What you will learn from reading $100M Offers:
– How most businesses are stuck in the commoditisation trap and how to escape!
– How to charge more money for your offering whilst selling more.
– How to create a compelling offer that is so good people would feel stupid saying no.
$100m Offers Book Summary:
$100M offers is a fantastic book on creating the most compelling offer for your business. It not only helps with creating an offer that will help your sales but it will also provide you with a framework for how to think about increasing the value that your business already provides. A must read for entrepreneurs, digital marketers and anyone looking to understand how to create compelling offers that sell.
Book Contents:
General Outline Section I: How We Got Here
Section II: Pricing: How To Charge Lots of Money For Stuff
Section III: Value: Create Your Offer: How To Make Something So Good People Line Up To Buy
Section IV: Enhancing Your Offer: How To Make Your Offer So Good They Feel Stupid Saying No
Section V: Next Steps: How To Make This Happen In The Real World
Where exchange begins:
“Make people an offer so good they would feel stupid saying no.”Travis Jones
Much to the disappointment of the idealists on the sidelines, succeeding in business means getting prospective customers to trade us money for our services. Our passion for their hard-earned coins. That’s the agreement. The only way to facilitate that exchange, to transact, to literally carry out business as a business is by making the prospect an offer.
The only way to conduct business is through a value exchange, a trade of dollars for value. The offer is what initiates this trade.
It’s necessary to first address the offer as this is the starting point of any conversation to initiate a transaction with a customer. What you are literally providing them in exchange for their money. That’s where it all begins.
This book is about how to make profitable offers. Specifically, how to reliably turn advertising dollars into (enormous) profits using a combination of pricing, value, guarantees, and naming strategies.
The classic Business Problems:
Although you can make the list of problems you face a mile long, which is a great way to stress yourself out, all these problems typically stem from two big kahunas:
Not enough clients
Not enough cash (excess profit at the end of the month)
So, then, what does it take to grow?
Thankfully, just three simple things:
- Get more customers
- Increase their average purchase value
- Get them to buy more times
It’s not your fault. Typical models weren’t designed for profit maximisation. They were designed by companies who have boatloads of funding and can operate at a loss for years. When these models are used in the real world, business owners just barely “get by.” They essentially “buy themselves a job” and work 100 hours a week to avoid working .
Section II: Pricing: How To Charge Lots of Money For Stuff
The truth is that 99 percent of businesses need to raise their prices to grow, not lower them. Profit is oxygen. It fuels the fire of growth. You need it if you want to reach more people and make a bigger impact.
Pricing: The Commodity Problem
Commoditised = Price Driven Purchases (race to the bottom)
Differentiated = Value Driven Purchases (sell in a category of one with no comparison.)
You aim is to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE.
People are prone to purchase based on “price” instead of “value.” If all products are “equal,” then the cheapest one is the most valuable by default. In other words, if a prospect compares your product to another and thinks “these are pretty much the same, I’ll buy the cheaper one,” then they commoditised you. How embarrassing! But really . . . it’s one of the worst experiences a value-driven entrepreneur can have.
This is where you offer comes in. You need to create an offer to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, an unmatchable value proposition, a premium price, and an unbeatable guarantee with a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers . . . forever removing the cash constraint on business growth.
If done correctly, it allows you to sell in a “category of one,” or, to apply another great phrase, to “sell in a vacuum.” The resulting purchasing decision for the prospect is now between your product and nothing.
Why you need a gram slam offer:
Here’s the key takeaway from all this: a business does the same work in both cases (with a commoditised or a Grand Slam Offer). The fulfilment is the same. But if one business uses a Grand Slam Offer and another uses a “commodity” offer, the Grand Slam Offer makes that business appear as if it has a totally different product — and that means a value-driven, versus price-driven, purchase.
If you pay the same amount for eyeballs but 1) more people respond, 2) more of those responses buy, and 3) they buy for higher prices, your business grows.
If you have a “commodity” offer, you will compete on price (having a price-driven purchase versus a value-driven purchase). Your Grand Slam Offer, however, forces a prospect to stop and think differently to assess the value of your differentiated product. Doing this establishes you as your own category, which means it’s too difficult to compare prices, which means you re-calibrate the prospect’s value-meter.
