Episode 8: The Antidote to Over-Delivering in Your Membership
LISTEN NOW:
SUBSCRIBE & LISTEN ON THE GO:
EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:
About This Episode:
One of the biggest fears and frustrations of the membership owners I talk to is over-delivering: the feeling that you’re giving too much, for too little in return.
The problem? We’re thinking about over-delivering in the wrong way. It doesn’t mean what most of us think it means.
We’ll explore:
The 4 reasons why membership owners get stuck in a pattern of over-delivering and then resenting their members
What over-delivering looks like inside a membership
How to bring exceptional value to your members without burning yourself out
A new role to try on that will help you show up differently for your members — so they get better results without you have to work around the clock to make it happen
Links and Resources:
Contact Natalie: themissingink.co/connect
See how you can work with Natalie: themissingink.co/services
Follow on Social Media:
Instagram: instagram.com/natalietaylor.co
Threads: threads.net/@natalietaylor.co
Facebook: facebook.com/natalietaylor.co
PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:
Can you think of the most amazing dining experience you've had lately?
If you're not a food appreciator like I am, then maybe substitute that for an amazing event, a beautiful location, something that made you say, “This was exceptional. They have exceeded my expectations…”
“They have over-delivered.”
I want you to hold onto that because we're having a conversation about what it really means to over-deliver inside your membership — and why it may not mean what you think it does.
In fact, I believe that the traditional definition of “over-delivering” is what leads most membership owners to burn out and resent their membership.
Today, we’ll talk about how we can frame what it means to over-deliver more broadly in terms of the overall experience you're offering to your members—and how by doing this, you will create more time and spaciousness for yourself, your team, and your members too.
What to expect from today’s episode
First, we’ll explore how over-delivering, as we typically define it, often leads to burnout for membership owners and overwhelm for your members. We’ll also talk about how over-delivering might be showing up for you right now.
Then, we’ll look at a different approach—one that involves curating exceptional experiences, rather than just giving more and more.
And finally, I’m going to share with you the key skills you’ll need to embrace in order to become an experience curator inside your membership: creative direction, pacing and spaciousness, expert communication, and relationship-building.
By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll walk away with a completely new perspective on what it means to truly over-deliver, and some ideas for how to make it happen.
This episode is inspired by a conversation I had with somebody during a Mini-VIP Day, which is a service I offer for membership owners who want to clarify how they position and sell their membership.
If you're curious about that or the other ways we can work together, I encourage you to check out the show notes.
Everything I do is designed to support membership owners in enjoying what they deliver more, growing their revenue from their membership, and helping their members get better results:
Most of us come to the realization that we are over-delivering when it's too late, and we're tired, and we're really considering whether this membership, this offer, is sustainable for us anymore.
Sometimes by giving more—even if to us, that feels like a safe place—it creates a lack of safety and a lack of results for members.
Our members have less attention, they have more conflicting priorities, and I think it's harder than ever for people to sit down and consume the stuff that we're providing to them.
Addressing the reasons why we over-deliver also means we also have to accept the reality check that people have way less time than we want them to.
So why does it happen?
How over-delivering shows up inside our membership
Often, we over-deliver (or more accurately, we over-give) for four reasons:
1. Believing that more is better:
We believe over-delivering is synonymous with giving value, but in reality, we may be overwhelming our members.
If you’re someone who is used to producing a lot of content, this is probably a “comfort zone” for you (even if you’re getting tired of it).
What it looks like:
If you’re someone who always has a lot of ideas for new member resources, you might be in the habit of just “whipping up” another PDF, quick training or guide whenever you think it would be useful for members. Sooner or later, this creates a feeling of clutter for members and questions around what they should be doing and when.
2. Lack of clarity on your promise:
When membership owners aren't clear about the promise or result their membership is built around, they tend to fill the void with content—over-giving to prove value.
What it looks like:
You worry that you need give people more things to do in order to make your membership “worth it” and that if you aren’t delivering something new to them more than once a month, people aren’t going to see the value. This encourages you and your members to over-focus on the deliverables, and less on the results of your membership — which is the real reason why people stay!
3. No clear or repeatable process for members to follow:
(*Or, if you do have a method or framework… you’re probably not reminding members frequently enough that it exists!)
Much like a promise, a clear process creates guardrails for your members.
If you haven’t turned the way you solve problems into a framework people can follow, you’re likely finding yourself answering a lot of the same questions and wondering why people aren’t getting it.
You might find yourself answering questions inside your community group, writing long answers, jumping in to solve people’s problems and doing a LOT of coaching on any live calls you offer to members.
4. You simply have too many ideas:
You know a lot about your subject and you’ve been doing this work for years (more likely, decades!). You have so much to share and it’s all really important.
