Outcomes For Them = Your Offer

We’ve talked mainly about outcomes for you through lifestyle design, working through the five freedoms framework, and looking at the type of business you’re building.

But this Outcomes section would not be complete unless we also talk about one of the most important parts of your business: your offer.

You can think about an offer as a promise to your audience. Your offer is the outcome that your business helps them achieve.

I’ve learned from no less than a dozen authors, coaches, and teachers when it comes to offers, and while they all have different approaches, they - knowingly or unknowingly - are all saying the same thing. This chapter will distill the process that everyone seems to understand but us creators.

It took me over a decade for this to finally click, but once it did, I went from closing one out of every five sales calls to four out of every five. The only thing that changed was the offer.

Craftsman Creative started as a course business, and reached six-figures in sales in less than two years while I was off producing movies because the offer took care of everything.

A good offer becomes one of the most important assets in your business, and is requisite to get right before you work on the next parts of the framework: visibility, implementing systems, and expanding your impact. You can waste a lot of time and energy in those areas if you don’t have an offer that works.

We’ll start by defining an offer that works, and help you craft a no-brainer offer that’s perfect for your right-fit clients.

An Offer That Works

Your offer is your promise to your audience. It can be as simple as, “This is a movie. To watch it you must buy a ticket.” But that isn’t very compelling, is it?

So you’ll see movie trailers with language like “the feel-good movie of the year”. Now we’re getting somewhere! There’s a promise in that statement - this movie will make you feel good. The other promises a movie trailer makes include the actors that are in the movie, who it was written and directed by, what genre it is, and what key moments you’ll see if you decide to purchase a ticket.

The movie trailer is the offer, the promise to an audience: if you purchase a ticket, this is what you’ll get.

A movie trailer that works is one that leads to ticket sales - to customers.

This is true for every offer from every business. There’s a simple, single metric you can track to see if the offer works. Generally that metric is sales.

The simplest way to measure an offer’s effectiveness is how many people have to receive that offer in order for someone to buy. If the answer is “1 out of every 100”, your offer isn’t very strong.

A talented salesperson will “close” or sell 30% of the leads they talk to. So let’s put the goal north of 1% and as high as 25-30%. Yes, you can create offers that have a 75% or higher “close rate”, but it’s better to set a goal of improving your current rate by a few percent rather than blindly say “our new goal is 75% close rate!”

So, take two offers as examples - one digital, and one that requires a sales call.

Offer 1 - a digital product, less than $100, that people can buy on your website. Go to your website and look at the analytics page. How many people visited that sales page in the last 30 days, and how many sales did you have in that same time period? Divide sales into visits, and that’s the “conversion rate” for your offer. If it’s less than 5%, you’ve got room for improvement. If it’s north of 20%, then you need to send more people to that page! Digital products cost very little, if anything, to fulfill, so there should be a very high profit margin. Sending more traffic to an offer that “converts” is a great way to grow your business.

Offer 2 - a high-value offer like custom video production for $25,000. This generally requires a sales call with someone on your team to identify the needs of the customer and create a bespoke offer each time. If you get a new customer one out of every 10 sales calls, you have a 10% conversion rate. You can look at both the offer itself to make it more compelling, and also your sales process to get the conversion rate closer to 20-30%.

Now that you know the goal - an offer that “works”, meaning it converts 1/10 to 1/3 of the people who receive it - we can look at the steps that go into crafting a no-brainer, compelling offer for your right-fit clients and customers.

Again, I define a customer as someone who purchases from you for the first time. A client is someone who is a return customer - they’re paying you a monthly fee or have hired you more than once or bought more than one of your products or services.

Create Your No-Brainer Offer

This is a distillation of the dozens of offer-creation books, courses, webinars, workshops, and conference sessions that I’ve been through over the years. It’s a simple process that puts the needs and desires of your right-fit customers and clients at the very center, and aligns your business with helping them get the outcomes they care about.

It looks like this:

Identify the pains, desires, and needs of your audience
Match your offer to each one
Stack the offer
Price it appropriately
Test and optimize

Identify the pains, desires, and needs of your audience

You should know about these because most creators understand their audience at a much deeper level than, say, a tech company. Draw a big circle on a whiteboard or a sheet of paper, and split it into three sections, labeled Pains, Desires, and Needs, like this:

Start with pains. List out every single pain or frustration that your audience has. The goal is to get to 15+ in this section, so dig deep and take as much time as you need to get a full list.

