The Offer So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No | Ep 990

0:00I've been in business 13 years. I've sold nine companies. My last company has sold for$46.2 million. My current portfolio at acquisition.com is over$17 million a month. And I'm going to compress 13 years of business advice into this one video. I didn't open up a second channel of acquisition until we were at$4 million a month. Now, mind you, I started with paid ads because I was good at paid ads. And I learned how to run paid ads in my local business, which then when I went national, I knew how to do the same skill set. But after$4 million a month, I was like, okay, I need to get this second channel going.

0:30And so I started increasing that channel via cold email, cold call, cold DMs with an outbound team. But I say that because a lot of people are like, shouldn't I do this? I try to delay that as long as I possibly can, because I know it's going to cost a huge amount of time, a huge amount of money, and it might not work for six to 12 months. And to give you context, it took me 12 months for outbound to be responsible for half of my revenue. So it's not going to happen overnight. Number five, always start for free, always. and I don't usually use explicit 100 % black and white language, but I have yet to see a time where starting for free has not made me more money.

1:10So let me explain. So when I started my fitness business way back when, I started with free. I wanted to get people results, and I said, I don't have any experience, so please let me just train you for free. And because of that, I have lower stakes because they didn't pay me money. They're still paying in other ways. They're still paying time. They're paying inconvenience. all the other things that a customer has to do, those costs are still there. By the way, those hidden costs are the things that you want to decrease as much as you can in your product so that you can charge more money because you'll find over time that the most expensive thing about your product often isn't the price.

1:44It's everything else you require a customer to do as a result of the purchase, which is what things do they have to give up that they like doing as a result of the purchase, and what are the things that they have to start doing that they hate doing as a result of the purchase. And this happens with everything. And when I say like and hate, I use those as extremes. But fundamentally, there's some sort of friction. There's some sort of inconvenience. Like when I buy a car, I have to now get gas. That is now an inconvenience in my life. Now, compared to all other cars, maybe all cars that have that inconvenience until they have an electric car.

2:10And all of a sudden, that inconvenience has been removed because I can plug the car in at night. So I'm a co-owner of school.com. And I talk to beginner entrepreneurs a lot. And so I see this happening more often than not, which is that they say, hey, no one wants to buy my thing. And I say, okay, well, where are your testimonials? Where are the people that you've used before this that you've helped get the result? And they're like, well, I don't have any. I'm like, well, why would I believe you? They're like, well, I have this amazing offer. And I'm going to talk about this in number six at length.

2:41But if you don't start for free, why should anyone believe you? And if you are doing this for the first time, why would you want to take money for something that you don't even know if it's good yet? And so this can both give you the conviction and give you the confidence to get going because you actually have some results that you can go off of. You can use those results to market to get more customers. I do this at every level of business. And so everything that I do, I always start with free, no matter what it is. And whether it's a new product line and a massive company, one of our portfolio companies, we built out a software product for the existing service base.

3:14And so we said, hey, we can now have a DIY version of our services that you can use with this software product. And what did we do? We started for free. We took our top 100 customers and said, hey, why don't you try it out? Let us know. Get us feedback. And they just kept giving us feedback. And honestly, in the beginning, the fact that some people want to charge for this is insane. It's like they're giving me so much valuable stuff. I'm just happy that they use it, right? And so you go with free, and then you go with a small, small amount of money, and then you keep raising your prices over time, which I'll get to in a second.

3:44And for those of you who are worried about your pocketbook, like I'm fronting all these costs. Well, yeah, that's why it's called investing in a business. But people who you work with for free can make you money in three ways. Number one is they can leave you a testimonial. Number two is they can refer you other customers via word of mouth that you did a good job. And number three, they can actually stay on and pay after a certain period of time when you do make it not free and you make it for money. Because if you want to keep surfacing, and this is ideally how it works out, is that you do such a good job that they're like, I don't want this to stop.

4:15And then you say, great, now you can do it in exchange for money because I can't do this anymore in exchange for nothing. Because I have enough demand, because I've done a good job that I have these referrals and I have this proof that people do want to pay me for my services. So if you'd like that too, you can get the same price they have. Number six, and this is a big one, proof over promise. So what a lot of beginners do, and they read$100 million offers, and they're like, I have a Grand Slam offer. And so because of that, I've got this big thing with all these bonuses and the stack and these guarantees, and I've got a premium price, and yet no one's buying it.

4:46So what I want to do is walk you through a hypothetical. Let's say on one extreme, we've got somebody who has an amazing, crazy, awesome offer for whatever. They promise you the world and beyond. On this extreme, same core product or core service as the first guy, except he has no crazy offer. He just has 1 ,000 testimonials. Who is going to get the most customers. This guy. And so your proof is going to do more selling than any promise can possibly do. Because the promises all function as an approximation of the likelihood that they're going to get a result. And proof is always going to be more compelling.

5:24And so when you're starting out, you want to capture as much proof as humanly possible. Now, I have a huge amount of stuff on proof because I'm obsessed with it. But I'll give you four very good things that you can do to make your proof more compelling. Number one, recent proof is better than delayed proof. So if proof was five years old, proof that's from last week is going to be more compelling. Second is you want it to be as visual as possible. So just a bunch of words on a screen is less compelling than a screenshot of someone's bank account after they made money. Or someone saying, hey, I lost 20 pounds is not as compelling as the picture of them losing 20 pounds, which is also less compelling than a video of them weighing in, and then a video of them weighing out.

6:06The third component for proof that I'll give you is you want high volume. And the nice thing is that most businesses actually have a lot more proof than they know they do. They just never capture it. And so one of the things that I did in our brick-and-mortar chains that we'd had with all of the gyms I do across all our brick-and-mortars is if you look at Yelp, you look at Google, you look at Facebook, all of these have reviews for your business. And so for me, and if you're digital, then you have Facebook reviews on your Facebook page and things like that. And so I would go into the stars, you click into it, and there's like 100 of them.

6:35And then you just screenshot each one of them. So if you have 100 five-star reviews on Yelp, that's like a mediocre Yelp account, right? But if I screenshot 100 of those, and then I frame them, and I put them on my lobby wall from floor to ceiling, it's overwhelming the amount of proof that is. And so most businesses have way more proof than they think they do. They just don't leverage it. And so one of the easiest things you can do, take the screenshots of all review sites across all platforms, show them individually, and show them as your new wallpaper. And the fourth element of proof is that you want to capture pain.

7:08And so let me explain by this. So I've been able to look at a zillion ads across all companies where they have testimonial ads from customers or user-generated content, to be fancy, right? The thing is, is the content that begins with pain converts significantly higher. And so this is my theory around this, which is that the pain relates to the customer or prospect where they're currently at. If they start with the promise, it's too far disconnected. But if you start with pain, they relate to the person and then you can take them through the story of them getting the result. But if you start with the end result, it's too disjointed, it's too far away, it becomes less believable.

7:45So if you had to pick between proof or promise, double down on proof. And that's also the reason that I tell everyone to start with giving stuff away for free because it's the easiest and fastest way to get tons of it.