Are You Complicating Your Offer?

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hi everyone, this is Julie Chenell, and today I have a great podcast episode for you, and I want to take you back to when you were 6 years old, let's just go with 6, and you had one of those like coloring books or activity books, and one of the activities was where you spot the differences. You know what that, you know, like you had 2 dogs and maybe they both had vests on. I don't know, I'm thinking of Paw Patrol right now. And you would have to find like the 5 or 6 differences between the 2 dogs, right? And circle them. And that was the activity. And the whole idea was that it was a brain exercise. It was actually work for the child's brain, for your brain, to look at two things that look similar, but to figure out what the differences are. Okay, let's now talk about marketing. So I have been in the weeds with a lot of my private clients on Black Friday and Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday sales, even the holiday sales between Christmas and New Year's. And people come to me with their various offers. So I asked Carrie if she was cool with me kind of using her as an example, and she said, absolutely. So Carrie works in the social media world, so she has an offer that she helps you get your Reels done, edited, uploaded, and it's called Videos Made Easy. So she was sending me basically an outline of her Black Friday offers, and she sent me 3 offers, and one of them was like 5 videos and a strategy call. Another one was like 20 videos, and then the other one was, you know, 25 videos for 3 months. And I remember reading it and looking at it, and I said, you know, I'm working really hard to understand this. Like, my brain, it's going to take me 20 seconds maybe, which seems like not very long, right, to sort of differentiate the offer, right, as I'm reading it. And I said, can you rewrite this so that in 5 seconds I want to say yes? So she gave it another shot and she said, okay. And then she tried again. Try it out, videos made easy. This is the basic, and then this is the medium one, and then this is like the all-in one. It's true that if I was looking at this on a, on a sales page and the design was really well, that the design would help me also, you know, quickly comprehend the information. I didn't have the design handy. I was just reading it on a text, and I said to her, "You're still making this too difficult for me to understand. This is like that coloring book activity where I'm looking at 3 offers and they're basically all kind of the same. There's a couple of key differences in price, in the amount of videos I get, in the duration, but I'm having to work really hard to spot those differences." I said, "What if your Black Friday sale is simply your Videos Made Easy is 30% off if you book for December, January, or February during the weekend?" And she all of a sudden got it. I said, "In 5 seconds, I understand. Here's a service. If I book this weekend, I'm gonna get a great deal, which is 30% off." That's a really significant deal. I could probably do an entire tangent on why I think 30% off is the perfect discount. I know I'm going to get a great deal, and I know that if I book for the winter anytime, whether I do December, January, or February, I'm going to get that 30% off deal. The sentence is simple. Now what she can do in her Black Friday sale— and guys, this doesn't have to just do with Black Friday, this can be with any type of sale, any type of launch, it doesn't matter— all she has to do is work on positioning how valuable the offer is, and then there's no work in involved trying to distinguish what, which choice I should make. The other problem with offers where there's like just minimal differences is that you're putting a lot of the responsibility on the customer to know what they want and know what they need. How do I know if I need 20 videos or 25 or 5? If I'm not a social media expert and I'm just a customer that wants help, I don't even know what's realistic. I don't know what's considered like benchmark for growth. So it's a very arbitrary number and doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And so if you're looking at an offer, whether it's one offer or it's sales, are you making the customer work their brain similarly to that coloring book activity? Because if you are, you're going to reduce conversions and possibly lose the sale. And as I was having this conversation with Carrie, she said, "You know, why do I always make it complex?" You know, she's kind of ruminating about like, "I always seem to make this harder." And I said, "No, this is not like a you-specific issue. It's actually very common for a lot of people, especially when you're very close to your offer and like you can, you know, you're not at a distance." And I would argue that complexity is a default mode of most of us in Simplicity is expert mode. So what's the example? We think about something like the iPhone, right? I watched a good movie on one of these million plane rides I had, and it was a documentary about the rise and the fall of the BlackBerry. And the BlackBerry was inherently a more complicated design, right? It had the keypad and it had the like touchpad and all of that. And there's a moment in the documentary, or it's like dramatized movie where the iPhone is about to come out for the first time and the guy wrongly assumes that, you know, that the iPhone isn't going to make waves because it doesn't have a keyboard. And so if we look at it, the iPhone was a second, third, fourth iteration of the cell phone, and we had the flip phones and the BlackBerrys and all the keypads, right? Simplicity was a more evolutionized version. So when you, when you look at this and you say, okay, well, why do I always make things complex? Chances are you are thinking that you are somehow making it more complicated than it needs to be. And the truth is that most things are more tangled up, complicated, difficult to understand in their default mode. And it's your job as the marketer, as the business owner, to continue to tumble that offer until it's in its most simplistic and beautiful form. Think of the iPhone with, you know, then it got rid of the headphone jack, and then it got rid of, you know, the home button, and it just got simpler and simpler and simpler. Another analogy would be those tumble rock, you know, when you put those rocks in those little tumblers. It was a toy as a kid, like, if you were into geology, and the rocks would get smoother and smoother and smoother. So I said, "Don't stress. You know, this is something most offers, when they come out, are, you know, all wrinkled up and mangled up, and it actually takes several rounds before you can get it simplified." So I want you to go back to your offers, look whether it's for Black Friday, whether it's for the end of the year, whether it's just one offer with different tiers, and ask yourself, "Is this the iPhone version of this offer, or is this the BlackBerry version of this offer?" You know, because simplicity is is a sign that you've worked it more and more and more. And we don't want to give people the experience of that coloring book activity. That's great for a 5 or 6-year-old that needs to learn to use their brain and muscles. But in marketing, we want a seamless, like slide down the water slide experience so that all they have to do is decide, is this the person or is this the offer that is going to solve my problem? And when the answer is yes, They buy. Talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.