What Your Buyers Are Actually Paying For

If we stop trying to articulate the transformation and we ask instead, what is the hope that my audience is carrying? Can I say that in one sentence? Can you put your entire business or every offer that you have in one sentence of what is the hope my audience is carrying? That's how simple it gets. Today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about something in my business that had me feeling this tiny voice of just, I guess, guilt about my business for a really long time. And that was based on looking at my sales pages, my ads, my launches, the emails that I was sending. And this little voice in the back of my head kept coming up for me every time I would read my stuff, and I would feel this guilt and say— that said, Allie, you're just selling people hope. You're just selling them this hope that an online business is going to change their life and selling the hope of freedom, the hope that money is just going to show up while they sleep. And is that even ethical? Like, are you even running a useful business? Like, this word useful kept popping into my head of like, is what I'm even doing, or is what I'm doing useful? Does it matter, or am I actually just hurting people by making them think that it's possible for them and maybe it's not possible for them. Like, I was pre-doubting if my clients were going to get success or not because, as we know, I mean, people buy gym memberships they don't use, right? People would buy my courses and not go through them. People would join my communities and never show up. And I started making that about me. And having coached thousands of entrepreneurs, I know that this is a very frequent thought. That my clients have. And that's why I want to talk about this today. So selling hope, I made it mean something bad about me. Like I was this hope dealer. I was the hope dealer that belonged in the same category as snake oil salesmen, right? And then one day recently, actually, I went back and read my testimonials. I read hundreds of different testimonials and words that people had written or shared about my programs, about my coaching, about my communities.. And this pattern popped out to me that changed the way that I think about selling forever. The thing that showed me, or that popped out to me in the testimonials, was that people kept saying the same thing, some iteration of the same thing. They said, you showed me it was possible. Allie gave me hope. And they weren't accusing me of anything negative, right? This was not a bad— there's nothing, no negative connotation whatsoever. They were thanking me for giving them hope. Now, I remember being on a walk with my friend Tara Zerker, and Tara and I have these great conversations, so I'll probably talk about them on this podcast frequently. We were on this walk at an event. We had walked to get food, or maybe actually I know what it was. We had walked to get me— totally different story, but I know the ladies listening can relate. I was speaking and I was having not a body-positive moment, and I needed a jacket that would go over my dress because I was not feeling good. And I think that's a whole podcast episode for another day. But Tara and I were on this walk to go to get me a jacket to put over my dress for speaking so that I could feel better. And when we were walking to the store, I think we were— where were we? We were in San Diego, I think. We were walking and we were talking about just business and life and Tara was like, Allie, I got to tell you, like, you are one of the main reasons that I decided to pursue growing my business. You gave me hope that it was possible. Like, you're a mom, you're, you know, like, very family-oriented, and you're a woman, and like, you've done all these things. And I had little kids— or this was Tara talking— she's like, I have little kids, and I saw you collect your Two Comma Club Award on stage, and I thought, you know what, I can do this too. So she was saying that just the fact that I was running my business the way that I was gave her hope that it was possible. And she is massively successful, right? She has a huge business and she's got a really amazing thing that she's built too. And she said, Allie, I did this because you gave me hope that it was possible. So today I want to talk about why hope is one of the most honest things that you can sell and why it is really important to include hope in what you're selling. Now, a lot of people are like, sell the transformation, blah, blah, blah, like sell the results, not the features. And I think that gets something wrong. I don't think that is enough to really move people towards purchase, especially when we're talking about cold traffic, we're talking about front-end offers, we're talking about tiny offers, low-ticket stuff, right? You have to give them hope and you have to show them what it looks like on the, the other side. I think it's a little nuanced when people say sell the transformation. So what I'm telling you today is sell the hope. So let me back this up to where this started for me. If you've been around here for a while, you know my story, you know that I've made over $7 million in revenue through the Tiny Offer Method, and most of it has been driven by paid ads, which means I've written a lot of sales copy. I've written a lot of headlines and I've made a lot of promises. So somewhere along the way, and this probably coincided with the other podcast that I've created, the last two episodes. I internalized this belief that promising people a better future was manipulative, that it was, you know, real ethical marketing had to be dry and clinical and full of disclaimers. And that was the moment that I kind of feel like I started to lose my edge, or I started to lose some of the passion for what I was selling. And I started feeling like the moment you painted a picture of what someone's life could look like after they worked with you, you're crossing a line where you're promising something that you can't guarantee, right? So I'd write the copy and then I'd water it down and I would hedge and I'd add qualifiers and I kind of talk forward and backwards at the same time. And I would