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Implementing this one framework can easily yield a 7x-9x increase in your customer lifetime value (LTV) by turning your skill or expertise into over a dozen products (that don’t suck up all of your time).
It’s not only one of the most important frameworks I used to build my personal brand to over 6 figures in 15 months, but it’s also a framework used by business juggernauts like Grant Cardone, Ed Mylett, Justin Welsh, Dan Koe, Sabri Suby, and countless others.
When you first look at this framework, you might be tempted to think that this would only work for info products, which is far from true.
This framework applies to any area of skill or expertise under the sun. Whether that’s in the form of info products, digital products, physical products, or even digital & physical services.
The framework does, however, operate with one big assumption: You must have great offers.
If you don’t know if you have a great offer…it means you don’t. The good news is I’ll be releasing The Godfather Offer Framework in one of my upcoming articles. That framework will detail exactly how to develop an offer so good people will feel stupid turning it down.
But for now, let’s explore The Offer Branching Framework and how it can multiply your customer LTV.
The Offer Branching Framework
In the framework, you’ll see that there are 3 main components:
Expertise, Gateway Products, and Conviction Products.
Expertise
Your expertise (or skill) is the broad arena that you can offer help to customers for in exchange for their time or money.
You might package this expertise as
- A digital service
- A digital product
- A physical service
- A physical product
- Or even a hybrid offering
The area of expertise that I’m currently creating products for is building & monetizing a personal brand.
To find your domain of expertise, you’ll need to ask yourself some key questions:
- What have I accomplished in business and/or life?
- What do people ask me for help or advice with?
- What have people told me I’m really good at?
- What challenges have I overcome?
- What skills have I mastered?
As I was first launching my personal brand, people kept asking me to teach them about technology like the blockchain. Overtime that led to me leaning into my expertise and success in that domain to flesh out my own Offer Branching Framework.
Once you have defined the expertise that will be at the center of this framework, you can then begin turning that expertise into a series of Gateway and Conviction Products.
Gateway Products
Gateway Products are traditionally (but not always) low-ticket products that trigger impulse purchases. In the context of this framework, we’ll equate these low-ticket, impulse products to anything $200 or less.
I refer to these as “Gateway Products” because they should act as a gateway to your higher ticket “Conviction Products” where you really start seeing the big returns.
While not an exhaustive list, the most common Gateway Products include
Ebooks
Print books
Audiobooks
Live Classes
Subscriptions
Cohort Sprints
Ebooks / Print books / Audiobooks - The great part about these 3 products is that once you create your manuscript you don’t have to do any more work. You can use platforms like ACX & KDP to get these published.
Live Classes - Offer paid (or free) seats to a live webinar training that actually delivers value to attendees instead of just being a sales pitch for one of your Conviction Products. Make sure to have an email sequence in place to follow up with registrants and promote your other offerings.
Subscriptions - This one is great for combining with your other offers (both Conviction & Gateway products). But it can also stand alone.
Premium newsletters, course subscriptions, paid communities, etc.
Cohort Sprints - Aside from Dan Koe’s primary course offerings, he also offers two week “sprints” for $150. In these sprints there will be two live calls per week on top of receiving the recordings from the prior sprint. The content of the sprints is really just excerpts from his primary course offerings.
Gateway Products accomplish a few key things for your business:
Allows you to scale easily
Brings people into your funnel
Gets people to pull out their wallets
Builds trust (if you deliver real value)
Accommodates different learning styles
Further qualifies leads for Conviction Products
Conviction Products
Your line up of Conviction Products are the mid-high ticket products that your audience goes after once they realize that you are the right person to address their problems.
Some of the best Conviction Products are
1:1 or Group Coaching
1:1 Consultation Calls
Paid Speaking
DFY Services
Licensing
Courses
Conviction Products
Build your authority
Multiply customer LTV
Are typically harder to scale
Lead to the best testimonials / case studies
Competitive vs Complementary
Most people only have one or two products from each side of the coin (Gateway & Conviction Products), which can make sense in some cases, but they’re missing something huge.
Most entrepreneurs treat their Gateway Products & Conviction Products as alternatives to each other when they should really be complementary to each other!
Rather than offering a book that can functionally replace your course, the book should be the hook (the gateway) that eventually upsells them to the course. This kind of approach, of course, must be done tactfully and where it makes sense.
