MBA1995 Q&A Wednesday: How do I make my offer appealing without discounts?

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Hey all, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show Business, simplified every single day with our daily ten minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar100mba.net. Today's question is from Harriet and Harriet asks. I sell online courses slash coaching and I'm trying to craft the most irresistible offer possible. But I'm trying not to discount my product. I want to force myself to actually charge what I deserve. But I often see see a lot of different business owners make an offer on a webinar or through ads and slash their price down. How can I make my offer appealing to my customers without discounting? Would love your help in any way. Thanks for everything you do with the podcast, Harriet. Harriet My pleasure. Thank you so much for the great question. If you're a listener of the show for some time, you know that I am not a big fan of discounting. I think that discounting is a bad habit to break not only for yourself, but for your customers. You train your customers to expect a discount, but this doesn't mean you can't offer a compelling offer for your customers. In today's lesson I'm going to break down some strategies, some ways that you can package your offer and present it so your customer buys. Many people think that price is the only driving factor to buying something. That's simply not true. At the end of the day, we buy pricey stuff if we want to, right? If we see the value in it. I'm gonna break down how in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

To start today's Q and A Wednesday's lesson, answering Harriet's question. How do I make a compelling offer without discounts or discounting my product? I want to start by just explaining why we buy anything. Okay? Why do you buy anything under the sun? Whether it's a holiday, a car, a home, a pair of shoes. Let's talk about a pair of shoes. Okay? Let's think about the last time you bought a pair of shoes. When you looked at the price and you decided to buy that pair of shoes, a few things happened in your mind, okay? You quickly calculated the value of that pair of shoes, and this is what value looks like in your mind. You see those pair of shoes, you look at the price tag and you think, you know what? Those shoes are going to look great with that outfit bought yesterday. Or I know exactly how those shoes would look with something I have back home. Oh, I'm going on vacation in two weeks, and I'm going to look amazing in photos as I'm walking down the boardwalk in those shoes. This is perceived value. This is why we buy. It's not because of the laces or the leather or the straps. It's not that we pick up the shoe and say, hmm, this feels like $150. This feels like $300. No, we look at what the sho provide for us, how it will enhance our life, our experience of life, what it means for us. And then we calculate, is that price worth that value? This happens in really seconds. So at the end of the day, we buy anything because the perceived value is more than the price. That's basically it. So your job when you're offering your products and services is to increase the perceived value, to make sure it completely outweighs the price, whatever your price is. So instead of discounting your price, increase the perceived value. Show people what this means for them, how their life will change, what results will they get, how will their life be impacted, what this means now and in the future, what your product or service did for others. So you can look forward to getting that as well. So this is where you start. Increase your perceived value. The other thing I want to mention is that you mentioned that you saw a lot of people, they slash their prices down. I want you to question that a little bit. A lot of people use the tactic of valued at. What does that mean? Well, maybe they have an online course and they charge $2,000 for that course, but they say this course, with everything that's included, it's valued at $10,000. And then they put a line through and they say you're not going to pay $10,000, you're going to pay $2,000. That's not, it's not like the course was priced at $10,000 and then they discounted it at 2,000. They're saying that the value of this course is 10,000. Now I'm not totally opposed to the strategy. I think that there are some good merits to this to increase the perceived value. But if you can't justify really that the course actually is worth that much money and is valued at that, then you're really just inflating your value price to make your price seem small. And this is called anchoring. And this is normal. You know, this is part of marketing and sales where you say $2,000 doesn't sound so expensive compared to $10,000. But make sure that your valued app price is based on facts and not just some numbers you pulled out of a hat. Now one of the best ways to have a great offer or have a compelling offer is the idea of scarcity. And we're talking about real scarcity, not fake scarcity. And scarcity can take many forms. For example, maybe your coaching or course is only available until a certain time or certain day, meaning you will close enrollment. This is called an open and closed course or open and closed coaching where you take in a cohort of students at a time. This is very effective. I've tried this in the past with many courses and you do sell more in my experience than if you had an open ended corset. Because people want to get in before it's over, before the doors close. So Therefore they're pushed to buy. We all need a why, right? We all need to be pushed for a reason. Why do people go to the gym? Because maybe they're pushed because they want to get in shape before the summer so they look good in a swimsuit, right? We all work in incentives. So you're incentivized to buy now because you won't be able to buy later on. But this of course means you have to fulfill on your promise. You need to actually uphold your scarcity and not let anybody in after the deadline until of course, you open up the course again later down the line. Another form of scarcity is the fact that your price may go up. In fact, you can promise it can go up. Many people when they launch a course, they say, the first time we're running this course it's going to cost this much money. The next time I run it, it's going up to this price. So it forces people to buy it now because it's going to be more expensive later. This is not a new concept. This has been used in many industries like the airline industry and the auto industry. Scarcity of price. Another way to make your offer appealing are what they call value added bonuses. Now I'm not a big fan of bonuses for bonuses sake. Sometimes that really overwhelms the customer, especially when you have a content product where it's like, wow, there's so much to consume. I don't know if I could do this all, but I like the idea of bon that help them implement whatever you're teaching that actually apply to the coaching or the course or something that allows them to apply easier or faster. For example, we sell a course called the automated webinar course. It's a 30 day course and one of the value added bonuses is that we give them access for a month for free to our software so that they can apply what they learn. That bonus makes sense because it actually allows them to apply the teachings of the course and it actually has value because you can actually buy a month worth of our software at a set price. And I can actually say this is valued at this price. So bonuses that actually help the customer get the result they're looking for really are good add ons and a way to kind of make it more appealing. And you can say, hey, these bonuses are offered only to those on the webinar, only those who buy in the first week that the course is available. There's plenty of people that do this. You can also incentivize people for going with certain payment options. So maybe they go with the annual instead of a payment plan. And those who go with annual, you may want to give them an extra bonus. Maybe a coaching call or be part of your private community. Or even just some swag like a T shirt. Some incentive to choose one over the other.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?