shrink the promise until it felt safe. But what that actually does when you're writing marketing copy is that it makes your marketing weaker and it doesn't protect anyone because the people reading it still have the hope. I— but I'm not giving it to them. I wasn't giving it to them. They were showing up with it. So every mom that was strolling at midnight looking for a way to be home with their kids, every burned-out corporate employee that's Googling how to start an online business, the hope's already there, right? They're looking for a solution that's burning a hole in their pocket. But the only question was whether my message is going to meet that hope or if it's going to ignore it. I have clients that built very successful businesses. I'm thinking of a client that I worked with named Michelle Terpstra, who She is now teaching people how to be CROs. But when she joined my world, she was teaching people sales. And I remember sitting with her at a mastermind event that I was hosting at one point, and she said, Allie, I got to tell you a story. The first time I watched your webinar, I was sitting in the Trader Joe's parking lot in my car, watching it on my phone, and I was bawling. And I was so grateful and I was so excited and so relieved that I finally found someone who understood me, who gave me hope, and who could fix the problem and fix the situation that I was currently in. You don't get that kind of response when you water down your content, when you tiptoe around the results that you can give for people in a best-case scenario. When you water it all down, people are not crying in Trader Joe's parking lots, right? They're like, meh, this sounds like everything else. When you write copy with AI, it sounds like everything else. So you have to be able to understand the hope that your audience is coming in with. Like, what are they hoping for? And you have to meet them where they're at. So when I read these testimonials, I expected to see things like, oh, she has good modules and clear trainings. And sure, some of that was in there, but the phrases that kept showing up over and over were, Allie's the real deal, she showed me it was possible, you gave me hope again, I finally believed that I could do this. My clients and friends were telling me in their own words, the most valuable thing I ever gave them wasn't a template or a funnel, it's a belief that I helped them hold in themselves, right? I saw something for them that was beyond what they could see for themselves. Now, I was in a mastermind a few years ago, and I won't name any names, but I remember the creator of this mastermind stood in front of the room, and there were probably, you know, 50 of us in the room, and she was teaching us something, and she stands in the front of the room and she says, most of you will never make it. Most of you are not going to be successful. This is a really hard business to run online, and most of you are going to give up before you see any level of success. And I remember sitting in that room and just like tilting my head and being like, what the heck? Probably said something else, but we'll keep it PG for now. I was like, how dare you? Like, all of us are paying to be in this room, and we are here to see that it's possible. You are here to show us that it's possible. How dare you stand in front of the room and tell us we're not going to make it? Like, it felt like such a slam. And maybe that's me projecting, or that's me— I don't know, something about me that it really triggered me. But I remember thinking in that moment, like, I will never make people feel the way she just made me feel, of like, you're wasting your time, this is impossible for you. I just felt so crappy that I remember that moment so clearly and thinking like, I'm never going to do that to anyone who is willing to give me their time. I'm not going to make you feel like it's not possible because it's always possible. You can always learn the skills. Everything is learnable. I think I say that on every single episode and I'm really mad that Marie Forleo wrote a book called Everything Is Learnable because I wish I had written it anyway. So when I started again, thinking about this hope thing in the last couple weeks, I look at— I've shared on, you know, podcast 18 months ago about how I was taking a break from getting coaching and from joining masterminds, and like, I just had to get clear on my own voice again for a while. And honestly, it was one of the best things I could do. But I did start investing in coaching again this year. I hired a health coach at the beginning of the year, hired a leadership coach, I joined a nervous system coaching program. And I look at what triggered me to get out the credit card, what made me want to buy. And it was because I wanted them to give me hope. Like the health coach, I had hope that I was going to lose weight that I've gained. I was hoping I was going to feel better. I was hoping that I was going to feel like myself again. I hired the leadership coach because I was hoping he was going to help me run a really great team. I hired the nervous system coaching because I was hoping that I would to stop blocking myself on scaling my business, which, you know what, I had hope in all these scenarios and I got exactly what I put into the program, which is what happens when you join coaching programs, right? We are buying hope and that's okay. So when I was on a coaching call that I run where I get on Zoom with people who are in the program every single week, we talked about this last Thursday and we talked about selling hope. So we talked about buying a gym membership. That's hope. I've got a client in there that is teaching parents and students how to do better at school. Those parents are hoping that their kids are going to get better grades, have a better future, have a less stressful life, have more options. They're buying her program with hope. I've got another client in there that works with really amazing athletes, really elite athletes, people who are in the NBA and the NFL, and they are hoping that they're not going to freeze during the game, that they're hoping they are going to have a great game because their