Latest / Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue / Crafting Strong Offers: A Question, a Warning, and a Myth

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Crafting Strong Offers: A Question, a Warning, and a Myth · Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: When people come to me and tell me they want to work on their sales process, most of the time they want to start talking about lead gen and they want to talk about their sales script and they just want to learn how to close better.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: What I have found is that if your offer is weak, it doesn't matter how great your leads are.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter if you have the best script in the whole world or if you are the best closer.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: If your offer sucks, you are not going to close anyone.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're going to talk about today.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm going to give you a question, a warning, and a myth to consider before you ever launch a new offer.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: These are principles that have helped me launch successful offers in my agency, in my coaching business, and in a lot of different side hustles that I've been a part of.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also going to get into some of the really terrible business ideas that I had.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's worth listening to this episode just so you can hear about some of the awful business ideas that never came to fruition.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: First step is the question.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually what I'm going to call the$100,000 question.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It is the question my husband asks me every single time I bring him a new business idea.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: How many would you need to sell in order to reach$100,000?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's not asking because he's a jerk or because he expects every idea that I have to hit$100,000.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He's asking because it's one of the best metrics that we've seen for how to measure if something is actually going to scale.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: My husband has known me since I was 16 years old and he has heard every crazy idea that I've had, the ones that have generated money and the ones that have been truly awful.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you one of my favorite terrible ones.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I was about two months postpartum and I had sewn exactly one baby dress.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I had bought a sewing machine just for fun at Walmart.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I had bought this little pattern and I was so excited for my new little baby to make her this dress.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I finished it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was, I would say, fine at best.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of issues with it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I came to him and was like, I think that I might want to open a baby boutique.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: This has been so fun.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think that I could definitely take this and run with it.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: My husband, being so kind, did not say, hey, maybe you should sew more than one in order to see if this is something you actually like doing or could do at scale.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: He just really kindly said, How many do you think you need to sell to hit six figures?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I started to do the math.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, well, I started really looking at the dress.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, maybe at best I could sell it for, I don't know, like$50.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, okay, that's about 2,000 baby dresses.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: How long do you think that would take you?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it all of a sudden the math just slapped me in the face.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, that's a lot.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, yeah, you'd need like an army of elves in order to get that done.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: This was a silly example and one that we can chalk up to a severe lack of sleep and delusion from having a newborn.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I actually had a version of this at Lawson House too.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was a stretch where I really wanted to build out a t-shirt line, a whole lifestyle merch brand for the agency.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't necessarily a bad idea, right?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can do this really well.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And there are people that do this all the time and are really successful with it.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, I wasn't one of those people and I didn't have that skill set.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had never grown a clothing business.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what sourcing looks like.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had no idea how to calculate in costs that way.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I just honestly thought it sounded really fun and thought we're really good at social media.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: How hard could it be?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: When I realized that we would need to sell 3,333 t-shirts at$30 a piece in order to hit$100,000.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that was way before costs or anything else.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I started to rethink things.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: It helped put it in perspective to me, not to say that this wasn't a good idea or that one day I couldn't pursue this, but I had a lot more education to do, and it was going to be a lot harder than I originally anticipated.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: This question might seem like a downer, but I think that's because of the examples that I'm giving.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: There have been a lot of times where I have created an offer and I've looked at it and said, wow, actually, we only need to sell 10 of these to get to$100,000.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or we only need to sell 25 of these.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if we upsell people, we really only need to sell like 18.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the kinds of offers for me that started to click.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: We had the leads for that.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: We had the lead flow.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are definitely people who make this work with low ticket.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: They understand the math.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: They have the following.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: They have the ad structure.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: For us, when we looked at the effort to get to$100,000, it was so much easier for us to sell high ticket than it was for us to get distracted by low ticket.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: My second thing that I wish more people would take into account with their offers is a warning.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Alex Ramosi's book talks about this so beautifully in$100 million offer.