Irresistible Offers: One Offer To Rule Them All

Shane Melaugh

Hello, and welcome to the ActiveGrowth Podcast. This is our second episode in our new series about How to Create Irresistible Offers. Today, we cover many topics that will help you create irresistible offers, and get all the benefits that come from that. Among other things, we will cover in more details what exactly the difference is between your product and an offer.

We will also talk about how you can, once you have decided on a product idea, or once you have an idea of the market you want to enter, how you can take that product idea or take the skills that you have and spin it out into multiple different offers. We will give you a framework and clear action steps for how to test those offers to find out which ones are the best ones, because as is often the case, the way to arrive at an irresistible offer is not basically to think your way there. It is to test and see what works in the real world.

Shane Melaugh

Being able to create multiple offers is a very important thing. You want to be able to create multiple offers then test them, so you can find out for sure and validate which one is the most irresistible one. We'll also look at multiple examples of businesses that were launched with such test offers to validate before the real business was created and the product was created.

Shane Melaugh

We'll also look at how you can put together a short pitch that you can use to present to people and use to create landing pages for validating your offers. All this and more in today's episode. To get the show notes, the transcript for this episode, and links to many of the things we talk about during this episode, go to activegrowth.com/16. That is also where you can leave a comment either by writing or leave a voice comment if you want to get back to us or ask questions or have any feedback. All that is at activegrowth.com/16. I'm Shane Melaugh.

Hanne Vervaeck

And I'm Hanne Vervaeck.

Shane Melaugh

In today's episode, we will dive deeper into how to create irresistible offers. Now, in the last episode, we already talked about how you should avoid general offers, where you try to kind of be everything to everyone, and niche down on a more specific idea and with a clear focus.

Shane Melaugh

Today, we're going to continue on that and give you more tools of how to get clarity about, first of all, how to come up with different offers, different potential offers that you can already put together, and also how to evaluate them. How do you pick the best one? How do you find out what will eventually end up working? We're talking about testing the market value of something, and basically, again, getting to that point like we talked about last time.

Shane Melaugh

You want to get to that point where you have this hell yes kind of offer where you can make an offer to people that they just cannot resist, that they really, really want. Where they're not just like, "Yeah, that sounds good." They really have this hell yes moment when they hear what you have to offer. Let's start by, first of all, talking about the difference between what is the product and what is an offer?

Shane Melaugh

Because we've already talked about these are not the same things. We're not talking about, when I say find the right offer or make a good offer, I'm not saying that one offer could be oh, I'm selling a pencil and the other offer is I'm selling a banana. They're two totally different products. Those will be different products. Pencils and bananas different products, but different offers. You can think of that almost as a subcategory of a product.

Shane Melaugh

For example, different offers can be extrapolated from existing skills that you have, or from the product idea you've already come up with. By the way, if you don't have a product idea yet, then go back and listen to our earlier series where we talk about how to arrive at a product idea in the first place. I'll link to that in the show notes of course. If you're listening to this thinking, "Well, I have no idea at all. I don't even have a product yet," then maybe you should start there.

Shane Melaugh

As an example, if you have an existing skill that you know around this skill is where I will create my offer, then to give you an example, let's say the skill is SEO, search engine optimization. This is in the olden days, one of the businesses I had was around this. From a skill of SEO, from understanding how search engine optimization works and being able to do this for websites, there are many different offers that can come from that.

Shane Melaugh

It could be an SEO online course, teach people how to do that. It could be an SEO service, doing SEO for other people's websites. It could even be something like let's say an on-location SEO training for companies that have search marketing teams, and even there, you can then refine the offer further and you can say, okay, or maybe the problem is you've got your SEO team in your company, but you're worried about being able to keep up because Google changes rules all the time.

Shane Melaugh

The landscape is changing all the time, and you're worried that your team is not up to speed. The service I offer is I keep your team up to speed. Those will be different. That's an example of different offers within the same skill. Those aren't necessarily completely different products, because the product is always search engine optimization. It's different ways of offering that product.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think someone who is doing a really good job with this is Bushra Azhar, because she actually has membership sites around copywriting about persuasive copies. It's very specific to that. I don't know how much anymore, $7 per month membership, but she also has high end consulting around the same persuasive copy. Then now she comes out with a tool where actually you can fill out some copy and then you get persuasive copy in return, something like that. It's very specific, but it's different offers around the same topic.

Shane Melaugh

If you think about all the different offers that you might be able to make around your skillset or around your product, then I want you to think of it like this. There are probably dozens, maybe even hundreds of potential offers you could make. Many of them are basically doomed to fail, right? Many of these possible offers you could make are offers that are just not economically viable. There's not enough people who are interested in that. People wouldn't be willing to pay for it, or some other problem like that.

Shane Melaugh

Some of those possible offers are winners. Some of them are great winners. Some of them are irresistible offers, that could be the basis for a massively successful business. The goal is to find those. Among all the potential offers, find the ones that have the most potential and will bring the most impact. In most cases, we can't just guess our way there.

Shane Melaugh

As we've talked about before, generally if we kind of just sit in our ivory tower and try to think our way to a solution of the problem, or try to think our way to the perfect offer. It's just not going to work. Our best guess is usually not that great. That's another thing to keep in mind.