mind is in the right place and they believe in themselves. They're not gonna, you know, like hit any level of wavering in their self-belief and screw up in the game. So every single person is buying things out of hope. But when we act like selling hope is shameful, what we're really saying is that wanting a better life or wanting to have something on the other side of this transaction, or, you know, when they say like transformation is the transaction, like Okay, but what does that even mean? That feels very like esoteric and I can't really understand, you know, how do I paint the transformation? Like that never really motivated me. But when I think about selling hope, that I can understand that I can see clearly. So the distinction that really matters here, and this is the thing that matters the most, is that false hope is a promise with no vehicle behind it. So if you have a framework, if you have a method, if you have a way that is proven that you have a, you know, you have a belief, you have a systematic pattern, I guess, that you've seen work well for people. Like, for me, it's tiny offers. I've seen people change their lives with tiny offers and with all of the other stuff that goes into the coaching behind it. I know that if someone follows the framework, if they come to the coaching calls, if they commit to testing, if they commit to making it work, I know that I can change that person's life. That's not, that's not false hope, right? That's not made up. I'm not telling someone you can come in with no skills and no effort and you can have a million-dollar business with never having to show up on the like that would be selling false hope. That would be unethical. But if you have this method, framework, tool, system that has genuinely worked, then illustrating the hope of that result is actually a service because you're showing people that it's possible. Hiding it is the disservice because you're leaving people alone with the dream and no map, and those people are gonna find it somewhere else, and they might hire someone who's not as good as you, right? So we have to make sure that we are getting in front of the people. We're not the best kept secret. We're not hiding. We are findable. So a lot of what I teach is based around that. So if we're going to make this a little bit more practical, because that's what I want to make sure all of my podcast episodes have, this is where offers will live and die. So every single coach on the internet says sell the transformation, and, and maybe I've said it too at some point, but when I watch my clients hear that, they freeze because Transformation feels like this enormous word. It feels like it has to be all-encompassing. It has to be measurable. It has to have specific steps and quantifiable outcomes and all the things that marketers love to say. For a lot of businesses, especially ones who are working human to human, work with feelings, families, things that are not like quote unquote tangible, you can't always quantify it. So I was recently coaching a client inside of my accelerator program and she said, She works in the homeschooling space, and this is exactly what she said. I can't promise in 3 weeks you'll see a 50% improvement because she's dealing with children, family systems, emotions. There's no dashboard that she can sell, right? There's no like checklist and or swipe file, like these are the 10 emails that are going to change your family's life. Like it's not like that for her. So the reframe that I gave her, and I watched it land like a lightning bolt, is that she, she said she literally had goosebumps after I said this on the call, actually. So if we stop trying to articulate the transformation and we ask instead, what is the hope that my audience is carrying? Can I say that in one sentence? Can you put your entire business or every offer that you have in one sentence of what is the hope my audience is carrying? That's how simple it gets. So, you know, if someone's coaching sales coaches who's coaching closers, her hope are that they're going to close more deals. One sentence. The one working with the elite athletes on mental performance, her buyers are hoping they make the winning shot when the game is on the line. One sentence. The homeschooling client, her buyers are parents who are hoping their kid never falls out of love with learning. Parents who are terrified this system is gonna crush their kid's curiosity and hoping that there's another way. One sentence. So for me, my buyers are hoping an online business can fund the life they actually want. For me, that looked like being able to say yes to my kids' passions. Being at every horse show, buying a horse for my daughter with cash, right? And a nice horse too, like really good horse with cash. Building a business that serves my family instead of consuming it. One sentence. So when you can name that hope in one sentence, everything else downstream is going to get easier. Your headline is the hope. The hook is the hope. The offer name points at the hope. Your testimonials get selected because they confirm that it's possible. So if you use this, you know, hope box is what I'm talking about or how I'm talking about it now. If you can use this as a filter, this is what is gonna change the way you think about your offers, your sales pages, how you're structuring your copy. And I want you to steal this. So every time I design a new offer or review a client's offer, I'm gonna be asking one question. Does this check the hope box? Meaning when a stranger, because most of my people are building their lists full of strangers who are buying from them for the first time, does it instantly connect to the hope that they're already carrying? It, or does it connect to the work? Because this is the trap that just about everybody falls into. We build offers that sell work. So set up your analytics, organize your systems, learn the framework. Like, sure, all of that might be the thing that the person needs to do, but nobody wakes up hoping to do work, hoping to do all the setup themselves. They wake up hoping for the outcome on the other side of that setup. Now, for years I've said that tiny offers need to sell the