When I help my clients refine their teaching inside their membership, I always ask them: if you had to pick just 1 to 3 main ideas to share for now, what would they be? (Then, usually, we have to talk it through because this isn’t always an easy thing to answer. It’s OK to need help with making these kinds of decisions!)
You need to give yourself a filter and deal with the discomfort of not giving people everything at once, so they can do more with what you share.
Ultimately, the true meaning of over-delivering is less about how much you give… and more about the quality of the experience you can provide.
When we focus on creating an exceptional experience for our members, over-delivering is the natural outcome.
Can you remember your last exceptional experience?
I'm going to tell you about a time I went to a restaurant called The Gidley. If you come to Sydney, you have to come to The Gidley. It is an amazing upscale restaurant.
Source: Liquor and Larder
There’s no signage, so we did get a little bit lost trying to find it. (For those of you who are directionally challenged, be warned.)
But everything about it was incredible. They’re known for their contemporary food, particularly their steaks. My partner and I shared the most incredible ribeye. We had a salad on the side, and even the salad was good—and I'm not really the kind of person who gets particularly excited about a salad. The starter was amazing too. They were these tiny little bagels that came out on this beautiful plate with three different dips. I still think about those dips.
Everything about it was exceptional. Of course, the food was amazing, but the way that we were treated—the level of attention and care we received—was really special. The energy of the space was very elevated. There was a healthy hum of conversation and energy, but it wasn't loud. We could hear each other talking.
Then there was the decor. Rich green velvet chairs and dark mahogany walls. The lighting was dim, but not so dim that we couldn't see each other. And the timing between each of the courses gave us just enough time to digest and appreciate and talk about how cool that was, but not so much that we got a bit antsy waiting for the next course.
So that's an example of an experience that really took my breath away and that I would consider to have over-delivered in every sense of the word.
Over-delivering is about the experience you create, not the “stuff” you give to people
Now, I want you to think about your example.
By now, I'm hoping that you’re starting to get on board with this new perspective on what it means to over-deliver inside your membership:
Over-delivering is not about the amount of content we produce for members, or how much we give to them.
It’s actually is about the space in between.
Our ability to design incredible experiences for members that feel spacious, supported, and unique—and to welcome them into a space that feels on-brand, curated, and like something they couldn't get anywhere else—is actually what it really means to over-deliver.
Great content is just the baseline now.
And in fact, being able to show restraint and do less so that our members can experience more is, I believe, one of the hallmarks of the successful memberships of the future.
So today, I want to leave you with some thoughts around what it means to curate exceptional experiences for our members, the kind of muscles that you might need to strengthen as a membership owner, and a new role to step into that I think will be much more energizing for you than the one that you may be feeling a little bit stuck in—which is the role of content producer, the person with all the ideas who has to create all the things for the membership.
I think that you’ll like this new role much better.
The new role I want to introduce you to is: Experience Curator
When we talk about the role of experience curator, there are a few key skills that you'll need to master:
Creative Direction: This is about intentionally designing your membership experience—the look, feel, and flow of your membership space. How does it reflect your brand? How does the tone feel in your communication?
Make it Spacious: The ability to create enough space and time for members to digest content and take action, rather than overwhelming them with more and more information. When you show restraint, you allow for greater member results.
Expert Communication: What can feel like over-communicating is really just good communication, and most of us aren’t doing enough for it. It’s your role to guide members clearly through each step, ensuring they understand how to take action on the content they’re consuming.
Relationship-Building: Every membership owner is in a long-term relationship with their members. You get to design this relationship with intention. If you don’t, you’re going to feel burned out, resentful and disconnected from your members.
How Less Content Can Lead to More Results in Your Membership
This idea of being an experience curator is something I’d love for you to lean into. First of all, it could spark some amazing creative ideas for you, but it will also make you less tired.
When we curate experiences, we think about space and environment, and the "stuff" becomes much less important.
In fact, you might find that when you think about experience, you get inspired to declutter and do less. And that's a great gift you give yourself energetically, but it's also a gift to your members too.
So where do we begin?
Whenever I'm mapping out with a client either what's going to be included in their membership or how their membership is changing, I always come back to:
What is that monthly experience going to look like for members?
And again, you might do things on a quarterly basis, so use your own imagination here.
But I always think in terms of their member engagement cycle, which I referred to in the previous episode, knowing the rhythm and routine of how we want members to engage on a regular basis.
How are we going to guide them?
Every new piece of content you offer opens a Pandora's box of questions, what-ifs, objections, "What’s next?", "How do I make this work?", "I don't believe this," and all of that is something that you need to address.