Shane Melaugh

Another thing, it's also important to not be too attached to like the first product idea and the first idea for an offer you come up with, because maybe it's one of those 90 plus percent of potential ideas that's just not going to work. Another way in which different offers can come from the same product or the same skillset is by presenting the same thing using different value propositions.

Shane Melaugh

This is, let's say, one level deeper in terms of detail. We have essentially a product that does specific thing, and we're trying different ways of framing the value of that product to see which one hits home. To give you an example, from my own experience, let's say Thrive Themes as a business, and the Thrive Architect plugin as a product. I can frame Thrive Architect. I can formulate different offers and different value propositions around this product, without changing anything about the product.

Shane Melaugh

I can say, for example, "Thrive Architect is the perfect tool for creating sales pages in WordPress." If you ever tried to create a sales page using WordPress, using the WordPress theme or something like that, it's an unbelievably frustrating experience, because WordPress is just not built for that kind of thing.

Shane Melaugh

WordPress is great. WordPress is great to write a blog post, but as soon as you want to format a sales page, you want to have some layouts there, you want to have control over what that page looks like, and you want even things like pricing tables, buttons, and things like that, it becomes incredibly frustrating in WordPress. Thrive Architect is the solution to this problem. That's one way to frame Thrive Architect.

Shane Melaugh

I can take the same product and make a different offer. I can say, "Thrive Architect is the tool for professional bloggers." Because as we've seen over and over again, and there's a lot of data to support that, rich blog posts, that means well formatted, media rich blog posts that offer more than just a wall of text do better across all metrics. They get more attention from readers. They lower the bounce rate from your website. They get more social shares. They get more traffic. They lead to higher conversions if there's some conversion goal involved in the blog post.

Shane Melaugh

You cannot afford to use the WordPress editor to write boring, old blog posts. You have to start enriching your blog content with things like mobile responsive tables, with interesting layouts, with highlight boxes, and so on, to keep your content more interesting, to keep people's attention, but also to make it look more professional, to make your brand more credible, and to basically help give people a reason to share this, give people a reason to keep paying attention and share with their friends. That is what Thrive Architect can do for you that the default WordPress editor can't.

Shane Melaugh

Those are two different value propositions for the same product. These are two that I could test. They would have different target audiences, and I would want to test which of these target audiences, when they hear this offer, is more excited to give me money for this product.

Hanne Vervaeck

Yeah, I think it's very clear actually. I wonder if you who's listening to this can feel the difference. Like probably one of those two is much more appealing to you than the other one. That's exactly what we are looking for.

Hanne Vervaeck

We're looking to see which of these offers would be the most appealing to the biggest audience, and for which people would actually be ready to pay money. Here, yeah I know which one I prefer, but it's very clear I think that when you hear the different pitches, that even though it's the same program, even though it's the same software, it doesn't feel the same at all.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly. Also, note that if I tried to ... Of course, I could spin more such pitches with Thrive Architect, because it does more than sales pages and blog posts as well. I could do many more of these. Imagine if I tried to convince you of all of these different values all at the same time. If I had one pitch where I'm like, "Oh, you can build sales pages, but also blog posts, and also landing pages, and also ..." Then it becomes one of these trying to be everything to everyone offer, and then I lose your attention, right?

Shane Melaugh

Now also, these pitches I just made for Thrive Architect, you can think of them like as extended elevator pitches, right? It's more than just an elevator pitch, which will be one or two sentences. It will be an elevator pitch, plus two or three follow-up sentences once you've gotten someone's attention. This is the kind of pitch I want you to be able to create for your offers, for the ideas for your offers.

Shane Melaugh

You need to arrive at, and this is one of the ... We will get to the action steps in the exercise at the end of this episode as well, but this is one of the goals is that you'll be able to write out concise pitches like the ones I just presented for Thrive Architect. These are the ones that you're going to be presenting and testing.

Shane Melaugh

Another way in which different offers can be derived from a single product or from a single skillset is that you can sell the same kind of thing in different forms. Two examples of that will be, first of all, let's say the thing that you're selling is information. Information can be sold in many different ways. It could be an online course. It could be in person training, one-on-one training or group training. It could be an eBook or a print book. It could be Skype coaching, and so on.

Shane Melaugh

Again, this is another example where you're essentially selling the same thing. You're selling the same information, but depending on how you package it and whom you make the offer to, it will have very different results. These different modalities of information will appeal to different people, will be able to command different prices, and will mean that you can reach more or fewer people.

Shane Melaugh

Now, an example of this will be a lot of authors also do speaking, right? They have these two modalities. One, the book, which is very low price and can reach a lot of people, but it's not very exciting. Most people don't get very excited about a book. On the other hand, then there's the speaking gig, where you can go and see this person live, which is very limited.

Shane Melaugh

There's only so many people who can fit in that room, and usually much, much more experience. You can see that these two modalities of information, even if essentially this author is talking about the same thing in the book and in the speech, appeal to different people, are going to be sold to different groups of people, and at totally different prices.

Shane Melaugh

The second example would be a physical product. Even a physical product can be sold, let's say eCommerce, people come to your website, they add whatever they want, however much they want to their carts and they buy it. Or it can be sold, for example, as a subscription, right? We've seen a rise of subscription services, whether it's getting a new razor every month or new pair of underpants, whatever, subscription boxes of various kinds for physical products. Again, same kind of thing, you're selling the same thing, but different modalities appeal to different people, different situations, and make for very, very different offers.

