High-Impact Offers: Strategies for Sales Success

0:00And 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, or any kind of broad-based thing. So that ensures that we have problem agreement.

0:37Then 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.

0:53Hey, 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 raw and real. I am - It's fulfilling on the promise. It's fulfilling on the promise. Yeah, it is. I am your other brother, 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.

1:33But 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 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.

2:14But 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 is still kind of hanging in there difficultly. Although, depending on what you read, it's somewhere between 2 % and 4 % rate.

3:00Two is the target that the Fed has if you're in the United States. 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 webpage for a sale, webinar or VSL, video sales letter, going to a sale, e-commerce site, going to a sale.

3:58And 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 over three thousand dollars. 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, oh, 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 led me to saying, let's just go live and have this conversation where everybody can hear it was, yeah, but we have been selling on the phone for certainly the past three and a half or four years in a few of the businesses that we work together.

4:53And 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. 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 we were talking about it. Yeah, it was. I'm sorry. Nailed it. Dude, perfect. Now, 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.

5:25Sales 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.

6:11Life is good. Just about everything that we did was structured around this direct to consumer, you know, D to C e-commerce based business model, even a lot of the B to B 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 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.

6:58And this wasn't just in the business to business space. This was also in a lot of consumer markets. And so people finding like, okay, just getting people to click on links and go to websites and give me 50, 100, 200, 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.

7:40And 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 to travel. Right. Couldn't go. 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 from marketing, meaning a salesperson needing to talk to someone.

8:18And 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. exist 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 there 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 to 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.

9:33And 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 assist. 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 of like, like more depth and clarity and give some examples, but I just want to make sure if you're following is what I, is what I just said. Does that make any sense? Yeah, a hundred percent. So let's go back to Eugene Schwartz's, um, levels of awareness. So this is like, in my opinion, the best marketing book ever written is breakthrough advertising by Eugene Schwartz.

10:15In 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 have no idea about your product, your service. 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.

10:51And 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?

11:31Now 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. You know, I'm not just thinking diet pill. I'm thinking this specific one, right? 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, you know, 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 fifth level, the most aware is the highest level.

12:08All 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 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 targeting people who are already problem aware or marketing needs to make them problem aware so that's marketing advertising does that then um 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.

13:02So 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.

13:40This is the problem. You've got this issue. You've 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.

14:20And 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.

14:56So 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 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, are, you have them talk to leads, they're going to fail every single time. So again, you can go into more detail. I've been monologuing too much.

15:28Thoughts, 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 than going to salespeople, what's the difference specifically in the offer for the, or the, cause you said offer, um, what's specifically different about that offer for the salesperson selling it versus the, um, the challenge or webinar selling it that is then driving those leads to a phone sales room.

16:11So there's a, there's a difference in the offer, but there's an even bigger difference in the sales process itself. 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 solve that for you.

16:52Those people, 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.

17:34But 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 going to happily, they're going to confirm through the discovery process. They're going to confirm and they're going to 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?

18:09What 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 50-ish people, right? That's kind of the sweet spot there. Owner operated and the owner is absolutely burnout and the business is kind of flat 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.

18:47Well, what, I don't understand. What is a mastermind? What is, what is it this? Oh, let me explain to you all the, yeah, I don't know. I don't know time. Like, 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 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.

19:28It 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'll say, okay, well then what you need is a course that teaches you how to do this? Do you agree that, of 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.

20:04But 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, OK, 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.

20:38That felt too far. So then we said, OK, 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.

21:19If 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 area, you know, to solve that particular problem for the people who agree 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 middle chunk there. Got it.

21:49Cool. 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.

22:34Yes, 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.

23:17So 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.

23:59So 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 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, 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.

24:30If these sound like anything you've said, heard, thought or felt, just drop a yes in the box. OK, cool. We're getting problem agreement. Now, the next phase that we've got to get, 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.

25:14Guess 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.

25:57So 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?

26:34So 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 prop where in your thing do you get problem agreement? Where do 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.