Commoditised businesses and offers have a harder time getting responses from ads because all their marketing looks the same as everyone else’s. Note: It all looks the same because they are all making the same offer. You pay us to work. We do work. Maybe you get results from that work. Maybe you don’t. It’s reasonable, but it’s easily duplicated (and subject to commoditisation). This commoditisation creates a price-driven purchase . . .
We want to make an offer that’s so different that you can skip the awkward explanation of why your product is different from everyone elses (which, if they have to ask, then they are probably too ignorant to understand the explanation) and instead just have the offer do that work for you. That’s the Grand Slam Offer way.
BREAKDOWN: You spend the same amount of money for the same eyeballs. Then, you get 2.5x more people to respond to your advertisement because it’s a more compelling offer.
Picking the right market:
So how do you pick the right market? What To Look For There is a market in desperate need of your abilities. You need to find it. And when you do, you will capitalise, all while wondering what took you so long.
In order to sell anything, you need demand. We are not trying to create demand. We are trying to channel it. That is a very important distinction. If you don’t have a market for your offer, nothing that follows will work.
The main market needs:
Most markets have a common unmet needs that fall into one of three categories: improved health, increased wealth, or improved relationships.
There are three main markets that will always exist: Health, Wealth, and Relationships. The reason that those will always exist is that there is always tremendous pain when you lack them.
When picking markets, Alex looks for four indicators:
1) Massive Pain
They must not want, but desperately need, what I am offering. Pain can be anything that frustrates people about their lives. Being broke is painful.
The degree of the pain will be proportional to the price you will be able to charge.
I have a saying I use to train sales teams “The pain is the pitch.” If you can articulate the pain a prospect is feeling accurately, they will almost always buy what you are offering. A prospect must have a painful problem for us to solve and charge money for our solution.
2) Purchasing Power
Your audience needs to be able to afford the service you’re charging them for. Make sure your targets have the money, or access to the amount of money, needed to buy your services at the prices you require to make it worth your time.
3) Easy to Target
Let’s say you have a perfect market, but no way of finding the people who comprise it. Well, making a Grand Slam Offer will be difficult. I make my life easier by looking for easy-to-target markets.
4) Growing
Growing markets are like a tailwind. They make everything move forward faster. Declining markers are like headwinds.
Application:
So if I were a relationship expert trying to find my avatar, I’d rather focus on “second half of life relationship” coaching for old timers than helping college students in relationships. Why? Because senior citizens who are alone are likely suffering more pain as they are nearer their deaths (pain), have more buying power (money), and are easy to find (targeting). There are also more people turning 60 then 20 showcasing the growth of the market.
The Niche Slap:
Commit to the Niche. Alex has a saying when coaching entrepreneurs on picking their target market “Don’t make me niche slap you.”
Why honing in on one niche will make you more money. Reason: you can literally charge 100x more for the exact same product.
This concept applies to anything you decide to do. You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear.”
The power of premium pricing:
Let’s get back to pricing. The first step to making crazy money is charging premium prices.
As Dan Kennedy said, “There is no strategic benefit to being the second cheapest in the marketplace, but there is for being the most expensive.” So the goal of our Grand Slam Offer will be to get more people to say yes at a higher price by increasing our value to price discrepancy.
Remember, People want to buy expensive things. They just need a reason. And the goal isn’t just to be slightly above the market price — the goal is to be so much higher that a consumer thinks to themselves, “This is so much more expensive, there must be something entirely different going on here.” That is how you create a category of one.
Price to Value Discrepancy
“I hope what you’re giving them is worth it.” Those words would probably sting for most, but when my dad said them to me, I just knew he didn’t understand the value we were providing.
In order to understand how to make a compelling offer, you must understand value. The reason people buy anything is to get a deal. They believe what they are getting (VALUE) is worth more than what they are giving in exchange for it (PRICE).
How most people price their offering:
Most business owners are not competing on price or value. In fact, they’re not actually competing on anything at all. Their pricing process typically goes something like this:
Look at marketplace
See what everyone else offers
Take the average
Go slightly below to remain “competitive”
Provide what their competitors offers with a “little more”
End up at a value proposition of “more for less”
And the big secret: those competitors they are copying are dead broke.
