Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

If you've built a business around more than one product, there's a good chance you're promoting the wrong one more. Hear me out.

It's genuinely hard to tell the difference between the product that gets the most attention and the product that's actually making the money — especially when they're both good, and both selling. 

Maybe it's a free lead magnet next to a paid one, a beginner course next to an advanced one, or the offer you built first sitting next to the one that quietly became your best seller. If you've got more than one thing to sell, this is worth reading closely, because the gap we found here is one almost every multi-product business has somewhere.

That was the exact situation one of my coaching clients was in with two of his core products.

This client taught a creative skill through two flagship tools inside his niche. One was the tool he'd started with: it's what most of his content was built on, it's what drove nearly all of his traffic, and it's what most people found him through.

The other was the tool he actually recommended to most people once he understood their situation: a better fit for a specific, more specialized segment of his audience. It was outperforming his original tool and he just didn't realize by how much, until we pulled the numbers.

His secondary tool was outselling his flagship, primary tool two to five times over. Meaning: the product getting almost all the traffic wasn't the product doing most of the selling. 

The two didn't match and he hadn't noticed, because from where he was standing, the original tool looked like the flagship: it's what he led with, what people asked about, what showed up in every metric that counts views and clicks.

If you've ever felt like your "main" offer isn't pulling its weight the way it used to, or noticed a smaller, newer product quietly outperforming the one you spend the most time promoting, this might be the same gap. It's more common than most course creators realize, because attention is loud and easy to track, and revenue is not, unless you go looking for it.

Underneath the numbers, there were really two distinct groups of people showing up through the same funnel, and they didn't think about the problem the same way at all.

One group was earlier in their skill development — curious, still exploring, drawn in by content that felt approachable and low-pressure. They weren't looking to solve one specific, narrow problem yet. They wanted to get comfortable with the basics first, and they were open to being guided toward whatever made the most sense once they understood their options. This group responds well to broad, welcoming, "here's how to get started" content.

The other group already had a defined, specialized need, shaped by real professional or technical requirements. They weren't simply browsing; they were looking for something that solved a specific problem they already understood well, and they moved faster toward a purchase once they recognized that a tool was actually built for people like them. Generic, beginner-friendly messaging didn't land with this group, because it didn't speak to the specificity of what they already knew they needed. What worked for them was messaging that named their exact situation and confirmed, clearly, that this was the right fit.

Same top of funnel, two very different psychological starting points — one shaped by curiosity and exploration, the other by a need that was already defined and just waiting to be matched.

What we needed to figure out

The obvious response is to just push the better-converting product harder, but that's a guess dressed up as a fix, and I don't do things like that. Before changing anything, we needed to understand why the gap existed so a few questions had to get answered first:

• Were people coming in through his top-of-funnel content the wrong audience for his higher-converting product, or the right audience who just didn't know it yet?
• Was this an awareness problem (they need it but don't know it exists) or a positioning problem (they know about it but don't see why it's relevant to them)?
• How much of the gap was about the product itself, versus what someone saw first the moment they landed on his site?

That last question turned out to matter more than expected. 

His lead magnet page listed the original tool first, and the pop-up capturing new subscribers promoted it by default. Every new person entering his list was being funneled toward the product that converted worse, before they'd ever had a chance to hear about the one that converted better.

This is the part that matters for you if you're running more than one offer: the order things appear in, isn't neutral. Whatever sits first on your lead magnet page, your homepage, or your welcome sequence isn't just a design choice, it's a decision about which product gets the traffic, the trust, and the follow-up sequence. Most people never audit that decision: they build it once, it works well enough, and it never gets questioned again — sometimes for years.

This was really a buyer journey problem 

A buyer journey isn't just the path someone takes from stranger to customer, it's also a map of how much someone understands about their own problem at each step along the way. Someone who just discovered they need help doesn't need the same message as someone who's already tried three things and is now looking for the right tool. 

Send the wrong message to the wrong stage, and it doesn't just underperform, it can send someone toward the wrong outcome entirely, even if every individual piece of content is good.

