Law of The Great Offer - Persuasion Strategies - Pt. 4

Ultimately, why do we buy anything? Why do we plunk down our hard-earned cash for products or services?

We have to feel, at some level, that what is offered is a good, or even great deal. This applies to everything from grocery store products to high-end professional services.

If you watch TV, you've notice Billy Mays, the pitchman with the beard, blue shirt, loud voice, and big smile. He sells Oxi Clean and a plethora of other household products these days.

What he's selling is always positioned as a great offer.

For professional services, it's more complicated. You need to communicate in much more depth. Take Shai Agassi, featured on the cover of Wired Magazine this month. He's starting a company to build an interconnected grid of re-charging stations for electric cars. His first client is Israel.

Agassi has an extraordinarily complex service that will entail the investment of billions of dollars in countries around the world, yet, it still comes down to the same thing: Is it a great offer?

So let's look at the basic components of any great offer, whether large or small.

1. Target: Your offer needs to be targeted towards a very specific market. It can't be for everyone. And you need to know that market inside and out. It might be women homemakers or sophisticated government decision makers.

2. Problem. There needs to be some pain your clients are experiencing. For homemakers, it's the drudgery of cleaning. In the case of electric cars, the problem is keeping them charged no matter where you drive.

3. Outcome. You must have a well-defined outcome. If you buy this product or service, this is what you'll get, what you'll be left with, and how things will change. This needs to be measurable and predictable: Cleaner clothes, convenient and affordable recharging.

4. Package/Process. This is the design of your service. It's what the service looks like and how it works. Cleaning products are tangible with simple features and benefits. For services, you need to make the intangible tangible. Agassi's key concept is a battery that you can either charge or easily swap for a new one.

5. Price. What do you need to charge so that enough clients or customers will buy and make the business profitable for you? This usually entails some trial and error. Notice that all those Billy Mays products sell for $19.95 (must work!). For recharging cars, it needs to cost less than half the price of gasoline.

To persuade customers or clients, you need to have a complete concept or story that all adds up to a great offer. When you make each of those five criteria above as explicit and as clear as possible, you have the essence of persuasion.

Then you translate this into the appropriate medium for your buisness: presentations, web copy, white papers, perhaps even videos. You don't have to be a Billy Mays or Shai Agassi to pitch a great offer, but you need to apply exactly the same principles.

What's your great offer?

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The More Clients bottom line: Perhaps more than anything else, your persuasiveness hinges on your ability to construct and then to communicate a great offer. Investing the time and work into creating great offers pays large dividends.

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What offers have you made in your professional service business that have been very effective? Please share on the More Clients Blog.

Comments

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[Barbara Saunders]

When I worked as a personal trainer, I had great success using an anaerobic training class both as a product in itself and as a springboard to selling private training packages.

Target: Gym members already doing aerobic exercise regularly in the gym.

Problem: Not getting the results they wanted in one of a few, named areas: weight loss, performance in some sport activity, and/or enough variety to keep the workouts fun.

Outcome: More fun and the means to overcome weight loss and performance plateaus.

Package: 6 week class, twice a week in a limited-size class with others who are purusing the same goals - at half the cost of private training for the same time period.

Story: "Three times thiry minutes a week is not the complete picture; it's really a baseline. If you want to take your fitness to the next level, let me show you how to safely incorporate higher intensity training to your routine."

Presentation: Fortunately the presentation was easy; the club had designers to make professional fliers and a place to post them. The only hitch was competition from other trainers with other offers.

Result: I filled the small class, and then sold $1,000 private training packages to 3 class members. Those sessions led to a couple of additional referrals as well.