Takeaways:
Charge a premium. It will allow you to do things no one else can to make your clients successful.
Section III: Value – Create Your Offer How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No
The Value Equation.
There is a repeatable formula that Alex has created to help quantify the variables that create value for any offer. He calls it The Value Equation. Once you see it, you can never unsee it.
There are four primary drivers of value. Two drivers, you will seek to increase. The other two, you will seek to decrease.
Increase:
The Dream Outcome (Goal: Increase)
Perceived Likelihood of Achievement (Goal: Increase)
Decrease:
Perceived Time Delay Between Start and Achievement (Goal: Decrease)
Perceived Effort & Sacrifice (Goal: Decrease)
It’s all about perception – The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.
Our goal as marketers and business owners is to increase the value of the dream outcome and its perceived likelihood of achievement, while decreasing the time delay of achievement and the effort and sacrifice one has to put in to get there.
The Dream Outcome (Increase):
The dream outcome is the expression of the feelings and experiences the prospect has envisioned in their mind. It’s the gap between their current reality and their dreams. Our goal is to accurately depict that dream back to them, so they feel understood, and explain how our vehicle will get them there.
People generally, and our clients specifically, want: . . .
To be perceived as beautiful . . .
To be respected . . .
To be perceived as powerful . . .
To be loved . . .
To increase their status
But multiple vehicles may accomplish the same thing. Take the desire “to be perceived as beautiful” for example, here are a lot of things that touch on this desire:
Make Up
Anti-aging creams/serums
Supplements
Shapewear
Plastic Surgery
Fitness
The dream outcome value driver is most prominently used when comparing the relative value between two different desires being satisfied. In general, the dream outcome that most directly increases a prospect’s status will be the one they value most.
How to market Status Increase:
So it’s not about the money, it’s about the status (the perceived increase or decrease in relative standing when compared to others socially or professionally). Talk in terms of things your prospect believes will increase their status, and you will have your prospects drooling.
Pro Tip: Frame benefits in terms of status gained from the viewpoint of others When writing copy, you can make it that much more powerful by talking about how other people will perceive the prospect’s achievement. Connect the dots for them.
Example: If you buy this golf club, your drive will increase by 40 yards. Your golf buddies’ jaws will drop when they see your ball soar 40 yards past theirs . . . they’ll ask you what’s changed . . . only you will know.
Perceived Likelihood of Achievement (Increase):
People pay for certainty. They value certainty. Alex calls this “the perceived likelihood of achievement.” In other words, “How likely do I believe it is that I will achieve the result I am looking for if I make this purchase?”
People value this perceived likelihood of achievement. Increasing a prospect’s conviction that your offer will “actually” work for them, will make your offer that much more valuable even though the work remains the same on your end.
So to increase value with all offers, we must communicate perceived likelihood of achievement through our messaging, proof, what we choose to include or exclude in our offer, and our guarantees.
Time Delay (Decrease):
Time delay is the time between a client buying and receiving the promised benefit. The shorter the distance between when they purchase and they receive value/the outcome, the more valuable your services or product is.
The thing people buy is the long-term value, aka their “dream outcome.” But the thing that makes them stay long enough to get it is the short-term experience. These are little milestones a prospect sees along the way that shows them they are on the right path.
We want clients to have a big emotional win early (as close as possible to their purchase). This gives them the emotional buy in and the momentum to “see it through” to their ultimate goal.
Pro Tip: Fast Wins Always try and incorporate short-term, immediate wins for a client. Be creative. They just need to know they are on the right path and that they made the right decision trusting you and your business.
The faster and more clearly you can demonstrate those benefits, the more valuable your service will be.
Effort & Sacrifice (Decrease):
This is what it “costs” people in ancillary costs, aka “other costs accrued along the way.” These can be both tangible and intangible.
So even though the outcome is the same, the value of the vehicles are dramatically different, hence the difference in price. Decreasing the effort and sacrifice, or at least the perceived effort and sacrifice, can massively boost the appeal of your offer.
This is why “done for you services” are almost always more expensive than “do-it-yourself” because the person doesn’t have all the effort and sacrifice.
