Ep 158: From Pop-Up Offers to Productized Tiers: A Solo Consultant’s Guide to Scale with Less Stress

We answer seven rapid‑fire questions solo consultants ask most: how to run cold outreach without being spammy, what to delegate first, how to productize pricing, how to start biz dev without selling, when to hire, how to test ideas fast, and how to keep clients focused. We share scripts, signals, and simple systems to help you protect your time, grow profit, and scale with less stress.

• LinkedIn cold outreach using a simple connection note and warming signals
• Delegation via an Eisenhower‑style approach to offload low‑skill, high‑drag tasks
• Productized offers with three tiers and a middle anchor focused on outcomes
• Business development through niche communities and LinkedIn relationship building
• Gateway offers with “hell yes” pricing to reduce friction and convert faster
• When to hire operational and delivery support based on capacity pain
• Validating ideas with a wait list and seven‑day pop‑up offers
• Scope control using documented priorities, milestones and stakeholder sign‑off

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Format Twist
• 2:52 Smart Cold Outreach on LinkedIn
• 6:02 What to Delegate First
• 9:07 Productized Offers and Pricing Tiers
• 12:47 Jumpstarting Biz Dev Without “Selling”
• 16:37 When to Hire Help and Scale
• 19:47 Testing Ideas with Pop‑Up Offers
• 20:41 Listener Feedback & Club Waitlist