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about building what he calls the Grand Slam offer, an offer position so well that people almost feel dumb not for buying it.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the part of the book that really stuck with me wasn't the offer framework itself.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was him talking about how many offers he tried before he hit the one that worked.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, one of the best things I ever did in my own business was try multiple offers instead of betting everything on the first thing I came up with.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: My warning to you is this don't fall in love with your offer before you've seen if people actually want to buy it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: I have watched so many business owners get caught in the trap of thinking, oh my gosh, I know exactly what my audience wants.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I know exactly what these people need.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe they have a following, maybe they don't, but they haven't asked their following what they actually want to buy from them.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when the money doesn't show up and the money doesn't come in, that's when they start to blame sales.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: They start to blame marketing.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We just need more leads.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: We just need better people.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have a team that's bought in enough.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody else gets the blame.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in a lot of cases, from what I have seen, it is the offer itself.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: If nobody's buying it, the law of supply and demand has spoken.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's not enough demand for what you are trying to supply.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: What I love about what Alex Cremosi says is you need to place your bets wide and far.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: You need to go and create a lot of different offers so that you can find out what people actually want and what they want to pay you for.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not saying you should open a baby boutique of hand-sewn clothes and run a website design agency.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: That would be crazy.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just need to be willing to test things and let the market speak.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: For example, if you're a social media agency, you might think people really want full service, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok management, all bundled into one.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: You might also want to try offering, hey, we do individual channels as well and start testing it and see which one is easier to sell and what converts well.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you have an intro offer and you call it a social strategy.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe the next time you sell it, you pitch it as a social audit and you see which one starts to convert better.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Alex Dermosey's whole principle is really around this idea of testing out multiple things and letting your customers tell you what they like with their credit card numbers.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: You want to see what people actually buy.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is going to be your best data.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so far I have given you a question and I've given you a warning.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm going to give you a myth that I want to debunk.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is called the passive revenue myth.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's an idea floating around the internet that passive revenue means you wake up one day and money just shows up without effort.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And from what I've seen, that is never ever how it works.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Passive revenue requires a massive amount of effort on the front end.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not effortless, it's just effort that happens on a different timeline.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I have sold things where I got paid up front and the delivery on the back end is brutal.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have also put in a ton of work into building things on the front end that ended up paying me for years afterwards with very little ongoing effort.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Both of these required a lot of work.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The only difference is where I put the effort in and when I got paid for it.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of my clients will tell me, I really just wish I had a passive revenue income.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And my question back to them is always, do you have the time to invest in that now?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's time, sometimes it's money, but typically there is an investment of both that is required in order to set yourself up for passive revenue.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The internet does not want you to believe this.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody wants you to buy their course on how they created passive revenue.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you just follow me and you do my click funnel thing, guess what?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to sell their own passive revenue stream.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's so easy for us to look at somebody else's outcome of all the work they've put in up front and say, oh my gosh, they're just making money in their sleep.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, they might be making money in their sleep now, but they had a lot of sleepless nights to get that ready so that it would be passive later.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: All right, y'all, those are my three things that I wish everybody could take with them when they are building a new offer.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The next time you are working on offers, I want you to ask yourself how quickly you can get to$100,000 with this offer.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to find ways to test it, not falling in love with any offer before you actually have seen that this is what the market wants and there's a demand for it.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to make sure that you don't fall trapped to believing that it should be easier.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to require work.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Most things, I would say, I'll say this with an asterisk, everything that produces revenue requires some amount of work, whether it's up front or on the back end.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you take these principles to heart, your offers will be stronger and more resilient, paying you out in the long run.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know what your offers should look like and you want some help brainstorming that, I would love to meet with you.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can visit my website, susiecoli.com, and book a time for us to chat.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to hear more about your offers and help you get to the bottom of what is going to help you scale the fastest.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone else, I can't wait to be with you again next week.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, so well.