Problem Solving:
Life will pay you for your ability to solve using a divergent thought process. In other words, think of many solutions to a single problem.
So if I were selling a brick, I would find out what my customer’s desire was, and then devise how many ways I could create value with my “brick.”
Value Offer: Creating Your Grand Slam Offer Part I: Problems & Solutions
Step #1: Identify Dream Outcome
No one wants a membership; they want to lose weight. When you are thinking about your dream outcome, it has to be them arriving at their destination and what they would like to experience.
Step #2: List Problems
Next, write down all the things people struggled with and their limiting thoughts around them. When listing out problems, think about what happens immediately before and immediately after someone uses your product/service. What’s the “next” thing they need help with? These are all the problems. Think about it in insane detail. If you do, you will create a more valuable and compelling offer as you’ll continually be answering people’s next problem as it manifests..
What points of friction exist for them? Think in the sequence that the customer will experience each of these obstacles.
Each of the above problems has four negative elements. And you guessed it, each aligns with the four value drivers as well.
So, to recap, just list out each core thing that someone has to do. Then think of all the reasons they wouldn’t be able to do it, or keep doing it (using the four value drivers as a guide). Now we get to the fun part: turning problems into solutions.
Step #3: Solutions List
Now that we have our dream outcome and all the obstacles that will get in someone’s way, it’s time to define our solutions and list them out.
Creating the solutions list has two steps. First, we are going to first transform our problems into solutions. Second, we are going to name these solutions.
What we’re going to do is simply turn them into solutions by thinking, “What would I need to show someone to solve this problem?”
Then reverse each element of the obstacle into solution-oriented language. This is copywriting 101. By simply adding “how to” then reversing the problem will give most people new to this process a great place to start. For our purposes, we are giving ourselves a checklist of exactly what we are going to have to do for our prospects and what we are going to solve for them.
Examples of PROBLEM→ SOLUTION PROBLEM:
Buying healthy food, grocery shopping . . . is hard, confusing, I won’t like it. I will suck at it→ How to make buying healthy food easy and enjoyable, so that anyone can do it (especially busy moms!) . . .
takes too much time→ How to buy healthy food quickly . . .
is expensive→ How to buy healthy food for less than your current grocery bill . . .
is unsustainable→ How to make buying healthy food take less effort than buying unhealthy food . . .
is not my priority. My family’s needs will get in my way→ How to buy healthy food for you and your family at the same time . . .
is undoable if I travel; I won’t know what to get→ How to get healthy food when traveling
Value Offer: Creating Your Grand Slam Offer Part II: Trim & Stack
Step #4 Create Your Solutions Delivery Vehicles (“The How”)
The next step is thinking about all the things you could do to solve each of these problems you’ve identified. This is the most important step in this process. This is what you are going to deliver.
For the purposes of keeping creativity high (divergent thinking), think about anything you could possibly do. Think of all the things that might enhance the value of your offer.
Even if you come up with something you’re not actually willing to do, it’s okay. The goal here is to push your limits and jog your brain into thinking of a different version of the solution you’d normally default to.
If I wanted to provide a one-on-one solution I might offer .
If I wanted to provide a small group solution I might offer
If I wanted to provide a one to many solution I might offer .
What level of personal attention do I want to provide?
What level of effort is expected from them?
If doing something live, what environment or medium do I want to deliver it in?
If doing a recording, how do I want them to consume it?
How quickly do we want to reply? On what days? during what hours?
As you see, the list can really go on and on here. This is just to illustrate the many ways to solve a single problem. Now do this for all of the perceived problems that your clients encounter before, after, and during their experience with your service/products. You should have a monster list by the end of this.
Solve All Problems:
It’s important that you solve every problem. One single item becomes the reason someone doesn’t buy.
Don’t get romantic about how you want to solve the problem. Find a way to solve every problem a prospect presents with. When you do that, you make an offer that’s so good, people just can’t say no. And that’s what we’re building here.
Step #5: Trim & Stack
Now that we have enumerated our potential solutions, we will have a gigantic list. Next, I look at the cost of providing these solutions to me (the business). I remove the ones that are high cost and low value first. Then I remove low cost, low value items.
