Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • The market is continuously growing. The stock market grows at 9 percent per year. If we aren’t growing at 9 percent per year, we are falling behind. “Maintenance,” in the most generic sense, would be 9 percent growth year over year. Furthermore, if you’re in a growing marketplace, then you might have to grow at 20-30 percent per year, just to keep up, or risk falling behind. So you can see how maintenance is a myth. So, then,what does it take to grow? Thankfully, just three simple things:
    • Get more customers
    • Increase their average purchase value
    • Get them to buy more times

  • Having a Grand Slam offer makes it almost impossible to lose. But why? What gives it such an impact? In short, having a Grand Slam Offer helps with all three of the requirements for growth: getting more customers, getting them to pay more, and getting them to do so more times. How? It allows you to differentiate yourself from the marketplace. In other words, it allows you to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE. Commoditized = Price Driven Purchases (race to the bottom). Differentiated = Value Driven Purchases (sell in a category of one with no comparison. Yes, market matters)

  • Let’s start by defining a Grand Slam Offer. It’s an offer you present to the marketplace 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 a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers . . . forever removing the cash constraint on business growth. In other words, it allows you to sell in a “category of one,” or, to apply another great phrase, to “sell in a vacuum.” The resulting purchasing decision for the prospect is now between your product and nothing. So you can sell at whatever price you get the prospect to perceive, not in comparison to anything else. As a result, it gets you more customers, at higher ticket prices, for less money. If you like fancy marketing terms, it breaks down like this:
    • Increased Response Rates (think clicks)
    • Increased Conversion (think sales)
    • Premium Prices (think charging a lot of money).      

  • Having a Grand Slam Offer increases your response rates to advertisements (aka more people will click or take an action on an advertisement they see containing a Grand Slam Offer). If you pay the same amount for eyeballs but 1) more people respond, 2) more of those responses buy, and 3) they buy for higher prices, your business grows. I’ve “struck gold” on my share of offers. Not because I’ve got some superpower, but because I’ve just done this a lot of times (and failed even more). I sorted through the crap that chronically fails and pocketed all the stuff that reproducibly succeeds.

  • 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, however, forces a prospect to stop and think differently to assess the value of your differentiated product. Doing this establishes you as your own category, which means it’s too difficult to compare prices, which means you re-calibrate the prospect’s value-meter.

  • In order to sell anything, you 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.

  • The point of good writing is for the reader to understand. The point of good persuasion is for the prospect to feel understood.

  • 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).

  • If I were a relationship expert trying to find my avatar, I’d rather focus on “second half of life relationship” coaching for old timers than helping college students in relationships. Why? Because senior citizens who are alone are likely suffering more pain as they are nearer their deaths (pain), have more buying power (money), and are easy to find (targeting). Lastly, at the time of this writing, there are more people turning 65 each year than turning 20 (growing). That is the idea. 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.

  • Starving Crowd (market) > Offer Strength > Persuasion Skills.

  • I have coined the term “niche slap” to remind entrepreneurs in my communities to commit once they pick. All businesses and, all markets, have unpleasant characteristics. The grass is never greener once you get to the other side. If you keep hopping from niche to niche, hoping that the market will solve your problems, you deserve to be niche slapped. 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. 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.

  • Let’s say you sold a generic course on Time Management. Unless you were some massive time management guru with a compelling or unique story, it would be unlikely it would turn into anything significant. What do you think “yet another” time management course is valued at? $19, $29? Sure. Nothing to write home about. Let’s just say $19 for illustration sake. Now we shall unleash the power of niche pricing in various stages on your product. So let’s imagine you make the product more specific, keeping the same principles, and call it “Time Management For Sales Professionals.” All of a sudden, this course is for a more specific type of person. We could tie their increase to even one more sale or one more deal and it would be worth more. But there are a lot of sales people. So this might be a $99 product. Neat, but we can do better. So let’s go down another level of niching and call our product…. “Time Management for B2B Outbound Sales Reps.” Following the same principles of specificity, now we know our sales people probably have very experienced deals and commissions. A single sale would easily net this salesman $500 (or more), so it would be easy to justify a $499 price tag. This is already a 25x increase in price for almost an identical product. I could stop here, but I’m going to go one step further. Let’s just niche down one last level…. “Time Management for B2B Outbound Power Tools & Gardening Sales Reps.” Boom. Think about it for a second, if you were a power tools outbound sales rep, you would think to yourself “This is made exactly for me” and would happily fork over maybe $1000 to $2000 for a time management program that could help you achieve your goal. The actual pieces of the program may be the same as the generic $19 course, but since they have been applied, and the sales messaging could speak so much to this avatar, they will find it more compelling and get more value from it in a real way. This concept applies to anything you decide to do. You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear.” That’s why a fitness program for generic weight loss might be priced at only $19 while a fitness program designed and marketed only to shift-nurses might be priced at $1997….(even though the core of the program is likely similar - eat less, move more). End Result: The market matters. Your niche matters.

