In short
Coaching websites are bad at saying what they actually sell. In this article we show you how to write an offer a stranger understands, with a full before and after example.
Try this before you read any further. Open your own homepage, and pretend you've never met yourself. Then answer three questions using only what's on the screen. What does this person sell? What will be different for me afterwards? And what do I actually get if I say yes?
If you can't answer all three in under a minute, you haven't got an offer on your website yet. You've got a description of coaching. And you're far from alone, because this is one of the things coaching websites do worst.
What is a coaching offer?
A coaching offer is the thing you're selling, said in a way the buyer can picture. It has two parts. The first is the change they'll get, in their words. The second is one clear thing they can buy or start, so they know exactly what saying yes means.
That's it. It isn't a clever name, it isn't a stack of bonuses, and it definitely isn't "six sessions of transformational coaching". Which brings me to the problem.
Why "six coaching sessions" isn't an offer
Because nobody wakes up wanting six coaching sessions. They wake up wanting to stop feeling knackered, or to get the promotion, or to stop arguing with their teenager. The sessions are how you do it. They're not what anyone's buying.
When I sold cars, nobody asked for "a personal transportation journey". People wanted to know which car, what price, what warranty, and when they could drive it home. Everything was spelt out, and that made it easy to say yes. If I'd started talking about the freedom of the open road, they'd have walked off to the next garage.
Coaching websites do the open road thing all the time. "Unlock your potential." "Step into your power." "Create the life you deserve." It sounds lovely and it tells the reader nothing about what they'd be paying for.
What we found on coaching websites
We looked at 10,954 live coaching websites and checked each homepage for 10 things a stranger needs before they'll get in touch. One of them was exactly this: can a stranger see what's being sold and what changes for them? If you want to know how we checked, it's all here.
The answer, for a lot of sites, was no. Out of the 10 things we checked, only four came out worse than this one: proof, price, the coach's own story, and credibility. And the sites that did best overall, the ones where a stranger can follow the page from arriving to getting in touch, were more than twice as clear about what they sell as the sites that did worst.
So if your offer is a bit woolly, you're not alone, but it's also one of the easiest places to get ahead.
How do you write a coaching offer people understand?
You answer four questions, in this order, in plain words.
1. Who is it for? One type of person, described the way they'd describe themselves. Not "busy professionals". Something like "managers who've been running on empty for months and can't take time off". If you're not sure who that is, the niche and audience post will help.
2. What changes for them? The result they can picture. Not "find balance", but what their Tuesday looks like afterwards. Use their words, not coaching words.
3. What do they get? The actual stuff. How many sessions, how long, how often, what happens in between, what they get to keep. This is where the sessions belong. Not as the offer, but as the proof the offer is real.
4. What do they do next? One clear step. Book a call, book a first session, or buy it outright. One thing, not five.
Then put it next to a price, or explain what the price depends on. The coaching pricing post goes through both ways of doing that.
What does that look like in real life?
Here's a burnout coach's offer, before and after. The names and prices are made up to show you the shape. The buyer's words aren't. They come from what people actually write about burnout, which I looked at as part of my research.
People in burnout say things like "worked too hard for too long", "no amount of rest will help", and "quitting isn't an option". Keep those words in mind.
Before:
Burnout Recovery Coaching. Reclaim your energy and step into a life of balance and wellbeing. I offer 1:1 coaching sessions tailored to your unique needs. Book a free discovery call to begin your journey.
Read that as a stranger. Who's it for? Anyone. What changes? Something about balance. What do you get? Sessions, of some kind. It's not wrong, it's just empty.
After:
For people who've worked too hard for too long, and can't just quit.
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You've had the holiday. You've had the long weekend. You came back just as tired. Rest isn't fixing it, because the way you work hasn't changed.
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Over 12 weeks we work out what's draining you, change the parts of your job you can change, and build a way of working you can keep up without leaving. By the end you'll have your evenings back and you won't be dreading Monday.
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What you get: six one-to-one sessions, every two weeks, 60 minutes each. A short check-in by message between sessions. A written plan you keep.
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Price: £X for the 12 weeks, or three monthly payments.
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Next step: book a 20-minute call to check it's right for you.
Now run the three questions again. What does this person sell? Twelve weeks of help recovering from burnout without quitting. What changes? Evenings back, no Monday dread. What do I get? Six sessions, check-ins, a plan, at a price. Done, in about thirty seconds.
Notice the after version says "can't just quit". That one phrase does more work than the whole of the before version, because it's the exact thing that person is worried about. That's why you use their words, not yours.
Should you have one offer or several?
Lead with one. If you've got three things on your homepage that all look equally important, the reader has to work out which one is for them, and they won't bother.
If you genuinely sell more than one thing, put your main offer first and give the others a clear way in further down, each written the same way: who it's for, what changes, what they get, what next. Think of a menu with sections, not a page where everything shouts at once.
What about "irresistible offers" and bonus stacks?
You'll have seen the advice. Pile on the bonuses, add a free workbook, a private group, a recorded masterclass, then show a crossed-out price ten times bigger than the real one. Some people swear by it.
In my opinion, for a coach selling to a stranger, it gets the order wrong. A stack of extras only works once the person already understands what they're buying and wants it. If the main offer is woolly, adding bonuses to it is like putting alloys on a car nobody's test-driven. Get the four questions right first. If you still want to add extras after that, fine, but they're the garnish, not the meal.
And keep it believable. People buying coaching are already a bit sceptical, and anything that smells like a sales trick makes that worse. How to sell coaching goes into what actually helps people decide.
Where should your offer go on your website?
On the homepage, near the top, straight after the line that says who you help. That first line gets them to stop. The offer tells them what they'd get if they stayed. What to put on a coaching homepage shows where it sits with everything else.
Then give it its own page as well, with the full detail: what happens in each stage, what's included, the price and who it isn't for. The homepage version is the short one. The offer page is the one they read before they book.
Questions coaches ask about this
Does my coaching programme need a name?
No. A name is fine if it helps people remember it, but it doesn't explain anything. "The Reset Programme" means nothing on its own. "12 weeks to recover from burnout without quitting your job" means something straight away. If you use a name, put the plain version right next to it.
Should I sell sessions or packages?
Packages, in my opinion, because a package has a beginning, a middle and an end, and a result at the end of it. Single sessions are hard to picture a result from. You can still offer single sessions, just not as the main thing you lead with.
How long should my offer be on the homepage?
Short enough to read in under a minute. Who it's for, what changes, what they get and what to do next. The full detail goes on its own page.
The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.