High-Impact Offers: Strategies for Sales Success

And you've got to say, at what point in this process do we get agreement on the problem? Because there's got to be problem agreement before anything else. Now, this can come in the form of a very specialized lead magnet that you offer. So for example, at the scalable company, our highest converting lead magnet is the CEO scorecard. So you only would download that if the problem that you have is you're lacking visibility. You, you don't have metrics, you don't have scoreboards, you don't have dashboards, it's not promising to make you any richer, thinner, any kind of broad based thing. So that ensures that we have problem agreement. Then if you do have some type of sales motion, you've got to make sure a sales component, whether it's group sales or one on one, that there is scripting in the discovery.

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch.

And we're excited to have you with us today. Ryan, who is my business partner and co podcast host, is looking slightly confused because I said, let's just start and talk about this thing we're talking about. And he's like, what? And I clicked the button, which is fun because it's, it's raw and real.

I am what you're building on the promise, it's fulfilling on the promise it is.

I am here. Roland Frazier, nice to see you guys. So Ryan and I were talking about offers and I thought this would be really good for us to just have it and record it and see what happened. But we were talking about offers in three different businesses that we own and run together, and that each of these businesses, like we have this dream that all three are going to be kicking on all cylinders. So someday. But it's so far been a dream that maybe it's happened for two weeks in the past 10 years where all of them were doing everything they were supposed to be doing. But we're talking about a pretty big transition that we've made that maybe will help some of you guys and others of you, maybe you can join the conversation and share your experiences and maybe even give us some thoughts on how to improve it that we can share with everybody as well. But we're talking about really over the past four years, kind of from when the pandemic first started, end of 2019, early 20 on into 21, 22, first half probably of 23, everybody had lots of money from the government, was giving away everything. And so all of the panic that caused us to believe that maybe the economy was going to go down turned out the exact opposite happened. And now we have seen across several of our businesses and we see in the press that things are slower now. Businesses are a little bit more pessimistic, but inflation's still kind of hanging in there difficultly. Although depending on what you read, it's, it's somewhere between 2 and 4% rate. Two is the target that the Fed has if you're in the United States. But, but it's very uncertain. So one of the things that we are trying to do is generate more sales. And to do that, we want to either buy more ads or we want to have better converting offers. And the buying more ads has been difficult because it's hard to spend above a certain level without getting dramatic diminishing returns where your acquisition costs go way, way up. And ultimately it doesn't become as profitable to do so really focusing on how do we get better conversions. And Ryan and I were talking about that most of our sales, say especially five or 10 years ago, were online, just straight online sales offers. Driving to a web page for a sale, webinar or VSL video sales letter, you know, going to a sale, e commerce site, going to a sale. And now most of our offers that are higher ticket, which I'm going to say, Ryan, what would you say? Over 2,000?

Yeah, typically it's considered 3,000 and above.

But okay, so over $3,000. We are not selling those online. We are, we are basically marketing them online and then driving to a sales team. And, and so we were just talking a minute ago and Ryan said, well, it's, it's basically a fundamentally different way that you build an offer for the sales team for the phone closes versus online. And so my response that, that led me to saying, let's just go live and have this conversation where everybody can hear it was, yeah, but we, we have been selling on the phone for certainly the past three and a half or four years in, in a few of the businesses that we, that we work together. And, and, and so I didn't really see any difference. And he said, no, it's actually different. And so he was about to tell me what that was, and I wanted you guys to hear it too. So. And you can summarize some of that, Ryan, and correct anything that I may have said, not completely correctly.

Yeah, everything you said was dead on, I think.

Yeah, it was.

