Making a Guarantee with Your Online Program
I know that promises are a big no-no in therapy, but in online income they’re essential.
Have you ever had buyer’s remorse? Buying something that doesn’t deliver on what it promises can just about ensure disappointment.
Don’t let this happen with your side hustle! To avoid buyer’s remorse (and seller’s remorse) you need to craft your guarantee thoughtfully, and be sure that you can deliver on your promise.
Not only will this increase the confidence in your offer (you know exactly what you’re offering), but also reduce the possibility for buyer’s remorse because you’ve set clear expectations with the buyer already.
It’s so important to nail this! Discover how you can create a very intentional promise on the latest podcast episode.
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Full Show Notes (Transcript)…
Hey, risers. Welcome to episode 105 of Empathy Rising. Just before I hit record, I was putting some finishing touches on our Summer Slow Down Workshop series and man, I am getting so excited for this event. This is a super fun offer that I think is going to meet a lot of you exactly where you are in terms of your online income streams.
The workshops are really designed to be valuable whether you're brand new to online income, or if you've been working at this for a while and the implementation nature is a huge part. You're going to walk away from these workshops with tangible assets. That's what I think makes them so different is that this is not just a presentation or a training or a webinar.
These are nitty-gritty workshops where you are going to work, hence the name. So you're going to walk away with tangible assets that you can print out - that you can hold in your hand, that you can do something with, and that they're really going to help you make forward movement, right? Taped steps forward with your side hustle.
And I think that is really the big part. The idea is that these bite-sized action steps are going to give you huge momentum. So in just three hours a day, three times over the summer, you're going to knock down these key stuck points that I see people get mired up in and just stuck in, and you're going to knock them down and they're going to just propel you forward.
More details are going to start coming out soon, so make sure you're tuning into the episodes. Tickets go on sale on May 31st, but I do want to give you guys the dates. Now they are June 19th, July 17th and August 21st, because I know it takes some time to block off our calendars. So I wanna put those dates out there now, and you will be able to purchase tickets starting on the 31st of May.
And more details are going to start coming out next week. So tune in to the episodes that come up in the next couple of weeks, as well as if you want more information you can always get that in our Facebook group as well. I'll be posting about it and talking about it in there. I'm just really excited for you guys to participate in this and I'm really excited to do it.
It's something that sounds really fun for me - to have a workshop series. So I'm really looking forward to it. Now (dun dun)... if you have a keen listening ear, I have basically just modeled exactly what we're going to be talking about here today, and that is creating a guarantee for your online offers.
Offering a promise, making a guarantee. And I know your clinician heart is probably like pounding - like what a guarantee, a promise? We can't do that. And it's cringing, it's terrified of the idea of making a promise or a guarantee around an outcome. But I promised this episode is going to help you see not only why it's necessary for your online income for your side hustle to have a guarantee, but how to do it well so that your program has an impact.
And it also makes income because that's what the promise really does - helps you deliver what you said you're going to deliver so that it helps other people, and also promises help your programs or your offers sell well so that you actually make an income from what you're doing. So promise guarantee equals impact and income. That's your equation to keep in your head for the rest of this episode.
The reason a lot of us get intimidated or nervous about the idea of guarantees is that the first thing we learned in grad school is that there's no guarantee for therapy, the person-centred nature of our work means that we're meeting people where they're at. In the therapy room, we take their biological, their psychological, their social environments and we know that they are imperfect humans operating in an imperfect world.
Therapy is the opposite of standardized, and it's for this reason that making promises on therapeutic outcomes, it pretty much puts us like smack in unethical territory. We're pretty much very much discouraged from doing that. Not only is it in that unethical territory, but it also starts to feel like ridiculous, right? Like how can we imagine a client sitting down for a brand new intake and telling them that without a doubt, they will never have a panic attack again, after six sessions?
"It will never happen again. And I promise and I guarantee that our therapy will make it so you never have a panic attack again". I'm being facetious here, but I really want to point this out - that I know this is something that's just a no-go in the therapy industry. It's a no-go from an ethics perspective, and it's just a no-go from the nature of our profession. The nature of our industry, it just doesn't work that way.
Now there are absolutely evidence-based practices out there, right? Evidence-based practices, evidence-based orientations, evidence-based methodologies, treatments, all of these things. And those get closer to promising results because they're more proven. They've been researched and studied and they have clinical outcomes with clinical trials.
But even the most highly credentialed clinician, right, they've got all the EMDR certification and this certification from all of these evidence-based practices - I still think that person would feel uncomfortable making a guarantee. It's just not how it's done. It's just, it doesn't work that way.
