The Perfect Offer Formula with Jordan Mederich: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by high level the all in one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode we'll be breaking down the perfect offer formula and to drop these value bombs I brought to Jordan Mederich and EO fire studios. Jordan is the founder and CEO of drop funnels.com and all in one marketing platform. He's also an investor father of three and helps businesses build funnels courses and websites on WordPress. us. And today we talk about how you don't need a lot of tools to run your business. How about ethical buying is as important as ethical selling.

0:36John Lee Dumas:Align your values and intentions with your company and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Giorno and our sponsors. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days? Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something.

1:16John Lee Dumas:Short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD. On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today. Gordo, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, everybody? Glad to be here. And thank you, John, for having me on. Yeah, I'm excited to chat through various strategies and things that I think are working. But what I love about this question already is that I think in many cases, the number one thing that people often disagree with me about is that I think that there's this overwhelming sense of what I call duct tape overwhelm, right?

2:05Specifically with entrepreneurs who are chasing shiny objects at many times. There's so many tech platforms. There's so many tools out there to choose from. But really, my number one thing is, especially for businesses that are about under$30 ,000, maybe$50 ,000 per month, you really don't need to have a massive amount of tools to support your business. In fact, I think that addition can come by subtraction. And if you can stay in your lane and aligned with your message in the marketplace, you can do that all in virtually one, maybe two different platforms. And so as it relates to tools that entrepreneurs are using, I think the biggest thing that people can do is eliminate, not add more to it, and focus on just a few key tools that can help you to grow.

2:51John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, we have a pretty big promise today, the perfect offer formula. And I want to start off, Giorno, by talking about how any entrepreneur can eliminate 90 % of the tools and cost of running our businesses. I mean, that's a pretty appealing promise here. Let's go into it. And it is certainly a big promise. I think, you know, obviously I'm the founder of DropFunnels and it's, for those who aren't familiar, it's an all-in-one platform to help you to eliminate a lot of other things and really just focus in on marketing and sales and doing what you do best, which is hopefully serving customers and clients at the highest level.

3:28You know, but I find that in many cases, the goal surrounding where we're trying to get to, again, as I mentioned, needs to come through subtraction. So when we're coming down to what I call the perfect offer formula, it's kind of this set of questions. It's kind of an algorithmic system to help you to determine how good your offer is. I think the absolute number one thing that can separate you from anyone else in the market is by having a great offer. And really a sales funnel, your website, any other tools or anything that you're building around is an amplifier. It's ancillary to how great your offer is.

4:09I mean, I can have an okay, maybe okay offer and have all the tools and tech stack in the world and duct tape it all together and hope that it works out. But I'm going to sell far less than having just one really great offer that serves people at the highest level where you can become really well known for serving people and to make it an irresistible offer that mitigates risks and helps people to get results quickly. That's really the key inside the perfect offer formula that you can eliminate a lot of other things that you're probably working on, whether you've got website builders. And, you know, drop funnels is kind of, if you imagine WordPress plus ClickFunnels plus Kajabi plus PipeDrive.

4:49If they all had a baby, that's drop funnels to allow you to build everything into one place. But I think from an ethos, if us as entrepreneurs, we think about how to simplify our lives and businesses, the key is, again, by simplifying all the things that are just amplifiers, focus on having a really great offer that's irresistible. and then amplify those with simple tools that are easy to understand, easy to change, easy to split test and get things off the ground and running as soon as possible.

5:19John Lee Dumas:That is one problem that I find with most entrepreneurs is they just overcomplicate things. It's like a disease, it's like a sickness. They just wanna keep adding more and more and more onto their plate and they never take anything off. They just keep complicating things, they just keep adding things and then it's just a house of cards and everything collapses. So let's make things simple. Let's focus on what works, Fire Nation. That's where our head needs to be at. I want to talk next about high-ticket sales because this is what I found works really well in my business, and that's what I've been focusing on for quite some time now.

5:49John Lee Dumas:And a lot of people think that high-ticket sales and high-ticket sales funnels specifically are really difficult to make and will have a lot of difficulty in making a lot of sales, enough to make legitimate revenue. But the reality is we're going to talk right now about how to easily build a high-ticket sales funnel that can rank in Google for free organic traffic. I mean, there's a lot of great things going on here. How can we do this? Yeah. So there's a lot to digest here, but to synopsize this as much as possible, it really comes back down to the offer. And specifically for consultants or maybe doing coaching, you have a service.