We often think that the persuasion stops when we've sold somebody into our membership, but because someone is consistently making that buying decision to renew again and again, the persuasion continues every single month—or else, people will leave.
The way that we persuade is by curating an experience that helps members make progress, and that extends far beyond the teaching content that we offer to people.
Let’s talk about how this looks in practice.
Creative Direction is What Keeps Your Members Coming Back
I love this conversation because it allows me to indulge the unrequited part of me that wishes I could have been an art director. But I do think that when we have a membership, we really have this cool opportunity to be experience curators, and that we're not just creating content, we're not just designing learning materials—we're actually designing an experience.
You are now the creative director of the space that your members step inside.
I want you to define:
What is the feeling of the space?
Visually, how can we reflect that?
Structurally, how can we reflect that?
In the tone of voice that we use on calls, in our community posts, in our comments, how can we reflect that?
You are now designing an experience. This is a reason for people to buy from you and it’s an even bigger part of why they choose to stay.
Your membership should extend and evolve and even be a flag in the ground that says, This is our brand. This is how we show up.
If you want to hear more about that, I talk about ethos in a previous episode on making your membership irresistible. It's just a few episodes back.
From the colors of your membership portal, to the way that it's organized, to the level of conversations that are had in the community, to how you structure your content—all of that is the art of curation.
And I don't know about you, but I really want to be a part of spaces that are just dripping in originality and perspective and thoughtfulness, and that have been designed in a way that shows me, "I can't get this anywhere else."
More importantly, I want to be a part of spaces that show me that I am understood. That my unique desire for how I want to move through the world, how I want to operate, is welcome in this space.
This is so important in the time we find ourselves in because there are so many different ways that your members could choose to take action and get results.
There are so many people they could learn from, courses they could buy, memberships they could join, people they could pay, or even just the status quo of doing nothing. We're really spoiled for choice.
So the way that we can position ourselves against competition isn’t just through the brilliance of our ideas, but also through the originality of the experience we curate and provide to our members.
What are the spaces you love to be a part of? What is the space you want to curate for your members? Make it tangible. Visualize a real space. What’s in the room? What music is playing? Colors, textures and more…
It’s all yours for the making. Why not make it a space your members can’t resist being a part of?
Creating Space for Members to Take Action
In addition to experience design, it's really your role to create space and spaciousness.
And in order to do that, we have to think about the pacing of what we offer.
Because our job doesn’t end once we hit publish on the content. Our job continues in helping members consume that content and take action.
I have a service where I write people’s engagement emails for their membership, such that I'm the one helping them curate what they say to their members and when.
The hardest thing about writing these emails is making sure that we aren't just presenting new content to members all the time.
Instead, we have to be mindfull about presenting ways for them to move through what they already have. It is very, very hard to do this when you're in just this cycle of creating and over-delivering.
So think about it:
For every new thing I hit publish on, what does somebody need to do with it?
What's the next step going to be?
Have I made this clear?
What runway, support, and even space and time do I need to give somebody so they can get the full benefit out of what I've just produced, instead of consuming it and not getting a result, or already feeling so stuffed that they never consume it in the first place?
I think one of the best ways to check yourself on this is to imagine how you would communicate with your members about everything they get in a given month.
If you're thinking about what members get in a month, ask yourself: Would it be feasible for you to share all of this with someone in a given month and also communicate with them about how to take action on it?
In my experience, we often need to take a few things out so that we can add in the communication required for people to consume, engage, and get results.
Your ability to communicate that next step to someone is really what’s going to create an amazing experience for your members—one where they have space, where they are succeeding in taking action, and where they are getting results.
It allows us to curate a very intentional experience for people and create that sense of spaciousness.
Over-Communicating as the New Over-Delivering
Instead of over-delivering, I would love to see us over-communicating instead.
Better yet, I want you to think about over-communicating as part of a larger role that you are taking on as the curator of your member experience.
In contrast, when we over-deliver, it’s usually tied into “producing”. When we produce so much that our members can't move through it, what happens is our membership underwhelms.
Instead, if we can be very restrained with the experience we provide, in the same way that I described my beautiful dining experience as having the perfect amount of thoughtfulness and restraint, we give people space.
And then through over-communicating, we give them pathways through our content, ways to move through it, get results, take action, and blow their minds with the beautiful, curated experience that we have just provided them.
It feels like over-communincating, but it’s just good communication
So when I was talking to this particular client about what was going to be included in her membership, one of the things that I looked at, of course, was: What do we want to offer? But also: How do we want to communicate around what is available?