And from our therapeutic background and from our therapeutic orientation, we know that's just not how our industry works, but here's the biggest and probably the most stark contrast with any online income. And really if we get down to it, any other type of business, they have a promise, they have a guarantee.
And I think that is one of the biggest obstacles. One of the biggest barriers to clinicians making that jump into entrepreneurship - having to make a guarantee of our work. Having to make a promise of our work. It feels so foreign that I think that's one of the biggest stumbling blocks. And when we start going into entrepreneurship of any other kind, beyond the therapy room, not only is having a guarantee ethical for our online income streams, like it's totally ethical. It's essential, right? Having this guarantee.
I alluded to this at the beginning of the episode, but it does a lot of things in terms of really any other business that's not in the healthcare field. The first thing that having a guarantee does is it combats buyer's remorse when you have a guarantee for your product, your program, or your service when you have a guarantee for it. People who put their credit card information in and then they regret it a second later.
That's much less likely to happen when we can articulate the actual results of our work together. I think we've all done that. I think we've all made a purchase (whether it's a small purchase or a big purchase; I've had buyers remorse with small purchases too) and I think we tend to equate buyer's remorse with bigger purchases, but that's not always the case.
We've all had that immediate feeling of like worry and fear and doubt of "oh my gosh, did I just make a mistake?" and I think that tends to happen if the purchase was like an impulse buy "I don't really need this, but I want it", right? Then we're going to have some buyer's remorse, but often even if it's something we thought about for a while, or we really do want, we might experience buyer's remorse and it's because we cannot connect directly to the way that product or whatever we purchased is going to help us.
"Why did I get this?" That's what buyer's remorse comes from. "Why did I just buy this? Oh gosh. What did I just do?" Having a promise associated with your online income stream with your program gives you something to reiterate to a person who is doubtful of their purchase. So having that promise gives you definition. It gives parameters to what they just bought so they can say, Oh yeah, this is why I got this, and this is how it's going to help me. And I'm not remorseful, I don't regret this purchase anymore.
Flip that onto the sales side, and having a promise makes your product or your program or your service easier to sell because you can definitively say what it's going to do. So when that person's hesitating or trepidatious about pulling out their wallet, you can say here is the promised result of engaging in this program. So it makes sales easier. It also makes your marketing easier because you can start from the sales end of the process.
Marketing is the beginning of the process, so if you can market from your promise of your program, you start attracting people from the very beginning with specific definition and specific parameters. So they are marketed to with the promise of your program, and then when you do go to sell the promise of your program, it's that much easier.
So marketing and sales work in a symbiotic relationship, and when both are centered around a guarantee, it makes both of those processes easier. The other thing that having a guarantee does for you as the provider of a product or the provider of a service or provider of a program, is it prevents scope creep.
Now scope creep is when you are functioning beyond your role, or when people are asking things of you that are beyond your role and you start sacrificing your boundaries or saying yes or acquiescing to their requests, even though it is beyond the boundaries, beyond those parameters that you defined for yourself.
Now, scope creep has lots of issues to it, and we talked about boundaries and everything. There's lots that goes into scope creep, but if you have a defined promise of what your offer does you inherently know what your offer does not do as well. So if you start to feel yourself being pulled outside of the scope, you can start to look at the promise and say: is that included?
Did I make the guarantee that would happen or that, that would be part of this? And you can say, no, I didn't. And then you can relay that no, to your group program member, to your coaching client, to your membership site member, whatever. You can go back to your promise internally and it can help you make decisions on how you want to interact, how you want to function, how much you want to take on, what you want to say yes to, what you want to say no to.
So having that promise also helps you as the provider and it also just combats buyer's remorse, it combats seller's remorse because don't think that people who purchase your program are the only ones who say, "why did I do this" sometimes, especially if you are a victim of scope creep, right?
If you have had poor boundaries or if you have said yes to things that you didn't want to say yes to, you can absolutely have seller's remorse. You could have seller's remorse about a particular person saying "oh, I wish they weren't in my program". You can have seller's remorse about the entire program itself.
Whoa, why did I offer this, right? Having a promise surrounding your program will help you not only define it, it will help you prevent seller's remorse because you will know what it is you signed up for. And you will be able to have firmer boundaries because you'll be able to go right back to that promise.
And you'll be able to say like I said, just a moment ago, is this included or is this not included? Is this something I want to do or not? Was this the original grounds and definition of the program or no? So there are many benefits to having a promise when it comes to building out your side hustle, when it comes to knowing what your offer is and knowing what you're selling a promise is essential.
Now that doesn't mean that these promises are far-fetched or that they're made up or they come out of nowhere. Our guarantees still have to be grounded in integrity. They still need to be legitimate promises, things that we can legitimately fulfill. If we think about two industries where we see a lot of promises, weight loss products or beauty products, they will make outlandish or outrageous claims, lose 40 pounds in 10 days or whatever. They're making these outrageous promises. Beauty products look 10 years younger, overnight, right?
