Why Some Courses Sell (But Most Don’t)

Read time: < 5 mins

Most courses struggle at the selling stage

Not because the idea is weak, but because the basics are missing.

In this post, I walk you through five steps to fix that.

1. Validate the market
2. Define a clear audience
3. Market the outcome in their words
4. Pick the right platform for delivery
5. Price the outcome with confidence

This post is a bit longer because it’s vitally important to selling courses.
Take your time, work through each step. When you put them in place, you’ll give your course a real path to sales.

1. No market validation

Too often, I see coaches building courses they think people want, without testing the market.

You need to know there’s real demand before you invest time and money.

It starts with simple validation

Talk to your audience, run surveys, create a waitlist, or test with a lead magnet. Make sure people actually need what you’re selling before creating anything.

Obvious? Maybe. But so often ignored.

2. Unclear audience

You’re not selling a course, you’re selling an outcome – a solution to a problem.

If you don’t know exactly who your course is for and what problem you’re solving, the content will be generic and fail to connect.

You have to go deep into your audience’s pain points and listen to the exact words they use.

Their language becomes the foundation of your course and your marketing.

How to find that language

You can find it in online groups, forums, or anywhere your audience spends time. Research your subject, join the groups, and listen. You’ll quickly see how people describe their problem.

Additionally, offer a handful of free discovery calls with people who fit your ideal customer profile. With their permission, record the calls using a tool like Fathom to capture the words they use to describe their struggles and desired outcomes.

Feed the transcript into AI and ask it: what are the pain points and keywords your ideal customer uses? This is pure gold that will set you head and shoulders above most of your competitors.

3. Weak marketing

Once you understand the problem and your target audience, you can use their language in your marketing.

Don’t sell modules, lessons, bonuses, or downloads – that’s just the how.

What matters is the outcome.

Highlight the pain you’re solving and the transformation they’ll get. That’s what makes people buy.

Here’s the thing

You have less than five seconds to capture your ideal customer’s attention.

Too often, I see landing pages that start by waffling on about course content, instead of leading with the outcome. The outcome is everything – it needs to be above the fold on your landing page, in your profile, and anywhere else people first see you.

They should read it and immediately think: “Yes, that’s me, and this is what I need.”

The other trap

Spending months building a course, then hiding it behind a weak call to action or a buried page.

It’s almost as if the creator is afraid to put it out there in case it fails. But if nobody sees it, nobody can buy it.

If you stand by your product and the value it delivers, you need to promote it clearly and confidently. Visibility matters as much as the content itself.

4. Wrong platform choice

Even if you sell the course, will people stay and finish it? A poor platform can kill engagement and hurt your brand.

If you’re starting out with a minimum viable product, you might not need a powerhouse platform like Kajabi yet.

My 30-Day Coaching Business Blueprint shows how to use four simple systems to get a coaching offer live quickly.

But if you’re delivering more complex training, with community, automation, and scalability, you’ll need a platform like Kajabi to give learners the best experience and keep them engaged.

5. Pricing mistakes

“How much should I charge for my course?” is one of the biggest questions I get asked.

Pricing isn’t about how many slides, modules, or bonuses you have. It’s about the value of the outcome.

Ask yourself

• How long has your audience spent trying to solve this problem already?
• How much money have they already spent trying to fix it?
• What will it cost them, in time, money, or missed opportunities, if they carry on as they are?

If you’re not sure, ask them. That’s where your pricing should be set.

If your course costs $5,000 but saves someone another $10,000 and 10 years of struggle, it’s worth it.

Price on outcomes, not inputs.

Examples of outcome-based pricing

The point is this: the same amount of content can be worth wildly different amounts depending on the outcome it delivers.

The Takeaway

These are the core reasons most courses don’t sell. If you can fix them upfront, you’ll have a solid foundation to launch with confidence and start generating sales.

From there, it’s about feedback and refinement – every iteration makes the course stronger.

When your course delivers real value, learners talk about it, and that creates the momentum loop: more trust, more referrals, more sales.

But you have to get the basics right from the start.

Otherwise, you risk pouring time and energy into a course nobody buys, and there’s nothing more soul-destroying than that.

At the end of the day, people don’t want courses.

They want solutions

Your job as a course creator, whether you’re a single coach or head of a training company, is to provide those solutions – outcomes delivered in the shortest time, at the best value.

Example from the cockpit: How to Make Better Landings

When I was learning to fly, I couldn’t land a plane for the life of me. I was burning through my budget and getting nowhere.

So I found a pilot known as “the greaser”. Every landing she made was gold standard.

Her line was, “How to Make Better Landings”. It talked to me directly as it was exactly what I needed.

What I didn’t need was another 40 hours of flight training. I just needed someone to solve a single problem.

I paid her £200 for one session, and she fixed it. Problem solved, and I could keep moving forward.

She could have charged me £1,000, and I’d have still paid it. That’s how valuable one simple outcome was to me.

And that’s the point…
Learners don’t want everything you know. They want the fastest route to a result that matters to them.

In Part 3: Build Smarter, Scale Faster 

I’ll show you how to structure, record, and launch without drowning in tech - so you can get your course live quickly and with confidence.