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If you want to sell more stuff to more people, you need to understand this one thing first. And it has nothing to do with selling. In fact, most salespeople never learn it. And that's because it's all about the marketing. I'm talking about the packaging that you put around the product or service you sell. A great product is useless if you can't package it. And most businesses have terrible packaging around everything they do. But guys, I'm not talking about physical packaging. I mean the framing, the positioning and everything about your pitch. Or you can call it an offer, but it's actually a lot more than that as you'll see in a few minutes. But to keep it simple for now, let's just call it your offer. And I want to talk to you about offer market fit today. Now, you've probably heard the term product market fit. That's where entrepreneurs obsess over finding the right product for their customer. And that's a good exercise. This is similar, but, but it's one level up offer. Market fit is about making sure the thing you sell sounds so good that it's hard to say no. Impossible to say no if you're new here. My name's John Davids. I'm the founder of influicity, where we help companies like these sell more stuff to more people. And something you may not know is that I've developed over 130 offers over the last decade for all sorts of businesses. Some offers flopped, many crossed six figures and a few generated millions and millions in sales. In fact, my all time best offer still pulls in $350,000 a month after four years. So today I'm going to talk to you about how to create and pressure test your offer. Let's do it. You're listening to Making it with John Davids. So guys, we're going to look at five questions as we go through this. And the first one is this, is it attractive? And attractive has two parts. You've got the attractive, but then really you've also got the word relevant in there. And I'm going to come back to the word relevant in a second. So to be attractive to the buyer and connect with them, you've really got to make it something that they already want. Instinctively and intuitively they should want it. And this is right away where people get tripped up because they think to themselves, oh, people should, should want this. People should want this thing. I don't want to hear the word should. I want to hear what they do want. So you've really got to get inside the head of your consumer, of your buyer, of your customer. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they losing sleep over at night? What are they thinking about in their brain when no one else is around? So I'll give you an example that you might see out there somewhere in the workplace. A recruiter might say something like, I can give you 100 candidates to choose from. So if you're somebody who's hiring people, what do you want? You want candidates? So a recruiter who says, I can give you job candidates has kind of, sort of given you something that might be attractive, right? Eh, it's okay. It's kind of attractive. How can we make that more attractive? Well, instead of just saying, I can give you a hundred candidates, I can give you 100 qualified candidates. A little better, but still not great, what if I were to say, I can give you the perfect candidate that you can hire for this job? Okay, that's a little better. How about I will guarantee that you will hire a qualified candidate in 30 days? Do you see how by chipping away at one after the other after the other, we can get to something that is actually attractive? Because most people who are in charge of hiring don't just want to look at a pool of a hundred candidates. What they want is the right candidate, and they want them asap. And so when you really start to drill down on what makes an offer attractive, it's not always about variety. It's not always about quantity. It's not always about those things. It's about putting it together in a way that makes the person that you're selling to say, oh, this is for me, and this is solving the problem that is making me lose sleep at night. That's the attractive part. But I want to jump to the second thing I mentioned, which is the relevance. It has to be relevant. And this is where people get messed up. Also, what they try to do is attach an incentive that has nothing to do with the thing they sell. So the classic example of this is, open a bank account at this bank and you'll get a free iPad. Come to my seminar and I'll put you in a raffle where you could win a trip to Vegas for the weekend. The problem with that is it is kind of attractive, but it's totally irrelevant to the product you sell. So now you're bringing people in. You're wrapping your product in a packaging that is actually totally unrelated to your product. And even though your customer might be attracted to a free iPad or a free trip to Vegas. That doesn't mean that they're interested in the thing you sell. Someone wants an iPad, not because they want the bank account. Somebody wants to go to Vegas, not because they want to buy your timeshare. So you got to make sure that your offer is attractive, that you really get inside the mind of your key customer, and that it is relevant. And relevant is just as important. Relevant to the customer and relevant to the thing you sell. That's number one. This episode is brought to you by my Playbook website selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com Playbook. Here's the truth. Your website is either making you money or it's costing you sales every single day. And most businesses just aren't optimizing their websites as they should be. This leads to fewer meetings booked, lower average order value, and just a whole lot of people clicking away as fast as they arrived. That's revenue you're losing. You can change all that right now with the insights in my Playbook website selling machine. Grab your free copy@johndavids.com playbook. Let's jump over to number two. And that is, is it believable? Another way to say this is, is it achievable? So it's got to be within reach. If it sounds unrealistic, it actually dies very quickly. You know, an example of this is if I was a renovator and I was offering