demand, with little to no human interaction.
Things have become incredibly fragmented.
With every passing day, our prospects are exposed to ever-more-amazing
offers – especially on the Internet.
So the very first step in the process is this:
Sell What People Want To Buy
This might sound elementary, but you wouldn’t believe how many
supposedly smart, university-educated people in business don’t understand
this.
They start by looking at what they would like to buy, and not their market.
They swim against the raging river that is the desires of their marketplace and
begin with their own interests in mind. They ask, ‘What would I like to buy?
What is convenient for me to sell? What do I think is a cool gizmo or
service?’
They don’t ask, ‘What is the market starving for?’
Once you’ve done your research using the Halo Strategy and have discovered
what people really want in your market, then sell it to them!
Keep in mind that sometimes you can have the right crowd at the wrong time.
You could be offering the best hamburgers in the world, but if you’re trying
to sell those hamburgers to a crowd that has just finished a seven-course
gourmet meal, you won’t have many customers.
If, through this process, you uncover that what you’re selling isn’t indeed
what your market is starving for, don’t try and put lipstick on a pig. That is,
don’t try and dress up what you’re selling as being what they want and try
and fool yourself or your market.
Do not try and reason with or convince yourself that what you’re selling is
‘good enough’.
Good enough won’t cut it. Simply do what’s required in order to pivot your
business to align with what your market desires most. Fire employees, get rid
of departments, sell the remainder of your stock in a fire sale. Whatever it is,
do it. Do not flog a dead horse.
Enduring short-term hardship, loss, or discomfort will save you a lot of
extreme long-term pain.
Most business owners and entrepreneurs spend tens of thousands of dollars
developing a product or service before they’ve done deep market research or
put together their offer or sales message.
They then try and mould their sales pitch to fit what their product and service
can actually do, removing this claim or promise, or that benefit, ultimately
castrating the sales message from the get-go.
The right way to approach this is to write your sales message before ever
creating the product and service. Make the biggest claims, give the market
what they’re starving for, create the dream-come-true experience for your
market. And then, and only then, start to develop the product or service to
deliver on it.
Moving on: Once you know what your market is starving for, then you take
your product or service and craft it into a compelling pitch … an offer they
can’t refuse.
Here’s how you do it.
Create A Detail Sheet: Features And
Benefits
First, create a ‘Detail Sheet’ about the product or services you want to sell.
On this sheet you should have two columns, column one should be titled
‘Features’ and this is where you list the full list of the features of what you
are selling.
The second column should be titled ‘Benefits’. This column is where you
convert all the features into corresponding benefits.
Don’t discount the importance of this just because it sounds simple. While
this might sound very simple, if you do this exercise correctly and do a good
job on your research, your offers will almost write themselves.
IMPORTANT: Please ensure you take a lot of time with this. Really sweat
over it. Most amateur marketers and rookie copywriters don’t do this step at
all, and even most of the ‘top’ copywriters don’t labour nearly long enough
over it.
You should literally list every single feature about what you are selling that
you can possibly think of.
Once you’re finished with this step and your Detail Sheet is as
comprehensive as you can make it, we are now ready for part two which is to
write a Benefit List.
What we do here is go over our Detail Sheet and we translate each feature
into a corresponding benefit, wherever possible. So first, lets get clear on the
differences of a feature and a benefit. A feature is simply a detail or
specification. Like the fact your mattress is made from latex, or that it comes
in a cotton sleeve.
A benefit is what your product will do for the buyer. Let’s say the mattress
on your bed is made from high-grade natural certified latex. That’s a feature.
That fact could translate to benefits including it moulds itself to your body for
perfect comfort, and it absorbs the movements of a fidgety partner and makes
for more undisturbed sleep.
But there could be even more benefits! Thanks to the high-grade natural
certified latex, you will sleep more soundly, awaken refreshed, perform better
during the day at work, get the promotion you wanted, make more money,
and move into a bigger house in a nicer neighbourhood.
All because you bought the right mattress.
Here are more examples of how facts and features can translate into benefits:
FEATURE
BENEFIT
High-grade natural certified
Reduces shoulder and hip pressure
latex
Good ventilation
Allergy-free properties
Allows better blood circulation
Provides pressure relief
100% Organic Bamboo
Durable and long lasting (will save you
Cotton Sheets
money)
Made from breathable
Keep you cool in the summer and warm
material
in the winter
If you do this process properly you should have several pages of features and
corresponding benefits.