I'm sorry. Nailed it, dude. Perfect. No, I think what we're really talking about is how does the sales motion itself impact the offer structure? If we were just going to sum it down Sum it into kind of one statement. I think that's it. Sales motion impacts, offer structure. And this is something that I don't think I fully appreciated until we got into so many businesses that sell in so many different ways prior to, like you said, the pandemic. And we owned an entire portfolio of companies prior to 2020, 2021, where they were pretty much all consumer. And even the B2B ones functioned a little bit more consumery. Where the whole idea was we get people to a website either through some type of organic traffic or through paid media. They come to a website, they read a page and or they watch a video, they click a link, they go to an order form, they fill it out, they click the submit button, the money arrives, they get access to the stuff or we ship it out in a box. Life is good. Just about everything that we did was structured around this direct to consumer D2C E commerce based business model. Even a lot of the B2B stuff. Well fast forward and number one, our business mix changed because we frankly sold a lot of those businesses, exited most of those businesses. But also what we found is that after ad costs have increased dramatically, which, which happened in 2020, it happened a lot because the iOS 14 update and things like that, ad costs just went up. And when ad costs went up, what, what we saw in our businesses and what saw across the board is you frankly just had to make your customers worth more or you couldn't afford to acquire more. And this wasn't just in the business to business space, this was also in a lot of consumer markets. And so we what's so people finding like okay, just getting people to click on links and go to websites and give me fifty, a hundred, two hundred, you know, maybe $1,000 which you could get online. That didn't work anymore. We've got to get the average customer, average client values up so that we can afford to spend. Well once you get above a certain threshold, now is when people just still today want to talk to someone. Now there was this brief moment in time when people were fine to just go online and to buy something that was 3,000, 5,000, 7,000, even $10,000 without talking to someone. And that was in this little window immediately post Pandemic when as you described, everybody's flush with cash from the government. Interest rates are nothing. We haven't been. This is another biggie that I think we forgot. We weren't spending money on anything else like everybody was so that we couldn't spend money. We weren't really going out, right?

Yeah.

And so people are like, I've got all this excess cash laying around, I want to deploy it. And so there was this window when you could do quote unquote, high ticket without any sort of sales function. And I would distinguish sales for marketing, meaning a salesperson needing to talk to someone. And if you did, then it was more of a sales assist. So what's the difference between a sales first function and the sales assist? A sales assist is I got all of the information that I needed to make a decision online. I watched a video, I attended a webinar, I attended a multi day challenge, I went to some kind of an online event and I'm pretty much ready to buy. But the call to action is, you know, is still book a meeting or you know, request a demo or maybe it's here's a link. But if you have any questions, go over here. That person who then closes that sale, that is a sales assist. They don't actually have to quote, unquote, sell. Now they do, they need to close, but they don't need to sell. And I'll explain where I see the distinction in just a little bit. I'm not saying that they're just a pure order taker, right. They are doing sales. But on the spectrum of sales, there's the I've got to basically take everybody from the I've got a problem two, I've closed the sale. That is the highest level of sales that you need. Taking somebody from all the way from problem awareness to solution awareness and agreement to product and ultimately closing it. And that really is the different phases. If somebody generally has accepted the solution and they just have a couple of questions about the product, that's a sales assistant, that is not the full blown selling. And I think that's the biggest change that we've made is in that piece there. I'm happy to go into more depth and clarity and give some examples, but I just want to make sure if you're following is what I just said. Does that make any sense? Yeah, 100%. So let's go back to Eugene Schwartz's levels of awareness. So this is like in my opinion, the best marketing book ever written is Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. In my opinion, the best chapter in that book is the chapter that he has on the levels of awareness. And I think levels of awareness, if you can understand levels of awareness, you understand probably 80% of what you need to know to be really good at sales and marketing. So level