making such an outrageously generous offer. Perhaps it’s a ‘Special
Introductory Offer’ and you’re so confident that once the prospect
experiences the truly amazing benefits your product or service provides,
they’ll be a raving fan of your company and a customer for life. Or maybe
you have a more efficient business model than your competitors and this
allows you to pass the savings onto your customer – exposing a ‘hoax’ or a
‘con’ positioning yourself as a concerned advocate, casting stones at a shared
enemy and becoming your new customer’s greatest champion.
Whatever your reasoning and rationale for the amazing, truly spectacular and
almost unbelievable offer you’re making, put it up in lights and make it
abundantly clear to ensure your offer is believable.
2. Build Value
First things first: You want to build the value of your offer based on the usual
everyday price – this can be what you normally charge or even what your
competition is charging.
It’s important to establish your regular price and make it seem like really
good value. To make your regular price believable, specifics and forensic-like
detail are crucial for proof.
Tell your prospect where your product has been offered or sold at full price
or even how many thousands of people have paid the full price for the
product or service. Show, don’t tell: Where possible, it’s very important to
include screenshots of other websites and catalogues. This makes it even
more believable to the everyday sceptic that this is indeed true and you aren’t
building superficial value or hype.
Then, illustrate in great detail (sell) why even at full price your product is an
incredible deal. Show how your product or service is a mere pittance to what
they will make or save, even at the regular price.
Then reveal your discount in a way that illustrates your role as your
prospect’s advocate and champion.
Quantify the monetary benefits the product will deliver and compare it with
the almost insignificant price you’re asking in return. Reduce it down to the
ridiculous. Breaking the regular price down to a daily or weekly figure and
compare it with something far more trivial that they spend more on without
even thinking about the expense: A cup of coffee or protein smoothie that’s
just $1.33 per day, week, month; or cheaper than a cup of coffee to get [insert
huge benefits].
3. Pricing
If the offer you’re making is designed to turn complete strangers into paying
clients and customers, the key is to offer a low-end price point that will get
you maximum numbers of new customers, plus one or two higher price
points to increase your average sale and return on investment. You want to
lead with your most aggressive offer and then have two to three upsells after
the initial purchase has been made. This makes the first sale as attractive and
irresistible as possible and once the prospect has bought the first offer, the
additional upsells are met with less friction than if you would have offered a
higher price on the front end.
You can even lead with a loss leader – an introductory product or service that
you’re willing to sell or give away at a loss in order to build customer loyalty
and future sales. For example, one of the most profitable smartphone game
apps in the world is Candy Crush. You may even play it yourself! And guess
what? It’s a ‘freemium’ app, which means you download the basic game for
free. You can even play the basic game for free as long as you want to. You
are never required to pay a penny. But Activision Blizzard, who now owns
the game, earns a reported $633,000 per day by selling in-game upgrades for
more moves, more lives, and more levels. The game is designed to make
users an offer they cannot refuse – and sure enough, they love it and keep
spending to play it.
The key here is to avoid presenting prospects with too many choices on the
front end, and leave that to the upsell process. Your chances of losing the
initial sale increase with every extra option to purchase they’re offered. Any
additional time your prospect spends trying to decide which offer to go for
kills the sale.
Now if you’re generating leads, your offer might be a free consultation. If
that’s the case, you still need to attach a dollar amount to the consultation and
you still need to sell hard to get people to take you up on your offer, even if
Your offer should be specific, so you can’t just slap a ‘free consultation’ as
your offer and think you’re done, no, no, no. Offer a free 30, 45 or 60-minute
phone consultation, analysis, strategy session or roadmap.
More on this in the ‘Putting Together Your Landing Page’ section of this
chapter.
4. Payment Options
When your ideal price point – the level at which most of your customers will
buy – is relatively high for prospects, consider breaking up the purchase into
a payment plan of three or four payments.
You collect the credit card number with the order, then charge it for one-third
or one-fourth of the total amount each month for three or four months.
By doing so, you effectively lower the perceived price point in your
prospect’s mind and this should increase response. Plus, ‘today’ money is
always more crucial to a prospect’s decision to buy than ‘tomorrow’s’
money.
5. Premiums
These are the free gifts that prospects receive along with the product they’re
purchasing.