If you aren’t sure what’s high value, go through the value equation and ask yourself which of these things will this person:
Financially value
Cause them to believe they will be likely to succeed
Make them feel like they can do it with much less effort and sacrifice
Help them accomplish their goal and see the result they want with far less time investment.
One to many solutions:
These types of solutions require a high, one-time cost of creation, but infinitely low additional effort after. (Fyi – This is exactly why software becomes so valuable).
Many of the “one to many” solutions require more up front work. Once created, however, they become valuable assets that create value in perpetuity. It’s worth putting in the time to create these because they will create high margin profit for years to come.
Naming:
I’m going to display each problem-solution set as: Problem → Solution Wording→ Sexier Name for Bundle . Then, underneath, you will see the actual delivery vehicle
Buying food→ How anyone can buy food fast, easy, cheaply → Foolproof Bargain Grocery System . . . that’ll save hundreds of dollars per month on your food and take less time than your current shopping routine
Your bundle needs to do three core things:
Solves all the perceived problems (not just some)
Gives you the conviction that what you’re selling is one of a kind (very important)
Makes it impossible to compare or confuse your business or offering with the one down the street
Section IV: Enhancing Your Offer Scarcity, Urgency, Bonuses, Guarantees, and Naming
How to use the enhancements:
Use scarcity to decrease supply to raise prices (and indirectly increase demand through perceived exclusiveness)
Use urgency to increase demand by decreasing the action threshold of a prospect.
Use bonuses to increase demand (and increase perceived exclusivity).
Use guarantees to increase demand by reversing risk.
Use names to re-stimulate demand and expand awareness of my offer to my target audience.
Increase demand by limiting supply:
What people want: People want what they can’t have. People want what other people want. People want things only a select few have access to.
If we seek to increase the demand (or desire), we must decrease or delay satisfying the desires of our prospects. We must sell fewer units than we otherwise can.
The “perfect profit combination” is lots of demand, and very little supply, or perceived supply. The process of enhancing your core offer is designed to do both of these things: increase demand and decrease perceived supply so that you can sell the same products for more money than you otherwise could, and in higher volumes than you otherwise would (over a longer time horizon).
How buyers think of their ‘rare problem’:
Start with the buyer. If they have a rare problem, and they must solve this problem for their own pursuit of happiness, it will consume all of their attention. By the nature of their problem being specialised, there will be very few people who can solve it. This means there is not a large supply of solvers. In many cases, they will perceive only one possible “solver”
Enhancing The Offer: Scarcity
Three Types of Scarcity:
Limited Supply of Seats/Slots: in general or over X period of time.
Limited Supply of Bonuses
Never available again.
Physical Products
Having limited releases is a tried and true method of using this psychological bias to your advantage. You can have limited releases for flavours, colours, designs, sizes, etc. “This month, we are releasing 100 boxes of mint chocolate cookie flavoured protein bars.”
Important point: to properly utilise this method you should always sell out.
When using this tactic, you must also let everyone know that you sold out. That is part of what makes it work so well. This way, even people who were on the fence, when they see that it was sold out, it gives social proof that other people thought it was worth it.
Employ one or multiple methods of scarcity in your business. You will drive a faster purchasing decision from your prospects, and at higher prices. Just let them know your limits and let psychology do the rest.
Pro Tips:
Provide Limited Access For Higher Ticket Services: These scarcity tactics work especially well for higher ticket upsells. If you want to create one off workshops, trainings, events, seminars, consulting, etc. These are things that by their nature take time and provide more access. Paring them with clear scarcity or fixed amounts, seats, or spots will rapidly drive up the demand. But always remember have less spots available than you think you can sell . . . so that when you want to do it again in the future, everyone will remember you sold out . . . fast. This is a compounding strategy that increases in effectiveness over time.
Once You’re Out, You Can Never Come Back – You can create scarcity by also capping your service level and saying that if they leave than can never return. This type of scarcity makes people think extra hard about leaving.
Enhancing The Offer: Urgency
How to think about the difference between scarcity and urgency: Scarcity is a function of quantity. Urgency is a function of time.
Alex’s four favourite ways of using urgency on a consistent basis, ethically:
1) Rolling Cohorts,
2) Rolling Seasonal Urgency,
3) Promotional or Pricing Urgency
4) Exploding Opportunity.