In this case, everyone entering the funnel was getting treated as if they were at the same point in that journey, when they clearly weren't. Some people were still exploring, wide open to whichever tool got explained to them first. Others already had a specific, specialized need and just hadn't been shown the tool built for it yet. One funnel, one message, one order of operations, trying to serve both. 

The solution

We tried the next test: He swapped the order on his lead magnet page — the higher-converting product first, the original second — and updated the pop-up to match, then tracked what happened over several weeks.

The honest result: opt-in rate dropped, sharply and leading with the higher-converting product brought in fewer new subscribers overall, even though the people who did opt in were arguably a better fit for what he actually wanted to sell.

That's a useful result, even though it's not the one anyone hopes for. 

It told us something specific: his original product wasn't just a weaker seller, it was doing real work at the very top of the funnel, pulling in volume the other product couldn't replace.

The fix wasn't going to be "promote the better product more." It needed to be more like: let the original product keep doing its job of bringing people in, and build the education and awareness piece further down the funnel, so people who came in through it could still get introduced to the better-fit product before they saw an offer.

So the plan shifted from a single global change to a segmented one — keep the original product as the front door, since it was proven at bringing in volume, and start testing a dedicated path for those leads that could build the case for the second product before asking them to buy anything, rather than assuming one generic funnel could serve two audiences at two different awareness levels.

If you've got a lead magnet that brings people in reliably but doesn't lead anywhere near your best offer, this might be the fork in the road you're likely facing too: fix the top of the funnel, or build the bridge further down it. The data is what tells you which one.

Why this matters if you have more than one product

Most course creators don't have this exact setup, but almost everyone with more than one offer has some version of it: a lead magnet that's easy to promote but doesn't lead to your best-converting product, a homepage that defaults to your oldest offer instead of your strongest one, a funnel built once, years ago, that's never been questioned since.

Attention and traction are not the same metric. 

What gets clicked isn't always what gets bought, and the two can drift apart slowly enough that nobody notices until someone actually pulls the data side by side. If you've never compared what's getting the traffic against what's actually generating the revenue, side by side, there's a real chance you're looking at a version of this same gap right now.

The result

Coming back to my client, the segmented approach started showing up in actual numbers.

The bridge content we built specifically for people coming in through the original product started doing its job. 

One piece of copy spelled it out plainly: most people in his audience would use the better-fit product 90% of the time, but if they wanted more advanced capability, that's exactly what the original product was for. Instead of treating the two as interchangeable, the messaging now told people which one was actually right for them — and why.

Then came the proof. 

His best-converting webinar to date happened once he committed to leading fully with the better-fit product for a live launch to his whole list — it converted at 11%, the highest he'd seen. 

A few months later, he ran a webinar on his original, flagship product instead. Same offer structure, similar audience size. It converted at 1.6%, against a normal baseline closer to 5%. 

His own words after seeing the numbers side by side: the original topic just didn't resonate with his audience the way the better-fit one did anymore.

That's the confirmation the whole test was built to find. 

The gap between "what gets attention" and "what actually sells" wasn't a one-time fluke worth a single funnel tweak,  it was a real, repeatable signal about where his audience's actual interest had shifted. Once the funnel and the messaging caught up to that, the results followed.

What Happens Next?

Just like a doctor doesn’t prescribe treatment before identifying the root cause, I don’t recommend new funnels, ads, emails, or offers until we understand where your business is losing momentum.

Sometimes the bottleneck is traffic.

Sometimes it’s positioning.

Sometimes it’s an offer that isn’t compelling enough.

Sometimes it’s a sales funnel that leaks buyers at every stage.

And sometimes the biggest bottleneck isn’t marketing at all—it’s unclear priorities or building things in the wrong order.

If you’d like someone in your corner to help prioritize, challenge assumptions, review your work, and keep momentum going, coaching is the next step.

Together we’ll:

• prioritize what actually moves revenue
• refine your positioning and offers
• build or optimize your funnels
• review copy and messaging
• analyze performance data
• identify new bottlenecks as your business grows

Instead of wondering what to work on next, you’ll always know the highest-leverage move, because every business eventually reaches another bottleneck.

So, the goal isn’t finding one perfect strategy, but continuously removing the biggest constraint to growth.

If that sounds good to you, start by filling in this form.