  • In order to understand how to make a compelling offer, you must understand value. The reason people buy anything is to get a deal. They believe what they are getting (VALUE) is worth more than what they are giving in exchange for it (PRICE). The moment the value they receive dips below what they are paying, they stop buying from you. This price to value discrepancy is what you need to avoid at all costs. After all, as Warren Buffet said, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

  • There are four primary drivers of value. Two of the drivers (on top), you will seek to increase. The other two (on the bottom), you will seek to decrease.      

  • (Yay) The Dream Outcome (Goal: Increase) * (Yay) Perceived Likelihood of Achievement (Goal: Increase) / (Boo) Perceived Time Delay Between Start and Achievement (Goal: Decrease) * (Boo) Perceived Effort & Sacrifice (Goal: Decrease).

  • They corresponded with these pillars:
    • What will I make? (Dream Outcome)
    • How will I know it’s going to happen? (Perceived Likelihood of Achievement)
    • How long will it take? (Time Delay)
    • What is expected of me? (Effort & Sacrifice)

  • In the beginning of my career, I focused all my attention on dream outcomes and the perception of achievement (social proof, third-party edification, etc). In other words, the top side of the equation. That’s where beginner marketers make bigger and bigger claims. It’s easy, and it’s lazy. But as time has gone on, I have realized that these larger-than-life claims are the easiest to establish (and therefore less unique). After all, anyone can make a promise. The harder, and more competitive, are the Time Delay and Effort & Sacrifice. The best companies in the world focus all their attention on the bottom side of the equation. Making things immediate, seamless, and effortless. Apple made the iPhone effortless compared to other phones at the time. Amazon made purchasing a single click of a button and made purchases arrive almost immediately (maybe by the time you read this, they’ll be sending drones to our doors within 60 minutes). Netflix made consuming television immediate and effortless. So, the older I get, the more I have shifted my focus to “the hard stuff” — decreasing the bottom side of the equation. And I believe the better you do this, the more you will be rewarded by the marketplace. Final note: The reason this is a division equation and not an addition (“+”) is that I wanted to convey one key point. 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 equals infinity (which is technically undefined for the math nerds). In other words, if you can reduce your prospects’ true 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. Given this postulate, a prospect would (in theory) purchase something from you, and the moment their credit card was run, it would immediately become their reality. That is infinite value. Imagine clicking the purchase button on a weight loss product and instantly seeing your stomach turn into a six-pack. Or imagine hiring a marketing firm, and as soon as you sign your document, your phone begins ringing with new highly qualified prospects. How valuable would these products/services be? Infinitely valuable. And that’s the point. I don’t know if we entrepreneurs will ever get there, but that is the hypothetical limit we all should strive towards, and why I structured the equation this way.

  • Perception is reality. It’s not about how much you increase your prospect’s likelihood of success, or decrease the time delay to achievement, or decrease their effort and sacrifice. That in itself is not valuable. Many times, they will have no idea. The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.

  • The dream outcome is the expression of the feelings and experiences the prospect has envisioned in their mind. It’s the gap between their current reality and their dreams. Our goal is to accurately depict that dream back to them, so they feel understood, and explain how our vehicle will get them there. The dream outcome is simple; it’s the “getting there” where the value gets enhanced or detracted.

