In short
Podcast Notes: The Game with Alex Hormozi - Episode 16: Advanced Offer Stacking
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Game*, Alex Hormozi discusses advanced offer stacking, providing insights into how to effectively increase revenue for businesses while minimizing complexity and maximizing value to customers. He emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs and strategically designing offers to enhance profitability.
Key Themes
- Goodwill and Offers:
- The amount of money a business can make is proportional to the goodwill it generates and the variety of offers it presents.
- Businesses should focus on revenue additions that incur little to no cost, operational complexity, or time.
- Complexity vs. Profitability:
- Adding offers and services can complicate operations.
- Any complexity introduced must yield significant profit or manageable costs.
- Focus on creative solutions that solve customer problems without overwhelming operational processes.
- Conversion Processes:
- The analogy of accommodating resistance in weightlifting illustrates the need to match customer desires and abilities with the right offers.
- Adjusting offers based on where a customer is in their journey is critical for maximizing sales.
Key Strategies for Effective Offer Stacking
- Identify Customer Needs
- Analyze adjacent needs related to the core problem you are solving (e.g. health, aesthetics).
- Create affiliate relationships or additional offers that require minimal operational changes.
- Revenue Opportunities
- Convert customer needs into revenue streams.
- Utilize affiliate marketing effectively to supplement income without direct operational burdens.
- The Ultimate Offer Stacking Process
- Monetize all customer needs.
- Structure the sales process effectively, including:
- Attract: Initial customer engagement.
- Upfront Cash: High-value offers to secure immediate payment.
- Upsells and Downsells: Tailored offers based on customer feedback and buying behavior.
- Continuity: Develop ongoing revenue through subscriptions or repeat purchases.
- Customer Interaction and Feedback
- Regular feedback meetings enhance customer relationships and identify upsell opportunities.
- Ensure every interaction reinforces goodwill and addresses any service concerns.
- Layering Offers
- Introduce one new offer at a time, ensuring it provides significant value for minimal complexity.
- Communicate with customers consistently to maximize sales opportunities.
Practical Example
Weight Loss Service Flow
- Initial service sale → upsell to a nutrition package → continuity offer for ongoing support.
- Utilize feedback from clients to tailor future offers and adjust strategies as needed.
Four Steps to Selecting the Right Offer
- Right Stage: Ensure the offer aligns with the desired outcome in the sales process (acquisition, profit maximization, etc.).
- Right Problem: Focus on solvable problems that bring substantial value to the customer.
- Right Way: Cater to customer preferences in how problems are addressed.
- Right Time: Present offers at moments when customers feel the greatest need.
Conclusion Efficiently stacking offers allows businesses to enhance their profitability while providing exceptional service. Understanding customer needs, structuring offers appropriately, and maintaining open communication are pivotal in achieving sustainable growth and increasing customer satisfaction.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Advanced Offer Stacking How to. The amount of money you make is directly proportional to the amount of goodwill you have multiplied by the amount of offers you make. Frank Kern, timeless copywriter and marketer. Before we dive into this, there's one strong warning I must make. Adding more offers and services is a fast track to adding operational complexity. That makes business hard. If you're looking at your own business, you want to look at things that you can do to add revenue that add little to no cost, time, money, or complexity. If something is going to add complexity, it had better be worth it.
0:30lots of profit, or very little cost. Keep that ratio high. I think of a conversion process like an accommodating resistance exercise. What that means is that in exercise physiology, the perfect rep is repetition of exercises that maximally match your ability to generate force every point in an exercise and with each repetition should get proportionally lighter so that you're always 100 % effort at all times. This allows you to work a muscle more efficiently, gaining strength and muscle faster. For example, you're much stronger at the top of a squat than you are at the bottom. This is why experienced lifters add bands and change their barbells, to get it to be hard at the top where they're strongest and lessens at the bottom where they're weakest.
