Sold a Course People Aren't Finishing? Look at Your Course Support
When buyers stop finishing, most course creators reach for the same fix.
Add more!!
More bonuses to prove people got their money's worth. Nobody stops to ask whether more content is the thing that was actually missing. Spoiler alert: it isn’t. Course support is.
My last guest, Brenda, came in with a course that was already good. I know because she built it in my membership and I watched her do it. Brenda founded Informed Tech Solutions, and she makes tech easier for small business owners. Her course teaches people how to build their AI dream team, a foundational course that cuts through the AI noise so you can actually use the stuff. People were buying it. They just weren't doing it.
Listen for the full episode
AND the BS Breakthrough (where I break down how this applies to you) will be out September 2nd
Short version? When your buyers stall, look at what's happening around the course. It can be built around application and the information can be solid and people still won't finish. With Brenda's buyers, two things were in the way, and neither one was the course. We'll use my chat with her as an example.
The “My Buyers Won't Finish” Problem h2
Being stuck on completion is common. You built a good course, people bought it, and then it just sits there. They had all these grand plans, they got busy, and the thing they paid for never got opened. Or it got opened and they didn't make it very far.
And the reflex is to assume you didn't give enough. So you pile on bonuses. But adding more to a course nobody's finishing just gives people more to not finish.
Feel familiar? Ever built something good that people just… stopped doing?
What's Actually Stopping Them from Finishing?
When I listen to someone who's telling me they're stalled, I'm listening for one thing: The barrier between the buyer and actually doing the work.
With Brenda's folks, I heard two.
The first was time. They had the activities, they had the information, and Brenda explained why each one was there. What they didn't have was time blocked off, and somebody noticing whether or not they were doing it.
The second was expectation. They came in wanting AI to hand them their time back, like today, or yesterday. That's not how it works. The more you set up front, learning the systems and how it all fits, the better it pays off later. And when there's a mismatch between what people expect and what actually happens, they stall. Every single time. It's all over the research. It was part of mine.
However, neither of those is a problem with the course. You can't write a better module that makes somebody block time off in their calendar. That is support. So support was the actual answer.
What Does the Course Actually Need to Do?
Once you know the barrier is time and expectation, the question stops being how do I fix the course and becomes what has to happen around it.
For Brenda, that left one real decision, and I pushed her on it in the full episode of Course Creation Crap above. Keep leading with the course and sneak in the support calls, or lead with the membership and let the course ride along inside it.
She'd been leading with the course, because that's really all she had. She picked the membership. Good call, because her buyers were already telling her what they needed. They needed the time. And business owners who hadn't bought yet were saying they'd pay for just that.
So she's launching the AI Lab. A monthly membership, a 90-minute block on Monday afternoons, a short lesson to open, then co-working, then a community space for the in-between parts. The course comes with it. Brenda's course didn't change. The job it does changed. It went from the thing she sells to the thing that comes with the thing she sells.
Three Things I Want You to Take For YOUR Self-Paced Course that Isn’t Getting Results
If you've got a course out in the world (or you're building one) and your buyers keep disappearing after they pay, here are the three points to take from all this.
When support becomes the product, lead with the support
Brenda's move was bigger than a patch would handle. Back in my episode with Luna, we added a coaching call right where people got stuck, and that patched a gap. Brenda's support has to come before the product, and then the course gets wrapped around it.
And some topics just need that. AI is one of them. The tech changes weekly. You could run a session every day and still have something new to cover. A self-paced course on a moving target can teach the foundations, and it should, but nobody keeps up with the moving part on their own.
And frankly, the market's ready for it. People are burnt out on the kind of courses that Joe Schmoe the Marketing Bro has told you to create. I don't have a single person I'm working with right now selling what you'd call a straight evergreen course. Everything has some form of support attached, because too many courses were built as information dumps with no way to apply any of it.
There's a lot of research showing that having a guide, even if it's just someone who gives a shit about whether or not you succeed, changes outcomes for people who are trying to learn. And that person doesn't have to be in the room.
Synchronous, asynchronous, doesn't matter. They just have to be a real person who cares.
So if your buyers keep telling you, whether it's in words or in silence, that they can't get to your course, look at what would actually help them. And if the answer is some time and a person, that might be your offer.
Put up an expectation wall
Before buyers get access, have them write down what they're expecting.
Because when expectations don't match the experience, people stall.
That gap is a barrier, and we want to remove as many barriers to success as we can. My whole dissertation and the research after it was on this.
Not that you want to read a 350-page dissertation, but it's there, should you find yourself curious.
Sometimes people get over that barrier because there's another person around. And sometimes they get over it on their own, once they know what's actually going to be in the course.
When you can line your expectations up with the experience before the experience, and correct the ones that are completely off-base, more people make it through. Part of that is the tie between emotions and learning.
For Brenda's folks, they expected AI to be the quick fix. It's actually the opposite, because the more you put in up front, setting up the systems and learning how it works, the better it gets. So if she captures that expectation at the door, she can meet it head-on in week one instead of losing people as they move through.
So if you know your buyers walk in with a specific wrong expectation, name it before they start, on the sales page or in the onboarding, and then show them how the course meets or expands what they wrote down. As soon as you possibly can.
Make your mini-lessons about them
Brenda's plan for the weekly sessions was a short teaching segment on one of the 10 operational areas of a business. She listed a few off in the episode: leads, onboarding, payments, offboarding. They're high-level topics, and high-level works whether a lawyer or a therapist shows up. High-level is fine.
What I pushed back on was what to use that time for. A mini-lesson where you deliver information is you talking at them. A mini-lesson where members assess their own business, what's working and what isn't in that particular area, is them actually doing the work.
And that's where learning happens.
So instead of teaching how to identify what might be going on in your business, you actually ask the question. Where is this happening in yours? Where does it need to be? Where's the gap? And then that co-working time goes into helping them apply the course materials.
It solves two problems. It keeps a 10-minute lesson actually 10 minutes, because reflection prompts don't sprawl the way content does. And it makes the same session land for completely different businesses. The lawyer and the therapist have totally different lead processes, but both can answer where do my leads come from, and what happens after? Everyone's working on their own version of that thing.
So if you run live sessions of any kind, look at your teaching segments and ask what the learner is doing during them. If the answer is just listening, you're going to want to rethink that.
I do have a workshop coming up on exactly this: Teach Them; Don't Just Talk to Them.
How to Apply This to YOUR Course So Clients Get Results
Step one, ask your buyers what they expected.
If you've got a course out in the world, message the people who bought it and ask two questions. What did you expect this to do for you, to be, to feel like? And what got in the way?
Their answers are going to tell you whether you've got a content problem or an offer problem. And when you make a change based on what they say, tell them. Let them come back in and get started again, knowing you listened. That's a really good way to get repeat buyers and people who refer and recommend you.
Step two, take the next thing you're planning to teach live and rewrite it as an assessment.
Take the concepts and turn them into questions. What's the question that gets your people looking at their own situation instead of just taking notes on yours?
If you're sitting on a course that people bought and aren't finishing, and you're not sure whether it's a content problem or an offer problem, grab a strategy session and I'll get you going on your next right step.