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

This is Sarah BlackBlock, a 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 at work. Ready to scale smarter? Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with Tiny Marketing. Hey beauties, it's Sarah Noah Block here, and welcome to episode 158 of the Tiny Marketing Show. Today I'm doing something a little bit different because I have started joining these monthly consultant calls where consultants of all walks of life, the only thing they have in common is that they are solo, come together and ask their questions, and then the other consultants answer them. So what I'm doing today is I actually have the list of questions that were asked on September's call. And I'm going to run through rapid fire style answering those questions for you. Since many of you are solo consultants, I am willing to bet that you have these questions too. So I'm going to pause and pull up the first question. Okay. The first question that came up was LinkedIn cold messaging outreach. How do you do it? So honestly, you could refer to episode 157 last week's episode. Um that wasn't planned that way. It just happened to work out that way. Um don't. I think cold, well, you can do cold outreach. I'll take that back. I'm gonna fast forward or rewind, whatever one that would apply to. Um cold outreach is fine if what you're trying to do is connect and build a relationship with someone. So my advice with cold outreach is to use the magic DM. And that would be, or I guess it would be more of called a connection note. So when you're sending that connection request, you can add a note to it. And in that note, you'll want to explain how you found them in the first place. That's the first line. So hey, Sarah, I found you because we're in the same niche community, name that community. And then in the next line, you'll want to explain who you are. You just use your one-liner here. So basically, what it is is hi, this is how I found you in the first place. Line two, this is my one-liner. This is who I am, who I help, and how I help them. And then line three is some sort of closer, like I'm really looking forward to your posts. And send it away. So that will allow you to open up that relationship with them knowing how you can solve their problems, but you're not pitching them. You're just informing them. So that's the first thing I would do with cold messaging is that. And then referring back to episode 157 again, I would pause on the DMs for a while and warm that relationship up, engage with them, engage with their public content. Um, I said that's so weird. Engage with their content publicly for a while. So you build some familiarity and warmth with them before you slide into DMs and deepen that relationship. Um, you can look for signals or hand raising um triggers that will tell you they're ready to deepen the relationship. Maybe they are commenting on your post pretty regularly or engaging with it. They've viewed your profile before. They signed up for your newsletter after connecting with you. Things like that tell you that they're ready for a deeper relationship. So, what I want you to do if you are looking to do some cold messaging is start off with that magic DM and then move towards a warming period. And it can take a couple of weeks, but that's okay because you're building a deeper relationship with them. Wait for two to three warming triggers and or warming signals would be more accurate. And then you can dive into a deeper relationship where maybe you have a conversation about what challenges they're going through, but more naturally than that. However, you would ask a question like that. Okay, let's look for question two. Question two. What is worth outsourcing or delegating to make your business easier? Whether it be apps or hiring someone. So the first thing that I would delegate is the thing that you're worst at. So for most solo consultants, you're good at that thing that you're doing for your client delivery. I'm gonna use myself as an example for this. I'm good at marketing. Um, what I'm terrible at is accounting. Like I want nothing to do with it. That's the first thing that I outsourced was I got a fractional CPA to take care of all of my bookkeeping accounting stuff. I wanted nothing to do with that. So look at what it is that you're either not good at or have zero desire to do and outsource that first. I would use an Eisenhower matrix, which is basically a grid where it's what you want to do versus what you're terrible at doing. So, what do you like to do? And uh, what do you maybe what do you like to do, but you're not good at it? It would take you a long time to learn how to do it. So anything that falls into a category of I'm not good at it and I don't like doing it, that's the first thing that you should delegate. So for me, that was a fractional CFO. Um, the next thing that I delegated was content management. So I love content creation, but putting it on the landing page or updating a website or putting it in my social media automation tool, that felt like a complete chore to me. So the next thing I delegated was getting a virtual assistant. So basically, first thing you want to look at is what do you hate doing and what are you not that good at? Delegate that first. All right, on to question three. Okay. Productizing andor creating structured offers or tiers for your consulting services. So that was one of the first things that I did because I did not want to charge hourly. And a lot of consultants start with charging hourly, but then you get into almost like a power dynamic issue with your clients where they're constantly like, well, what did you spend those hours on? What were you doing? When really you should be getting paid for the outcomes. What is it that they're getting at the end of the day? If you're a really, really smart, really good at what you do, it's gonna take you less time than someone else. You shouldn't be penalized for that. So, what I want you to do instead is create tiers with deliverables. So, tier one, these are the deliverables or the outcomes, depending on what you do, that you'll get with this amount. So it's a set amount and you know that it is profitable. So you need to look at a number where you know how much time it actually takes you to deliver and you're making a hefty profit on it. So choose that for that number. And then your next tier can be a couple extra deliverables and it's a higher tiered price. Um, three tiers is usually best, and use your middle tier as an anchor. That's usually where people will land is I want to go to that middle one first, and then they might move up. Um, so you can use a popcorn strategy where your tiers are only like a little bit apart. So it's easy for people to escalate to that next offer. And that's a strategy where people are like, well, why wouldn't I pay a thousand dollars extra a month and I'd get all of this instead? So that's one strategy. Another strategy with your pricing is you can make the highest tier way more than the middle tier. And that's just guiding pricing. You want, like, if you're what you really want is for people to buy that middle tier, like that's your goal. Um, then you want to price and uh offer deliverable strategically so people are guided to that middle tier. So maybe your highest tier is really, really expensive. So you're guiding people to that middle tier. So that is one way to do it. And if you want to dive more into pricing and offer structure, that is there's an entire module or mission inside of Tiny Marketing Club where we get into building out your offer and pricing strategy so you can figure out the right pricing and how you structure those offers, tiers, offer products, however you want to call them. So let's go on to the next question. Four. Okay, next one. How to jumpstart business development? There's so many options, limited