to renovate your kitchen, and I said to you, hey, I'll remodel your kitchen in 24 hours. Well, remodeling my entire kitchen in 24 hours sounds great, but it actually sounds totally unrealistic. It sounds fake. I'm not interested. Somebody comes up to you and says, hey, we'll get you a hundred qualified leads in 30 days, guaranteed. It just feels icky. It feels weird. It feels like you're not playing on the same reality that I'm playing on. I'll give you guys a really good example here. You know Mr. Beast, the huge YouTuber, Mr. Beast, he actually discovered that on his video thumbnails, when he would put a thumbnail that said, I'm giving away a million dollar prize for people who can do, you know, stand in this hole or jump off this mountain, I'll give a million dollars away. Those thumbnails didn't do as well as when he would say, I'll give away a $500,000 prize or I'll give away $200,000. Something about that giving away a million dollars sounded unrealistic. It sounded not believable. And people Sort of just brushed past it, Right. We all have these little sensors in our brains that immediately can spot things that just seem fake. And that's actually really a good thing. That's why, you know, spam email comes in. You get an email saying, hey, go ahead and send $2,000 to this account and I'll send you $2,000 back. And I'm a Nigerian prince. Right. That sort of stuff doesn't work on most people, at least not these days, because that was rampant in the last 10, 20 years. And so now you've realized, hey, this is too good to be true. It doesn't make sense. So in the videos that Mr. Beast makes, even though he could very easily give away a million dollars, and that seems better, and that's not a big deal for him, to the average person, giving away a million dollars seems crazy. And so Mr. Beast said, let's go ahead and bring this down a little bit and make it a $500,000 prize. Boom. More believable. Now, this is actually a problem. Sometimes when you develop a product that is so good and you say, well, hey, John, my product actually does do this thing. I have a detergent where if you spray it on your stain and rub it for 10 seconds, the stain totally disappears. The problem is that if you market it like that without some kind of demonstration. Yeah. If you're going to show a live demonstration of it and you have people there that are captive, that's a different story. But if you were to put that offer in an ad, a lot of people would just swipe past it. So you've got to give whatever you sell the believability test. Another way to do this is to just name the trade off. So you could say, hey, I have this detergent that actually removes stains much faster. It's not so great for the environment and it's going to ruin your shirt, probably after three or four uses. But it does work really well if you want to use it just one time. So naming a trade off. There was cough medicine. I can't remember the name of it, but there was a cough medicine that used to advertise, we are the most effective cough medicine and we taste terrible. So it's like, okay, you're super effective and you taste terrible. Now, I'm not even sure if this cough medicine tastes terrible, but they're saying that because they want you to know there's a trade off here to make the core offer more believable. Number three, is it differentiated? Is it unsaturated in your market? And that's the key line there. Is it unsaturated in your market? So your thing needs to stand out from what everyone else is saying in your market. Because if you sound like everybody, you are a nobody. So if you're a real estate agent, you're a broker, you're a realtor, and you say, hey, I'll give you a free home evaluation. But everyone else in your market also says, I'll give you a free home evaluation. That's boring. What about saying something more unique, like, I'll show you three ways to increase your home value before you list it, which is actually the same thing but a stronger angle. And that's something I want you to think about as we go through this whole list. None of this is about changing your core product or what you actually sell. This is about changing simply how you position it, how you frame it, how you pitch it. It's the words that you use. So if I'm willing to give you a free home evaluation, that's cool. But if I say it's a free home evaluation, I don't really get the benefit of it and it sounds like what everyone else is doing. So if I come to the results, the outcome, and I put that in the front, I'll say, I'll give you three ways to increase your home value before listing it. Which of course is the obvious result of a free home evaluation. It'll work a lot better. And you know why? Because it's obvious to you and it's not obvious to them. This all comes down to use cases. This brings me over to the conversation of use cases. I talk about use cases all the time. You've got to give your buyer the use case of what it is that gives them the reason for why they would do it. This is also why people get really commoditized when they start to talk about things like buy one, get one free, buy one 50% off. 50% off is such a saturated offer in so many markets that it just doesn't have any effect. Now, I'm not suggesting that 50% off doesn't have any value. I'm saying that on its own, it is completely undifferentiated. So if the pricing part of Your offer is 50% off on the price, that's cool. But recognize that you still need to have the attractiveness and the believability layer to add on to that differentiation layer, because 50% off on its own is totally undifferentiated. This episode is brought to you by my one minute marketing roadmap available at johndavids.com roadmap in 60 seconds, you'll get a custom report showing you how people are finding your brand, where you're losing them and how to fix it. We used a decade of data from Influicity and layered in AI to give you a real action plan. It's fast, it's free, and it might just change your business. Go to johndavids.com roadmap and get yours right now. Number four, is it low risk or is it de risked entirely? Am I taking a risk by doing the thing that you're suggesting I do? The downside to me should really feel minimal. It should feel