Summary in 100 words or less
A great business starts with a great market, not just a great product. Go where the demand already exists, then craft an offer that channels that demand instead of creating it. The key is value—the gap between what something costs you and what it’s worth to the customer. Use the value equation: increase dream outcomes and likelihood of success, while reducing time and effort. Add offer enhancers—bonuses, scarcity, guarantees, and speed—to make it irresistible. Price high enough that it stings, because investment drives results. Once you have a winning offer, resist change. Just refine, repeat, and scale.
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Commentary
My Highlights
No offer? No business. No life. Bad offer? Negative profit. No business. Miserable life. Decent offer? No profit. Stagnating business. Stagnating life. Good offer? Some profit. Okay business. Okay life. Grand Slam Offer? Fantastic profit. Insane business. Freedom.
A commodity is a product available from many places. For that reason, it's prone to purchases based on price instead of value. If all products are equal, the the cheapest one is the most valuable by default.
A Grand Slam Offer is an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, and 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.
In order to sell anything, you need demand. We are not trying to create demand. We are trying to channel it.
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 change money for our solution.
Here's the simplest illustration of the order of importance between markets, offers, and persuasion skills: Starving Crowd (market) > Offer Strength > Persuasion Skills
You must stick to whatever you pick long enough to have trial and error. You will fail. In fact, you will fail until you succeed. But 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.
Raising your prices can directly enhance the value you provide. What's more, the higher the price, the more allure your product or service has. People want to buy expensive things. They just need a reason.
If you offer a service where a customer must do something in order to achieve the result, or solve the problem you say you solve, they must be invested. The more invested they are, the more likely they are to achieve the positive result. Therefore, it follows that if you care about your customers, you should get them as invested as humanly possible. Ideally, this mean pricing your services or product in such a way that it stings a little when they buy.
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.
There are four primary drivers of value. Two of the drives (on top), you will seek to increase. The other two (on the bottom), you will seek to decrease.
- The dream outcome
- Perceived likelihood of achievement
- Perceived time delay between start and achievement
- Perceived effort and sacrifice
(Dream Outcome x Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) / (Perceived Delay x Perceived Effort) = Value
If you can make the bottom part of the equation equal to zero, you're golden. No matter how small the top side is, anything divided by zero equal infinity.
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 only thing that beats "free" is "fast." People will pay for speed. Many companies have entered free spaces and done exceedingly well with a "speed first" strategy.
Whenever you are building a business, you have a continuum between ease of fulfillment and ease of sales. Find a sweat spot where you sell something very well that's also easy to fulfill.
Create cash flow by over-delivering like crazy at first. Then use the cash flow to fix your operations and make your business more efficient.
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.
People want what they can't have. People want what other people want. People want things only a select few have access to.
A single offer is less valuable than the same offer broken down into its component parts and stacked as bonuses.
We want to employ bonuses because they expand the price to value discrepancy and get people to purchase who otherwise wouldn't. They massively increase the prospects' perception of the value of our offer.
Reversing risk is an immediate way to make any offer more attractive. You will want to spend a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how you want to reserve it.
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.
Once you've monetized an offer, rarely should you change it. Just rinse and repeat over and over and over again. This can be hard because we are entrepreneurs and love change. Change here usually just creates inefficiency and operational drag, costing you money.