6:25Specifically, if you're selling something over $100, but under$2 ,000, there's a couple of really simple strategies to help you to separate yourself from the market and not have a race to the bottom. Now, I think a lot of offers are really commodity offers. So for example, if I'm just a life coach, I'm going to be in a market that's completely red and there's a lot of life coaches out there and people are going to be looking for, all right, why are you the same or different than anyone else? It's tough to differentiate. So what I find is that there's two ways to separate yourself out. One is through branding and your actual offer direction, like niching down to a more specific target audience.

7:03So if it's like life coaches, I do life coaching for high performance athletes. I do life coaching for high performing entrepreneurs. I do life coaching for teachers or for politicians. If I can serve a niche market, I can stand out and be the biggest fish in that pond. So your direction of the offer matters a lot too. The other side is really the pricing model. What I find is that in many cases, is people are dropping their prices to try to encourage more enrollments or they're focusing on, hey, I'm going to sell this$37 mini course. And I always say that the money flows where your focus goes.

7:36So if I'm going to spend a lot of time building just a$37 mini workshop or product, there's a time and place for that for sure. But you're going to be getting$37 buyers. So what do you want? Do you want$2 ,000,$5 ,000,$10 ,000 buyers or do you want$37 buyers? Now, I always suggest have your first and your core offering, what I call a core offering, as a high-ticket offer that's at least got a client value of$3 ,000 or more. Now, architecting this doesn't take a lot of time, and you can really separate yourself out by packaging. Instead of selling sessions or hours of time or any individual widgets, it's like how can you bundle everything that a person would need into one specific offer?

8:19it eliminates objections it eliminates the things that they aren't even aware that they're going to need yet and it really helps guide them in the in the direction that they want to go anyway so my best suggestion is have your offer be between three thousand dollars or more in client value now that could even be a thousand bucks per month for a minimum of three months but the economics start to really work well especially with paid advertising when you've got at least a three thousand dollar client value so that's kind of on the offer side make sure that you're pushing your prices up, not down, and including more value in that, you may get a fewer or a lower volume of clients or buyers, but you're having way less stress and headache on billing or support.

8:58You're going to be drawing the highest level and highest quality people to you, and your economics are going to be far better to be profitable on a month-to-month basis. So then on the funnel side, when it comes to enacting that, so let's say we've got a great 3 ,000 or more dollar value offer. And we've got that dialed in. Maybe we can organically validate that, send out an email list and try it out on a couple of people to sell that bundled product altogether. When it comes time to automating that, that's the time when a sales funnel starts out. And I think a lot of people confuse a sales funnel for the offer.

9:32The sales funnel is the amplifier of the offer. It's the automation. It's not the offer itself. The sales funnel just guides people to the decision that they want to be making. So there's really only four different types of sales funnels. I'll cover these briefly. One is a lead magnet or list builder. And that's great. If you just want to build your email list, you want to get people into your ecosystem. Number two is what we call an SLO. It's or a self-liquidating offer. And that would be when you're selling a low ticket offer that might have some order bumps or upsells throughout the process.

10:02This can work well for supplement companies. I just jumped onto a food meal prep company and they had a sales funnel where you can maximize the order value, but your entire goal is to just liquidate your ad spend. You want to make back at least, say it costs you$200 to acquire a customer to have an average order value of about$200 to have a sales funnel. But again, that's not where the profit is made. It's on the backend. So we've got a lead magnet or list builder. We've got a self-liquidating offer. We've got a high ticket funnel, which is really the best case scenario for most people who are experts, coaches, or they're doing personal branding, authors, speakers.

10:39The final one, which is probably least likely to be used as more for local business. So it's what we call a flash sale funnel, where the whole point is to give something irresistible away as a discount. So carpet cleaning services, instead of 300 bucks for a room, you can get it now for a hundred bucks, right? It's kind of that flash sale mentality. But when it comes down to honing in on your high ticket funnel, the whole goal is to build an application process. So a high ticket funnel, the whole purpose is not to get as many people through the process as possible. It's actually to get as few people through that are highly qualified.

11:12So instead of trying to get people to buy continually throughout a funnel or you're trying to warm them up, some of those other funnel strategies can work well to also aid in other business objectives. But I'd say for about 99 % of people who are under 30K per month, a high ticket application funnel is going to qualify people and draw them to you at the highest rate possible. You're going to be spending a lot less time with tire kickers and people who might waste your time. And really the funnel flow is very simple. It's just an opt-in page that can give away some type of training or value. The next page is the actual deliverable of that.