Shane Melaugh

All right, now that we have a basis of how you can spin your product idea on your skillset into different offers, the goal is to test which of these will be the best, which of these makes an irresistible offer. The first thing you need to do here is you need to know where and how to reach your audience. My first example here of where and how to reach your audience is that you have a social circle made of friends, friends of friends, relatives, coworkers and so on.

Shane Melaugh

That is one example of how you can reach maybe some people who would be in your potential audience. If you have an idea for an offer, through these social connections, you can maybe find some people. We talked about that last, and that's actually one of the criteria, right? If you make an offer and you ask a friend, "Do you know someone who could use this? Do you know someone who might appreciate this?"

Shane Melaugh

If they basically draw a blank and go, "No, no idea," then that's not a great sign. But if they go, "Oh yeah, I know this one guy who definitely has the problem you're talking about," that's a good sign, and also maybe you should go and talk to that guy as we're going to talk about next.

Shane Melaugh

I also want to bring something else up here, because as soon as I mentioned this, I bet some of you listening were like, "Oh my God, no," because you don't want to go and pitch stuff to your friends. There's a certain fear of presenting this kind of thing or like pitching to your friends or social circle. That is justified, especially if you've had the experience, as I'm sure you have, of the kind of thing where people are like flogging some multi-level marketing nonsense and trying to get their friends by this stuff.

Hanne Vervaeck

Oh yeah.

Shane Melaugh

It's like, "No, I don't want your bloody weight loss scam or whatever."

Hanne Vervaeck

I was just going to say that that is one of those when somebody calls you and it's like, well you usually don't call me. That's mostly how that starts. We usually send text messages and then have a coffee together, but now you're calling me because apparently you have this thing where you have to call 10 people.

Hanne Vervaeck

Then you start with this script of like, "Hey Hanne, you travel a lot, right?" I'm like, "Yes, you know I do. Why are you asking me this?" "Wouldn't it be better if you could have the lowest price each time?" I'm like, "OMG, where is this going? Okay, I see where this is going. Let's not go there."

Hanne Vervaeck

I think it's completely different. I just want to ... Because actually that same friend, now started a children's clothing brand, which is amazing. It's like eco-friendly clothes, and I have no problem sharing her Facebook posts and trying and like ask my little nieces if they want to be actually models for her brand and whatever. But when she tried putting that MLM stuff on me, I was like no.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, it's so cringeworthy. Here's the thing. The problem is that when we see a bad offer, which is exactly what that is, it's a bad offer. If we see a bad offer, it sticks out to us like a sore thumb, and it's terrible if we ... It's cringeworthy if you have to sit through someone and make a bad offer. It's terrible, and we don't want to be that person, which is good. That's totally justifiable. Don't be that person.

Shane Melaugh

Here's the thing. What we tend to miss is that a good offer doesn't feel like an offer at all. That's why we have this idea, well anytime someone pitches something, I hate it because you only notice it when it's bad, right? Here's a simple thought experiment you can do. Think of a hypothetical product that is absurdly specific to your needs. Think about how you'd feel if someone pitched that you.

Shane Melaugh

Let me give you an example. If someone came to me and said, "Look, here's a lightweight portable travel blender." I know that sounds weird, but here's the thing. I love green smoothies. I really love green smoothies very much. So much so that when I'm traveling, if I'm in a place for more than three weeks, I will go and buy a blender just so I can have green smoothies for those three weeks. I then inevitably have to leave it behind because blenders are huge and bulky, and I can't travel with them.

Hanne Vervaeck

A lot of Airbnb hosts have been very happy to find me a blender.

Shane Melaugh

I have literally sponsored my blenders to about a dozen Airbnb hosts at this point.

Hanne Vervaeck

I have to say that I was on the opposite direction where somebody bought a blender just before me, and I was very happy about it.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, it's great. Maybe that was me, who knows? So yeah, for me if someone told me, "Here's somehow ... " Don't ask me the physics of this, "But here's somehow a collapsible lightweight travel blender," I would be all over that. Of course, as I said, this is absurdly specific. I'm probably the only customer for this in the world, but that's fine.

Shane Melaugh

That's what I mean is like if someone came, and no matter if it's a friend or someone, even if someone stopped me in the street and said, "Hey, I have a travel blender," I'd be all over that. That's so good. That's exactly what I want. This is how you should think about, or this hopefully shows you that a good offer is never cringeworthy, and it's never unwelcome. It doesn't feel like an offer at all. It feels like oh my God, finally. That's what we're trying to get to.

Shane Melaugh

As we talked about last time, if you're basically already starting to talk people to see does this offer resonate with anyone that you know, that's the way to start calibrating. You want to keep calibrating until you can get that effect. Until you can talk to the right person and they get super excited about what you're talking about, right?

Shane Melaugh

Now, another thing, there's a few more things in which you can do this reaching your audience thing. It depends on what your product and your offer is in some cases. In some cases, for example, just hitting the pavement, very old school, is going to be a good solution. Depending on if you have some kind of an offer, for example, that is relevant to small business owners or business owners, you could easily get out the house and go to all of your local gyms or hairdressers or car mechanics or whatever, and pitch your thing to the owners.

Shane Melaugh

Same thing here, right? These people will all tell you, "I hate being sold to," but if you come to them with something that's truly an irresistible offer that's really made for them and solves an important problem they have, they will love that, and they will want to hear more. That's what we want to get to.