Create Your Offer
Next, start thinking about your offer. Your offer is your basic business
proposition, and is by far the most important element in your entire sales
message.
Offer Basics
What are you selling? _______
How much does it cost? _______
Who will take immediate action on this offer? ________
How do you claim/buy it? ________
First up, forget about your lawyer. Forget about your industry regulations,
and all of that stuff for now. I want you to think about what promise or offer
you’d make if you had a magic wand and there were no rules or limitations to
what you could say, what you could promise, and what you could have in
your offer.
Even if it’s not your whole service, even if it’s a splinter of your core product
or service, what could you give prospects that would give them some results
right away? Get creative with it. Really think about what your best offer
could possibly be.
I want you to come up with the most powerful offer you can put down in
writing. It should be no more than a few lines. When you’re doing this, it’s
really important to remember that no one is going
to see this piece of paper
except for you at the beginning. This really gives you an opportunity to go
over the top and go all out. We want that.
Make it outrageous.
Now it’s down on paper, start pulling it back to something that you can
actually back up and deliver on and that won’t get you sued for false
advertising. Obviously, you have to offer only what you can deliver on.
Otherwise, that promise is going to backfire and cause all types of headaches
and problems for you. You want to start really big, put it down on paper, then
dial it back to something that’s irresistible but you’re still confident you
could deliver on.
Irresistible offers are detailed and specific. Let me explain. Let’s say we’re
selling mattresses online. Let’s look at a lacklustre offer I found by doing a
quick Google search. (And generally, when we do Google searches, it’s very
rare that people have great offers, which is why it’s no surprise so many
businesses fail.) Here’s the offer I found:
‘Buy your mattress online. Fast and free delivery’.
There was also this restatement of the offer:
‘American-made with free delivery. Buy your mattress online today for better
quality’. If we reduce that down to this: ‘Buy an American-made mattress
online with free and fast delivery’, then most people looking at that would
think it’s okay.
But when you know a thing or two about creating winning offers, you
understand that this is an incredibly boring offer. Let’s compare this vague
and watered down offer to a winning offer in this space.
Take Casper a mattress in a box start-up. This is their offer:
‘Get America’s best-reviewed mattress, delivered to your door for free, for a
120-night trial’.
This is an irresistible offer that helped Casper shake up a stale $29 billion
mattress industry, taking them from zero dollars as a small start-up to over
$600 million in sales in their first 4 years of business. That’s the power of an
irresistible offer.
There’s specificity in it. There’s risk reversal. And you’re going out into the
market with a really, really strong and compelling Godfather Offer. If you’re
in the market for a high-quality mattress, this is an offer that will get you to
sit up in your chair. It will raise the hairs on the back of your neck, and it will
demand that you pay attention.
And pay attention they did. Their mattress has over 45,000 reviews at the
time of this writing, with almost 30,000 of them five-star. Here’s another
example. Let’s say we’re a homebuilding company. Again, I’ve done a quick
Google search to see what kind of offers people are running in that market.
This is a very important thing to do. You want to see the environment your
offer is going to be competing in. In this instance, we’re looking at Google
Ads. Here we see:
‘Home Builders Melbourne. Explore our latest designs. Designing luxury
homes from a range of elegant designs. Enquire Now!’
That’s their ‘offer’. When we reduce it down to a straight headline it turns out
it’s this: ‘ Designing luxury homes from a range of elegant designs’. For most
people that sounds pretty good. That’s what they do. They design luxury
homes. They’ve got a whole range of elegant designs you can choose from.
However, again, this is incredibly vague. It’s gutless, and it will be ignored in
a sea of other lame, impotent offers that provoke zero action. As a consumer,
I don’t even know what they want me to do from this. But it certainly doesn’t
get me excited.
Compare this to an offer we created for home building start-up Enso Homes:
‘We’ll build your new home in just 30 weeks or give you $5,000 in cash’.
We didn’t just create this offer out of thin air. We found from our research
(during the Halo Strategy) that the biggest pain point for consumers
commissioning boutique luxury homes was that builders often drag out
projects and constantly miss deadlines. And we found that most consumers
who are building a new home with a boutique builder are renting, and they
really can’t afford to be renting and doubling up on paying repayments on
their house and land plus their rental property for an extended period of time.