one is completely unaware people who have no idea about Your product, your service, their. They don't even know that they have a problem. They are totally and completely unaware. Level two is they're problem aware. So at this stage they have a problem and they're aware that they have a problem. They don't necessarily know what the problem is called yet. And they also don't know what solutions are available to solve the problem. They just know they got a problem. So this is somebody saying, I'm overweight, I need to lose, you know, I need to lose some pounds, right? They know they have a problem. The level up from that is solution aware. And solution is when you're becoming aware of the different solution categories. So going back to the weight loss example, this is I could take diet pills. This is I could join a gym. This is I could get surgery. This is I could get the Ozempic shot, right, which was a new solution category for an existing problem. Right is I could go and get this magical skinny shot right now. Level up from that is product aware. Product aware is I am now aware of the specific products within these different categories. So I'm not just thinking gym, I'm thinking I want to join Iron Tribe. I'm not just thinking diet pill, I'm thinking this specific one. And then the level above that is most aware. This is where somebody, they pretty much have made a decision. They just have a couple of questions that they need answered. They might need to invoke some scarcity, might need to have some bonuses, might need to have a better payment plan, you know, might need to make some tweaks to the offer. But that, that fifth level, the most aware, is the highest level. All right, with that framework in mind, if you think about sales motion, there are certain sales motions that get people further along that continuum than others. For example, a five day challenge, which is the one that we've run for years and years and years at Epic, right? You, you do a five day challenge. People come online, they show up for this thing or they watch the recordings and what are you doing? The ads are taking people who are unaware to some level of awareness. That's what's getting them to, to sign up for the challenge. So marketing, either we're, we're targeting people who are already problem aware or marketing needs to make them problem aware. So that's marketing, advertising does that. Then it is the job of, in this case, the challenge. But it could also be a webinar, it could be a video to take somebody from problem aware to solution aware. So in this case, the solution is for you Know for Epic is you need to start investing in private companies at the scalable company. The solution category is you need a business operating system. So you've got an entrepreneur who's frustrated, they're flailing, their business is flat. Also things that they think that there's a lot of different possible solutions. I need to become more efficient. I need to hire an integrator. Right. I just need to. We just need more growth. Those are all different solution categories. And it's job number one is to first affirm and name their problem. Right? That's the first thing. This is the problem. You've got this issue, you got this challenge. Job number two is to get. So first we need problem agreement, then we need solution agreement. Do you agree that this is the ideal solution? Then we can get product agreement. Do you agree that this product is the best in the solution category which is going to solve this broad problem? If you have a sales motion that is very content heavy, like a webinar, like a challenge, there's more friction to get somebody to show up and to actually consume, but it takes them all the way. Problem, you get problem agreement, you get solution category agreement, and in many cases you even get product awareness. They may not know the price yet, but they're all the way through. Problem, solution, product. The job of the salesperson to just convince them that this product is in fact the best one way easier. Now compare that to another sales motion that we do. Right. We also have a sales motion where we've got a lead magnet that's out there or a book, for example. So somebody opts in for a lead magnet. Now all the lead magnet is addressing is problem stage awareness, but it usually doesn't get into the solution and it definitely doesn't talk about the problem. So when you have somebody opt in for a lead magnet and then go and talk to a salesperson, if that salesperson doesn't know that they need to actually walk them all the way to make sure that we got problem agreement, to make sure that we then have solution agreement and then introduce the the product. If they don't know that they need to do all those steps, the sale is going to fail. If you just. If that same salesperson is used to talking to people who've been on a webinar, you have them talk to leads, they're going to fail every single time. So again, can go into more detail. I've been monologuing too much thoughts, feelings and emotions about that. Does that generally make sense?