Nobody wants to be upsold to a course in every other chapter of a book that was supposed to give them answers to their problem.
How Many is Too Many?
You should be thinking that creating and managing ALL of the products on both sides of this framework would be a logistical nightmare that leaves you without any time outside of the business.
There’s certainly merit to that concern.
Which is why I don’t advocate offering all of them simultaneously. Instead, experiment with a few of them at a time to discover both what works best for your audience and what you find most aligned with your ideal lifestyle.
Moreover, the number of products you create from your expertise needs to be sensible for the situation.
In some cases, you may be better off creating just a single offer.
Other times, it may make perfect sense to offer 2-3 products.
And for some contexts, you may make a dozen. Use your judgment.
Personally, when I was focusing on my expertise in the blockchain space, I turned that knowledge base into 6 different products!
Gateway Products
#1 Print & Ebook version of The NFT Equation
#2 Audiobook version of The NFT Equation
#3 Live Classes - free & low ticket options.
Conviction Products
#4 One on one NFT consultations - 1 hour zoom calls for $100-$150.
#5 The NFT Equation course - A highly structured and organized course with over 7 hours of video training on navigating the NFT space safely and profitably.
#6 Course Licensing - I allowed other content / course creators to buy a bulk amount of seats to license my course for their own community.
I could have easily increased to a total of 9 products if I added these 3:
- Group coaching
- Paid speaking gigs
- A newsletter subscription
Even having all 9 products would’ve been manageable for me. Especially considering the books, course, and licensing don’t take up much more of my time or energy after they are created.
And if I did find myself struggling to handle all of the products, I could raise my prices to slow down the deal flow and make it more manageable.
I sold the synthetization and organization of the information.
I regularly told my audience that everything inside the book and course I’ve already shared openly through my free content.
The key here is that no one has the time or patience to comb through all of my YouTube or Instagram posts and piece it all together.
They want it all in one place, organized, and with some accountability.
How You Can Implement It
1 - Define Your Area of Expertise
You may have many, and I encourage you to lean into that and even create a new category altogether.
2 - Choose One of Each
If you’re just getting started, focus your efforts on creating one Gateway Product & one Conviction Product.
If you need help with that, send me a DM on Twitter @jaredtross
3 - Expand Your Offerings
If you already have some products and you’re ready to expand your offerings and customer LTV, here’s how you do it.
Listen to Your People
If you’ve been successful with your existing offerings, it’s likely you’ve received feedback or requests from your audience for additional formats or products. If not, you could send out a survey to existing customers or audience members.
When I first released The NFT Equation course, I almost immediately started getting requests for a book version of it. Some people simply prefer to learn that way and others may have disabilities that inhibit their learning through certain formats.
Use Artificial Intelligence
You can use ChatGPT to help get the ball rolling in your brainstorming process.
If you have ChatGPT pro and you have access to the image interpreter, upload the framework, and give it a prompt.
If you don’t have ChatGPT Pro, then you can also just copy and paste parts of this article to teach it what The Offer Branching Framework is and then provide your prompt.
Go Solo
If you’re the type of person who violently refuses to use AI tools like ChatGPT…then you’re welcome to go the old fashioned route and brainstorm new offer branching ideas or borrow what’s working for others in the same or similar field.
4 - Add Cohesion
You’ll want to make sure that your product offerings collectively create a cohesive ecosystem where the various products support one another instead of competing.
In practice, this might look like creating a funnel for your book that ultimately leads people to a subscription service, your course, coaching, or other offers.
5 - Refine Your Offers
As you test your offers in the market, you’ll start to receive feedback from customers (or have no customers which is also a form of feedback) about what they’d like more or less of.
You’ll also get a sense of which offers you enjoy fulfilling and which you find too draining.
Adjust accordingly.
Watch Me Build My Offer Branching Framework
If you want to watch a real-time implementation of this framework then you’re in the right place!
Just make sure you’re subscribed to The Lifestream Newsletter and you’ll get to see me build this out for myself.
On the Gateway Product side, I’ll be rolling out a subscription offering for the newsletter for those who want to go even deeper and see more case studies of the frameworks in action.
For my Conviction Products, I’m offering a 12-week hybrid coaching program called Brand Supremacy that’s designed for those who want to build a personal brand that generates them $100k+ each year even if they don't have a massive following.