1) Cohort-Based Rolling Urgency
For example, if you start clients every week (even in unlimited amounts), you can say: “If you sign up today, I can get you in with our next group that kicks off on Monday, otherwise you’ll have to wait until our next kickoff date.”
If you wanted to juice it up a little bit, you could say: “I actually had a client who signed up a few weeks ago drop out, so I have an opening for our next cohort that kicks off on Monday.
The two tweaks above have pushed so many sales over the edge for Alex, by just reminding a potential customer that if they sign up, they will be starting on Monday, and if they do not, they will have to wait a week. It’s small things like this that nudge people to take the action they know they should take anyways.
2) Rolling Seasonal Urgency
In a digital setting, having actual sign up date countdowns is very useful. But make sure they are real.
The actual promotion may be the same, but naming it something different “by season” gives you a “real” differentiator that gives you a start and a finish. Deadlines drive decisions.
3) Pricing or Bonus-Based Urgency
This is another way of creating urgency using your actual offer or promotion/pricing structure as the thing they could miss out on (kind of brilliant!).
Pro Tip – Clean Your Pipeline With Every Price Change: If you ever really are planning on raising your prices (hopefully soon if you are reading this book!) then you can always clean out your pipeline by letting people know “The price is going up! So get in now!” Never raise your prices without letting people know. It shows a position of strength and will give you a nice little influx of cash from the people in the pipeline who were on the fence.
4) Exploding Opportunity
On occasion you will be exposing the prospect to an arbitrage opportunity.
Highly competitive job environments often get job offers that are “exploding offers” everyday they wait to take the job, their pay or bonuses decrease. This forces prospects to make fast decisions rather than try and “wait it out” to see if they get a better offer.
Enhancing The Offer: Bonuses
The main point to take away from this is that a single offer is less valuable than the same offer broken into its component parts and stacked as bonuses.
This section is about how to present the pieces of what you offer in a good order. For example, you may in fact do lots of things with you service, but until you talk about them, they are unknown. This is why every infomercial of all time continues on with “but wait….there’s more!”
The reason this works is we are increasing the prospect’s price-to-value discrepancy by increasing the value delivered instead of cutting the price. We anchor the price we tell them to the core offer. Then with each increasingly valuable bonus, that discrepancy grows wider and wider until it’s too big to bear and we snap the rubber band in their mind that is holding their wallet in their pocket.
Pro Tip: Add Bonuses Instead of Discounting Whenever Possible on Core Offers: Whenever trying to close a deal, never discount the main offer. It teaches your customers that your prices are negotiable (which is terrible). Adding bonuses to increase value to close the deal is far superior to cutting prices. It puts you in a position of strength and goodwill rather than weakness.
When selling one on one, you ask for the sale first, before offering the bonuses. If they say yes, then after they have signed up, you let them know the additional bonuses they’re going to get. This creates a wow experience and reinforces their decision to buy.
On the other hand, if the person does not buy after the first ask, then you present a bonus that matches their perceived obstacle, then ask again. Don’t feel weird about asking again. You simply agree with the prospect, add the bonus, and ask if this consolation was “Fair enough.”
Bonus Bullets – a few key things to remember when offering bonuses:
1. Always offer them.
2. Give them a special name that has a benefit in the title.
3. Tell them: a) How it relates to their issue b) What it is c) How you discovered it, or what you had to do to create it d) How it will specifically improve their lives or make their experience.
4. Provide some proof (this can be a stat, a past client, or personal experience) to prove that this thing is valuable.
5. Always ascribe a price tag to them and justify it.
6. Tools & checklists are better than additional trainings (as the effort & time are lower with the former, so the value is higher.
7. They should each address a specific concern/obstacle in the prospects mind about why they can’t or won’t be successful (bonus should prove their belief incorrect).
8. The value of the bonuses should eclipse the value of the core offer. Psychologically as you continue to add offers, it continues to expand the price to value discrepancy. It also, subconsciously communicates that the core offer must be valuable because if these are the bonuses, the main thing has to be more valuable than the bonuses right?
