they're spending some of them to save others. Once you're at the point where you're wanting to attract premium clients, they're going to be spending a lot of money to save time and energy. So can the intensive that you were doing that right now is set up to take four hours. Can it be done in two hours for a busy time- stressed person who is hiring you? That makes a big difference. Do you, can you ditch some of the follow-up calls that are in-between and make it a more automated, easy process for them? Anything you can do to save them time and energy is so important. 

Katrina Widener: [00:14:38] And it's one of those things too, where I think that people oftentimes only think about the money aspect of the time, energy and money. They're like, okay, someone's spending money on me. Even with group coaching, it's two hours a week. People have to really be like, this is what I'm going to devote myself to do. So I make it only two hours a week. I'm not going to be asking them to be sending me emails in-between. I'm not going to be asking for extra calls or whatever it is because I'm already getting two hours a week with them. And that's enough. 

Hunter Welling: [00:15:04] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that. You're thinking about that because this one is also really tied to the simplifying and streamlining. When you start adding stuff on there, just out of your own insecurity  what you end up doing is costing your client time and energy. It actually becomes a worse investment. I have a high priced -- for the market that it's in -- done for you marketing service. It's a four figure price tag every month for people to have me do their marketing. And so one of the key selling points is they meet with me for 30 minutes a month and that's it. And there's not extra stuff for them to review and there's nothing else. And that's what makes it an easy sell because these people are so busy, they don't want to outsource it and then have to spend two hours a week in review processes and talking back and forth. They want to have a 30 minute download and just trust that it's done, right?

Katrina Widener: [00:15:51] Yes. Yes. 

Hunter Welling: [00:15:52] It's a big difference in all the ways you can think of to just narrow down and narrow down that the amount of time and energy people are having to spend so that they can be happier with the amount of money that they're spending. 

Katrina Widener: [00:16:03] Yes. I love all of these questions so much. Thank you so much for sharing them. I'm ready to go and be like, what can I go do for my own offering?

Hunter Welling: [00:16:11] You're so welcome. And I don't know if this is helpful for anybody, but I'm not much of a journaler, if you're in that boat,  the voice memo app on your phone can just be your best friend, pull it out and talk it out. However you work best, don't let journaling or something hold you back from going over the questions because they'll make your offers better.

Katrina Widener: [00:16:30] Definitely. Thank you again so much for sharing and thank you for coming on here. Hunter's also one of our guest experts for group coaching. So she's someone that I'm so grateful is  in this realm and sharing all of her goodies and knowledge with everyone. So how can everyone find you after this podcast?

Hunter Welling: [00:16:47] Yeah. So the best way to find me as over on Instagram @theagenshe, S H E there at the end, it's a good pun, but it's hard to pronounce. So yeah, come over connect and I would love it if you come and you follow just DM me and go ahead and DM me, what your offer is, send me a voice memo. Tell me what your offer is that you're thinking about right now. And I'll tell you which one of these questions to consider most closely with your offer. So I love to connect over there.

Katrina Widener: [00:17:12] Thank you so much again. I know I keep thanking you, but this has been amazing. And thank you for offering that to all of the listeners. I am sure you will get people popping in your DMS. 

Hunter Welling: [00:17:22] Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Badass Business Squad Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/badassbusinesssquad/

Katrina Widener Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/katrina.widener/