Next, go to the desires section. What does your audience want? What is their dream outcome? You can use the five freedoms framework from their point of view. What do they desire in terms of money, time, experiences, location, freedom, purpose, fulfillment, etc.

Just like the first section, try and list out 15+ desires for this part. The reason is you want to exhaust your ideas so that you’ve got many to choose from when we get to the next part of the process.

Now repeat the process for the Needs section. What do they need that is different from what they desire and what they’re frustrated by? This isn’t your product yet, these are the solutions, the “jobs to be done”. They don’t “need a video” from you, they need awareness from an audience. Your video offer is an option, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves if we include it here. This is one step removed from your product or solution. We’re looking at the needs, not the solution.

List out as many as you can here and, again, take the time you need to fill this section out completely.

Now, you’ve got a big circle with three pie slices that include dozens of pains, desires, and needs. The next step is to take an honest look - even asking your audience if you can - what the top three in each section are. Take a highlighter or circle with a different color pen the pains that you hear most often, the desires that you know are forefront in the minds of your audience, and the biggest needs that they have.

Do that now before we move to step 2. You want to identify the top three pains or frustrations, the top three desires, and the top three needs.

Match your offer to each one

Now you’ve got a list of at least 7 or 8 - ideally 9 - pains, desires, and needs that we can use to craft your offer. Let’s take an audience of marketing directors. Say your list looks like this:

Pains

no budget
bureaucracy
uncertainty / bad past experiences

Desires

free up their time
look good to the company
not overpay

Needs

good marketing partner
marketing that aligns with their brand
grow the business

We now know what matters most to them, and we can take each one of these statements and craft our offer to match it perfectly. So, let’s say our offer is for marketing video production. Most offers sound like this:

“We create custom video for your business. We’re a small team so we have less overhead which means we cost less than other vendors, and we have the best cameras and team around. Videos start at $10,000.”

The problem with this offer is that it sounds like a hundred (or thousand) other video production companies. Nothing about this offer is a “no brainer”, nor does it speak to the pains, desires, and needs of our ideal customer.

So, lets take each statement from our example and use it to craft a new offer:

no budget - “we can work with any budget, understanding that every business and every campaign is different. We’ll help you maximize your spend through a complimentary discovery call before we start working together.”
bureaucracy - “getting sign-off from your team and others in the company can be a frustrating part of the process and a major bottleneck when you’re under a time crunch. We have built a system that ensures buy-in from stakeholders at the start, works backward from the delivery date, and gives you complete clarity along the way. You’ll be kept up-to-date on the progress toward each milestone, and avoid any last-minute derailments to getting the video you need”
uncertainty / bad past experiences - we’ve worked with XX companies in [industries] over the last XX years. That’s hundreds of videos and dozens of happy customers, just like you. We exclusively do videos in [industry] so you know we understand the intricacies and needs of this space. We speak the language, so that your message gets across clearly and effectively.”
free up their time - the last thing you want to do as a marketing director is figure out how to produce a video. We partner with our companies and handle production all the way from concept to delivery. Our process includes weekly progress updates and visibility into the process so you can check-in any time, but also allows you to focus on the other needs of the campaign, your team, and your customers.
look good to the company - we provide you with a detailed report 30-days after the video goes live with key metrics that show you the effectiveness of the campaign. This not only helps you look good, but shows you where to double down to continue the success for months and months.
not overpay - we’ve structured our video production in an annual retainer plan. No more overpaying for a single video. You get four campaigns every year, which includes a hero video, a dozen supporting videos for social media, email, and the different pages of your website, and imagery so that your campaign has a consistent look and feel across all formats.
good marketing partner - we make sure that working with us is FUN. You’ll enjoy being on set with us, if you choose, but we’re pleasant and professional on calls, and easy to work with. No more chasing down an update, wondering what’s going on, and getting radio silence from a vendor who is too busy with other projects.
marketing that aligns with their brand - we take the time to deeply understand your brand story, your previous successes, and your audience. We align our videos with your vision - your brand, your tone, and your values.
grow the business - our videos are outcome driven to align with the needs of the campaign for your business. Whether you’re trying to expand awareness, drive leads and sales, or launch a new product, we make sure that the video helps you grow your business.