Shane Melaugh

Then as we've talked about in previous episodes, of course there are options like online groups, people who manage online groups, forums, newsletters owners, niche blogs, websites and so on and so forth. I just wanted to also bring this back because we've talked about this before, but it's so important that you don't just have a precise idea of what is my product. But you can also very specifically point to a group of people and say, "These are the people that this product is for, and here's where they hang out." That is, again, very, very important to be very clear about when you create your offer.

Hanne Vervaeck

Now, the thing is that we've started out with the idea of being paid for coaching. That's one of the methods that we use in order to get to a product basically. The problem is that it's not because people will pay you for coaching, that they actually will pay for an online program. It's still, like Shane already explained, most of those modalities can actually fail, because people might be interested in what you have to offer, but not at all the way you're offering it.

Hanne Vervaeck

That's why getting actual money is really important, because talking to people is necessary. Having them to actually hand over money is the real validation that you need. Now, if you can go out, talk to people and convince them to buy your offer, that's amazing. That's where you want to be. But there are some other ways that you can actually do this online too.

Hanne Vervaeck

One of those methods has been promoted by The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss' book. The way that he suggests that you actually validate if your idea or your offer is a good offer is by having a landing page and sending traffic to that landing page. Mostly this will be paid traffic, because you want to get a result quickly. Then from there, you can actually measure how many people would click the buy button. This is something that I think it used to be easier several years ago, because it was easier to buy traffic, but I still believe that this can work very well in very specific niches.

Shane Melaugh

I think it can be very ... It's like a hard test, right? Because buying traffic is generally becoming more competitive and more expensive, if you can make that work, if you can get people to pay attention to your ad and click through and interact in the flood of ads and so on that they're seeing, I think that's a hard but good validation.

Hanne Vervaeck

Like we said, making an offer to friends and family can be very hard, especially the moment that you start talking about actually exchanging money, but if you listen to Rob Walling from Drip, he actually did that to validate the idea before starting Drip. He emailed his friends and asked them to pay a specific monthly fee for the service. Even before the service existed, he asked people not just to pay once, but to pay a monthly fee for the service.

Hanne Vervaeck

He only started thinking and working on Drip once he had 10 people paying him. That is super valuable, because here it's not just somebody, your mom being like, "Oh yeah, I will give you $20, don't worry." It's actually people committing to be like, "Yes, I'm going to pay whatever amount that you just set out every month because this is how valuable your service would be to me," because it's not even a service at that point.

Shane Melaugh

That's pretty ballsy. I think there's also something that is implied here, that is a networking thing. Because of course when Rob Walling asks his friends, he asks his like entrepreneurial online marketing friends, and presumably he's built a bit of a network, he's hang out with people, with like-minded people who would be in the position where that makes sense. I think that's also another aspect where it can be really, really useful to maybe go to meetups and conferences and things where you do meet like-minded people, makes this kind of thing easier to pull off I think.

Hanne Vervaeck

That goes back again to knowing where your audience is.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly, yeah.

Hanne Vervaeck

If you have no idea who your audience is and how to connect with them, it's never going to work.

Shane Melaugh

There are many examples actually of companies that started small, and they started with this kind of validation. Buffer is a pretty famous example I think where initially they simply had this very simple landing page advertising their offer as if it existed. Then once you clicked on one of the buy now buttons, then you'd get to the landing page saying, "Oh sorry, this actually doesn't exist yet."

Shane Melaugh

They basically wanted to see how many people would click and how many people would share. A lot of people shared this. People got excited about the idea of this app existing, and that was their signal to start. Another example of this was Dropbox, where this was a bit more sophisticated, because they launched with a video where someone was "using" Dropbox, except Dropbox didn't exist yet.

Shane Melaugh

They basically created a prototype like a simulation of what they envisioned the interface would look like. Or I think they maybe even rendered the whole thing like an aftereffect to make it look like someone using a desktop app, but it wasn't actually. It was all pre-rendered. They used that to give people a clear idea of this is the thing we want to build, and again tried to see how many people wanted to sign up for this. How excited are people about this? Only once they had did they actually start building the tool

Shane Melaugh

Now, these are all things that are worth considering. As you can tell, different methods here will make sense in different markets. This kind of simulation mock up thing makes sense for a piece of software, it doesn't make sense for many other things, right? To give you some more examples. There are two examples out of my own experience that might be useful.

Shane Melaugh

My first product, I'll link in the show notes to the course where you can read about, it's like a mini course where you can read about how I arrived at my first product. I won't go into a lot of detail in case you already know that, and if you don't, you can go to the show notes and sign up to read that. Basically, I had a slow approach to a product with kind of validating every step along the way through the content I created on the blog, but then more importantly through free guides.

Shane Melaugh

I would put out free guides on different topics. I would feel up what are people interested in? Which ones get downloaded more? Which ones do I get more emails and replies about, and which ones don't work? That's how I then finally arrived at a beta version of my product, got some feedback from early customers, and then had a final product.

Shane Melaugh

This is a very, very cautious and slow approach. In general, I don't recommend that you're so cautious. I recommend that you move faster basically. But that's an example of how you can kind of field your way forward and validate your way towards an information product. Then Thrive Themes is actually also an example where really it started at a product review. It started with a roundup review of visual editors.