time, and I'm not trained or a natural-born salesperson. Girl, me either. I'm not a natural salesperson. What I am good at though is making friends with people. So that is my only goal when I'm doing business development is to build a deeper relationship with someone. So if you want to jumpstart business development, I would start with a small pool. And I've talked about this a thousand times before. You can search my podcast for anything around niche communities, and I'm probably talking about this strategy, but find a niche community. It's small, it's tailored to a very specific person and become valuable in that. Answer those questions that people are coming up with. Set keyword alerts so you're the first person to answer questions. Um, connect with them over on LinkedIn too. So you're kind of hitting them on different levels, not just in the community, but now they also see you on LinkedIn. So that's where I would start is as niche as possible, find the communities where your ideal customers are hanging out, be super valuable, answer questions there, move that relationship over to LinkedIn so it can become more of like an inerture sequence because once they're over on LinkedIn, they're seeing all of your content. Um, you can comment on their content, you can deepen that relationship. It's no longer surface level. So that is what I would do as someone who is also not a natural-born salesperson. It's combining like the business development of niche communities to LinkedIn and then combining that with a gateway offer that's easy to say yes to. I call it hell yes pricing. Like choose a price that you know people are be like, why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I buy that offer when it's going to solve this problem? So it should be low ticket but high value. All right, on to question five. Okay. Actually, a few people answered or asked this question. So I will go into how do you know when it's time to scale or bring on help under you as a solopreneur? It's kind of tied into that previous question about who should, like, what should you outsource first, but a little higher level, like how do you know when it's time to bring someone else on? So I would say there's a couple different elements to this. Like, if there are parts of your business that you were incapable of doing, and there's no shame in that, there are parts of my business I am incapable of doing. Bring that person on right away because you need that solved. For example, taxes. You don't want to do your business taxes yourself. Get someone else to do that. That makes sense. But now let's go to that next level. And we're talking deliverables, which I'm assuming is what this person is asking about. Like, when do I know that it's time to get support in delivering to clients? Because that is usually the last thing that solo consultants start doing. Like, it's scary. Now all of a sudden you're building a team and you have other people who are responsible for supporting client deliverables when it was always you. It's super scary. I've been there. So I would wait until you're starting to feel the pain. You feel the strain of what it's like to just like be overextended. When you start feeling that pain and you're like, I can't do this on my own anymore. I'm getting too many clients right now. I can't handle the amount of deliverables I need to do anymore. That's when it's time to bring someone on. And the first person I would bring on is someone who can support, again, back to the Eisenhower matrix, the things that you one aren't that good at doing and don't like doing. So usually that's a virtual assistant. So that's what I would do. I was wait, I would wait. And I wish that I had done this. I started my business, but now, like smarter five years later, me. No, I'm maybe six years later, me, um knows that I would continue doing client deliverables until I couldn't anymore. And then I would bring people in to do like the low-level client stuff that they're not touching a client directly. That like from what I was saying earlier, the content management is something that I delegated. But um, wait until you're feeling that pain because you might as well keep all the profit you can while you can. Okay, on to question six. Okay, this one's fun. Testing business ideas. How have you done this before? What worked and what hasn't? So, my favorite way to test business ideas is to create a pop-up offer. So it's an offer that is not available all the time. It's limited. I might only be selling it for seven days, but it gives me an opportunity to test out if I want to expand that offer further and also see is this something I like delivering. So that is how I would do it. But let's take it back one step because you also need to validate if that idea is even worth trying to do a pop-up offer. So you can validate the offer by creating a wait list, like telling people, teasing out the idea for the offer on social media and on your email list, and then having a wait list available that people can sign up for to show that's their little hand raise, that they are interested in the offer. And then from there, I would move over to pop-up list or pop-up offer. I will do this for the next seven days. This offer might never happen again. But so if you want it, you need to get it within the next seven days. And the nice thing about that is it's a cash injection. You're getting a lot of money at once. It allows you to test out the idea without being committed to doing it long term. You're not married to it. You're just trying it out. And you can just walk away after that. So that's what I like doing. I like a good old-fashioned wait list plus pop-up offer to test out ideas. Okay, and we will end with question seven, which I think is pretty interesting. And probably a lot of you are dealing with. How do you get your clients to focus on what they really need and prioritize it? Current client who is great wants to do a huge project overhaul with many parts, but isn't prioritizing areas or spending time to think through what is needed. Um, I'm worried that we'll go down rabbit holes. That's so common. So let's get into it. The first way to eliminate the rabbit holes from happening is to start the engagement with a gateway offer. Because the gateway offer allows you to get information from them right away, build out the foundation for what that project or engagement will look like on a document. So documented. Um, next stop, you review it with the entire team and they say yay, nay. And at that point, you prioritize what's the most important thing for you. Now you have all of this documented. So as you move into the execution phase, let's say you did that gateway offer. They're like, yes, I want you to do it. You upsell them into the execution phase. Now you have the document saying this is what you signed up for. This is the priority that you chose. These are the milestones we're going with. And we're gonna stay focused on that for I'll just say the next 90 days, and then we can review and revise to see what makes sense. So that helps a ton is having that gateway offer, getting their sign-off, and choosing the priority up front before you ever sign them on for the execution engagement. Because if they can't agree on priorities, then when you're in that smaller container and you can still say bye and walk away from the whole project, then you're already seeing red flags and you know that they probably won't be a great client. So I will end there with this. I still have quite a few questions that came up in that consulting call. So maybe if you guys liked this style of episode, I will do another one of these. I'm actually in a half hour about to pop into another one of these consulting calls for October. So in the comments, let me know. Did you like this style of episode and should I do more? All right, 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.