Ep 199: How to Productize Your B2B Consulting Offer for Easier Sales
Your best prospects are trying to buy without you.
They’re researching. Comparing options. Checking proof. Building a shortlist before they ever reach out.
And if your website hides your deliverables, your process or any hint of pricing, you get filtered out before you even know they were looking.
That’s the real reason sales feels so icky for so many consultants. When your offer is full of unknowns, every sales call turns into a persuasion session.
I sat down with Joe Daniels, who helps B2B consultants package and position their offers so they practically sell themselves, to talk about what it really takes to make your offer buyable.
Here’s what we covered.
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Why sales feels so icky
For most of us, “selling” conjures up an image of convincing someone. Pushing. Saying, “No, here’s why you need to buy my thing.”
Even when we logically know that’s not what good selling is, our bodies still want to run away from the call.
Joe’s answer isn’t to get better at convincing. It’s to package your expertise so clearly that 80–90% of the decision gets made before the prospect ever talks to you.
Buyers want to decide on their own
There’s a mismatch between a lot of sales advice and how people actually want to buy.
Joe pointed to Gartner research suggesting that around three-quarters of B2B buyers would prefer a buying experience without a sales rep at all. They want to do their own research, ask for recommendations, maybe ask AI who solves their problem, and then compare:
How much does it cost?
What’s included?
What are the deliverables?
Then they build a shortlist of two or three people and reach out.
If you’re gatekeeping that information, you probably won’t make the shortlist.
The bespoke trap
Bespoke-only offers don’t really work for either side.
The buyer doesn’t know what they’re getting. And you get stuck reinventing the wheel for every client, constantly tweaking your process, which quietly eats your profit margins.
Joe’s advice: save bespoke for the upsell. Once someone has worked with you and trust is at an all-time high, customizing makes sense. As a first engagement, it’s a hard sell.
Here’s the ironic part. A bespoke offer is often easier to sell one-to-one because you’re shaping it around what they tell you. But you can’t market it. Nobody sees “I do a bit of everything” on LinkedIn and thinks, “That’s exactly what I need.”
Give buyers a pricing signal
Transparent pricing is one of those topics that gets LinkedIn fired up. Joe’s take is nuanced, but clear: don’t have zero pricing.
If your offer is packaged, you can list an accurate price.
If it’s more custom, use a “starting at” or your minimum engagement.
If it’s modular, build a simple pricing calculator.
And if you can’t put a price on your website because you don’t know what you’d even be pricing? That’s a sign the offer itself isn’t clear yet.
There’s a business side to this too. If every project is different, how do you know how many sales you need to hit your revenue goal? With a standardized offer, you can reverse engineer your leads, conversion rate and sales targets.
Start with an entry offer that builds trust
Joe recommends a simple structure:
An entry offer that’s small and productized.
A core flagship offer that’s standardized enough to be transparent on price and process.
A bespoke tier for clients who’ve already worked with you and want to keep going.
I love an entry offer that’s two weeks max. You both get to test each other out, and you build the foundation you’ll need for a longer relationship. You’re deciding whether you want to work with that client just as much as they’re deciding whether they want to work with you.
I also like that entry offer to be a “why not?” price. Why not test this out and see if it’s a good fit?
Compare these two pitches from a stranger:
“Let’s work together for six months, meet every two weeks, and I might give you some deliverables depending on what you need.”
“In two weeks, we’ll nail down exactly who your target client is, and you’ll walk away with a report showing what they need.”
One is a hard pass. The other is an easy yes.
Turn sales calls into fit calls
When a prospect already knows what you do and what they’ll get, the call stops being a pitch.
Instead, they spend 20 minutes of a 30-minute call talking about their situation. You ask questions. You figure out whether they actually need you. It becomes a diagnostic conversation.
Joe shared a story from his agency days: they once sold an 18K package to a client they’d never spoken to through a “pay now” page. It did not go well. A quick fit call would’ve surfaced that they weren’t the right match.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do on that call is say no. I do this all the time. After a Booked-Out Blueprint, I’ll tell some people, “My next offer doesn’t make sense for you yet. Go see this person.” That builds referral relationships in both directions.
Stop giving your strategy away
The old consultative sales model trained a lot of us to give away the diagnosis, and even the strategy, inside the proposal.
Don’t do that.
Give away your knowledge in content as generously as you want. But once it becomes specific to them, charge for it. That’s exactly why a paid diagnostic makes such a good entry offer.
I haven’t written a proposal in years. And when someone asks Joe for one? “Just go on my website. It’s there.”
That’s the proposal, my friend.
The Three Ds of buyability
So what should actually go on your offer page? Joe’s framework:
Desired: Name the pain points and symptoms your buyer is feeling, then name the underlying problem causing them. That’s the diagnosis.
Different: Explain how most people try to solve this problem and why that approach doesn’t work anymore. Then show how yours overcomes those limitations.
Decisive: Give them everything they need to decide now: the step-by-step process, what’s included, the deliverables, the price and a clear next step.
Joe also likes offering an alternative for people who aren’t ready. “Book a call, or if you’re not quite there yet, grab this free audit.”
Write for the champion, arm the decision maker
If you sell into larger organizations, you’re probably dealing with a committee.
The champion is the person inside the company who’s feeling the pain and wants it solved. Your website and messaging should speak to them.
But the decision maker who signs off? They’re not feeling that pain. They care about the details: What are we getting? What does it cost? Is this within my sign-off limit?
So give your champion sales enablement assets that make the case internally. The clearer your offer, the easier it is for them to walk into their boss’s office and get a yes.
Try this
Pull up your offer page and ask: What is one detail I could add today to make buying feel obvious?
Maybe it’s a starting price. A step-by-step process. A list of deliverables. A clear next step.
Every unknown you remove is one less thing you have to “sell” on the call.
Joe Daniels
Joe has helped dozens of B2B consultants clarify their positioning and package up their offer so it’s easier to buy.
