1551 – The Do’s and Don’ts of Engagement with Allies 4 Me’s Craig Andrews

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now craig andrews craig you are the principal ally at allies for me that website is allies the number four me.com craig thank you for joining us oh it's so good to be here i've been looking forward to this also should point out fellow military veteran you're in the marine corps you were a sergeant what what were you doing uh in the marines so i worked on electronic warfare systems. And during the first Gulf War, you saw all the CNN coverage of bombs hitting targets. You didn't see us because when we flew over, nothing happened. And that's what you wanted. When we flew over, the radars didn't work.

1:37The ground communications didn't work. We jammed all those. And we allowed those sorties to kind of fly in and do that. And my squadron, And we also flew the raid on Libyan 86 over 120 sorties. Only one jet lost in that whole thing. And that was just sheer probability. The Libyans just fired everything they had in the sky and they just randomly hit one F-111. Oh, my gosh. So that was back then. Tell me what you do today, what your work is as an ally. All right. So we went from shutting down people's radars to exploding people's businesses. We're a marketing consultancy, and we work specifically with people who have high-ticket items that require a high level of trust.

2:24Usually, that's B2B, but it also includes B2C. Again, if it's a high-ticket item that requires a high level of trust, we have a formula that works really well to build loads of trust in a very short time. Yeah, tell me more about that. Yeah. So if you think about it, imagine you're single. I don't know your status. I mean, I was one single. But if I went into a bar and I saw somebody cute on the other side of the bar and I walked up and I said, hey, you're kind of cute. Can I get your phone number? Better yet, why don't we get married? She would freak out, maybe call the police. That would definitely be the end of the conversation.

3:05And so we don't do that in real relationships because it's inappropriate. We know it's inappropriate. But for some strange reason, when it comes to sales for business, that's precisely what we do. I've seen people try to cold call their way into a three-year, quarter-million-dollar commitment. I'm like, that's insane. That's inappropriate. And sadly, you don't know it's inappropriate. So what we do, if we think about it, the five stages of courtship, you have an introduction. That can come via a variety of means. That could be paid ads. That could be referrals. It could be conferences. It could be podcasts.

3:43It does not matter. You just need a method of introduction. From there, you have a conversation. That's where you start dialogue, usually with some content marketing that leads to a phone call. And when you get on the phone call, you have a coffee date. You schedule a coffee date just like you would in real life. And what the ladies tell me is when they meet a new guy and they go for a coffee date, they each drive separately. They don't ride there together. And the ladies have one of their girlfriends call them about 15, 20 minutes into the date to see if they need a rescue. Lots of safeguards because there's a lot of risk.

4:19And if that goes well, then you're hoping for better things. You hope it advances. And if it goes well, it does move on to other things. Well, what we do is we help people put together basically a coffee date, which we call a first-time offer. and it's something where you take out all the risk of engaging, just like that coffee date, the upside potential is a lot hopeful for both parties. It's hopeful for you that you get a new customer. It's hopeful for them because if you're selling something valuable that's going to help them solve a problem and it advances, then they get this problem solved.

4:55And so we break it down this way. If you think about the ingredients that go into that, a first-time offer, it has to be an impulse purchase. That means the coins in the cushion in your couch, the money in your wallet, or the B2B equivalent of that. So think about it this way. If they have to ask for approval or permission to spend that money, you've priced it too high. It has to be priced at a level so that anybody can spend this money and nobody's going to hunt them down to see how it's been spent. So that's an impulse purchase. The next thing is it has to deliver a disproportionate amount of value to price.

5:37And we usually like it to be a 10x the value to the price. Wow. And it has to solve a problem. It can't be some gimmick. You have to solve a problem for them. Because if you're not solving a problem, you're not delivering value. But you want to leave problems unsolved. If you solve all their problems for this, they're going to say thank you. Their problems are solved. And you're probably going to lose money because you're offering so much value for a cheap price. So you want to leave problems unsolved and you want it to naturally lead to your core offer. And you've seen this in different ways for what I would say simple offers.