Shane Melaugh

I tried to test all the visual editors that existed at the time for WordPress. My conclusion was, well all of them suck a little bit. In the comments on that review post, I started having discussion with people and some of them suggested, "Why don't you make one? It seems like you've got this figured out." I'd made software stuff before, and kind of out of that arose this idea.

Shane Melaugh

That was the validation where people basically looked at this review and agreed with me and said, "Yeah, I've tried this, that and the other and it doesn't do what I want." Out of this arose the validation, the idea that yes we should build a thing of our own. There are people here that are excited about this.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think what you're saying about your first product and then going through the whole slow approach, probably like one way to shorten this a little bit would be instead of you writing on the free guides and free contents, look what's doing well for your competition. If you can see that one of their articles or one category on their website gets shared much more often, or gets much more engagement, then probably people are more interested in that.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, absolutely.

Hanne Vervaeck

Another one, which is actually Kickstarter made a business model out of this, because what Kickstarter actually is, is for physical products, a validation method, because you're asking people to pay money even before the product exists. You can immediately see when you look at Kickstarter, some products like they bomb completely, and other products just get funded 500%, right?

Hanne Vervaeck

We're not going to go into the details of how Kickstarter would work and how you can game the system and blah, blah, blah, or how you need your own audience and whatever. At one point, if you get 500% of people like of your initial budget and thousands of people saying like, "Yes, I want to wait two months, three months, four months for this product to come out," you probably hit a good market pain point.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. That's also a good way to see examples of irresistible offers. Those are clearly well put together offers, the ones that do so well. Like Hanne said, we're not going to go into a lot of detail. I wouldn't actually recommend for most cases, I wouldn't actually recommend using Kickstarter. There are many caveats there. If you're interested, let us know in the comments. We can talk about that in more detail that will go beyond the scope of today's episode.

Shane Melaugh

Now, with these validation methods in mind, the next important thing is basically it's time to interview people again. We've talked about this before and our Forget Traffic series of how you can interview people and arrive at a profitable business much sooner than the traditional I'm going to build a website and do SEO for 10 years kind of approach.

Shane Melaugh

Yes, you've heard that right. We're talking about interviewing people again. You're probably thinking, I don't want to do that. It's the thing you probably don't want to do, right? We have resistance against the idea of having to get on the phone with people, having to do interviews. It's kind of more attractive I think to tinker with your website a bit and do a bit more SEO, but it's time to interview people again.

Hanne Vervaeck

Now, one of the advantages if you followed the coaching method, if that was something that fit in the way you want to do your business, is that you will actually already have people that you can interview pretty easily. It's one of those shortcuts. It's a way of not having to find new people over and over again also. You can really go in-depth with those people and find out what a good offer would be for them.

Shane Melaugh

We've already talked about, in the previous series, about how to interview people to arrive at a product idea, to find their pain points and things like that. Now, when you talk to people to validate your offer, there is ... Here the goal is you already have an idea of what you're going to offer and you want to find out what modality to use, how you're going to present this offer, and what exactly you're going to be offering at what price, that kind of thing.

Shane Melaugh

You want to be talking to people about this and presenting your offer and getting feedback from them. You want to see, first of all, can you get people excited about this? That's really important. You should be in a situation where you start by presenting this extended elevator pitch I talked about before, and it gets people excited. They start asking questions about it. They start asking you where can I get this? Even if they ask critical questions, even if they have objections, they go, "Hold on, what about this? I don't know, that sounds a bit expensive," or something like that. That's good.

Shane Melaugh

If someone is engaging with you, if someone's asking questions, even if they're critical questions, it means it's important. What they just heard you say is important enough for them to want to know more. Maybe they're even already starting to negotiate with you, which is great.

Shane Melaugh

What you basically don't want to hear is crickets. You don't want to be sitting there and then there's just like an awkward silence after your pitch. If there's an awkward silence after your pitch, or if there's like a very lukewarm reaction, it's like, "Yeah, that sounds nice. I wish you all the best with that."

Hanne Vervaeck

Yeah, sounds like it might work for somebody, just not for me.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly. That's a bad sign, right? Ideally, if you're actually seeing them, you want to kind of see a sparkle in their eyes as you talk about your offer. You want to see that are they hoping that your product already exists. That's what you want to arrive at. Again, you can do through an interview, so talking to people, you're telling them, "Listen, here's the offer I'm putting together."

Shane Melaugh

You give them your extended elevator pitch, and then you just leave it at that. You give them your extended elevator pitch and then you pause, because that's important. If there's an awkward silence there, then you leave that for a few seconds, and then you go, "Okay, clearly you're not excited about this. Can I ask you some questions?"

Shane Melaugh

Then you try to ask, "Clearly this doesn't excite you. Why is that? Is there something here, is there else that you'd prefer? Is there something similar, is there a similar product that you're already using? Is there a similar service you're already using? Why are you using that one? What do you like about that one?" This kind of thing.

Shane Melaugh

You want to start digging about why aren't they excited? But also as you're explaining and as you're talking to them about your offer, some of them will engage with you, and it's really mostly in this back and forth that you can learn more, from which questions they ask you, what they're interested about, what they resonate with. You want to see the things they respond to positively, the things they don't respond to well. From that, you can refine your offer. You can do that kind of live.