Yeah, it doesn't really help me with what I'm mainly after, but I think it's really helpful for background for everybody. So for me, I'm after what is the primary difference? So we know how to build offers that sell online. We know how to build offers that sell challenges online. Then going to salespeople, what's the difference specifically in the offer for the. Or the. Because you said offer. What's specifically different about that offer for the salesperson selling it versus the. The challenge or webinar selling it? That. That is then driving those leads to a phone sales room?

So there's a difference in the offer, but there's an even bigger difference in the sales process itself. Okay. And so I think the mistakes that we made in the past is we've had the wrong sales process and selling the wrong offer structure.

So what's the sales process that we've had and where do you believe that it was or is wrong?

So the sales process that we had is somebody would opt in for a lead magnet, or we would have, let's say, sales development reps doing outreach to our list, saying, hey, do you want. You know, you got this problem? Hop on this call, let's talk about it. Let's book you into a meeting where we can help, you know, solve that for you. Those people, what they're. If they then book in a meeting and the person immediately starts to sell them a product without first confirming, do we have problem agreement? Do we all agree that this is the problem? We've named it and we're happy with the way that it's named? Yes or no? Yes. Okay, great. Now, do you have solution agreement? Do you agree that the solution category is the right solution to solve that problem? That's the one more times than not that we're skipping. We're saying, do you have this problem? Yes, I do. Okay, then what you need to do is you need to join epic board, right? Or you need to join this other thing without getting solution agreement, like, crystal clear and down. But if you have a sales team that is used to talking to people who have frankly, had more education on the front end, then they're gonna happily, they're gonna confirm through the discovery process. They're gonna confirm and they're gonna ask questions to get problem agreement. They're usually pretty good at that. But they skip over the solution category, agreement, and it's a bridge too far to go from problem all the way to. Then you should buy this product. So it's been missing that middle step. That's kind of the first. And I can Give you an example of this at the scalable company, right? What is the problem that we're dealing with? We're dealing with post traction founders, people, typically entrepreneurs between 2 million and 50 million in revenue. They've got a team size of between 10 and you know, 50ish people. Right. That's kind of the, the sweet spot there. Owner operated and the owner is absolutely burnt out and the business is kind of flat because, because the business owner is bottlenecked and they are, you know, it's only moving as fast as they can. So we, the sales team would get really good clarity on. Do you have this problem? Yes, I've got that problem. Okay, well then the solution is you need to join this mastermind called founders board. Well, what I don't understand what is a mastermind? What is it? This. Oh, let me explain to you all the. Yeah, I don't know, I don't have time. Like we lost them, right? So. Or you need to join this coaching program or you need to join this thing. As soon as we jump from the problem all the way to the product, no go. When we then said okay without mentioning the name of the product, you've got this problem. The solution, what you really need to be is you need to be in the room with other smart market, smart entrepreneurs like you. You need to join a mastermind. If we could get them to agree that that was the correct solution category, then selling them the product was much easier. It was one step removed as opposed to two steps removed. The problem that we had was that the mastermind as an offer, as the product that we were selling wasn't actually the category that people wanted. But we didn't have that. We didn't know that was the case until we first got them to agree that this was the issue. Similarly, a lot of times we will say okay, well then what you need is a course that teach you how to do this. Do you agree that a course that a training is the right solution category to solve this? No, I don't, I don't have time for that. Oh, okay. So we had to repackage things in there, but you're not even going to figure out if you're selling the right offer if you don't get solution agreement.

So how did you repackage it?

So at the scalable company we basically got them to agree that the solution that they needed, the solution category was you need a new operating system. Right? So problem agreement, solution agreement. Now when we said okay, and the way that you get this operating system is you Join this mastermind called Founders board. People were like, wait, so to get an operating system I need to be in this 12 month program. We have four meetings. It was disconnected, that felt too far. So then we said, okay, we have this course that you can go through with a group of other people. And we literally had somebody say, please tell me if I invest in this, you're not just going to drop me in a members area with a bunch of videos that I can, that I have to watch and then you're going to tell me to jump on some group calls. We're like, well that's kind of exactly what it is, you know. And so when we said okay, well what do you want? They said, I just want somebody to help me build the thing. And what we needed, what we realized that we needed to create, which we didn't have at the time, was a one on one program which is not as quote unquote scalable, but it is what the market wanted. If they had this problem, if they agreed that the operating system was the solution, but they knew that the only way they were going to get that operating system was to go through some type of a productized service. And so that's what we had, that's what we had to build in that, in that area, you know, to solve that particular problem for the people who agreed to that. Now once we sold that and we delivered upon it, now it's easy to say, hey, you should be in the mastermind, you should be in the coaching program. Let's continue working together on an ongoing basis. But we need that, that middle chunk there. Got it. Cool.

So if people are watching or listening and they're experiencing either a stall in growth or declining sales or growth and they are only driving to. And is this Ryan, only for products that are over a couple thousand bucks?

I don't think so. I mean typically when you get to products that are over a couple thousand bucks, there is a complexity there that doesn't exist with just kind of normal. Like if this isn't. If you're selling kitchen gadgets on Amazon, certainly this isn't for you. But yeah, so this is somebody who is selling more of a complex solution oriented sale. It's usually going to be software, some kind of service offering. Yes, that it's most applicable to this.

Okay, so let's say that they are in that category and they've listened to this and now they're going, okay, cool. I just don't know exactly what I should do. What do you think from maybe assessment to plan to implementation. They should be doing the customer journey.