6:16So way back in the day when people were buying albums the first time, I'm seeing that's coming back again. Columbia House Records had this deal where you could buy 13 albums for a penny. Yes. Oh, and did I? Yeah. So that and that's an example that for simple low ticket things, when you're moving to a high ticket purchase that requires higher trust, it's a more complex product or more complex service. So your first time offer also has to be more complex. And so let me give you an example of one that I think everybody will relate to. We didn't put this together, but it's a good example because even if you don't go to Vegas, you know Vegas, you know the type of people that go to Vegas.

7:01Years ago, there was this dumpy old hotel at the end of the strip, and a guy named Bob Stupac bought the hotel. And he called it Bob Stupac's Vegas World. And he ran a deal where he said, you give me$396, I will give you three days and two nights in one of the deluxe suites in my hotel. When you arrive, there will be a bottle of champagne waiting for you in your room. Not only that, while you're on the property, whether you're gambling or not, all of your drinks are free. Even if you're sitting in one of our lounges listening to our entertainment, you pay nothing more for the drinks. And not only that, for your$396, I'm going to give you$600 of chips to use in my casino.

7:50And so that's moving more in the direction of the type of offers that we structure because they have three to five deliverables. You heard four deliverables in that offer. And I'm looking at your face and I see you're just kind of like overwhelmed. You're like, how do they do this and make money? And the answer is you have to know the lifetime value of a customer. It's a lost leader. Yeah. Yeah. But you see, if you're into drinking and if you're into gambling and that offer is dangled in front of you, pretty much the only answer you'll give is yes, please. Of course. If you're not into drinking, you're not into gambling, it's not an attractive offer.

8:30And so if you think about that, your offer should attract people that are ideal customers for you. It should also repel people that are not ideal customers for you.

8:44Wow. So there's got to be folks that are listening to us and they say, Craig, we can't do that. We can't sell a smaller offer because, yes, they can. But anyway, let's say that they don't think that they can because all they know is that it's just very labor intensive. It's very expensive for us to build a pool, for example, or whatever. Right. This, you know, and what would what would be a way that we could, you know, kind of go through an exercise where we could identify what that mini offer should be? What are the rules for that mini offer? Because I know, one, obviously, it needs to uncover more problems.

9:28You certainly don't want to just sell them something that, of course, they don't use. But what else? I just kind of listed the obvious. So that's great. It's a great question. And when we do these workshops with people, we have to spend so much time shifting their thinking. Because what do business owners want to do? They want to sell their product or they want to sell their service. And we actually have to spend a lot of time getting them out of sales mode and into serving mode. because one of our beliefs is if you would not put your best friend through your sales funnel, you've got a broken funnel.

10:08And when we actually sit down in the workshop, we start off by listing out the pains. We identify all the pains that their customer is feeling, and we highlight the top five pains. And we take those top five pains and we put them into a problem statement. and we spend time actually writing out a problem statement that would sound like something somebody would say who's feeling those pains. A couple of things are important. These have to be pains they feel, not pains you feel on their behalf. They have to feel the pain. If it's not a pain they're feeling, if it's a pain you know they have, but they don't know they have, it's not gonna work.

10:48If you screw up the pains, that's the unforgivable sin. It will not work. But once we have that problem statement, we ask and we say, you're having dinner with a buddy, a really good friend of yours, and they came to you and they said this problem statement. And you decided, and you knew for whatever reason, they would never be one of your customers. But because you love them so much, you decide you would devote five hours of your life to helping them remove those pains. What would you do in those five hours? And that's kind of the way we go through and we start building the offer. and it's really what and that's what I mean it has to you're helping them solve a problem you're helping them remove pain you're doing something that you would do for a friend and I've put that to the test I've sold my I've had people very very important people in my life come to me and when I listened to what they said the best absolute best advice I could give was you should buy my first time offer even knowing they would never be a client because that would give them so much value and point them in the right direction that they would be able to make better decisions moving forward with their marketing.