And the way that we communicate happens in a couple of different ways. Obviously, we have to communicate as part of our sales argument, right? We're going to communicate in our sales emails, in our social posts, of course on our sales page about how the membership works, what people get, and why it's valuable. But we also communicate behind the scenes to our members.
And it's this communication, this support that we provide to them, that allows them to move through the content.
In fact, I think of it as being an expert communicator, such that members always know where things fit, what the bigger picture is, and as adult learners, we all really crave this.
It's the reason why at the start of each episode, I do my best to tell you what to expect so that you're not sitting here listening to my story about the restuarant I visited and wondering, "How does this relate to me and my membership?"
We always need to be doing that with our membership content, helping people frame it up in context in terms of how it fits, what's next, and how they can take action and get results.
Again, I encourage you to listen to the previous episode. I have some specific examples of what that communication piece looks like.
The Balance Between Content and Communication
So again, reframe what over-delivering means. The more we can communicate about how to take action, and the more restraint we can show around what we give and put in front of people, the better results people will get.
You may be at the other end of this spectrum where, instead of releasing content to members nonstop throughout the month, you deliver everything at the start of the month, and then you just peace out of their inboxes until it's time to do your next monthly drop. And I would say that that's just not enough communication because our members really do need support to take action and to utilize this amazing content you're creating.
So over-communication may be a skill for you to start building here too. It's really not enough for us to just be communicating with members when we have a new release for them or when we have an upcoming call that we want them to add to their calendar.
There is so much more that they need from us in order for our relationship with them to be strong enough, and for their relationship with the membership and the content to be strong enough, that they're taking action and getting benefit from it.
The other point I want to make about over-communicating is that when we think about how we communicate with members and support them in taking action, it allows what we do in our membership to feel like a two-way conversation.
Being in conversation with your members, having a sustainable relationship with them, is one of the best things you can do for yourself as the person running the membership, but also for your ability to figure out how this membership needs to be positioned so that people will buy it.
Building Relationships Through Communication
It's actually really hard to focus on relationships when you're so busy behind the curtain, creating the next thing to go out.
And since we're talking about being an experience curator, I strongly believe that people who curate exceptional experiences are fantastic relationship builders because they think about the people they’re creating for.
When you have an ongoing continuity-based offer, like a membership, you're going to be in a long-term relationship with your members. The question is whether or not you've designed that relationship with intention.
If you haven’t, then you are likely over-giving, you likely feel like you put way too much time into this membership for too little appreciation, and you probably also feel, in a weird, ironic way, sort of disconnected from your members too.
Designing the Relationship with Intention
So when you design a relationship with intention, you start thinking about: How do I want to relate to my members?
First of all, am I even attracting members who I want to spend time with? If not, that's a much bigger question about your marketing and positioning and who you're selling to. But assuming you have people in your space that you want to spend time with, let's think about how you want to relate to them.
With the time that you have, where do you feel most connected to them?
Think about the type of relationship that you could offer to your members that would excite you and energize you, because you get to pick.
You don't have to do it by default, and you don't have to do what everybody else with a membership does.
From my experience of working with membership owners who might feel a little bit disillusioned or discouraged by their membership—maybe even sort of disconnected from what their members need because they're just so in that rhythm of doing what they've always done and producing what they've always produced—strengthening your communication muscles is what will make you feel like you're back in conversation with your members again, versus just hitting publish on a new piece of curriculum or content, a new monthly drop, and letting that go out into the ether.
By communicating, we spark conversation. You will get amazing feedback from your members around what they need and what they want, where they're struggling, and how to better support them.
This will give you amazing ideas for your marketing positioning and your sales promotions too, and it will just get you excited about what you're doing again.
Rather than us standing on a podium, bestowing information on people, there's more of an exchange happening.
We get to learn from people.
We build deeper relationships, which means not only can we show up better for them, but it means they're more likely to stick around and stay as well.
And that, truly, is what it means to over-deliver.
The Paradox of Less is More
The cool thing is that focusing on curating experiences and over-communicating will get you out of content creator mode.
You may find that by focusing on curating experiences and over-communicating, you're on the hook for creating less—and yet, paradoxically, your members are getting better results than ever.
If you're curious about this, this is the work that I do with my clients. It is never too late to refine, redesign, and curate your membership. If you're interested in this work and curious about what it could look like to work with me, I encourage you to reach out. All of my information is in the show notes below.
And if nothing else, I hope that you walk away with a new perspective on what it means to over-deliver.
I hope that in some way, you’ve been freed a little from this sense of being beholden to always producing more. You don’t have to. If you’re craving space, then it’s likely your members are too. And that’s a gift you can give to both yourself, your team, and your members.
I’d love to hear what you think. As always, you know how to find me—my information is in the show notes below. And I’ll see you next time.
