How to Create a Clear Coaching Offer (So You Can Actually Start Marketing)

Sep 18

The three essentials that’ll help your offer feel crystal clear.

If you've been trying to get clear on your offer so you feel more confident in your marketing and sign more clients, you have all the right intentions.

And if you’re like most coaches I know, you might also have fallen in the trap of constantly finessing your offer so that it hasn’t been put out to the world yet.

What keeps most entrepreneurs feel unclear about their offer is this: they have so many ideas about it and don’t know which part actually matters so they are stuck in decision fatigue.

After working with hundreds of coaches, I’ve come up with this simple three part framework:

A clear coaching offer includes three things: your audience, your result and your format.

Once you’re clear on this, you’re ready to market.

Because this framework is simple and focused on the essentials, it’s designed to help you get clarity - and be out of perfectionism and analysis paralysis quickly.

This is the foundation for how my offer has been able to bring in multiple six figures.

So let’s dive into what the common blocks are when coaches try to create these clear offers, and how you can create your own.

Why It's Hard to Create a Clear Coaching Offer:

These are the three most common things that keep coaches from creating clear offers:

Your audience ends up being vague because you don’t want to exclude anyone so you end up speaking to everyone.
Your offer results ends up feeling general like “live your best life” because you subconsciously tend to discount your results, and don’t want to overpromise anything.
Your offer format changes by the day because you keep on going back and forth between having a shorter duration (so you don’t burn out) or longer (to prove your generosity and value).

If you recognized yourself in any of the above, I want you to know that you’re not alone.

This happens frequently, especially for heart-centered Asian women coaches who were taught to contort themselves to fit everyone else' s needs, stay humble and not brag.

The good news though is that you don’t need to overhaul your personality or completely heal your past conditioning to create a clear offer ;)

Creating a clear offer just requires you to make three decisions, and below is a framework that guides you through each step.

The 3 step framework for creating a clear coaching offer

1. Your Audience: Who you help.

Your audience is who you help, and it needs to be a specific type of person.

For most of the coaches I work with, they actually have a niche or group of people that they want to serve (and often the past version of themselves).

But even with this background, it feels scary to “narrow down” because of the fear of getting it wrong or excluding people.

And the fear is very real - I remember every time I niched down, it felt so freaking scary even though my soul was telling me to and deep down, I knew it was the right direction.

The first scary move was me pivoting from a career & productivity coach (which I started out as), and pivoting to business coaching (which was what I actually wanted to do, but felt riskier).

The second scariest move was niching down from everyone to serving Asians, and then Asian women.

Even though each time it felt like I was limiting my audience pool, every time I spoke to a more specific group, my income actually grew.

Because clarity attracts.

And it became easier to sign clients because they knew I was the coach for them thanks to the specificity of my offer.

So even if it’s only for the next three months, what type of people would you love to help? Who feels the most alive for you to support?

Focus and speak to them.

2. One transformation: the exact result you deliver.

You may feel unclear about the result for several reasons, whether because it feels scary to guarantee it or you do so many things in your work that it's hard to name just one.

And you end up keeping the results vague.

What you need to do instead is to speak to a result people can actually SEE.

For example:

Instead of "live your best life," a life coach's result might look like: "break out of conditioned expectations and start making day-to-day decisions based on what actually excites you” 💫
Instead of "be your most embodied self," a somatic coach's result look like: "feel the anger in your body without burying it away first and pretending you’re fine”
Instead of "grow your confidence," a career coach's result might sound like: "negotiate your next offer to 10K more without over-explaining or apologizing for asking."

Notice what all three have in common: they're measurable (aka you would know if it happened), which helps them be clear.

3. Format: The structure of your coaching program

You might feel unclear on the format of your coaching offer because you’re looking at everyone else, ie. the people in your coach certification training, your competitors and social media to see how to structure your program.

This is looking in the wrong place.

Instead, think about your specific client:How long do they need to get the result they want? What’s the structure that would serve them?

And there’s no need to overcomplicate things, this gets to be simple.

For example, my offer is 3 months coaching with weekly 60 minute sessions.

(I got here too by putting my offer out there and testing the duration for one month then two before landing on three months. You don’t need to get the format right at first try and can always adjust later).

The most important thing is that you get just clear enough to take action.

This is how you start creating your own offer that’ll one day help you bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Coaching offer examples:

This framework is simple on paper, but I know simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy - and it can still feel abstract until you see it applied.

So I wanted to give you a few more examples on what coaching offers can look like so you can get a sense of the range, and also trust your own instincts.

Here are some different coaching offers from my clients over the years:

Career coaching: 8 weeks, weekly sessions, to help WOC land a role with the flexibility and pay they actually want, without over-explaining their worth in the interview to get it.
Business consulting & coaching: 1 year, weekly sessions, to help social impact leaders take their program from idea to fully funded and implemented in the field.
Creativity coaching: 3 months, biweekly sessions, to help professionals finally finish and launch the creative project or career they’ve been sitting on for years.

All of these offers have helped them bring in 6 figures in their business.

And not because these offers are the most bulletproof or unique, but because they focus on being specific and clear.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Coaching Offer

As you create and clarify your offer, watch out for these traps - they’re sneaky in that they’ll convince you that you’re “not ready yet” for any of the three parts of your offer framework:

Waiting for more proof to claim a result: whether it’s after you finish another coaching certification or have more clients wins. Remember that if you’ve helped three people through it, that's a real result. You don’t need to wait for 10 more ;).
Overloading the format with extra deliverables: you don’t need more bonuses or an already made curriculum to start marketing your offer. Your offer is already worth it with the essentials.
Waiting until your offer is 100% clear before you market it: remember that clarity isn’t the all-or-nothing magic sauce that allows your offer to sell like hotcakes. While it is the foundation, it’s the body of work and real feedback you get from putting your offer out that helps it sell out.

You don’t need a perfect coaching offer, just a clear enough one

A clear coaching offer comes down to three things: your audience, your one result and your format.

That's it.

Once you get clear (enough) on that, you are ready to market it.

To help you with the next step, if you’re ready to figure out your pricing, check out this post here (next post to come).

And if you want the rest of what it takes to build a simple, sustainable business around this offer, you can sign up for the newsletter below 👇

Yunzhe Zhou

Yunzhe Zhou is a holistic business coach for Asian women.

She started her business in 2018 as a former Silicon Valley marketer and DIY queen who thought hustle was the only way to make things work. After nearly burning out and barely making an income, she started experimenting with a different approach - a business built around her introverted energy, instead of against it.

That approach has helped her create a multi-6 figure business with a spacious calendar, deep relationships with the clients she works with, and without ads or a big following.

And now she helps Asian women do the same. Her coaching blends strategy and inner work (ie the conditioning, worthiness, good girl wiring etc), so that change starts at the root. And this is how her clients can close the gap between their impact and income without needing to be louder than they are.