  • People generally, and our clients specifically, want:
    • To be perceived as beautiful
    • To be respected
    • To be perceived as powerful   - To be loved
    • To increase their status
  • These are all powerful drivers. But multiple vehicles may accomplish the same thing. Take the desire “to be perceived as beautiful” for example, here are a lot of things that touch on this desire:
    • Make Up
    • Anti-aging creams/serums
    • Supplements
    • Shapewear
    • Plastic Surgery
    • Fitness

  • All these vehicles channel the desire to be perceived as beautiful. And if we further unpack the idea of a desire to be beautiful, we see that it may be a surface-level declaration of a deeper desire to achieve higher status in one’s social group. The dream outcome value driver is most prominently used when comparing the relative value between two different desires being satisfied. In general, the dream outcome that most directly increases a prospect’s status will be the one they value most. As such, a prospect may value that entire category of vehicles that satisfy one desire more than another category that satisfies a different desire. For many men, making money is more important than being handsome. Why? Because money drives status for men more than being handsome does. So, in general, they will value all offers that make them money more than offers that help them look good.

  • Frame benefits in terms of status gained from the viewpoint of others. When writing copy, you can make it that much more powerful by talking about how other people will perceive the prospect’s achievement. Connect the dots for them. Example: If you buy this golf club, your drive will increase by 40 yards. Your golf buddies’ jaws will drop when they see your ball soar 40 yards past theirs . . . they’ll ask you what’s changed . . . only you will know.

  • 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. So to increase value with all offers, we must communicate perceived likelihood of achievement through our messaging, proof, what we choose to include or exclude in our offer, and our guarantees.

  • Time delay is the time between a client buying and receiving the promised benefit. The shorter the distance between when they purchase and they receive value/the outcome, the more valuable your services or product is. There are two elements to this driver of value: Long-term outcome and short-term experience. Many times, there are short-term experiences that occur while en route to the long-term outcomes. They happen “along the way” and provide value. It’s good to understand both. The thing people buy is the long-term value, aka their “dream outcome.” But the thing that makes them stay long enough to get it is the short-term experience. These are little milestones a prospect sees along the way that shows them they are on the right path. We try and tie as many of these as possible into any service we offer. 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. For example, it takes a while to add an extra $239,000 per year to a gym. But that’s what they’re buying. So, once they have purchased, we need to create emotional wins fast. One way we do this is to get their ads live and get them to close their first $2,000 sale within their first seven days. By doing this, their decision to work with us is reinforced, and they immediately trust us more. This makes them more likely to follow the rest of our systems and get to their ultimate destination.

  • 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. A few notable examples: The MVD vs DMV wait in line forever or pay $50 you can skip the line and get your license renewed privately. Fedex vs USPS (when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight). Spotify vs Slow Free Music. Uber vs Walking. Fast beats free. Many will always be willing to pay (price) for the (value) of speed. So if you find yourself in a market competing against free, double down on speed.

  • When you sell fitness, you have to spend an hour arm-wrestling a client to give over 1/10th to 1/100th of the amount of money they pay for surgery. There’s just not a lot of perceived value because the perceived likelihood of achievement, the time delay to achievement, and the effort and sacrifice are so high.

  • Decreasing the effort and sacrifice, or at least the perceived effort and sacrifice, can massively boost the appeal of your offer. In an ideal world, a prospect would want to simply “say yes” and have their dream outcome happen with no more effort on their behalf. This is why “done for you services” are almost always more expensive than “do-it-yourself” because the person doesn’t have all the effort and sacrifice. There is also a component of “perceived likelihood of achievement” difference as well. People believe that if an expert does it, then they will be more likely to achieve the outcome than if they try on their own.

  • Steps to sell high value deliverable:
    • Step #1: We figured out our prospective client’s dream outcome.
    • Step #2: We listed out all the obstacles they’re likely to encounter on their way (our opportunities for value).
    • Step #3: We listed all those obstacles as solutions.
    • Step #4: We figured out all the different ways we could deliver those solutions.
    • Step #5a: We trimmed those ways down to only the things that were the highest value and lowest cost to us.
    • All we have to do now  is… Step #5b: Put all the bundles together into the ultimate high value deliverable.

  • Supply and demand are inversely correlated (in theory). If you satisfy zero desire (provide zero supply), you will not make money, and eventually leave people feeling rejected (Note: it takes much longer than you think). Conversely, if you satisfy all the demand, you will kill your golden goose, and not know where your next meal will come from. Mastering supply and demand comes from the elegant dance between the two. If you sleep with your significant other everyday they have less desire than if you haven’t slept with them for a week. We want the ravenous prospect, not merely the aroused. Therefore, understanding the interplay between these variables is key to enhancing your offer and the amount of profits you will make over time. Up to this point, we have covered all the things inside of your offer that can make it immune to price comparison and transform regular services and products into things that people will find a way to pay for. It would follow that the next variable that can make your offer more desirable is how it is presented. In other words, the outside variables that position the product in your prospect’s mind. These forces are often more powerful than your core offer.

