Ep 157: Design the first yes: a tiny offer that sets up the big result

Buy the Gateway Offer Workshop.

We walk through the full gateway offer system—from defining the first-step win to naming, pricing, selling, and turning it into a bridge to your signature service. You’ll leave with a clear template to stop giving away free discovery and start getting paid for tangible value.

• gateway offers as the paid first step that proves value
• why clients trust faster when they get an actionable deliverable
• three traits of a strong gateway: repeatable, aligned, preparatory
• examples: audits, blueprints, benchmark reports, assessments, mini workshops
• pricing guidance using 10–25% of the main offer and founders pricing
• packaging with a clear name, tagline, and simple description
• selling via discovery calls, social teasers, and invite-only email
• upsell tactics: fee credit, fast-action bonus, clear timelines
• systematizing with scheduling, templates, and canned emails
• pipeline planning with scheduled follow-ups at 3, 6, and 12 months

Grab the replay-turned-course with step-by-step directions to launch your gateway offer for $97.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Tiny Marketing Promise
• 1:58 Gateway Offers Defined
• 3:33 Why Clients Love the First-Step Win
• 5:07 Three Traits of a Great Gateway
• 6:52 Examples to Spark Your Offer
• 8:41 Trust, Upsells, and Pipeline Planning
• 9:50 Name, Frame, and Price It Smart
• 11:49 Selling via Calls, Social, and Email
• 13:00 Bridge to the Main Offer: Upsell Tactics
• 14:11 Systematize for Speed and Scale
• 15:28 Workshop Invite, Office Hours, and Wrap