There will be more to come on each side so make sure you’re subscribed!
The Power of The Framework
Frameworks might look and sound nice on paper, but that doesn’t always mean they come with concrete benefits in application.
In this case, however, the value is clear.
🟢 Multiply Your Customer Lifetime Value
By packaging your expertise into various formats and products you begin to structure out a product ecosystem for your customers that gives them better access to the solutions you offer to their problems and multiplies your average customer lifetime value.
In my own experience, the prime example of this was literally multiplying the lifetime value of many readers of my book, The NFT Equation, by 79x.
When someone buys my print book from Amazon, I’ll make around $5 after Amazon takes their cut. If I ONLY had the book and no other products to offer, then my customer lifetime value would be stuck at $5.
But because I offered a course as well, I’m able to convert those Gateway Product sales into Conviction Product sales. In this case, I offered readers of my book a 20% discount on course enrollment which meant they’d end up spending an additional $397 with me ($397 / $5 = 79x).
🟢 Turn Competitors Into Customers
One of my favorite parts about this framework is that it has an element of alchemy to it.
That alchemy is turning your competitors into your customers. There are a few ways to take this approach, but let’s hone in on the “licensing” offer under Conviction Products.
As an example, one of my offerings for The NFT Equation was licensure. I’d allow content/course creators to buy a bulk amount of seats to my course (at a big discount) so that their community members could take advantage of the NFT boom
One of the creators I sold a license to could have been considered a competitor. Their paid community regularly had classes on Web3, blockchain, crypto, and NFTs. They purchased about 300 seats to my course.
Alchemy.
🟢 Creating Blue Oceans
You often hear people talking about how important it is for a business to find a “blue ocean” in their market.
The Blue Ocean Strategy, popularized by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, is about finding or creating a new market or industry where there is virtually no competition and a low barrier to entry.
Businesses operating in this Blue Ocean often enjoy first-mover advantage, brand recognition, and obscene amounts of profit.
In contrast, a Red Ocean consists of all the industries and markets already in existence. Think of all the price slashing that happens during Black Friday between competing e-commerce brands – red ocean.
Here’s the thing – most people only talk about finding blue oceans (through research and/or pure luck) instead of equipping people with an approach to actually create them.
The way this framework can help facilitate the creation process is through divergent thinking.
The Offer Branching Framework’s underlying thinking process is divergent by nature. We begin with our expertise and branch off (diverge) into generating many possible products & offers.
The challenge for you is to find an unconventional offering for your expertise.
🟢 Let’s consider the meteoric success of Brett and his $1 million/year one-man business, Design Joy.
Brett’s expertise is design – a market most people would consider a red ocean.
So, how did he break through the noise?
His true success wasn’t in offering design services through freelancing sites or cold DMs.
It was in creating a blue ocean by offering “design as a subscription.”
The business model is simple: pay $5,000/mo and submit as many design requests as you need.
As it relates to The Offer Branching Framework, this business model combines a “subscription” product with a “done for you (DFY) service” to create a blue ocean within the graphic design industry.
🟢 Offer & Lifestyle Optimization
Perhaps most importantly, employing this framework in your own business allows you to better optimize both your business and personal lifestyle.
In branching your expertise into different products you’re able to quickly test which offers most resonates with your audience, which are the most lucrative, and which you simply don’t enjoy fulfilling.
Through this testing of different offers you can narrow your focus on what makes you feel the most fulfilled, generates the most customer success, yields the best profit, and gives you the most flexibility to live your life as desired.
Words of Caution
While offering such a wide array of products certainly has its benefits, there’s a delicate balance that you must strike to avoid overwhelming your audience with choices.
It’ll be up to you (or up to us if you enroll in the Brand Supremacy program) to decide the quantity of offerings you give your audience.
I’ll say it again: sometimes the best route you can take is offering just a single product when the circumstances call for it.
Make sure your offers create an organized, cohesive ecosystem that allows customers to easily identify which product is best for them at their current stage of understanding or development.
👏 The End
I appreciate you taking the time to read to the end!
Articles like this take me days to research, outline, write, and edit.
Not to mention the years it took to formulate and articulate the framework itself.
But it only takes 15 seconds to share this framework with the world. It’d mean a lot if you sent this article to 2 of your friends!
