All Offers Are Conditional
Just as every year brings different seasons, I’ve seen various seasons of business come, go, and repeat over the past 15 years of working for myself. I’ve been through the rise and fall of trends, the normalization of different technologies, and how the world adapted through a global pandemic.
One of the ways you can recognize a changing business season is by looking at the changes in what people are willing to buy.
Usually, it’s something you notice after someone says:
I think I’ve figured it out!
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Selling like hotcakes
Back in 2021, I started a business called Super Productive with my business partner Sarah Ohanesian. It is a Productivity Consulting company, specializing in Asana.
We were still in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic –– there wasn’t even a vaccine yet. Much of the world was on pause, locked down, social distancing, and sitting on Zoom.
But we got together over a weekend and stood up a website, built out some packages and sales offers, and started talking to people who needed help with Asana.
Within 3 months, we’d passed $150k in revenue, and by the following year we were generating nearly $500k/year while closing a little over 80% of all qualified leads.
One of the reasons we did so well over that period of time is that we learned early that no one wanted to buy open and flexible consulting engagements. They were buying packages with set scopes of work. So we dialed in those packages and we sold them.
As we cruised along, we often felt like we had things pretty well figured out.
Read the conditions, not the results
During the pandemic, we were in a time of relatively low change. The metaverse failed miserably. NFTs turned out to be the exact grift many people said it was. AI was still only a low rumble.
But while there wasn’t a lot of change, there was a lot of uncertainty.
Companies were attracted to defined scopes of work with defined timelines. They needed to be smart with budgets since they couldn’t be sure what the future would hold. Risk had to be managed.
Here’s the lesson I couldn’t see back then: we weren’t selling great packages. We were selling the right container for the conditions.
Two variables were doing most of the work.
Uncertainty: how unclear the future feels to buyers.
Rate of change: how fast things are actually shifting.
In 2021, uncertainty was high but the rate of change was low. The smart money needed low risk and defined scope. A package was the perfect answer.
We didn’t know that at first. But we tried different things and figured out how to match our offer to the moment.
Change.md
Just as everyone was getting “back to normal” after the pandemic, instability was getting ready to hit an all-time high.
ChatGPT hit the scene. Far right parties started taking over. New wars and conflict broke out domestically and abroad, and the global world order started showing deep fractures. Budgets and investments shifted seemingly overnight, layoffs became increasingly common, and entire industries started folding with the rapid spread of confident-sounding computers.
Uncertainty is still remarkably high, except now it’s combined with high volatility and an extreme rate of change.
And you know what else? No one wanted our packages anymore.
But you know what started selling with ease all of a sudden? Blocks of open consulting hours.
Same expertise. Different conditions. Different container.
The trap of a perfect formula
Companies, especially successful ones, can easily be lured into a false sense of security by their own success. It’s tempting to think that success is evidence of our own brilliance and problem-solving. Blockbuster, Kodak, adapt or perish, blah blah blah…you get it.
The truth we all must face at some point is that success is not a solo decision or destination. It’s a constant negotiation over what is needed right now. That’s the source of adaptation, having the courage to challenge your own status quo by asking more questions.
There’s a third variable that makes this more complex: whether the market is in a state of expansion or contraction. Expanding markets tolerate flexibility and ambiguity. Contracting ones demand defined value and low risk. Add that to your read of uncertainty and rate of change, and you have a rough compass for what kind of offer the moment is actually calling for.
I don’t have a perfect formula and I’m not sure one exists.
But here’s my advice: don’t fall in love with your offer, instead watch the conditions and stay flexible.
An offer is just the output. But if we stay curious, we can keep adapting our outputs to meet the conditions of the moment.
That’s the thing that won’t change –– our need to be ready for it.
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