  • Use scarcity to decrease supply to raise prices (and indirectly increase demand through perceived exclusiveness). Use urgency to increase demand by decreasing the action threshold of a prospect. Use bonuses to increase demand (and increase perceived exclusivity). Use guarantees to increase demand by reversing risk. Use names to re-stimulate demand and expand awareness of my offer to my target audience.

  • Real Life Value Case Study: There are many people who can solve the problem: how do I make $10,000 per month? But far fewer who can solve: How can I add $5M in profit without adding any extra product lines to my business? (This was a real project that took me 60min and resulted in exactly $5M in bottom line profit by slightly altering the pricing model of the business). You could say the business owner was… “very happy” with the result of the engagement.

  • There are two components to the value: first, how rare the sources are; second, the actual value being provided. The value and rarity compound to create some truly breathtaking profits. Specialized consultants are paid millions of dollars to solve problems worth tens of millions to clients. The client pays for all the experience and expertise the expert has and avoids the cost of errors (time and money). In short, they skip the bad stuff and go straight to the good stuff more quickly and for less money than it would cost to figure it out on their own . . . a beautiful economic exchange. I personally experienced this for the first time when I had two different people offer me $50,000 for a day of my time after speaking at an event. They were scaling an education business in a niche (not too dissimilar from my own) and could not get past the $1M per month mark. As someone who was doing $1M per week in the same business type (at the time), I was a very specific type of person with the keys to their problem.

  • When there’s a fixed supply or quantity of products or services that are available for purchase it creates “scarcity” or a “fear of missing out.” It increases the need to take action, and by extension, purchase your offer. This is where you publicly share that you are only giving away X amount of products or can only handle Y new clients. For example, if a musician drops a limited edition hoodie and says he only made 100 and they will never be made again, are you more or less likely to buy it than one that is always available? More likely, naturally. The idea that you can never get it again makes it more desirable. This is an example of scarcity. It is the fear of missing out on something. It pulls on our psychological fear of loss to get us to take action. Humans are far more motivated to take action to hoard a scarce resource than they are to act on something that could help them. Fear of loss is stronger than desire for gain. We will wield this psychological lever to get your clients to buy in a frenzy, all at once, until you are sold out.

  • Three Types of Scarcity:
    • Limited Supply of Seats/Slots: in general or over X period of time.
    • Limited Supply of Bonuses
    • Never available again.

  • Chanel, a brand that has maintained insane margins and pricing for over a century, is a master of scarcity. They send only 1-2 of each piece to each store so every store has a different selection and every item is the last or second to last item in stock. This allows them to price far above market and turn buying impulses into purchases.

  • With services, especially if you want to consistently get customers, it can be a little trickier to use scarcity. But I will show you a few simple ways to employ scarcity ethically to increase your take rates on offers. These all have similar elements with very slight tweaks. I’m enumerating these because one of these might mentally fit your business model more than others.
    1. Total Business Cap - Only accepting….X Clients. Only accepting X clients at this level of service (on-going). This puts a cap on how many clients you service but also keeps them in it. You create a waiting list for new prospects. The moment the door opens, they jump right in and price resistance disappears. Periodically, you can increase capacity by 10-20% then cap it again. This works well for your highest tiers or service levels. This is like saying “My agency only will service twenty-five customers total. Period.” Over time you can increase your prices and squeeze the lower performing accounts out and bring in new more profitable accounts, or, you can periodically ‘open slots’ as your capacity allows (always leaving some demand unmet).
    2. Growth Rate Cap - Only accepting X clients per week (on-going) “We only accept 5 new clients per week and we already have the first 3 spots taken. I have 6 more calls this week, so you can take the spot or one of my next calls and you can wait until we reopen.” I have used this method since the beginning of my business. I always knew what my capacity was per week, and simply chose to let our prospects know how many openings we had left. This banks on the fact that you can only handle a certain amount of new clients anyways, on a regular basis, so you might as well let them know it.
    3. Cohort Cap - Only accepting….X clients per class or cohort. Similar to the above, except done on whatever cadence you desire. Only accepting X amount per class or cohort over a given period is another way of thinking about it. Imagine you only start clients monthly or quarterly. This helps you get some cadences in place in your business operationally while also allowing your sales team some legitimate scarcity. Example: “We take on 100 clients 4 times a year. We open the doors then close them.” Etc.