easy button, that they need to show how you're gonna save them time, save them time, save them time, right? Saving them time has always been the differentiator for how to bring people into your list who will continue buying from you, who will ascend into your next steps, because those people just, if we create a blanket assumption about them, they value their time more than anything else. And people who value their time are the ones who are investing in courses, coaching, consulting and the ones that wanna keep shortening that learning curve, right? So we wanna build our email list full of people who value their time more than anything. But now I'm adding a little bit of a subheadline to that or a secondary checkbox. So we wanna save them time, but we also want to answer to the hope box or check the hope box of what they're hoping that your product will do for them. What is on the other side of the setup? And that's where we focus our messaging. So the offers that convert most lead with hope and then tuck the work inside. So a revenue calculator that sells the hope of seeing what's possible, and then data setup would ride along inside of that. So a homeschool schedule sells the hope of our days could actually flow like this, and the deschooling philosophy for this specific client, that's gonna ride along inside of it. So illustrate the hope, deliver the work, and do it in that order. So there's one more layer here because I wanna make sure you're doing this with integrity, right? I'm not, I don't want you to become a snake oil salesman because that's what I was afraid of for myself for so long. Selling hope comes with responsibility, so your offer has to be a legitimate vehicle for it, for delivering that result. If someone buys the hope and you hand them fluff, that's when hope selling becomes sleazy and the thing that we're all afraid of doing. Most of my buyers and most of my clients are highly ethical. They really want to make an They wanna be useful, right? Like want to run useful businesses. So if you sell hope boldly, then you have to overdeliver on the path. And that's something that I talk about a lot. Something I work with my clients on a lot is if someone's buying a tiny offer, how do we make it such a dang good offer that it could have been $1,000, but it's so good that they continue buying from you, that they continue staying in your world. And we design it in a specific way so that it's not like a ton of extra work for you. So your homework from this episode, after listening to this episode, here's what I want you to do this week. I have 3 steps for you. So step 1 is to go read your own testimonials, your DMs, your thank you emails, and highlight every sentence when somebody talks about possibility, belief, or hope. And I think it'll be in there more than you think right now. When you go specifically looking for it, I think you're going to find it and you're going to be surprised. So that language is gold, and that's your market or your marketing messaging that you're going to weave into everything else. You're going to put it in your headlines, you're going to put it on your copy, you're put it in your ads, you're gonna build your offers around it. So step 2 is going to be drafting your one sentence hope of your buyer. So not like a transformation statement, not your mission. I want you to map out the hope. So my people are hoping blank. And if you can't fill in that blank, then that's the real marketing problem. That's the real messaging problem. And no amount of funnel tweaking is gonna fix that. So step number 3, after you've done those last 2, is to look at your current offer, your headline, or your first ad or your best ads. And I want you to ask honestly, does this check that hope box or does it sell work? So if it's selling work, if it's selling improvement, if it's selling, you know, things that are going to be just a little bit better, you need to rewrite the front of it so that it's leading with the hope. So that's it. That's— it's a super simple change, but it's going to change everything. So if you've been feeling that same quiet guilt that I had carried, I want you to really dig in and listen right now. You're— you are allowed to sell hope. And if you have a real path behind it, you are obligated to share that hope and build up that hope in your audience. So if someone in your audience is scrolling right now with hope that they've never said out loud, your job is to be the mirror that reflects it back to them for the first time. Be their hope dealer and be the reason that the hope for them comes true. Now, if you're in this, in this world, in this coaching world, selling transformation, hope, teaching people what it is that you know that you've become an expert in. Love to invite you into a 7-day free trial inside of my Start Tiny HQ community. For $3 a month, you get access to my courses, my community. You can ask questions inside of the group, and it's an amazing community that I'm building. You also get 2 live workshops where I teach on things. Tomorrow I'm teaching ads, which is cool. Might be, you know, not tomorrow by the time you listen to this, but that's an example of what we'll be teaching inside of this community. 2 live workshops with me on Zoom each month. And then at the $297 a month level, you get access to weekly Zoom calls with me and also weekly Zoom coaching calls with a copywriter that's on my team. So you get at least 2 or 3 coaching calls a week as part of that community. And that one is $287 a month. I think I said the wrong price last, last time, but right now might be going up in the future. But as of right now, as of this supporting, it's $287 a month. So I would love to invite you into that community if you liked this conversation. If you're interested in hearing more behind-the-scenes conversations like this in the future, I do really invite you into that community, and I would love to support you in growing the business of your dreams and showing you that your hope for a bigger, brighter future for you, for your family, is totally possible. And I want to show you how to get there. So thank you for listening to this episode, and I will see you next week.