11:47It's the digital download or what we call a VSL, like a video sales letter. And it's just a very short three, maybe five minutes. You can go up to 30 minutes or so depending on your particular offer, but teach them something that they didn't know before. What are the three big sticking points or struggle points that they're suffering with right now? And how can you eliminate those by just teaching that in that amount of time? Again, we're only teaching kind of the how, but not exactly the how to. The whole purpose of that would be right below that video, you have a button that links over to your either Calendly or Schedule Once booking page, or even just embed that directly onto a page as well.

12:24And so it's really a three-step funnel. It's very simple, and it's probably the most effective way to draw people to your primary high-ticket offer.

12:32John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, so many value bombs from that. The one thing I want to draw you back to is higher your price. Don't lower your price. Raise those prices. And I love that Seth Godin quote, the problem with the race to the bottom is that you just might win and nobody wants to win that race to the bottom. I mean, think about that Fire Nation. And I love some of the points you made, Jordan. It's like you're talking about less customer service, less issues, less headaches, less chargebacks. You're dealing with higher quality clients because these are people they can and want to invest in something meaningful.

13:02John Lee Dumas:You're going to give them real change like that's going to actually happen. They're going to actually make shifts and change and progress. so many cool things. And we're going to talk about a lot more things along this line when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting.

13:36John Lee Dumas:Everything works together seamlessly. Plus, award-winning 24-7 support so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack. A 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 50-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something execution roadmap, and more. Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Fire Nation, are you ready to create something special in just 50 days?

14:16John Lee Dumas:If you just thought yes, then check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something. Every video is short, clear, and built to move you forward one intentional step at a time. Clarity, offer, validation systems momentum. By day 50, you are not working on something. You have built something, something to be proud of. And this is completely free on my YouTube channel right now. If you're done letting weeks just drift on by, visit eofire.com slash YouTube. That's eofire.com slash YouTube and press play on day one. 50 days will pass in the blink of an eye. The only question is whether you'll still be thinking or finally building something special.

15:01Jordan, I want to talk about why.

15:03John Lee Dumas:Why building one great offer is better than building dozens of products and all these different services. And let's even talk about how we can sell it before we build it. Yeah, boy, there's so much here. We could be spending hours on each one of these topics individually, or maybe, John, we can have a live event and you and I will just teach on how to do all this because it's definitely a deep subject. But, you know, I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, there's this dichotomy between using organic strategies or using paid strategies and which route do I go and what should I focus on first? You know, so to answer the latter part of your question first, you know, selling something before you build it is probably one of the best things that you can do, whether you're building an app or a software as a service or you're building a new high ticket offer or even a brand new course, the fastest way to validate whether the market even wants that is to get out and make offers to that market specifically for a beta run or an initial group of clients who can help you to build it.

16:01In fact, when I joined or I was starting out with with DropFunnels, you know, I was using a lot of other like sales funnel builders and WordPress sites and duct taping all these things together. And I said, man, why can't anyone just put this all together into one place? Help me to rank in Google quickly so I can leverage organic traffic? How can I build everything with no tech, no code, no plugins, servers, hosting, no any of that stuff that's just going to really drag me down? And even for someone who's non non-technical, how can I build a business literally in a weekend? And so I really posited out to the into the marketplace and said, hey, guys, I've got this idea for this for this platform.

16:37You know, WordPress powers 34 percent of the entire Internet, but it's really technical. it's tricky if you update one plugin things can crash plus you've got to add all these other tools on top it's like how can i just eliminate all of that give you all the tech benefit but with the sales psychology into one platform and help you to convert more with less time and even with that i went out and i said hey guys how many people want to do this i'll give you an actual grandfather life life lock plan for 37 bucks come in and join me and i got about my first 100 users before the platform even existed.

17:11So I had about a hundred people paying 37 bucks a month and that actually funded the first round, the first beta version of that product. So I think in almost all cases, obviously we took the recurring cashflow from that and reinvested very heavily. I've spent probably a million dollars invested in developing this platform to just to make it easier and easier on people every day. But for anyone out there listening, anytime you're going to launch a new business, you're going to launch a brand new offer. The best thing that you can do is go offer to the marketplace first because you're going to be getting cash flow immediately.

17:42You're going to get your first group of beta clients, which are great for testimonials, case studies, and they're literally paying you to build your future business. We live in a very Kickstarter economy where people, especially if they're able to get in early, they're willing to waive the instant gratification that might come from getting a product right now. So they're willing to vote with you with their dollars. They're willing to say, yes, this person has a plan. I want to fund what they're going to go out and build. and even to this day, I have some of those very early beta users who are still with me and I've never increased their price ever.