Shane Melaugh

You can say, "Okay, I hear that you've got a different problem than I expected. What about this?" You give them your version two extended pitch and see how they react to that, and so on. Out of that, out of really just discussions with people, you can really refine your idea of an offer.

Hanne Vervaeck

If at this point, you're cringing a little bit and you feel a lot of resistance about going out and talking to people this way, I think there are two very important things to keep in mind. First of all, you are not your offer. People aren't judging you at this point. If they don't like what you're offering, that doesn't mean they don't like you.

Hanne Vervaeck

I know this sounds silly, but it's very often what happens when we have to ask for a criticism. We have a full episode about ego and why ego is not a good thing in business. I would really suggest listening back to that episode. It will really help to get over this hurdle, and actually go out, talk to people, and be open to improving your idea.

Shane Melaugh

To make this even more hardcore, here's the next thing you should do. You should use the scientific approach in that. The goal for you, I mean once you've honed in on something that works at least a little bit, that gets people engaged and excited at least a little bit, then start trying to disprove rather than prove your idea. Start trying to find why might this not work and start trying to kind of dig for criticism.

Shane Melaugh

Very simply, for example, you can start asking people what they don't like about your idea. Ask them what will make you change your mind about this? For example, if they like your product, you can start asking, "Okay, if I sold this for $900 a month, would you still be interested?" Basically try to get to a no, start adding what-ifs and try to get to a no. Start looking for the limits of this.

Shane Melaugh

I think this is very important, because it's quite easy. First of all, generally people will be positive and polite. They will more likely tell you, "Yeah, this is great. I like it," than they'll tell you, "This is terrible, and here are some points." You have to do some work to get to the criticism. It's easy to fall into a confirmation bias trap, where you just keep ... Once you've hit on something that might work, just keep looking for further evidence that yes this is definitely a good idea. But you might just be kind of disappearing into your own little bubble, into your own little echo chamber there.

Shane Melaugh

If you can basically try and find, "Okay, what don't you like about this," and try and really poke, "Okay well, would you sign up for this right now? Would you sign up for this at this price? What if it's a coaching offer, but it's not me who's doing the coaching? It's one of the people in my company. Would you still do it?" This kind of thing, and see where are the limits where you start getting nos.

Shane Melaugh

If you've gotten a bunch of nos, if you know this is what people are excited about, but they're not willing to pay this much. They're not willing to travel to a location to do it. They're not willing, whatever, right? Then you can really start boxing in this idea of what are people willing to do? What is the exact thing that people are excited about and how can I get this off the ground?

Hanne Vervaeck

I think all of these are very good questions that you just raised, and questions that most people will be afraid to ask when they are in an interaction with somebody. Probably most of these questions will also throw the other one off a little bit, because like you just said, people usually are just like, "Oh yeah, okay," and they are used to and they say, "Oh okay, that sounds interesting." Nobody asks them anything anymore. But if you really push them and you ask specific questions like the ones just before, then you will get so much more information.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. What don't you like about my thing, is one of my favorite questions to ask. If you follow the Thrive Themes book, you've seen this a couple of times. I've done posts and updates where my main question at the end is tell us what you don't like. Tell us what you don't like about Thrive Themes. Also, if you've ever met me in person, and we talk about business, then I've probably asked you that question at some point. If you're a Thrive Themes user, I've probably asked you, "What don't you like about this?"

Shane Melaugh

It's great to get praise. We get a lot of praise. We've also had posts where we just had like a hundred comments or more telling us how much they like our software. This is great. This feels wonderful and it's very validating, but it's so much more valuable in terms of being able to move forward and building something better. It's so much more valuable to know what people don't like and what their biggest frustrations are.

Hanne Vervaeck

One other thing that I want to add to that, because I've been doing that a lot also asking like what don't you like about that product? First of all, people are like, "Well, maybe this thing, nah, nah, nah." Then if your answer is like, "Oh yeah, that's like ..." we really have to improve that.

Hanne Vervaeck

Then they feel safe in actually giving you a real feedback, because if then your first reaction is like, "Oh no, actually that's perfect," then you just shut them down again. Again, like this whole just staying open minded and agreeing that maybe for them it's not the best solution, even though you were hoping it was, is super important here.

Shane Melaugh

That's a really good point. Yeah, it's important to not be defensive. Always be open, even if the criticism is a bit tough basically, you should always be open to understanding that try to see where this person comes from. Yeah, don't be defensive, because then you're shutting down that avenue, like Hanne just said. You're shutting down that avenue for future feedback like that. That's a very good point.

Hanne Vervaeck

Which doesn't mean that you have to accept all feedback either.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah, you don't have to say yes to everything.

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly. If someone is like, "Oh yeah, well you should give it away for free," then it's like well, not going to do that. Thank you for your input.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly. Now, one more thing. We're about to get into the action steps, so we're about to summarize the exact steps for you to take to refine your offer and find the most irresistible one out of the ideas you have. Before that, let me also say that of course in the show notes we will have a summary of this. We will have all of these as a reference so you can see exactly what to do and what we talked about.

Shane Melaugh

For this interviewing people, I am not going to provide a specific script or a specific list of questions to ask. I do that deliberately, because in my experience, this kind of general feeling that you get for what people want, the kind of general feeling of "Yes, this is something people like. This is something people don't like," and so on, arises out of having real discussions.