Premiums are not to be scoffed at. You might be rolling your eyes and
thinking about late night infomercials that gush, ‘But wait… there’s more!
You’ll also get this free set of steak knives – if you order right now!’
The reason premiums are used is because they work. Having a hot premium
can double or triple your sales. When you start paying attention to
commercials on television and in the media, you’ll realise the ones that really
work, the ones advertising with real force and spending hundreds of millions
of dollars – they mostly have premiums.
Why? Do you think they enjoy burning their money and eroding their
margins? No! It’s because they dramatically increase response.
A great example of the impact of having a hot premium is from Sports
Illustrated. In the summer of 1986, Martin Shampaine, the magazine’s
marketing manager, found himself in the difficult situation where his last few
promotions had bombed, meaning he wasn’t persuading enough people to
subscribe, which is basically the worst news any magazine can get. So, he
needed something new, something fresh – an offer people couldn’t resist.
It was then that the Football Phone premium was born.
Sports Illustrated ran television ads giving away the football phone as a
premium with a yearly subscription of the magazine. This premium went on
to sell 1.6 million subscriptions for the once-hurting publication.
Premiums are a proven way to pull in more sales. And no, if you’re a
homebuilder it doesn’t mean you should offer your new clients a
football
phone. Great premiums should be aligned and relevant to your business.
Here are some premium examples:
Identify theft insurance company: Free document shredder.
Homebuilding company: $5,000 furniture and appliances voucher.
Car detailing company: New floor mats.
Moving company: A ‘get your bond back’ small home repair tool kit or free
end of lease cleaning service.
Divorce lawyer: Free $500 travel voucher (romantic getaway or get some
space!)
6. Power Guarantee
The stronger your guarantee, the better. The role of the guarantee is to reverse
the risk for the prospect and place it on you, the business, thus removing
some of the friction before making the sale. Twelve-month guarantees tend to
be the most common. However, it’s much better to be very specific and if the
guarantee is attached to the performance of what you’re selling: ‘If you
follow the program and don’t lose 10kg in your first 180 days, just let us
know and we’ll refund every cent you’ve paid’.
We’ll be diving into the exact specifics of guarantees later in this section.
7. Scarcity
Offers without scarcity don’t sell as well, but it needs to be genuine or you’ll
erode brand trust with your prospects. Think about it, if you don’t need to
take action now, when will you take it? Never.
Examples of scarcity include:
Putting an expiration date on your offer.
Countdown clocks.
Only X left at this price.
Buy before X to avoid a price hike.
We only have so many hours in a day/employees to service
you/products left in the warehouse.
Scarcity has been shown time and time again to dramatically increase the
pulling power of offers. The best marketers use it because it works. Injecting
scarcity into your offer tells prospects they’re being offered something
unique – but they need to act fast!
Anticipate And Overcome
Objections
After you’ve mapped out your offer, you now want to ask yourself what
objections a sceptical prospect might have in taking you up on your offer.
Spend some time thinking about the objections your prospects would have
and write them down below.
What are the main objections to the offer?
1.
2.
3.
How will you overcome these objections?
1.
2.
3.
Once you’ve completed this, it’s time for the last step – to read your offer and
ask yourself, ‘What can I add to make this offer even more compelling?’
Once you’ve made your offer as irresistible as humanly possible, then make
sure the copy is tightly written. Offer copy needs to be direct and to the point.
There can be no confusion about what the prospect will receive in exchange
for their money or time; when they’ll receive it and why it will benefit them.
That means you must edit your offer copy even more ruthlessly than normal,
making sure everything is crystal clear.
I can’t stress the importance of labouring over your offer. Once you know
what your market wants and you package it all up in the most irresistible
offer possible, everything else becomes a lot easier. And once you experience
a taste of what a Godfather Offer brings to your bottom line, you’ll never
look at it the same way again.
A ‘Power Guarantee’ That Slaughters
Your Competition And Leaves Them
Screaming For Mercy
Here is a simple but devastatingly effective sales strategy that can help
dramatically transform your business.
I’m now going to show you how to eradicate sales resistance and scepticism
through having a power guarantee. This simple approach builds trust and
goodwill, while getting you more customers than you know what to do with.
While just about everybody’s heard of a guarantee, very few marketers and
business owners know how to craft one that takes full, 100% advantage of its
incredible selling power.