9. You can further enhance the value of your bonuses by adding scarcity and urgency to the bonus themselves.
Add urgency and scarcity to your bonuses:
Bonuses With Scarcity:
Example: Only people who sign up for XZY program will have access to my Bonus #1, 2, 3 that are never for sale or available anywhere else other than through this program.
Bonuses With Urgency
Example: If you buy today, I will add in XYZ bonus that normally costs $1,000, for free. And I’ll do that because I want to reward action takers.
Advanced Level Bonuses – Other People’s Products and Services
You can get other businesses to give you their services and products as a part of your bonuses in exchange for exposure to your clients for free. This is free marketing for them, and high value products for you at no cost. Businesses will do this because you are going to give their business exposure for free to the highest quality prospects, your customers.
As if that weren’t already awesome enough, if you really want to be a jedi, negotiate a group discount and a commission to yourself. This is exactly what Alix did with his supplement company.
If you are following along, each of these bonuses can become revenue streams for you indirectly by getting clients to say YES more easily, and directly because you can negotiate that each of these businesses can pay you for the people you send their way.
That’s the beauty of these relationships. The other businesses will pay you and you don’t have to do anything but refer customers to them that you have already spent the money to acquire.
Summary of Bonuses:
You want to employ bonuses because they expand the price to value discrepancy and get people to purchase who otherwise wouldn’t.
So here’s what to do: Create checklists, tools, swipe files, scripts, templates, and anything else that would take lots of time and effort to create on one’s own, but is easy to use once created. Anything that you can invest in one time that clearly cost time or money to create, but can be given away endless time is a perfect fit for a bonus.
Beyond that, make a habit to record every workshop, every webinar, every event, every interview and use them as additional bonuses (as needed to crush a perceived obstacle).
Proactively negotiate group discounts and a referral commission with adjacent businesses that solve needs your customer will have as a result of beginning this process with you. What’s the next natural thing they might want? Go to those businesses, get a deal for them they could never get for themselves (because you are negotiating with the purchasing power of all your customers at once, very powerful).
Enhancing The Offer: Guarantees
From an overarching perspective there are four types of guarantees: Unconditional Conditional Anti-Guarantee Implied Guarantees.
Warning: While guarantees can be effective sellers, people who buy because of guarantees can become very shitty customers. A person who only buys because of a guarantee is a person who may not be willing to put in the work necessary to see success with your product or service.
Pro Tip: High Cost Services Warning – If you have a tremendous amount of cost associated with your product or service, you will likely want to employ a conditional guarantee or an ANTI guarantee, as you will have to eat the cost of the refund AND the cost of fulfilling.
4 Types of Guarantees:
1) Unconditional Guarantees
Unconditional are the strongest guarantees. They’re basically a trial where they pay first then see if they like it.
2) Conditional Guarantees
Conditional guarantees include “terms and conditions” to the guarantee. These are the ones you can get VERY creative on. In general, you want these to be “better than money back” guarantees. Because if they are going to make an investment, you want to match their investment psychologically with an equal or higher perceived commitment.
What makes a guarantee have power is a conditional statement: If you do not get X result in Y time period, we will Z. To give a guarantee teeth you have to decide what you’ll do if they don’t get the result. Without the “or what” portion of the guarantee, it sounds weak and diluted.
3) Anti-Guarantees
Anti-guarantees are when you explicitly state “all sales are final.” You will want to own this position. You must come up with a creative “reason why” the sales are final. Typically, you’ll want to show a massive exposure or vulnerability on your part that a consumer could immediately understand and think “Yes, that makes sense.”
4) Implied Guarantees
Implied guarantees are any offer that is a performance-based offer. This comes in many different forms. Revshare, profitshare, triggers, ratchets, monetary bonuses, etc are all examples. The end all concept is the same, if I don’t perform, I don’t get paid.
Pro Tips:
Name Your Guarantee Something Cool – If you are going to give a guarantee, spice it up. Instead of using “satisfaction” or some other “vanilla” word, describe it more strongly.
Unconditional vs Conditional Based on Business Type – Bigger broader guarantees work better with lower ticket B2C businesses (many people just won’t bother taking the time). The higher the ticket, and the more business oriented it is, the more you want to steer towards specific guarantees. That may or may not include refunds, and may or may not have conditions.