Very outlandish claims. Those are not really rooted in integrity. They're just things that they think people want so desperately that they're willing to promise it, whether it's true or not. And that's not what we're talking about here. We want to craft and create very intentional and purposeful promises for our programs so that we can deliver them so that those promises have all the benefits that we just talked about, but that they actually are true. Outlandish claims and outrageous promises.
They actually hurt your business in several ways. Buyers are disappointed. They think they're not going to have wrinkles anymore, and then they wake up in the morning and they're like, dang it. I still have wrinkles. F this product, this didn't work. So buyers are disappointed. They can actually then go and leave bad reviews on your product, they can Yelp you or whatever. Like wherever they would report you, they can go so far. If they're that disappointed they can leave public reviews. The other thing that's insidious that we don't think about is, word of mouth is the gold standard of marketing.
If we have people who are word of mouth referring us, it can be amazing for our business, but there's this such thing as negative word of mouth too, people can be like "don't buy that it's terrible" and we might not even know that word of mouth is happening, but yet then our product or our program or ourselves have a negative reputation.
So we need to ensure that the promises we're promising are not going to have this outrageous claim, they're going to be able to be fulfilled. And that the promises that we're making are rooted in integrity because just like these outrageous claims can have negative impact on our programs or our product's reputation.
Consumers are savvy now. People know what's up now, right? Like promises and gimmicks used to be enough for sales, right? These "lose 20 pounds in 10 days" or whatever. What did I say before, 40 pounds in 10 days? Those gimmicks used to be enough, but nowadays people are totally turned off by that.
Buyers do not want to see overpromises because then they know the products are going to undeliver. They're going to, they're going to underdeliver. So these overpromises are pretty much clear signs that the product doesn't stand up on its own, and so we have to make these outrageous claims.
So these types of promises backfire, they ended up hurting your businesses. People don't trust your offer to perform, and they don't trust you because they can tell that you're only out for the dollar. When we're talking about guarantees, we're not talking about selling snake oil. We're not talking about just getting out there, making any promises that we can so that we make sales.
These guarantees have really strategic budget purposes for us. They help us know what we're doing, how we're doing it, when we're doing it. They also help the buyer understand what they're getting, what they're signing up for. What they're participating in, what's expected of them, right? So promises are essential, but promises that are rooted in integrity that are true, and that are real are what we need to go after.
Okay, alright. So now that we know why guarantees for our programs are important, let's talk about the how of this. We've talked about what a guarantee is, about why it's important. How do we do this? How do we step into something that might be really uncomfortable for our therapist identity, and how do we do it so that our program is impactful, right? It does what it says it's gonna do. It has results. People get what they came for, but it also needs to bring us a good income. It needs to sell - people need to be happy with it. People need to know what to expect when they buy it, and then I'll add on to that.
It needs to be, it needs to be impactful for them. It needs to be bringing income and then this doesn't have a clever “i”, but it needs to be enjoyable for us to deliver. We don't want to be overextended or regret our decision as well. Okay, so that one doesn't have an “i” with it. Maybe I'll come up with one, but it's, in fact it's income and then it's like enjoyable and ease of delivery on our part to be able to make a promise about our program. We have to really know what our program is and what it does. So we need a very strong definition of what our program actually delivers, and we need to know the results of that delivery. So these are two essential things. To have in mind before we start coming up with the promise of the program, we need to know what the dang thing does.
So a promise is the exact inverse almost of the problem that your program solves. Okay, so that's not exactly helpful. So I'm going to give you some examples of how we craft a good promise, looking at what it does and the results of that delivery, what it delivers in the results of that delivery.
So let's go back to the beauty industry. And let's imagine that there's a brand new wrinkle cream on the market. One promise that this wrinkle cream could make is that it would erase all of your fine lines overnight and prevent them from ever coming back. So you wake up in the morning and instantly look 10 years younger
forever for the rest of your life. Right, by now, I'm sure you could tell this is the outlandish claim. This is the type of outrageous promise or outrageous guarantee. Something that would turn off buyers, something that would actually hurt their sales. So here's how we craft a better promise, a real promise.
And here's how we craft something that is grounded in integrity. Alright, so a better promise for this wrinkle cream would be to talk about exactly what it delivers. This cream is clinically proven to (and I'm making this up guys, I know nothing about wrinkle cream but) this cream is clinically proven to deposit hyaluronic acid to the third layer of your skin.