1:03To date, there is no machine or apparatus that does this perfectly, but understanding the concept is how I think about selling. I want to match my ticket price and value perfectly with the buying ability and desire of each customer without increasing the complexity of my business. This is where the creative fun begins. Identify adjacent customer needs and opportunities. First, I look at all the revenue streams a customer is buying that are related to the core desires I'm solving, power, money, beauty, weight loss, et cetera. Then I see if I can create affiliate relationships, a relationship where another business owner pays you to send them customers.
1:34Or if I can add it in with little to no operations, I'll do that. Adding in a sales consult to sell physical products is an example where the only added complexity is a meeting with the customer. That is usually worth the cost of making lots more money per customer. Here's what the quote need streams look like before and after they've been turned into revenue opportunities. So with the old model, a customer comes to you to solve this large problem and only pays you for one component of it, and then pays five or six other businesses for other components of that problem. With a new model, you can look at every single one of the problems that the customer has, and they give you all of that money.
2:07Most businesses refer out a lot of revenue. They make recommendations of products or services that are complementary to their own. Over time, though, you'll find that constantly thinking with this mindset adds up. At the time of this writing, I have directly made more than$3 million in affiliate commissions. Those pennies, since they are pure profit, go straight to your bottom line and are not to be underestimated. For example, take a small business owner who makes$35 ,280 per year take home off of$282 ,000 per year in revenue. Adding in$2 ,000 per month in retail sales commissions may not seem like a lot when compared to the$23 ,000 the business is making off selling services, but the added$2 ,000 per month takes their take home income from$35 ,000 to$59 ,000, which is life-changing for many.
2:49Do not underestimate it. That being said, if something you refer out makes even more money, sometimes it's worth buying or incorporating that business altogether. Pro tip, free onboarding. I was able to pay for my entire onboarding team and customer support team by adding additional call to our onboarding process for new clients. They appreciated the extra support and I was able to guarantee each of my customers clicked each of my affiliate links when signing up for the solutions they needed. I only had to cover the cost of the additional role in the company for the first month out of pocket. After that, the affiliate commissions I received literally paid for the team.
3:19These little quote tricks are the things that add up to making your business unbeatable while providing unmatched service to your customers. The ultimate offer stacking process. Now, back to stacking the offers. First, we figure out all the needs we can monetize. Next, we decide how we're going to choreograph the sales process. I use this framework for almost every business I work with to weave each core offer type together after obviously using a freer discounted hook. So, we have attract, we have upfront cash, we have upsells and downsells, and we have continuity. Okay, this gives me the best of all worlds.
3:51The upfront money model allows me to profitably acquire customers. My upsells and downsells allow me to squeeze the most juice per prospect by getting whales to buy big and the minnows into my world to buy something big later. Then, finally, I create consistent cash flow by tying in continuity. Which upfront money model, which upsell, and which type of continuity will rely heavily on the type of business I'm working with and how their typical customer buying journey is structured. Mind you, after I've done this process, I'll often repeat it again and again. After this person is taking continuity offer, I may offer additional services, which might be additional continuity, and then make offers for them to prepay as a bonus, which would be more attraction offers or upfront.
4:30So if you're looking at this example, it would look like something like this. You might attract the customer, then you might upsell some upfront cash, then you do more upsells and downsells, then you have continuity, then you have a second continuity, and then you might pull cash forward. This is how you continue to keep stacking profits in your business. You make money or break even in the acquisition, and you continue to make offers to your clients each time you're increasing the LTV of the customer and ultimately how much you can spend to acquire them. This concept is very simple but incredibly powerful.
4:58In many ways, I wrote all of the$100 million money models to get to this part. Let's do a few examples to really drive it home and make it real. So I show a sample weight loss offer flow. So someone walks in for a service sale. We try to sell to goal. If they buy it, we move on to the next step. If they don't, we try to sell them a smaller package. If they don't buy that, we try and sell them a free trial with commitments. If they don't buy that, we just give a free trial with no commitments. If they still don't want to buy that, then we try and put them into a free nutrition consultation. Now, all of those paths still lead to a nutrition sale, which is the second consultation.
