Give Them What They Want (Your Client’s Offer)
This is one of the most popular topics in the business world right now. Hormozi popularized the offer because he demystified it and made it simple. He brought attention to the fact that nobody will buy something they don’t want (if they have a choice).
The idea he presented of a great offer having to be priced higher than everyone else is not always helpful for the average business owner. There are actually lots of different offers at different price points that can be well worth having.
This is often a pointless conversation, though, because most agencies have nothing to do with their clients’ offers. They don’t advise their clients on offer design and they don’t design offers for their clients. In most cases, they don’t even consider a prospect’s offer(s) when deciding whether to work with them or not.
The offer is one of the greatest catalysts for growth because it’s the delivery system for the desired transformation. It’s the solution to their problem and their experience with it will determine whether they buy again, request a refund, leave a positive or negative review, send referrals, protest outside the business, etc.
The easiest way to leverage the power of the offer for growth is to make “having a great offer that people want” a criteria for working with a client. If you only work with clients that have offers that their markets are demanding, you’ll have massive success rates and results won’t be one of the primary concerns in client retention.
If you want to take the harder route and design offers for your clients, here are some options to consider (NOTE: Hormozi provided a simplified framework for creating offers. Get his book $100 Million Offers and use the following as a supplement):
Teach them how to solve their problems for free (or cheap)
Hormozi often says to give away the solution but charge to implement. Most businesses will avoid this because they are afraid that they won’t get any money if they give away all their secrets. This would be true if their market was only comprised of people who can’t afford to work with them, but those who can afford to pay don’t usually have the time to implement the solution themselves.
Naturally, this mostly applies to services. You can take a similar approach with products where you give away a smaller product that solves a smaller pain or part of the pain, then charge more for the complete solution (e.g. samples in Costco or different tiers of access to software). The most popular way of “giving away all your secrets” is by generating free content on social media, via a blog, or on YouTube.
The alternative to free content, if you want to make a little money and increase the consumption of your content, is to charge a bit for it. “A bit” is relative, but is generally lower than $49. $6.99-$27 is a popular range. This usually takes the form of a book or mini-course, but it’s only limited by your imagination and profit margin.
Legendary direct response marketer Alen Sultanic calls this a value vehicle because it’s the delivery system for valuable information and/or resources. This value should give the customer what they need to solve their problem. That’s why it’s considered valuable. The disparity between the low cost of the value vehicle and the high cost of the pain should be significant and people consuming/using the product should be shocked that you would sell it for such a low price.
Give them the tools/resources to solve the problem faster/better
After giving or selling them the solution to their problem in content form, the natural road blocks to them actually implementing the solution you gave them would be time, effort, and a lack of experience or confidence in implementing the solution themselves. Many customers will have uncertainty because they won’t know what to expect at each stage of the solution implementation.
This is when you can sell them tools or resources to implement the solution with greater ease, faster, or better. The value of solving the problem more quickly, more easily, and/or with less effort should naturally justify a higher cost. It shouldn’t be exorbitant, but it should be 4-6X the price of the value vehicle. This is usually $97-$197, but can be higher. Again, you want them to be blown away by how much higher the value is than the price of the tools/resources.
At this point you may be wondering why clients would sell solutions to problems for such a low price point. I’ll go into more depth next week, but just know that the 80/20 principle applies to pricing.
Let them pay for you to help them with it
This is where you get to the part that most businesses focus on exclusively. They don’t want their market to “do it themselves” because that means they’re not getting paid. However, people that would rather do the work themselves will not pay someone to do it for them just because they have to work harder to find or learn the solution. The people who pay for a solution are the ones that would rather pay to have it solved for them than take the time and energy to do it themselves.
You can either offer traditional products or services as your competitors do, or you can offer done-with-you help that guides them through implementation of the solution and offer Q&A support, community, and open access to tools and resources that are otherwise paid.
This DWY model is growing in popularity because there are those who want to bring a service in house, but don’t want to do all the learning, training, etc on their own. I’ve seen this called a hybrid model, a build-and-release infrastructure, and plenty of other names, but it’s basically DWY coaching with a course. Not the best option for every business, but awesome when it’s a good fit.
Give them the option to pay a ton for the ultimate experience
Not everyone has a ton of money to throw at top-tier products or services, but they exist for a reason. Some people want to be pampered. Some people want to be treated like kings or queens. They want to be perceived as important by others and themselves. They’ve worked hard and they’re willing to spend their hard-earned money for the best.
This is great for your clients (and you) because you can pull out all the stops to deliver the highest possible value in exchange for a hefty price tag. The value should still be higher than the price tag, though. Work hard to set the bar super high and still exceed expectations. You can give them greater levels of access to support, more features, complete hands-on implementation, or anything else they may perceive as valuable so long as it relates to the problem(s) your client alread helps with.
Pick one or stack them
I’ll keep this point brief, but these offer “levels” perform best when delivered as an offer stack that starts with the value vehicle and ascends to the ultimate experience on the back-end. Credit to Alen Sultanic for turning me onto this model back in the day.
You can offer any one of these offer types, as most businesses do, but you’ll get much more benefit if you focus on maximizing the initial deal value to offset the cost of acquiring a customer and focus on profiting from the back end (Sultanic calls that “competiting on economics”).
If you’re curious about how I work with agencies or if you’re frustrated with your agency’s profitability or retention of clients or employees, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see how I can help. I never charge for the first consultation and if I can solve it in 30-minutes, there’s no reason to pay for my services and you walk away happy.
If you know of someone who may benefit from this newsletter, please don’t hesitate to send them to https://kinglyconsulting.com/newsletter so they can start receiving them.
Also, you can now catch up on past issues you may have missed by visiting https://kinglyconsulting.com/archive/