Shane Melaugh

It's very different from the kind of information you get from sending out surveys. This is something I've noticed very much for myself. We have done ... For my businesses, over the years, I've done countless surveys and polls and things like that, but I've also talked to a lot of people, and these two types of information are very different. Surveys and polls can help give you insight, can help get good information, but talking to people, just having a discussion and basically, and this is why I'm not providing a script, because if you have a script then it's basically like an in person survey.

Shane Melaugh

If you actually just have a discussion with people and let that discussion go wherever it will go, then that creates over time this acute feeling of what do people generally want here? What are people generally into? I think that's absolutely priceless. You kind of develop an instinct. You start to develop an instinct.

Shane Melaugh

I don't think you can get this if you just follow a script and make it an in person survey. I just wanted to add that. I'm being deliberately slightly vague about how exactly this discussion should go, because really what I want you to do is I want you to open the discussion and then just let it take its course.

Shane Melaugh

With that, let's get into the action steps. Step number one, create a list of three to five offers you want to test, following the first thing we talked about in this episode. Think about how can you spin out your skill into different offers? How can you spin out a product into different value propositions? What are different modalities of how you could sell your product, and who might be interested in them?

Shane Melaugh

For each of these offers, you want to have an idea of this is my offer, and these are the people who'd be interested in this. Now, it should be a list of three to five offers. If you have fewer than three, that means you have too many eggs in one basket, and you'll get overly attached to those few ideas. I'll link to my video about the combination of focus and experimentation, which was one of the keys to how I started getting some traction in my online business. I'll link to that video that explains basically in more detail why you should avoid having all your eggs in one basket in this way.

Shane Melaugh

That's why three or more. If you have more than five ideas, I think you can right away do some triaging. Basically pick the best five out of the long list, because if you have a list of like 15, then that will be much more difficult to validate, much more difficult to get enough data.

Shane Melaugh

I think if you write down all of your ideas, let's say you've got 15 of them, you step away from it, you look at it again the next day, you can probably already tell, you can probably get a fairly good gut feeling about which ones you can toss out right away. Three to five different offers you want to test. That's step one. You write those down.

Shane Melaugh

For each of those offers, create a concise, extended elevator pitch, like the ones I made for Thrive Architect. Like I said, this is a bit more than an elevator pitch. It should maybe one minute, up to one minute if you explain this. You should write this out basically one paragraph that explains what the offer is.

Hanne Vervaeck

Are there some specific things that people have to include in this extended elevator pitch?

Shane Melaugh

I think what needs to be in this extended elevator pitch is the problem and how your thing solves that problem. I think you should be explicit about here's the thing that I assume you're experiencing. Here's like whatever, a problem or a frustration or something that costs you more time than it should or whatever, and then here's how my offer solves that.

Shane Melaugh

In most cases, an offer will be focused around some kind of a problem. The problem can also be ... I think it's also important to keep in mind the problem here doesn't have to be some tragic, crippling issue. A problem can be if someone is into, I don't know, model trains, you could easily say that whatever problem you may have with your model train, what does it matter in the grander scheme of things. It isn't like a life destroying problem, right?

Shane Melaugh

But still, if you're into model trains and you're, I don't know why I always use this example because I don't know anything about model trains, but presumably whatever the glue you use to stick together your train model doesn't quite live up to your standards. Well, that is a valid problem. In my pitch, I would mention, "Do you hate getting glue on your fingers when building model trains?" I really have to find a better example.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think it's true that we just have to ... You're not curing world hunger every time that you offer something to people. Basically a problem is an annoyance in somebody's life that you can help solve that. I'm going to put you on the spot here about the pitch, because I think it's very valuable to get this right. I've been pitched to a lot and in a very bad way, where the offer might be good, but the way they presented it wasn't very good.

Hanne Vervaeck

Does surveys or do productized surveys or whatever that I have in mind is ... I don't know why mine is always photography. Again, I'm not a photographer at all. But imagine that you want to offer an online business, a package where every month they get five stock photos that are related to their niche, that are only for them. How would you pitch that?

Shane Melaugh

First of all, I would think of the target audience for this. Let's say it would be bloggers. The bloggers who are, or people running blogs, so I'm talking about personal bloggers. People who kind of run a blog where they're publishing at least several times a week. I would say okay, if you're running a blog, you know that the image matters a lot. You need an image, you need a featured image, but you also need images to post on social media and so on when you share.

Shane Melaugh

You know that this can make a huge difference to your click-through rate, to how people engage with your post and what your brand looks like on social media and the engagement you get there. Featured images are important. There's good news and bad news. You have easy access now to free photos. Free photos have become very easy to find, but everybody is using the same kinds of photos, the same kinds of hipster type filters.

Shane Melaugh

If you use those photos, your blog, and your brand doesn't stand out anymore. This is where my service comes in. Based on your brand, we create specific customized photos for you, send them to you, and we add some kind of a brand flare to these pictures. They're ready for you to use right away. They're uniquely branded to your site, and they will help you be more professional, stand out from the crowd, and get better social branding as well.

Hanne Vervaeck

Nice. If we quickly analyze it, first you paint a picture about the importance of pictures in this case, of the image. The reason why people should be interested in your topic basically. Then what you did was show the solutions that were already out there, but also the problems with those solutions, and then you pitch your own solution and tell them why it would be better. I think that's a pretty good structure that people would be able to follow too.