Oh mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico to Rob.

Takes Q and A Wednesday's question from Harriet how she can make her offer more appealing without discounting her product or service. I got a few more tips. You can offer something in your offer that doesn't cost you money to produce, like an additional course. So you might offer coaching and you bundle it with a course. You can even phrase it as buy one get one free. Masterclass.com does this every holiday season where they do a buy one get one free where you buy membership to masterclass.com for a year and you get a free year for a frantic gift. And you can do the same for your business, for your product, for your service. But I would only do it for things that don't take your time or doesn't take a cost, doesn't cost you money to produce like something that you already have. And your cost for reproduction is pretty much zero. Like a copy of your ebook, like an email course, a standalone widget or software that doesn't require support, something that doesn't cost you so that you can continue to serve them or offer it. Another thing you can do is personalize the actual product. So for example, Apple does this all the time where they offer free engraving as a deal. If you buy like for example an iPad or AirPods, they'll engrave your name on the product for free as a part of the offer so you can enhance or personalize the product that you offer as well as a value add. Another great strategy I've seen is the concept of locking in a price. This is not a discount, but this ensures them that this price that they have will be the same price month over month, year after year when they renew. If you have a reoccurring membership, for example, even if you raise prices now, this is something you have to think about because you are going to be leaving money on the table. But this increases your lifetime value of the customer. And we've done this in the past and we found that customers do not cancel because they know they got a great deal, because they've seen the price go up on the sales page on the homepage, the pricing page on the website and they're like, wow, if I sign up now or if I cancel now and I have to re sign up, I'm going to pay two, three, four times as much. Much. I'm going to stick with my original plan. Grandfathering their plan, locking them into that price for as long as they're a member, as long as they renew is a great, great way to make a compelling offer that wraps up today's episode. Harriet, I hope that helps. I hope that helps everybody who's listening. For those who are looking to craft a compelling offer for their products and services, if you got a question you want to ask just like Harriet did, just go ahead and email me over at omar@100mba.net and I'll make sure to answer right here on Q and A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sales and marketing are not a once and done activity. You have to test, you have to iterate, you have to change. When it comes to our software company, Webinar Ninja, and our offering, we've changed our offer over and over and over, probably over two dozen times over the course of the last seven years because we want to test things, we want to see what works or we want to try different offerings. Sometimes it's not going to work and you're going to learn why it didn't work and then you're going to change it. You're going to try something different until you find something that works for your customers. And then even when you do, you want to optimize that, you want to improve that in some way. If you're interested in how we craft our offers or you want to take a look at how we offer our offers, just join one of our live webinars over@webinarninja.com workshop. You can sign up for the next one right here and you'll see me make an offer. That's it for me today, guys. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of we've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now, you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.