Yes, those are a lot of words. But think about having all of that in front of you as you present your offer to your potential customer. They end up feeling seen, understood, and taken care of before any transaction has occurred. They get an understanding of what you offer, what it’s like to work with you, and feel pulled to become a customer.

Stack the offer

The next step helps you stand out by over-delivering compared to anyone else in your market. By “stacking” the offer, you increase the value - real or perceived - while only slightly increasing the cost of fulfillment, creating more profit margin with each sale.

What that looks like is “but wait, there’s more”. So continuing our video production example, you could stack the offer by including:

not just one video, but four separate campaigns over a 12-month period
a complimentary strategy session before each campaign ($2,500 value each time)
a dedicated account manager who will be your single point of contact through the whole engagement
a complimentary project management platform to manage communication, milestones, and deliverables ($100/month)
Photo assets from each shoot included ($5,000 per campaign)
Reporting for 90 days after each campaign goes live ($10,000 value)

You’ve just included over $40,000 in value while only increasing your cost a few thousand dollars. That’s massive profit, more than you’d charge for a single video in the previous version of the offer.

Ask yourself what can you add to your offer to make it more valuable to the customer.

Price it accordingly

Now that you’ve increased the value so much, you can increase the price of the offer. The previous $10,000 video is now a $100,000 annual retainer, with a greater profit margin. Think about how this could affect your business - you go from needing eight new clients per month to clear $1m a year in revenue, to only needing ten clients per year.

You now have room to invest in growth, in your team, in new equipment, in expansion or acquisition, in advertising and finding new leads. It’s possible because you increased the value and priced accordingly.

This also works for digital products, events, books, coaching, and more. Rather than surveying what everyone else in your market is charging and then pricing your offer somewhere just south of the average, increase your prices. Doing that alone changes the type of people who come to your business.

When my wife and I got married she was charging $500-$1,500 to do a wedding. I remember going with her to a bridal fair and walking around to see the other photographer’s booths. They all were priced in the same range, offered the same number of hours of coverage, same amount of prints, and same time frames. Not a single one stood out.

After that, my wife and I sat down to talk about her business, and we decided to get out of the “pricing dead zone” and increase her prices. The next bridal fair, six months later, she had priced her wedding photography between $2,500 and $4,500. She was five to ten times the price of every other photographer there.

While she booked fewer wedding clients, the people who booked her had more money to spend, valued her style and approach, and have been repeat clients over the years, hiring her for baby pictures, family pictures, and travel photography.

Pricing your offers is also choosing what market you’re in, so if you want to be in a “higher” market, you need to price accordingly, and you can do that by crafting a valuable offer.

Test and optimize the offer

The last step is so important yet so many people skip this step, then wonder why no one is buying! You have to put your offer in front of your right-fit customer, every day, every day, every day.

Put your offer on a page on your site, talk about it on social media, and get people on sales calls so you can present the offer to them. You’ll discover what works and what doesn’t land. You’ll see how people respond to the offer. You’ll listen to their needs in the moment and adjust accordingly. You’ll tweak the pricing, the offer stack, and the way you present it.

Without this step, you’ve got an offer stack that’s more valuable that doesn’t resonate with the audience you made it for. That’s not the goal we’re after. A no brainer offer is one that your right-fit client sees and says “this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

The first time I crafted my consulting offer, I pitched it to a customer who had hired me for a strategy call. I knew that I could help them grow their business, so in a flurry I wrote an email outlining a new consulting offer specifically for them.

I took the pains, desires, and needs that I knew about them, crafted a solution that addressed every single one, and told them that it costs $15k for three months.

Their response came back within the hour: “This is perfect. How do I pay?”

One email, one customer, one hour. $15,000. That’s the power of a no-brainer offer for your right-fit clients and customers.

As much time as you’ve spent from this section of the book thinking about your outcomes, it’s now time to make sure that you’ve thought about the outcomes for your customers and clients in the form of your offer.

TAKE ACTION

Look at all of the offers you have for your business, go through this process with each of them, and put the new-and-improved offer in front of your audience. Keep testing and optimizing until you have a no-brainer offer that your audience is buying every single day.

How to get that audience, and how to get them to line up to do business with you is the topic of the next section.