Shane Melaugh

I think there's an important thing here that we haven't mentioned yet, which is what you just alluded to, which is that you have to assume that people are already scratching this itch, as you say. The people are already implementing some kind of solution of their problem. Essentially whatever the thing is that you're talking about, people already have a solution or they're already coping in some ways.

Shane Melaugh

It's very rare that you just step into a total vacuum and it's like, "Hey, you've never considered that here's a totally new way of doing things." That's usually not the case. I think it's important to acknowledge, okay this is the situation that you currently have. This is the solution you currently have, and here's why my thing is better. Often also I do kind of competition, thinking about the competition, thinking about what are people already doing, but how does my thing compare to other available options? It's a pretty important way in how I think about offers as well.

Shane Melaugh

All right, so then we have a pitch like this for each of our ideas for offers. Next, create one landing page for each of these offers. This is important for two reasons. First of all, it is great. This is one of the things that landing pages are literally made for. It's great to have some place you can send people. If you don't know what to put as a call to action [inaudible 00:54:10] onto your landing page, simply have a sign up form. Simply have like sign up to the waiting list basically.

Shane Melaugh

But also a landing page, I want you to think of it as a landing page that is a short landing page. This is not like an extensive sales page or something. This should be the kind of landing pages you can put together in half an hour or so, large headline, maybe a few bullet points or a few paragraphs, text and then your button or your sign up form.

Shane Melaugh

This is another great exercise, because you should be able to clearly communicate your offer, the point of your offer and who it's for on a concise landing page like this. If you've written out your extended elevator pitches, and you've created a landing page, at this point in your mind, you've already refined the idea of this offer quite well.

Shane Melaugh

That's one of the reasons to do it. The other reason is, like I said, it's great to have a place to send people. Once you talk about people and they're like, "Okay, how do I learn more about this? Where do I get this," it's great to have that ready and be like, "Okay yes, here's the URL. Go here."

Shane Melaugh

Next step, identify the ideal audience for each of these offers, and at least one very specific place where these people hang out. That's where you then figure out how to reach them as we talked about previously. Do you hit the pavement? Do you get on the phone? Do you ask your friends, whatever? For each offer, you have to have a clear idea, and at least one place where you can go and start reaching out to people.

Shane Melaugh

Then last step, start the interviews, like we talked about. Get on the phone with people, talk to them about your offer or meet them face to face, talk about your offer, and get into those discussions to start developing the offer and to start identifying the one that's going to work best.

Shane Melaugh

As a quick reminder, the goal here is not to have five different offers and start selling all of them. The goal is to find the best one to start with. One criterion for which one is the best one is, which one can you make money with the soonest? Which one can you make the most money with?

Shane Melaugh

I think this is important because even if it's not always the best idea to go after the most money, but looking at where can I make the most money the fastest is a good way to get a business off the ground. The other things you can do later. Once you can pay the bills, everything else becomes easier. That's why that's one of the things I'd look for, where can I make the most money right now?

Shane Melaugh

All right, that wraps up our second episode on How to Create Irresistible Offers. I hope you found this useful. For all the show notes and links to everything we talked about, go to activegrowth.com/16. So show notes, links, all that activegrowth.com/16. If you enjoy this podcast, and if you get value out of it, we would love to hear back from you.

Shane Melaugh

Also, if you know anyone who could benefit from the kinds of things we talk about in this podcast, if you know someone where you think they might appreciate a podcast that gets down to business instead of the fluffy nonsense that's in many marketing podcasts, do us a favor and send them a link to one of our episodes, or send them a link to activegrowth.com/podcast. Of course, we also appreciate the positive reviews and ratings that we've been getting on iTunes. We've also gotten some really good feedback and great questions through our audio messages. Here's an example of one of those messages.

Speaker 3

The Your Job Is To Ship Podcast series was quite frankly the most powerful and most needed podcast series I've ever listened to, because as I was listening, I realized that I'm in the exact same situation that you were describing. I was spending most of my time doing the stuff that at some point needs to be done, but it's not actually push my business forward right now. That I was avoiding the actually really important stuff, which was content creation and contacting clients or just getting my product out there to some people.

Speaker 3

What I did was create a new daily reminders list, just as Shane suggested. I came up with five points and three of them were actually Your Job Is To Ship. As I review them daily in the morning, I always ask myself, "What is the one thing I actually have to do right now that's actually pushing my business forward?" In the morning, I started doing the content creation and actually contacting customers.

Speaker 3

In the last week, I feel like I've progressed so much more in the business than in the last month. I have a new customer that pays very well, which I always was afraid to contact before because I thought my product wasn't worth enough, wasn't good enough. Seriously, thank you so much, Shane and Hanne. These podcast series actually had such a big impact on myself and on my business. Thanks so much. Greetings from Germany. Greetings from Tim.

Shane Melaugh

We appreciate this. This is of course great to hear for us. This is the reason we do this. As you probably noticed, we don't have any ads on this podcast. Basically we don't monetize this podcast in any way. Really we're doing this because we feel like we have some valuable stuff to give and we want to give it. Hearing about people who take action on this and get great results from it is super, super gratifying. Thank you very much.

Shane Melaugh

If you have a message like this, you can leave a review on iTunes or on Stitcher. Leave a comment or go to activegrowth.com/16, and click on the audio message button there to leave a voice message of your own. That is it for today. Thank you for listening, and I'll catch you in the next episode.