  • Extreme Scarcity: If you don’t hate money, sell a very limited supply of 1-on-1 access. You can do that via any of the mediums described in “Delivery Cube.” Direct message access. Email Access. Phone access. Voice memo access. Zoom access. Etc. There are lots of ways you can do this. But I promise you this - if you want to immediately make a lot of money, create a very exclusive service level based on access to you (yes, unscalable), that you cap at a tiny number. Price it very high. Then, tell people. You will make more money than you thought possible. These also tend to be some of the best clients. And limit your delivery to something that you don’t hate. For me, I hate emails and messages but dont mind zoom calls. Make it work for your working style. The cream of the crop (the 1% of 1% will adjust and take action).

  • Once You’re Out, You Can Never Come Back: You can create scarcity by also capping your service level and saying that if they leave than can never return. This type of scarcity makes people think extra hard about leaving. I started doing this with my gyms early on. Then I was in a mastermind that employed this. Then I started using it in my higher level of Gym Lords. This works best with small groups (like the above example). As groups become much bigger, the tactic loses some teeth (speaking from experience)

  • Scarcity is a function of quantity. Urgency is a function of time.

  • Having a defined deadline or cut off for a purchase or action to occur creates urgency. Frequently, scarcity and urgency are used together.

  • Four ways of using urgency on a consistent basis, ethically: 1) Rolling Cohorts, 2) Rolling Seasonal Urgency, and 3) Promotional or Pricing Urgency 4) Exploding Opportunity.

  • The actual promotion may be the same, but naming it something different “by season” gives you a “real” differentiator that gives you a start and a finish. Deadlines drive decisions. By simply having these, you can point to them and let human beings push themselves over the edge so as not to miss out.          

  • Local Businesses must vary their marketing more frequently than national advertisers. Putting a new wrapper with a date on the same core service gives you urgency and novelty that will consistently outperform the “same old” campaigns.

  • A single offer is less valuable than the same offer broken into its component parts and stacked as 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.

  • When selling one on one, you ask for the sale first, before offering the bonuses. If they say yes, then after they have signed up, you let them know the additional bonuses they’re going to get. This creates a wow experience and reinforces their decision to buy. On the other hand, if the person does not buy after the first ask, then you present a bonus that matches their perceived obstacle, then ask again. Don’t feel weird about asking again. You simply agree with the prospect, add the bonus, and ask if this consolation was “Fair enough.” People have a hard time rejecting reciprocity, so adding a bonus to accommodate, then another, then another, and people will feel almost obligated to buy from you.

  • There are a few key things to remember when offering bonuses:
    1. Always offer them
    2. Give them a special name that has a benefit in the title
    3. Tell them:
      • How it relates to their issue
      • What it is
      • How you discovered it, or what you had to do to create it
      • How it will specifically improve their lives or make their experience: Faster, easier or less effort/sacrifice (value equation)
    4. Provide some proof (this can be a stat, a past client, or personal experience) to prove that this thing is valuable
    5. Paint a vivid mental image of what their life will be like assuming they have already used it and are experiencing the benefits
    6. Always ascribe a price tag to them and justify it
    7. Tools & checklists are better than additional trainings (as the effort & time are lower with the former, so the value is higher. The value equation still reigns supreme).
    8. They should each address a specific concern/obstacle in the prospects mind about why they can’t or won’t be successful (bonus should prove their belief incorrect)
    9. This can also be what they would logically realize they will need next. You want to solve their next problem before they even encounter it.
    10. The value of the bonuses should eclipse the value of the core offer. Psychologically as you continue to add offers, it continues to expand the price to value discrepancy. It also, subconsciously communicates that the core offer must be valuable because if these are the bonuses, the main thing has to be more valuable than the bonuses right? (No, but you can use this psychological bias to make your offer seem wildly compelling).
    11. You can further enhance the value of your bonuses by adding scarcity and urgency to the bonus themselves (which takes this technique and puts it on steroids).