very, very minimal. You've got to give people an escape hatch. The less they can lose by going with you, the quicker they can say yes. That's why software companies say things like 30 day free trial. It deletes the risk. That's why injury law firms say we only get paid. If you win money again, it deletes the risk. Now this is probably the biggest black hole that loses everybody because this is where people think their packaging should live. They think if I take my product risk down to zero, everyone will try it. Everyone who's in my target market will want to give me a shot. And, and that is completely and utterly wrong. I want you to think about it like this. Just because something is low risk doesn't mean it is valuable. You could walk into a bookstore tomorrow and pick up any book in that bookstore and read it from COVID to cover, from start to finish. Or you could walk in and literally read the first chapter of a hundred books over the course of a few hours. That doesn't make it valuable. It's free. There's no risk to doing that. No one's going to tell you to get out of the bookstore if you're standing there just perusing through books. But it doesn't mean that it's worth your time. And this is something that business owners, especially people that are really putting a lot of work and effort into what they do, get so caught up on. You know how long it takes me to do this. You know how much money this costs me. You know how much time this takes me. No one cares at all. Nobody cares what you put into it. All they care about is the value they can get out of it. So the fact that you de risk it 100%, hey, just give this a try. Hey, just try my product for 30 days. Hey, just take this free sample, give it a shot and let me know what you think. That's my time you're asking for. And if I don't want to do it, if I don't see a potential benefit, then just taking the risk away alone doesn't give me any impulse or urgency or value to use it again. That's why all these things have to go together. I was having a conversation with an entrepreneur a few weeks ago, and I asked her about her offer, and she said, my offer is. It's a coupon. It's like 30% off your next purchase. And this is where she thought the offer lived. And that's why I think the word offer is just a little too simple. It's a little too. It's a little too bland. You've got to think about this as packaging, as wrapping, as an entire layer and pieces that you put onto your business and to the product that you sell to make people really want it. It's a combination of things. Any one of these things alone won't do the trick. If it's just believable or it's just attractive, or it's just differentiated, or it's just low risk, you're not going to accomplish the goal of getting people to buy it. You got to make them an offer they can't refuse. And it takes a lot more than just de risking to do that. You could give me a free gym membership, but if I have no interest in going to the gym and, and no reason to go to the gym, it has no value. So you gotta make sure you do all these things at once to make it valuable. Another problem that people don't realize when it comes to low risk and to taking all the friction away, making they're making it. So there's no downside to trying the product is you invite a lot of people in that are totally unqualified. If I'm a real estate agent and I have a mansion that I'm trying to sell and I do an open house, and it's come one, come all, you can walk into the house, take a look around, and it's a beautiful mansion in the middle of the neighborhood. I could have hundreds and hundreds of people coming by that mansion, trekking through the floors, going into the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the basement, walking through the kitchen, taking the free cookies, when 90% of these people are totally unqualified as buyers. So generally speaking, if you were the realtor representing that mansion for sale, you'd probably have by appointment only, only if you're represented by another real estate agent who has vetted you and make sure that you're actually a candidate to buy this place. If you take all the friction away and you make it no risk for everybody. That's also a problem because then you wind up wasting your time with a bunch of non buyers. They're never going to hand over their money and they're taking your time and attention away and your whole sales team attention away from serving the people that could actually pay you. All right, jumping over to number five here. Is it proven? Is it proven? Show me the proof. Nobody wants to be your crash test dummy, so you got to give us proof. And proof means raw results, testimonials and case studies. If I had a tutoring service, then I'd want to have videos, unedited, raw looking videos of students maybe saying, hey, I went from getting a C minus to getting straight A's in one year. You want to make sure that your proof looks real. You don't want to polish it up. You don't want to make it look professional, like it was studio produced. Because again, that makes it less believable. Going back to number two makes it look fake. We want this to be as real and authentic as possible. So run through it one more time. Is it attractive and relevant to what you're selling and to that target customer? Is it believable? Is it differentiated? Is it low risk? Is it proven? This episode is brought to you by Influicity's new tool, the AI Ads Generator, available now at johndavids.com ads. Great ads aren't about luck, they're about leverage. The brands that win are the ones who can launch faster, test smarter, and outspend everyone else without wasting a dollar. That's exactly what the AI Ads generator gives you. Instant ad copy that speaks to every customer and feeds the algorithm. High performing variations your competitors can't keep up with. It's like strapping a jet engine onto your marketing. And right now it's free. Yes, it's free. Go to johndavids.com ads. That's johndavids.com Ads. So let me give you now a real world example from Influicity. We have a client, it's a roofing company. They install about 600 roofs per year, probably close to 700 at this point. And they want to double. They want to get to