Create Your Own Winning Guarantee
Reversing risk is the number one way to increase the conversion of an offer. Experienced marketers spend as much time crafting their guarantees as the deliverables themselves. It’s that important.
But you can come up with your own! The key is to identify a client’s biggest fears, pain, and perceived obstacles. “What do they not want to have happen if they pay you? What are they most afraid of?” Reverse their fears into a guarantee.
Enhancing The Offer: Naming
Naming an offer correctly determines how well your advertising converts, how big of a response you get from outbound emails/cold calls/texts, and how many inbound responses you get from organic comments.
Here’s an example. Say you see a “Free Six-Week Stress Release Challenge” and a “Float Tank Center Session.” While they may be the same thing, just named differently, you’re much more likely to respond to the first.
Over time you can rename the offer to refresh it. This one concept will get you leads forever. You are not changing the actual offer. You are only changing the wrapping paper.
If you’ve put together a bundled offering, you’re still ultimately going to be doing the same things. The work you do, services you provide, and products you offer will remain unchanged as the name shifts. Again, you’re simply changing the wrapper.
MAGIC Naming
Magnetic (attention)
Avatar (discrimination)
Goal (purpose)
Interval (timeline)
Container (method)
Make a Magnetic “Reason Why”
We start the name with a word or phrase that tells people the “reason why” we are running our promotion.
Examples: Free, 88% off, Giveaway; 88% off, Spring, Summer, Back To School; Grand Opening; New Management; New Building; Anniversary; Halloween; New Year.
Announce Your Avatar
This component calls out your ideal avatar: who you are looking for and who you are not looking for as a client. You want to be as specific as possible, but no more. When in a local area, the more local you can make your headline, the more it will convert.
Examples: Bee Cave Dentists, Rolling Hills Moms, Brick & Mortar Businesses, Salon Owners, Retired Athletes, Brooklyn Busy Executives
Give Them A Goal
This is where you articulate your prospect’s dream outcome. It can be a single word or a phrase. It can be an event, a feeling, an experience, or an outcome, anything that would excite them. The more specific and tangible, the better.
Examples: Pain Free, Celebrity Smile, 1st Place, Never Out Of Breath, Perfect Product, Grand Slam Offer, Little Black Dress, Double Your Profit, First Client, High Ticket, 7 Figure, 100k, Etc.
Indicate a Time Interval
You’re just letting people know the duration to expect here. This gives an example of how long your results will take to achieve.
Examples: AA Minutes, BB Hours, CC Days, DD Weeks, Z Months. “4 Hour” “21 Day” “6 Week” “3 Month”
Complete With A Container Word
The container word denotes that this offer is a bundle of lots of things put together. It’s a system. It’s something that can’t be held up to a commoditised alternative.
Examples: Challenge, Blueprint, Bootcamp, Intensive, Incubator, Masterclass, Program, Detox, Experience, Summit, Accelerator, Fast Track, Shortcut, Sprint, Launch, Slingshot, Catapult, Explosion, System, Getaway, Meetup, Transformation, Mastermind, Launch, Game Plan, Deep Dive, Workshop, Comeback, Rebirth, Attack, Assault, Reset, Solution, Hack, Cheatcode, Liftoff, Etc.
Pro Tips:
Find Time To Rhyme – Good rhymes stick in people’s minds. Rhyme your program name to win the game. Google “rhyming dictionary” for an easy shortcut. Note – Don’t try and force it. It’s not a requirement, it’s just a “nice-to-have”.
Name Sub Items & Bonuses – Use the magic headline formula for each item in your stack and bundle. It will automatically enhance the value of your offerings simply by naming in a way that resonates with your prospects.
Changing your offer over time:
As you market offers, you will need to create variations over time as the tastes of the market change over time. Here’s the order in which you will change things to keep lead flow consistent.
Change the creative (the images and pictures in your ads)
Change the body copy in your ads
Change the headline – the “wrapper” of your offer
Change the duration of your offer
Change the enhancer of your offer (your free/discount component)
Change the monetisation structure, the series of offers you give prospects,
Getting off your feet:
How do you get initial traction? Good question. Try the offer structure and headline that you think has the highest likelihood of working. Then stick with it.