Through that initial sales process all the way from the point of awareness to okay, they bought. And you've got to say at what point in this process do we get agreement on the problem? Because there's got to be problem agreement before anything else. Now this can come in the form of a very specialized lead magnet that you offer. So for example, at the scalable company, our highest converting lead magnet is the CEO scorecard. So you only would download that if the problem that you have is you're lacking visibility. You don't have metrics, you don't have scoreboards, you don't have dashboards, it's not promising to make you any richer, thinner, any kind of broad based thing. So that ensures that we have problem agreement. Then if you do have some type of sales motion, you've got to make sure a sales component, whether it's group sales or one on one, that there is scripting in the discovery phase. So the very first part of that, if our when our salespeople are talking to a new lead, the very first thing that they want to get is problem agreement. So what's going on in your world? Why are you here? Why'd you book this call? Why are you on this deal? Do you have any of these particular issues? Yes, I do. Okay, let's name them and getting clear on. Okay, so if we could solve this particular problem for you, that would be worth it, right? Yes. So where in the process do you clearly get problem agreement? This can also come in the form by the way of if you're running webinars early on, you should probably say, hey, some of the things we hear from our clients time and time again are the following problems and we will list them out in their own words. If these sound like anything you've said, heard, thought or felt, just drop a yes in the box. Okay, cool. We're getting problem agreement. Now the next phase that we've got again, and this is the one that I found most people are missing. What is your solution category? What is the category that you are offering as a broad based solution to this? Not your product, not your specific deliverable, not your specific offer. What is the solution category? Because in the beginning we were saying if you've got these problems, then the solution to it is a mastermind. The solution to it is join our open ended coaching program where we'll give you all the things and make all your wildest dreams come true. Guess what? People will buy that all day long when everything is up. And to the right and the government's giving away free money and interest rates are at zero. People are happy to take a flyer on something that just sounds like it maybe could solve it. And it sounds really cool. In every other economic cycle, people are looking for that specific thing that is clearly going to get them the outcome they're looking for. So if we can get them to agree that what they really need is an operating system, an upgraded business operating system, then we can move on to the first step. But if we start talking about our particular solutions, like our particular products, our particular offerings, before we get solution agreement, you're going to close about 0% of them. So you now go and audit and say, where in our process are we getting solution agreement? This can come by the way, in the form of, now we were adding a checkbox to our meeting booking forms. When people apply. Do you agree that the thing that you need right now that's going to solve your biggest issue is a new operating system? Yes or no? If no, please don't book it. If you think it's anything else, that's not what we do. Right. So in the case of Epic, it could be. Do you agree that, you know, buying and investing in private companies, as opposed to real estate stocks and things like that, is a great way to build wealth and you want to know more about how to do that? So getting solution category agreement is really important. The mistake that a lot of people make is they define their solution category more by their deliverable. So I have a mastermind, I have a coaching program which nobody wants that right now. People aren't looking to buy new friends anymore. It's not 2020. So we got. Where in your thing do you get problem agreement? Where you get solution agreement. Now we can get into the offer structure itself. How are we presenting the offer? And I'll just say about this, the way that most people are taught to build an offer is through a value stack. Here's the main thing. And then we got this bonus and there's this bonus and we're going to add this bonus on over here. And when you get this bonus, it's worth this much. And so the total value is worth this much. Do you want to do this? That offer stack works really well in a visual environment. It does not work well over the phone and it doesn't really even work that well over Zoom one on one. So you've got to be very, very, very careful about the offer stack model when, when you're selling over the phone. Instead, what you want to be is Crystal clear on helping them visualize how the process is going to go after the purchase. Because if they can imagine themselves doing, performing the action, then they're happy to do that. So we want to get problem agreement on the overarching deliverable. Then we could say you could have bonuses there. But in general, we don't mention the bonuses unless somebody brings up a possible objection and the bonuses are there to be pulled off the shelf and to be mentioned only to the extent that they overcome an objection. Bonuses when and value stacks when selling online, when I can see it, when it's in a webinar, when it's in a challenge, totally fine. Doing a bonus stack one on one, it feels awkward. It takes it from consultative to really pitchy and awkward. It gets somebody feeling like if the thing isn't good enough, like if you got to add all these things to make it good now it must not be that good. So you're far better off to just keep the offer really, really simple. And instead of stacking the bonuses, go into more depth on the actual process of deliverable. So they can visualize themselves going through it because then they can imagine themselves experiencing the value at the end. That's the biggest difference in offer structure between selling quote unquote over the phone and selling through event type models.

Awesome. Well, hopefully that was helpful. Helpful to you guys. I know it was to me. And as we continue to brainstorm this for our businesses and come across things like this, and if that's something you guys enjoy us sharing this way, truly, this is the fly on the wall experience of, you know, hey, this is something we're going to be talking about together. We're going to share it with you. If you like that kind of stuff, let us know. If it was helpful to you, share it with other people. If not, then hopefully next time we'll get it. We'll get it for you. But thanks for joining us. Thanks Ryan. Appreciate it. We'll see you guys next time.

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