This was the problem keeping them up at night.
So we created this offer and put it front and centre of all the digital marketing
we were doing for Enso Homes. On the website, on the landing pages, in
their HVCO. Everywhere. How did it go? Let me tell you how it went. This
offer took Enso Homes from zero dollars, and never receiving a deposit ever
on a new home build, to over $7 million dollars in revenue in their first eight
months. It went nuts. Completely crazy. And that, again, just illustrates what
a really compelling offer has when it addresses those specific pain points of
that marketplace.
Let’s do one more exercise – a little bit closer to home. Let’s jump onto
Google and look at SEO agencies. This is an offer I found:
‘Best SEO management. Digital marketing experts’.
There’s no offer here. It’s more of a statement, right? There’s no specificity,
no risk reversal, no timeframes, no end benefit to me. This dull-as-dishwater
copy will never awaken your prospects from their sleepy state, shoot an
electric thunderbolt through them, nor provoke them to take action. This
are digital marketing experts! Now let’s take a look at what a winning offer in
this space looks like. This is one from yours truly:
‘Guaranteed Google rankings in 90 days or we work for free’.
Woo-ee! Now that is an offer. It’s bold. It’s specific. And it’s got risk
reversal all over it. Obviously, if we couldn’t deliver on that, we’d be quickly
going out of business. But when we looked at creating and guaranteeing our
offer, we did the research. We found that two-thirds of our target businesses
had been with another agency and had been burned because they didn’t see
the results that they wanted. When they came to us, they were highly
sceptical – not necessarily of us, but of the industry as a whole. In response,
we wanted to craft an irresistible offer that addressed these pain points,
reversed that risk, and really allowed us to guarantee our clients’ results.
This offer really helped us invade and conquer our hyper-competitive
industry. The waters are bloody from fierce competition in our space. There
are thousands of digital marketing agencies in Australia. And it’s really taken
King Kong from my bedroom, with no funding and no venture capital, to
being ranked the 28th fastest-growing company in Australia by the
Australian Financial Review two years in a row. And also the fastest-growing
digital agency in the country. That’s the kind of power that a potent offer has.
Your Offer Is The Tip Of The Spear
Of Your Sales Message
In most cases, a strong offer will succeed in spite of weak copy, but strong
copy won’t overcome a weak offer. The best laser-targeted traffic in the
world can’t save an
ordinary ‘good enough’ offer. In other words, you can
have the latest landing page building software, the most advanced sales
funnel possible with contingency campaigns up the wazoo, the best Google
Ads or Facebook ads guru running the most advanced traffic campaigns, heat
mapping software installed on your website – but if you don’t have an
irresistible offer for your market, then none of that matters. It really is the
offer that makes the heart beat and blood pump in your marketing.
A strong offer is not solely based on price. Don’t think you must have the
lowest price in order to have the strongest offer. Having an offer based on the
lowest price can easily be copied by your competitors. And whoever wins
that race to the bottom usually loses, or they always lose, right? It’s usually
the opposite with our clients because having a potent offer allows you to
command higher fees.
Don’t Use These Weak Offers
Even if they happen to be valid reasons why people should do business with
you, the items listed below are not irresistible offers that motivate people to
do business with you:
Great customer service
Outstanding quality
Being innovative
Having a great team
Being responsive to your customers’ needs
Having a great reputation.
I have a saying:
‘If the offer and the guarantee don’t keep the founder up at night, then they’re
not strong enough’.
You need to create a response from your prospects like, ‘How can they
possibly offer this?’ Or, ‘How can they guarantee so much?’ Or, ‘Are these
people out of their minds?’ It must look outrageous. It must make the
decision a no-brainer for your prospects.
A compelling offer is infinitely more powerful than a convincing argument
The idea of a compelling offer is to remove all friction for a prospect to buy
from you. You want to reverse that risk and burden and make it an absolute
no-brainer for your prospects to take you up on your offer. In the words of
the late, great Claude Hopkins, ‘Make your offer so great that only a lunatic
would refuse to buy’.
The Seven Parts Of Your Godfather
Offer
A Godfather Offer is comprised of seven major components that make its
brilliance come to life:
1. Rationale
Compelling offers begin with a clear and credible explanation of why you’re