5:30At that sale, we would try and sell them a full bundle of supplements, which would then lead them to trying to get them to buy more meals. If they didn't buy supplements, we try and downsell a four pack with extras, then just a four pack, then just extras. And then eventually, if they said no, we'd still try and sell them a 12-pack of food, which if they said no, we'd sell them an 8-pack. Then it would be 12 every week, and then it'd be 8 every other week. And you can notice here, as we keep going through it, we just have other options for them to buy, which then moves us to our third sale, which is the continuity sale for service.
6:00So we try to sell to their goal. If they said no, we'd try again in three weeks. If they said no, we'd try and sell the goal at the end, and then finally we would exit them. If they said yes, we'd leave them the fourth sale, which is we'd try and get them to prepay, now that you said that you were going to stay this period of time, try to prepay that whole period of time for a small discount. Now, I know that this looks complicated. It's not as complicated as it looks. Each of the sales flows naturally to the next over the span of their time with us. They do not need to take every offer, but we are still going to try.
6:28Not only that, in this example, you can see how I'm showing the downsells at each step. If you're selling in person or over the phone, in any one-on-one setting, really, these are just things you can do pretty effortlessly. Selling off a page digitally, you won't have this luxury, which is why I'm such a big fan of one-on-one sales. It affords you flexibility and allows you to perfectly match the buying power of the prospect with your ability to sell and solve their need on their budget. And when you do this, and you're competing against other people who do not sell like this, you will almost always be able to outspend them.
6:54In the above example, we are selling services and then products. Then we are selling them continuity. Then we're selling them some sort of prepayment discount. Some of these sales can happen in the same conversation. Others need to be spaced out. This is what is actually happening to create these sales from the grid I showed earlier. So, sale number one, the service sale. This is how we pull cash up front. On a micro level, we're offering a high ticket solution first. A certain percentage of customers will take that big ticket offer. But if they say no, totally fine. We transition to a half down version of the same offer with a different payment plan.
7:25If they still say no, we transition to a quarter down with a slightly higher payment plan over time. If they still say no, we shorten the duration of the program and offer just the quarter down payment with no payment plan. If they still say no, then they probably don't trust you and you need to work on sales, but that's beyond this book. But if they still say no, then we would try and downsell a free trial and put their card on file and get them to commit to consuming some of our services to increase the likelihood they convert on the back end. If they still say no, and they don't want our services, then to maintain goodwill, we offer a complementary nutrition orientation.
7:54At that orientation, which might be 24 to 72 hours later, we'd begin our next series of offers. Sale number two, physical product sale. This is an upsell. At this orientation, after providing some individualized support or value, we'd attempt to sell them on a three-month bundle of a full stack of supplements that still help them solve their main need, just in a different way. If they say no, then we'd offer just a one-month supply and put them on a subscription for a discount. If they still said no, we would cross out a handful of these products and just give them the essentials. If they still said no, we would give them one or two products they absolutely should take.
8:26After that, we ask if they need help preparing their food. Then we would sell different meal plan prices of a food prep company that we had created a partnership with. This helps the customer get results, save them time, and makes us money. Everybody wins. Pro tip. Another example of one-on-one free onboarding. The cash I made from the products I sold at my orientation covered my payroll to onboard every customer one-on-one, and my trainers ended up making more per hour than they did taking on personal training clients. So they were happy to do it. My customers loved the added service, and I still made enough profit most times to cover my entire cost of acquisition, advertising, commissions, and payroll all off of these product sales.
9:03Compare that to the guy down the street always trying to, quote, cut costs, or who is, quote, afraid of simply making more offers to customers. His employees would make less than mine, so he couldn't keep the best talent. His customers would get worse service and spend less with him, so they'd get worse the results. And he'd make less money, so he couldn't expand as fast or market to get as many customers. In a competitive market, it's obvious which way of doing business wins in the end. Bottom line, people like having problems solved for them in advance, so just solve them and profit. Sale number three, more services sale.
