“Make people an offer so good they would feel stupid saying no.”
A Grand Slam Offer is an offer 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 payment terms that allow you to get paid to get new customers, removing the cash constraint on business growth. 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, establishes you as your own category. 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 else’s.
In order to sell anything, we 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.
Here are the basic tenets of what to look for in markets:
1) Massive Pain: The client must not want, but desperately need, what you are offering. Pain can be anything that frustrates people about their lives. “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: make your life easier by looking for easy-to-target markets. Examples of this are avatars that have associations they belong to, mailing lists, social media groups, channels they all watch, etc. If our potential customers are all gathered together somewhere, then we can market to them. If searching them out, however, is like finding needles in a haystack, then it can be very difficult to get your offer in front of any potentially interested eyes.
4) Growth: Growing markets are like a tailwind. They make everything move forward faster. Declining markers are like headwinds. They make all efforts harder.
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. There is always demand for solutions to these core human pains. The goal is to find a smaller subgroup within one of those larger buckets that is growing, has the buying power, and is easy to target (the other three variables).
Think about what you are good at in regards to health, wealth, and relationships. Then think about who might value your service the most (is in the most pain), has the buying power to pay what you want (money), and can be found easily (targeting). As long as those three criteria are strong and the market isn't shrinking, you’ll be in good shape.
Order of importance between markets, offers, and persuasion skills:
Market > Offer Strength > Persuasion Skills
- Even if you have a bad offer and are bad at persuasion, you’re going to make money if you’re in a great market.
- If you are in a normal market and have a great offer, you can make tons of money even if you’re bad at persuasion.
- Let’s say you’re in a normal market and have a normal offer. In order to be massively successful, you would have to be exceptionally good at persuasion. It’s just the hardest path to follow and requires the most effort and learning.
You must stick with whatever you pick long enough to have trial and error. You will fail. In fact, you will fail until you succeed. However, you will fail far longer if you keep changing who you market to, because you must start over from the beginning each time. So, pick then commit.
“Charge as high a price as you can say out loud without cracking a smile.” Don't compete on price. 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.”
When you decrease your price, you decrease your clients’ perceived value, attract the worst clients and destroy any margin you have left.
When you raise your prices, you increase your clients’ emotional investment, attract the best clients and multiply your margin.
When you raise your price, you increase the value the consumer receives without changing anything else about your product. (Ex. blind wine test). 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. Those who pay the most, pay the most attention. You need to have a big discrepancy between what something costs you and what you charge for it. It is the only way to be unreasonably successful.
You should never charge more than your product is worth. But you should charge far more for your product and services than it costs to fulfil it. Think up to a hundred times more, not just two or three times more.
If you can reduce your prospects' time delay to receiving value to zero (aka you realize your immediate dream outcome), and your effort and sacrifice is zero, you have an infinitely valuable product. If you accomplish this, you win the game.
Dream outcome (objective: increase): our goal is not to create desire. It’s simply to channel that desire through our offer and monetization vehicle. 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.
Perceived likelihood of achievement (objective: increase): people pay for certainty. They value certainty. 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.
Time delay (objective: decrease): the shorter the delay between the client purchase and the moment when they receive value/the outcome, the more valuable your services or product is. 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. By doing this, their decision to work with us is reinforced, and they immediately trust us more. This is also backed by science. People who experience a victory early on are more likely to continue with something than those who do not.
Effort & sacrifice (objective: decrease): this is what it “costs” people in ancillary costs, both tangible and intangible. This isthe reason that the supplement industry ($123B) is twice the size of the health club industry ($62B). They both accomplish the same perceived objectives but one is perceived as more valuable because it entails lower effort and sacrifice. People are more willing to pay $200 for supplements than they are a $29/mo gym membership. Taking a pill, or drinking a shake, is so much faster and easier than going to the gym everyday. Hence, valued.
Convergent & Divergent Thinking
In simple terms, convergent problem solving is where you take lots of variables, all known, with unchanging conditions and converge on a singular answer. Think math. However, 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. Not only that, convergent answers are binary. They are either right or they are wrong. With divergent thinking, you can have multiple right answers, and one answer that is way more right than the others. Cool right? Our goal is to use a divergent thought process to think of as many easy ways to combine these elements to provide value.
Create a valuable offer that is differentiated and unable to be compared to anything else in the marketplace. We are selling something unique. As such, we are no longer bound by the normal pricing forces of commoditization.
“When demand increases, cut supply.” People want what they can’t have. People want what other people want. People want things only a select few have access to. Scarcity is one of the most powerful and least understood forces to unlock unlimited pricing power.
Enhancing the offer: Bonuses
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.
Enhancing the offer: Guarantees
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.
That being said, guarantees are enhancers. They can enhance the magnetism or attraction of any offer, but they cannot make a business. If a guarantee is used to cover up a poor sales team or a poor product, it will backfire into lots of refunds.
Warning: While guarantees can be effective sellers, people who buy because of guarantees can become very shitty customers.
Summary:
1. Don't be a commodity in the marketplace.
2. Pick a growing market. Niches get you riches.
3. Create your value offer.
4. Charge a lot of money.
5. Shift the demand curve in your favour using scarcity.
6. Use urgency to decrease the action threshold of buyers.
7. Strategically use bonuses to increase the demand.
8. Reverse buyer risk with a creative guarantee.
9. Name your product in a way that resonates with your avatar.
"Entrepreneurship is about acquiring skills, belief, and character traits. To advance, we must determine which skills, beliefs, and character traits we lack."