12:02Maybe one day they could afford our rates and bring us in. But that's it. It's really about serving and helping somebody solve a problem. Should we, you know, when we're thinking about things that we could do right out of the gate, should we do really, really inexpensive or should we do free? So we just like start doing stuff for them at no cost. That's a great question. And we never do free. And if you have about a minute, I could take you through the research. Yeah, so there's a Dan Ariely, a guy who wrote Predictably Irrational, did a study where he put out a table where he was selling chocolates.

12:50and he had Lindor truffles they were selling for 15 cents and he had Hershey Kisses they were selling for one penny. Well, given that choice, 73 % of the people chose the Lindor truffle because they knew it was an amazing deal for a wonderful chocolate. Then he reduced the price exactly one penny. The Lindor truffle was 14 cents. The Hershey Kiss was free and he made the same offer. the numbers flipped. In this case, 69 % of the people chose the free Hershey Kiss. Only about one third chose the Lindor truffle for 14 cents. Now, the takeaway, one takeaway, there's two important takeaways from that study.

13:34One is when you offer something for free, you move masses of people, which is 100 % true, undeniable. That happened. But what you did is you just created a list of people that if you offer something free, they'll say yes. Maybe there's some buyers in there, but all you know about that list is this is a list of people. If you offer them something free, they'll say yes. I like the shorter list. That's a list of people who have demonstrated a willingness to pay a premium for value when the other option was free. And those are the people that I find to be the most profitable prospects for my business and the most profitable prospects for my clients' businesses.

14:20This is really, really cool. Do you have any long-form content or, you know, when somebody goes to your website, where they can learn about first-time offers and like how to design a great first-time offer? Yes. So we have, actually, we just launched a new blog, about 2 ,500-word blog, that goes into much of what I'm saying. And if you just Google allies for me, first time offer, you'll pull up a number of things, but I won't include that blog. One of the things we will link to that blog very, very quickly is we have a guide to help you put together first time offers. So when I first started working on this concept, my first first time offer was a complete failure.

15:07Nobody understood it. Nobody wanted it. Nobody bought it. I sold none. And so I kind of fumbled around because I fell into the trap of, I know they have this pain. I wish they knew they had this pain. They're like, nope, we don't feel that pain. But anyway, it took 18 months fumbling around to finally sort of start getting it right. And then we've perfected it over years since. And so in that guide, you can skip the mistakes that I made, which I recommend doing. because 18 months is a long time to be lost in the woods. Yeah, you also have a website. For folks that are listening to us right now, there was something else that you had mentioned, right, about a free course?

15:55Oh, yes, yes. So for your listeners, we put together something special. It's that if you go to allies4me.com, and it's number four, slash thoughtful entrepreneur, all lowercase, If you go there, there's a place for you to sign up. You will get that guide immediately. You will also get 23 days access to our self-paced course to help build your own. And just to explain why we limit it to 23 days, I've signed up for free courses that I've never taken because somebody offered. I said yes, and I've never, ever taken those courses. We're in the business of changing lives. We want this to change your life.

16:38And so we put a 23-day capital in that to say, because we know it will change your behavior, so you'll actually put it to work. And if you put this to work, it is transformative. Not only did it transform my business, it transformed my marriage. I have a better marriage because it just took out a lot of stress. I have a better marriage today because I started doing this in my business. Wow. Well, this is really cool. I really have enjoyed this conversation. I wish we had more time. And so, again, Craig Andrews, again, you're the chief ally. Is that a principal ally? Yes. And allies for me for over 14 years.

17:20So you've worked with a lot of great businesses. Again, the website allies, the number for me.com. And then the link, Craig, that you shared to our friend that's listening to conversation, their podcast app, just kind of click around. you'll see where we have like notes for this episode and there will be a direct link to that website. So Craig Andrews, great conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you for your service and thank you for the work that you continue to do to help great business leaders. Oh, thank you. It's been a delight. Semper Fi.

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