18:15I, I honored that commitment to them and, and very deeply, deeply grateful that people were voting with it, but it validated the idea. So I think the, the biggest thing for anyone here to consider is that, especially if you're going to try to continually increase your prices, it's to test in the market first, go make offers to 20 different people. Literally, that's the minimum number, not two or three. Because if I'm in a baseball game and I swing once or twice and I don't hit the ball, it doesn't mean I'm a failure. Or if I swing once and I hit the ball, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm a success.

18:48Instead, we need an average of the, it's what we call the average of the mean, meaning that you'll need to have at least a minimum amount of opportunity volume to establish your new offer or business. So go pitch it to at least 20 different people and not necessarily as investors, but as end product users. And they're going to tell you straight up exactly what's missing from it. They're going to help you to fund the actual platform itself. And you're going to get a lot of, I think, both physical representation, but also an emotional boost to help you to push the project or the business forward.

19:21John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, again, so much value here. And one thing that really jumped out at me when Jordan was going through all this is what we do with Podcasters Paradise. I mean, we pre-sold that. We went to my audience. I said, hey, I'm going to create a community that will teach you how to create, grow, and monetize your podcast, but I need buy-in first. I need at least 20 people to put down$250. And then in 45 days, I will open the door to Podcasters Paradise at$500. You're getting a 50 % discount and you're going to help me build this product. And we got 35 people to sign up. So almost double what I needed.

19:54John Lee Dumas:And we created that. And now that proof of concept allowed us to build that. And now we have over$8 million in paradise sales to this day. So think about this process. Think about what Giorno is talking about. This is really exciting stuff. A lot of really cool things. Now I want to talk about ethical selling. You have an ethical selling strategy that closes, and this number is crazy, 50 to 80 % of sales with virtually zero resistance. I need to hear more. And John, I'm going to open up a bit of a can of worms here. So if anyone is sensitive to these topics, either tune in or tune out. But in any case, I think that there really is a dark side to the marketing space and the entrepreneurship space in general.

20:34And we're generally being conditioned. And social media has all of its values and benefits, but there's a real lack of integrity and ethics in the entrepreneurial space. And growing up, my dad was a pastor, my mom's a teacher, very humble beginnings. And what I learned through that experience, and I always say that the silver spoon that I ate from, we got from Goodwill, right? We were not handed anything on a silver platter, is humility, ethics, and treating people ethically. And I think there's a general lack of that, especially in the entrepreneurial space that we're always comparing ourselves to other people doing bigger things.

21:11And so sometimes we'll sacrifice our values and our ethics and things that actually matter to us at the end of the day just for a quick buck. And look, making money is easy. It really is easy when you learn a couple of the foundational aspects, you learn how to generate traffic, you learn how to make offers, you learn to sell things at the higher level. But I think the number one thing that's going to separate the winners from the losers and the people who get famous for treating people well are those who operate on a standard of ethics and integrity. And so what I find is that instead of having to hype up all of your stuff.

21:44You know, there's all these income awards where you can win awards for millions of dollars, you know, but, but they don't really talk about what's happening behind the scenes that their, their net profit might be 1 % of that total revenue. And we feel like they're being successful. It ends up just continually pushing down this, this really negative rabbit hole of feeling like we're insufficient, right. And that we're not doing enough. We're not as successful. And it's unfortunate that that's the case. So instead, what I recommend is that instead of overhyping your stuff or, you know, only relying on, on overselling your products is just to guide people in the decision that they're looking to make anyway.

22:21And that's what I call ethical selling is it's a very leaned out approach. Let's say you're, you're having a strategy call or conversation with someone for a high ticket offer and you're just asking them the right questions to help them decide if it's right for them. You know, the, the sales modality actually performs better when you are leaned out because it makes people lean into you. So there are lots of different opinions on how to sell, but I find that my, my sales that I've done over my, over my process, I learned very early on about kind of that really hypey, really high pressure leaned in style of sales.

22:57And it's really an energetic thing. And then, you know, I learned, wow, okay, I've got to generate so many leads or someone's got to generate so many leads just to sell five or 10 % of those people, but you're going to close probably half. I mean, we have people closing 80 % when you are leaned back, you're serving people. And it often just happens by asking the right questions. So some of my favorite questions to ask, especially on, on sales calls is, you know, where are you at right now? So I can get a clear distinction of where you're, of where you're at. I want to establish the gaps. I want to determine, you know, where are you looking to go in the next six months, you know, or where are you looking to take this business in the next six months?