9:31This is continuity. In the third sale, we're meeting with the customer a few weeks later. We're now positioning this as a feedback meeting. This is how we get valuable feedback about how they're enjoying our service. You should do this for any service you have. First, because it gives you valuable information that you can always improve. Second, it allows you to save a customer who's not happy. Third, it provides an upsell opportunity. This is where if the client was having a great time, we would sell them on staying for the long haul. Again, first we start with a high-ticket prepayment. Then we downsell our way to simply closing them on continuity.
9:59If the client is not enjoying their time or feel like they need more support, we still naturally sell them on a higher level program with more support. Every problem is an upsell opportunity. Oh, you feel like we haven't given you enough support? Then how would you like if we message you every morning and we check in with you weekly? Would that help? Awesome, then I think you'd be a great fit for our VIP program. You can start for free today. In fact, I'll even credit the entire cost of your first program to the VIP program because you didn't have the best experience. You get the idea. You just turn around and sell them the next Grand Slam offer.
10:27So number four, Pre-pay sale or last chance, upfront cash, downsell continuity. Finally, the last sale in the four-step sales process, getting them to prepay for services or become a last chance at getting them on continuity before the end of their treatment plan or program, etc. This helps suck up some of the sales where people, quote, weren't sure if they wanted to commit yet at the meeting beforehand. You can also use this as an opportunity to upsell those people who committed to continuity in the last example to prepay for a discount. Again, just more cash up front. Now, weaving them together.
11:02This may seem like a lot, but down over six to 12 weeks, it's not that overwhelming. And communicating with your clients more in general will make you more money. Notice a couple of things. First, the big high value offer is our Grand Slam offer. But in the real world, that Grand Slam offer may have gotten them in the door. Not everyone says yes. So having another Grand Slam offer in your back pocket will dramatically increase your closing percentage. The second thing to notice is that we still advance all prospects to the next stage, even if they said no. This gives us another opportunity to provide value and monetize the person.
11:31See how much more effective this is? Now, you may be thinking to yourself, how on earth am I going to do with all that? Well, you start by adding one of these conversation opportunities at a time that adds the most money at the lowest cost. Then we get that down, then you add the next one and so forth. Note, prospects want you to solve their problems. People like buying. They just don't like being sold. This is where the grand sum offer comes in and makes it fun for the buyer and the salesman because everyone likes selling a good deal and everyone likes buying them. A win-win. Layering these offers together one at a time and creating downsells is what makes your conversion process wildly efficient, not letting a dollar of spending power go to waste.
12:02Four steps to picking the right offer for your money model. Money models are built off a series of offers. Each offer or series of offers satisfies the stage of your money model. We lower CAC, we maximize 30-day gross profit, then we maximize gross profit over a lifetime. And the way I do things, each stage has different types of offers that fit that goal. But no matter what type of offer, I follow the same process when adding a new offer to my money model. It goes like this. Right stage, right problem, right way, right time. Right stage. First, I make sure the offer fits the stage of the money model.
12:33If I want to get new customers at a reasonable price, I'm going to focus on attraction offers. If I want to increase 30 to gross profit, I add upsells and downsell offers. If I need to maximize lifetime gross profit, I focus on continuity offers. Once I know the offer meets the goal, I move on to the next step. Right problem. Customers have many problems. You can't solve them all. so I prefer to pick problems that make sense for my business, that I can solve with existing resources, and that provide customers big value when solved. Right way. Third, I solve based on my customer's preferences. Say two people want to lose weight.
13:02One might change their workouts. The other might want to change their food. You can try to convince people that your way is the right way, but most times they're just going to go to someone who solves the problem the way they want it to be solved. So I prefer to present effective options that people already want. Right time. Fourth, and most importantly, I offer to solve their problem at the right time. Someone might be hungry, but if you ask them if they want another steak after they're full, they'll probably say no. So to sell the most, I make my offer at the time of greatest need. Summary. First, figure out which stage of money model.
13:31Then make sure your offers fit at that stage. Then make sure your offer solved the right problem for the customer, the way they like it, and at that moment that they need it most, not when it's convenient for you.
From the publisher
Welcome to The Game w/ Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
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