  • 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. So here’s what to do: Create checklists, tools, swipe files, scripts, templates, and anything else that would take lots of time and effort to create on one’s own, but is easy to use once created. Anything that you can invest in one time that clearly cost time or money to create, but can be given away endless time is a perfect fit for a bonus. Beyond that, make a habit to record every workshop, every webinar, every event, every interview and use them as additional bonuses (as needed to crush a perceived obstacle). Proactively negotiate group discounts and a referral commission with adjacent businesses that solve needs your customer will have as a result of beginning this process with you. What’s the next natural thing they might want? Go to those businesses, get a deal for them they could never get for themselves (because you are negotiating with the purchasing power of all your customers at once, very powerful).

  • The single greatest objection for any product or service being sold is…drum roll…risk. Risk that it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do for them. Therefore, 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 reverse it. That being said, how much more attractive can a guarantee make an offer? Jason Fladlien once stated that he had seen the conversion on an offer 2-4x simply by changing the quality of the guarantee. It’s that important.

  • From an overarching perspective there are four types of guarantees:
    • Unconditional
    • Conditional
    • Anti-Guarantee
    • Implied Guarantees.      

  • You must always hit your guarantee hard, even if you don’t have one. Say it boldly and give the reason why.

  • For a guarantee to not be worth it, the increase in sales would have to be 100 percent offset by people who refunded. So an absolute increase in sales of 5 percent would need to be offset by an absolute increase in refunds of 5 percent (but that might be a doubling of refunds, which is unlikely). So, for the most part, the stronger the guarantee, the higher the net increase in total purchases, even if the refund rate increases alongside it.

  • While guarantees can be effective sellers, people who buy because of guarantees can become very shitty customers. A person who only buys because of a guarantee is a person who may not be willing to put in the work necessary to see success with your product or service. In a world where you want to reverse risk and get customers the best outcome possible, tying your guarantee to the things they need to do to be successful can help all parties.

  • If you have a tremendous amount of cost associated with your product or service, you will likely want to employ a conditional guarantee or an ANTI guarantee, as you will have to eat the cost of the refund AND the cost of fulfilling.

  • An experienced salesman understands that, like bonuses, you can actually stack guarantees. For example, you could give an unconditional 30 day no questions asked guarantee then on top of that give a conditional triple your money back 90 day guarantee. That would be an example of stacking an unconditional with a conditional guarantee. You can also stack two conditional guarantees around different (or sequential) outcomes. For example, you’ll make $10,000 by 60 days, $30,000 by 90 days as long as you do thing 1, 2, and 3. This future paces the prospect into an outcome they now believe is far more likely (since you will be deliberately spelling it out in a conditional guarantee with a timeline for achievement). Doing this shows the prospect you are serious about getting them results and convinced that they will achieve what they want. This shifts the burden of risk back from them onto us…a very powerful strategy.

  • Unconditional vs Conditional Based on Business Type: Bigger broader guarantees work better with lower ticket B2C businesses (many people just won’t bother taking the time). The higher the ticket, and the more business oriented it is, the more you want to steer towards specific guarantees. That may or may not include refunds, and may or may not have conditions.

  • M-A-G-I-C formula: Attention (M-Magnet), Discrimination (A-Avatar), Purpose (G-Goal), Timeline (I-Interval), and Method (C-Container)

  • Good rhymes stick in people’s minds. Rhyme your program name to win the game. Google “rhyming dictionary” for an easy shortcut. Note - Don’t try and force it. It’s not a requirement, it’s just a “nice-to-have”. Ex: Six-Pack Fast Track, 5-Day Book Print Sprint, Marriage Thrive Deep Dive, 12-Week 2-Putt Shortcut, 12-Month No-Debt Reset, Celebrity Butt Shortcut, Get Some Ass Masterclass.

  • Alliteration is when you make all (or most) of the words start with the same letter or sound.

  • An alternative approach to rhyming is to use alliteration when naming your program. This is easier for most people than rhyming. Again, you do not need to rhyme or alliterate. Don’t force it. Ex: Make Money Masterclass, Change Your Life Challenge, Big Booty Bootcamp, Debt Detox, Real Estate Reset, Life Coach Liftoff, Etc.