about 1200 roof installations a year. These are residential roofs that they install. So we've tested a number of offers for them. Three offers I'll tell you about right now. So we tested first, get a full roof inspection with photos and our recommendation. Right. That was the headline offer that we'd use on Facebook. Second offer was find out if your roof qualifies for a replacement covered by insurance, free inspection. The third one, get your roof replaced in 7 days with $0 upfront and pay only when the job is complete. All right, so the first offer we made was actually really, really weak. Get a full roof inspection with photos and our recommendation. What made this weak? Well, number one, attractive and relevant. And it's not really that attractive because most people aren't sitting around wondering if they need a roof inspection. And then if they do need a roof inspection, the value of the photos and the recommendation, it just. There's no urgency. There's nothing there that's really making me beg for a roof inspection. Is it believable? Yeah, sure, it's believable, but it's also like, of no value. Is it differentiated? Not at all. Because if you think about it, a lot of roofers, whether they know it or not, would basically offer that if you just asked for it. Is it low risk? Yeah, it's low risk, but it's not worth my time. So in that sense, it is actually more high risk. And is it proven? There's nothing to prove. I mean, I can believe that you will give me photos. Do I know that the photos are going to be any good? Do I know that your recommendation is going to be worthwhile? I actually don't know. So offer number one is actually a poor offer. And as you can imagine, this is the offer they had before they started working with us. This was the offer they had kind of when we came in on day one. Offer number two, find out if your roof qualifies for a replacement covered by insurance. Get a free inspection. So this one actually was one of our first offers that we tried out. Now, why did we do this? Well, find out if your roof qualifies for a replacement covered by insurance. So right there, what we're saying is this isn't going to cost you anything. So if you are a homeowner who's been in that home for six, seven, eight years, you know that you might have to get your roof replaced maybe once every 10 years. All right, well, if I've been in my home for seven or eight years and I qualify and insurance will pay for it, that's actually not so bad. So is it attractive? Yes. Is the offer relevant to the product I'm selling? A roof inspection is relevant to getting a new roof. So, yeah, check, check number two. Is it believable? Yeah, it's believable. That Insurance would cover a roof replacement and you could tell me if insurance would cover it, so that's cool. Is it low risk? Yeah, it's pretty low risk. You're just going to check my roof and let me know. Is it differentiated at the time in that market? Yeah, it was differentiated. Not a lot of roofers were coming out with that headline offer. Low risk? Yeah, pretty low risk. You're just going to head up to my roof and then let me know when you're done. And is it proven? We had some case studies showing before and after of roofs being changed, although we didn't have proof that those roofs were covered by insurance. So that actually did okay. That one's actually still running in that market. Now, offer number three, get your roof replaced in seven days with $0 up front and pay only when the job is complete. Now, this one combined everything, so check this out. The number one objection we kept getting from people in the market when they would have sales calls that didn't go through was always around time. Customers are super skeptical about having renovators work on anything in their home because timelines always change. And so putting something into the offer where we actually embed a timeline into the job is a really good thing. So by saying pay only when the job is complete, well, if I'm a business owner, I want to get paid asap. And if I know that I'm only getting paid when the job is complete, I am incentivized to get the job done well and as soon as possible. So right now we're aligning the incentives of the buyer with the seller. The roofer wants to get the job done asap so they can get paid. And the customer wants to get the job done so they can live in the house with a roof on it. So that really, really helps. That's attractive, that's relevant, it's believable, because you're putting your money where your mouth is. Get a roof replaced within seven days, $0 up front. Again, we said $0 upfront. So this actually blended the insurance offer from number two. Many of the people who took up number three actually were able to get their roofs paid for by insurance. So by saying $0 up front, many are at $0, period. They're just paying their insurance deductible, but they had nothing to pay up front. And in the end, they had very little to pay even for the whole job. Is it differentiated? Absolutely. Still to this day, not a lot of roofers use that offer in this particular market. Is it low risk? Yeah, it's very low risk. I mean, you're de risking me on the time it's going to take to actually install the roof. You're de risking me on the price. And you're de risking me because you're showing me before and afters of roofs that you've replaced in my neighborhood. So check, check, check. We remove cost, we remove delay, and we remove uncertainty. Plus, no one else in the market was using it. And this offer it is helping right now to double the sales volume of this particular roofer. That is what offer market fit looks like. It takes a while to get there, but it is so worth it because it's not what you sell, it's how you package it. My name's John Davids. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com. If you're spending more than $50,000 a year on marketing, I've got something for you. It's a playbook I wrote called how to Build a Social Media Selling Machine. You can grab it now for free@johndavis.com Playbook this is the nine step formula we use for our clients at Influicity to turn their social media channels into reliable revenue engines. Grab it right now@johndavids.com Playbook.