In trials, we have measured that this acid, but I think I said goes to the third layer of your skin. And I don't even know if that's a thing, but let's go with it. That's exactly what it does. This is what it delivers. It deposits hyaluronic acid to the third layer of your skin. That's what it exactly does.
Then we talk about the results of this delivery and this depth of your skin, the acid deposits moisture deep enough that it stays longer. This, in turn, keeps your skin hydrated and looking fuller. And so you do see an appearance or a reduction in the appearance of fine lines because your skin is hydrated. Because it's retaining that hydration,it looks fuller. So the fine lines aren't actually going away, but they appear to be filled in more. Wouldn't you rather buy that? Okay, I know exactly what it's doing and I know why that does. I know why that actually works. I know what it's doing. And I know the result of what it's doing.
That is a much more concise promise. It's a much more realistic promise. It's much more believable. It's understandable. Okay, I get what is happening here. That's great. I understand it. And even more so it's measurable. So people can literally look in the mirror and say, yeah, I think that does look fuller, and I do see a little bit less lines and I do feel a little bit more hydrated. This is great. It's working, it's doing what it said.
So that's the experience we want with people or people to have with our programs. So to recap, we need to talk about exactly what it does. It delivers acid to the third layer of your skin. And then we need to talk about the results of that delivery, which is: this keeps it more hydrated, which reduces the appearance of fine lines. So that promise that we're going to work. But none of us (maybe one of you if one of you is making a wrinkle cream - find me in the Facebook group and tag me and tell me) but I was going to say none of us are probably doing wrinkle cream.
I don't know if that's true. Maybe one of you is. But here's another example that makes a bit more sense for the programs that most of us are creating. Miriam is a client of mine and she's creating a really fun program that I'm super excited about, and it's for queer women who want help with online dating.
So an unhelpful and an unethical promise would be to claim that her program will help women meet the partner of their dreams. Get married in six months and have a lifelong happy marriage and the couple never fights. That would be really unethical for her to promise, cause she can't promise that. She can't promise that they'll meet the partner of their dreams.
She can't promise that they're going to end up getting married. She can't promise that marriage is going to be happy lifelong. And she certainly can't promise that couples never going to fight. None of that even makes sense. It's completely outlandish. So these all might be bi-products, right?
The bi-products of her program might be that they get married and all of this stuff, but we can't make that as the promise. So as Miriam and I were working together, we realized that her program is effective at a couple of things. But one of the things that we really leaned into is that her program is effective at teaching women to recognize red flags in other people's dating profiles.
So that's what she's delivering. She's delivering a method to recognize red flags in dating profiles, right? So that there, this helps those people pick, engage with, and ultimately date higher caliber matches. That's the result of the delivery. So she's delivering a method to recognize red flags. Yeah, when you recognize red flags, you will pick, engage with, and date better matches.
So what it does, the results of what that does. This is so picking and engaging. That is the result of delivering a method that helps them recognize red flags. So of course picking a better quality partner to date can definitely result in a lifelong happy marriage. That's what I was saying.
It could be the bi-product of that, but that's not the promise of the program. One is deliverable. One is measurable. One is specific. One is a dream, like a really great dream. I was going to say a pipe dream, but one's a really great dream. But it's not something that's actually tangible where the promise needs to be.
So we need to again talk about what exactly is delivered and what is the result of that delivery. So that's your homework today. We're having some tasky episodes lately where you have homework at the end of each one. It's fun. So your homework today is to figure out exactly what your program teaches or delivers and to divine the result of that delivery.
Okay? So two things: figure out exactly what your program teaches and define the result of that delivery. And if you need help as always, I have got you. I've got your back. As you can tell from this episode, figuring out the promise of your program is essential. It's really essential to the success of your Side Hustle.
And that's why it's an entire module within my course, Space Holder, walks you through how to completely separate your program from your clinical work. So you can feel ethical providing that guarantee, but also so that you can create a program that's going to sell, it's going to sell, it's going to be impactful.
It's going to have some results to it. Your students are going to say. yes - I actually got what I came for and I'm so happy. You're also going to know that you're delivering what you promise. When you enroll insight in Space Holder, you get instant access to the curriculum, but I never ever leave anybody hanging because you also get access to me on monthly coaching calls.
And so these coaching calls help you get all of your questions answered, but you also get to have these regular progress check-ins right, so you get to ask me what's coming up, but we get to make sure you're moving forward on a monthly basis. I'll often say here's your task, and I want to hear about it next month.
Did you and did you not do it? So there's accountability built-in as well. I really love the Space Holder course, and it's a great way to get started figuring out all of these other details of your side hustle. So you can enroll in Space Holder over at marissalawton.com/spaceholder.
Alright, and we'll be back with another good episode next week. Until then keep on rising.