And that’s precisely what the following content is all about.
I’m going to take you by the hand and show you how to take your ordinary
guarantee and pump it up with steroids. You’ll discover how to soothe even
the most sceptical prospects and make your guarantee so compelling it
cripples the competition and brings them to their knees, pleading for mercy.
WAIT A MINUTE! What in the world am I hearing? You say you don’t
already have a guarantee? Are you trying to tell me you thought all you had
to do was tell your prospects how great you are and they would line up
waiting to throw their money at you?
Well, unfortunately, that’s not quite how it works.
So, before we get to work, let me address some of the biggest concerns
around having a guarantee and what your inner pessimist might be thinking
right now….
‘I don’t want to offer a guarantee…’
Listen: If you’re not willing to guarantee your products and services in some
way, shape or form, why should any of your prospects trust you?
Think about that for a moment. If you’re not willing to guarantee any element
of the products and services you sell, why on Earth should anybody trust you
with their hard-earned money?
How are you different from all the other companies they’ve done business
with, only to be left with empty promises and disappointment?
You need to realise your prospect has been let down, misled, and downright
lied to by other businesses. They’re sceptical. And if you’re not willing to
offer a guarantee for your product or service, how can you possibly put those
fears to bed?
Think about this – if you don’t have a guarantee, you’re literally placing all
the risk of your prospect’s purchase on them and no risk on you. What does
that say about your business? If you’re really planning on growing and
scaling your business, it means the majority of the advertising you do is
going to cold traffic – that is, people who don’t know, like, or trust you.
These are people who are just online. They’ve been doing their research.
They’ve seen your Facebook ad, Instagram ad, or whatever it might be.
Essentially, you’re asking a complete stranger to part with their hard-earned
money for a product or service they don’t even know is going to solve their
problem. Right? A powerful guarantee reverses that risk, and it reduces the
friction for someone to buy.
You want to lead with the Godfather Strategy, which is to make them an offer
that’s so good they can’t refuse. And then you want to back that up with the
whole ‘you can’t lose’ guarantee, and reverse all that risk. If you’re confident
with what you’re selling, why wouldn’t you make it as easy as possible for as
many people to buy your products and services? To do otherwise just doesn’t
make any sense.
If you’re still not quite on the same page, let me ask you this question: What
would you do if the customer bought from you, and then, for one reason or
another, they weren’t satisfied with what they bought? How would you make
it ri
ght?
Would you tell them, ‘bad luck’?
Would you say, ‘Look, you’ve bought it, it’s your problem now’?
Or would you work with them to ensure they’re happy, and add even more
equity to your brand name by really helping them?
The answer should be obvious.
However, if it’s not, let me bring something else to your attention. By law in
most countries, if someone buys from your business, and something is
defective or doesn’t perform as advertised, or could be perceived as not being
truthfully advertised, the consumer is entitled to compensation with either
repair or replaced goods, or part of them; resupply or fixing a problem with
services, or a part of them; or providing compensation to the consumer or
end-user. In Australia, consumer protections are enforced by the Australian
Competition and Consumer Commission, so you already have a guarantee.
Whether you like it or not, it’s built into everything that’s sold in this
country. So, if you’ve already got a guarantee, then why not advertise it? Use
it to your advantage to reduce buyer friction and increase your selling power.
A powerful guarantee can triple sales, and they’re called upon less than 5%
of the time. So, if you do the math, you can tell me whether or not you think
that’s a calculated play to use this front and centre of all of your marketing.
The Deeper Psychology of a Power Guarantee
In order to fully capitalise on the selling power of your guarantee, you must
grasp the primal psychology behind it.
The primary thing to realise is this: In any given transaction between two
parties, there will always be risk present. In most cases, one side will be
asked to assume the burden of this risk, and more often than not, it’s
generally the buyer, and not the seller.
For your prospects, the biggest risk they have is believing your promise to
them. In essence, you’re asking them to have faith and believe that what
you’re telling them is true. That they should simply ‘take your word for it’
and that they’ll experience the numerous benefits you’re promising.
And who could blame them for being reluctant to trust you? In an age where
so many false promises are made and scepticism is so rampant, prospects
must be very careful about accepting anything you tell them. Unfortunately,
in every market there are people out to make a quick buck by promising a