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Tiny Marketing. This is Sarah BlackBlock. The podcast that helps B2B service businesses do more with less. Learn lean, actionable, organic marketing strategies you can implement today. No fluff, just powerful growth tactics that work. Ready to scale smarter? Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with Tiny Marketing. Hi, and welcome to episode 157 of the Tiny Marketing Show. I am Sarah Noel Block. I'm feeling much better this week. Well, I wasn't, but I'm feeling much better today than I was last week. Today, we are going to talk about gateway offers. And before we dive into the meat of it, I want to tell you a little bit about a workshop that I put on last week for the Old Girls Club, which is a really awesome community. And if you are a female in a male-dominated industry, it's such a good community for you to join. You can meet a lot of like-minded people. But any hoozle, I put on a workshop for that community and I broke it into a course, so bite-sized pieces. And that is now available for purchase. So if you want the replay of that workshop, which has now been broken down into course material, step-by-step directions on how to launch your own gateway offer, that is available right in the show notes, and you can grab it now for$97. Okay, let's jump into it. Part one. So you might also hear it called a wedge offer or a lead off or an entry offer. It's all the same idea. We're all just renaming the same thing. It's the very first step that people need to take to work with you. So it directs new prospects to who want to work with you and builds out a foundation for them. So think about breaking off the beginning of the discovery piece of your work and the onboarding piece of your work into a singular offer. That is what a gateway offer looks like. So instead of spending hours on free discovery calls and writing a proposal that goes nowhere, um, a gateway offer lets you get paid for the initial work while you're proving your value. So it creates a win-win. The client walks away with something actionable. They have the foundation and P in place to be able to solve the problem that they're going through right now. But they also walk away with trust and insights and a natural upsell path. So it's a win for both of you. When I started using gateway offers in my own business, everything changed. Within four months, I was booked out for six months in advance. There was a wait list, and that pipeline has stayed full ever since because gateway offers are a big win for both you and the client. The idea behind a gateway offer is the client needs to be able to walk away and implement whatever is in that gateway offer. And if they choose, then they can choose to work with you on your high-ticket offer and have you do the execution of it or manage the execution of it. What makes a great gateway offer? There are three criteria that you want to hit in order to have a really great gateway offer. One, it needs to be easy to replicate. If you can create a template, create a template. You don't want to reinvent the wheel every time. So templatize. Maybe you do an interview and a documented. Have those questions prepped ahead of time and they need to be able to be usable for every single client. And have your document template available in your Google Drive. So all you have to do is open up that template when you're ready to document it. Maybe it looks like an audit. So you have that checklist done ahead of time. So you know exactly what you need to look at in order to create that audit. Two, it should be a piece of your signature offer because all roads lead to that signature offer. Look at your core service. Is there a discovery phase, onboarding step, or prep work that could stand on its own that would be a valuable thing to complete for a client before ever working with you on that signature offer? That's the best place to start. And three, it needs to prepare them for the bigger work that you can do for them. So a gateway offer should get your client ready for your signature service. So for example, if you're a web designer, your gateway offer might be website copy prep. So you walk them through what their copywriting should be. It could be a usability audit. Maybe you're going through their website and you're doing an audit so you know exactly what changes need to be made. So here's some examples to just spark ideas on what your gateway offer could look like. One, it could be an audit, like a website or a marketing audit, or maybe a campaign audit where you're going through and you're seeing what changes need to be made. And then your signature offer would be making those changes. It could be a blueprint strategy with like an interview plus a short plan. Here's an action plan of what you need to do next. It could be a benchmark report. You are comparing this business to the industry's averages so that you can help them see where they need to be and maybe build out an action plan for them to be able to get there. It could be an assessment or a survey with an analysis. So they complete that assessment, you analyze it, and then you have a call together to work through what action steps they need to make in order to hit this goal, hit this challenge. If you have more of a scalable signature offer, then a challenge or a mini workshop could be good for you. It's more of a one-to-many gateway offer. Here's the kicker. Your gateway offer should mirror the experience inside of your main offer. So if you normally work hands-on, make this interactive. If your main program includes a strategy doc, give them a taste of what that would look like. You want them to have a taste of what working with you is like. Part three, why gateway offers work. So there are two main reasons that they work really well. One, they build trust. So when a prospect is cold, ice cold, they've just come into your world, they're often price shopping. Without trust, they'll just choose the cheapest option. A gateway offer proves your value quickly and gives them confidence that you're the right partner. Two, they reveal upsell opportunities. So during a gateway offer, you uncover not just what they need now, but what they'll need in three, six, twelve months from now. That means that you can plan your pipeline and time out when upsells would make sense for them. A pro tip for you is to keep a running list of future needs for your clients. In every gateway offer, like this is what you're gonna need at the six-month mark. Have that prepared. Then schedule a follow-up email six months later. It's like planting little seeds that blossom into projects. Part four, how to package your gateway offer. So the simplest way to package your gateway offer is to name and claim it. First thing, you don't want to call it a strat a strategy or an audit because people tend to pull away from that. It feels like paying for something intangible to them, even though it's very necessary. So you want to name it something. Choose a title that's clear, catchy, alliterative. I like alliteration, minus strategic spark, and then choose a tagline, something that's three to five words and describes the transformation that you're providing. And then you need a description. So what does the container look like? What's the outcome? And what's the client win that they can expect? That's it. Tattle, Taddle. Title, tagline, description. Don't overcomplicate it. You can sell it with just those three things in mind. At first, you don't need a sales page, so don't worry about that. Just create a simple Google Doc and make it feel like an invite-only experience. Just share it one-on-one. Once you've got some traction, then you can build a more formal landing page. But at first, just a Google Doc is fine and sending it to people who would make sense in price. Let's talk about that. I remember I recommend that you start with a founder's price at the beginning. That's in like the$250 to$450 range. It's just enough to prove value and get your reps in and then later raise it strategically to filter clients who can afford your full offer. So I like to give a rule of thumb of your gateway offer should cost somewhere between 10 and 25% of your main offer. That's a good place to start. Um, I always like the 995 mark. I call it the why not price. It's just below a thousand and it's worth a shot for that. Part five, let's sell your gateway offer. Okay, you've built it. How do you sell it? That's the question I get all the time. Now that it exists, how do I sell it? So, first, discovery calls. Say the first step to working with me is the gateway offer. Here's what it looks like. Here's what you'll walk away with, and here's the price. Simple, confident, done to the point. You can also do social media. Use teasers like can I tell you a secret or polls where people essentially raise their hands. Whoever engages is a warm lead. With email, treat it as an invite only. So send a short email. I've got something new I'm testing out. Do you want in? Give like some exclusivity. So maybe only your list gets it first. Or you could even segment it to a list of people who'd be most likely to be interested in that gateway offer. And then last, let's talk about the upsell strategy. So once you've done, you've sold the gateway offer, what next? The next thing you want to do is upsell into your main offer. So you want to apply all or part of your gateway cost to the bigger project or offer a fast action bonus if they move forward within X amount of days. So let's say your gateway offer costs$995. You can say, okay, my main offer to be able to manage this project and make sure it gets completed just the way we talked about in the gateway offer is that's$9,000. Since you paid$1,000 for the gateway offer, I'll apply that to it. So it'll be only$8,000 for you if you sign the contract within 30 days, because I can't hold it forever. So remember, your gateway offer is not a one-off, it's a bridge to your high-ticket offer. So the last part, part six, is systematizing your gateway offer so it runs smoothly. So here are a few quick tips to keep it running frictionless. One, use a scheduling tool that collects the payment and the intake information all in one. So it's an easy to say yes thing. You go from you send them the scheduling link, they do the intake information, they pay for it, boom, done. Have templates for your strategies, your reports, everything so you don't have to duplicate the same thing over and over again. Create a canned email template for each step of your offer. So you might want an email that's canned for someone just signed up. This is the email that goes out. You just did the interview portion of your gateway offer. This is the email that goes out. You just um completed the review session. This is the email that goes out. So you can set all of that up in Gmail. You can set up templates where it's easy peasy. You just click on that template and it'll apply it for you. When you systematize, selling your gateway offer becomes second nature, super easy for you. So this is the challenge I have for you. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, Sarah, this sounds amazing, but I do not know where to start. The course that I just told you about, the workshop that I have turned into a bite-sized course, is the place to start. It is perfect for you, and it'll explain exactly how to get started with your gateway offer. And right now it's only$97. So I'm gonna have the link in the show notes so you can get right to it. And as a bonus for anybody who buys this workshop, you also get an invitation to the next office hours. So you can come in and have a conversation with me and make sure that your gateway offer is on the right track. That's a wrap for today's episode of Tiny Marketing. If you loved this episode, please hit subscribe, rate, and review wherever you're listening. And most importantly, share this episode with a friend because more consultants need to stop giving away free proposals and getting ghosted so they can get paid for their brilliance. Join my Gateway Offer workshop right below in the show notes. Until next time, keep it tiny, keep it mighty, and I'll see you next week. You love all things tiny marketing. Head down to the show notes page and sign up for the wait list to join the Tiny Marketing Club, where you get to work one-on-one with me with trainings, feedback, and pop-up coaching that will help you scale your marketing as a B2B service business. So I'll see you over in the club.