Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 8 - 3 Steps to Irresistible Offers
Synopsis:
In this episode of the Peaceful Profits podcast, Mike Shreeve shares three foundational steps that will completely change the way you think about creating offers.
Too often, entrepreneurs focus on flashy marketing tactics while overlooking the real driver of sales: the offer itself.
Mike explains how to clarify who your offer is truly for (and whether that audience can sustain your business), what your offer actually delivers in terms of real outcomes, and why the offer exists in the first place.
Using practical analogies, case studies, and insights from his 14+ years of experience, Mike demonstrates how better offers attract better clients, command premium pricing, and make selling nearly effortless.
Whether you’re just starting out or running a multi-7-figure business, this episode will give you actionable tools to rethink and refine your offers so your marketing works with ease and your fulfillment actually delivers results worth talking about.
Transcript:
3 Steps to Irresistible Offers
[00:00:00] About a week ago, I asked y'all what you wanted to learn, and many of you responded. How do I design a better offer? How do I create an offer that I can charge a lot of money for, and how can I improve that offer so it becomes easier to sell? So many things in business, the answer is really quite simple.
And I'm gonna give you a couple tips. Obviously this is not a complete masterclass, but hopefully this will give you some things to think about on how you can improve existing offers. Now, before if you're an advanced business owner and you're like, I've heard everything there is about. We're creating offers and I already know everything there.[00:00:30]
Hang tight for a second. I'll try to get through this as quickly as possible, but one of the things that I would say in the past 14 years of working with business owners of various from nine figure business owners down to people just getting their first businesses off the ground. I can tell you without any.
Hesitation that people in the help business, so services, coaching courses, et cetera, they do not spend enough time thinking about their offers. They spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about their marketing and not realizing that what their [00:01:00] marketing just isn't that good, and that's why the marketing doesn't work.
Marketing is simply an extension. Of the offer. The best thing you can do in marketing is tell the truth about what your offer is, who it's for, and what it can do. That's the best thing you can do. Everything else in marketing is a distraction. It's a trick. It's a trend. It's not nearly as effective as being able to say, here's what this is, here's what it does [00:01:30] here, and here's who it's for, and then that simple statement.
Being enough to convince people to pull their wallets out. That is the pinnacle of marketing, but you have to understand that it comes from the offer. Okay. Now, before my friends in marketing and people who listen to this podcast who have marketing businesses, I'm not saying that marketing isn't important.
There are a lot of ways to communicate. That very simple statement. But if you are relying on there, those are different tools. There's different [00:02:00] processes, there's different ways to repeat that message in different ways, to get it through people's very thick skulls, which you have to do in this overly just absolutely distracted world that we live in.
And how do you get their attention, how you draw their interest. So please don't misunderstand me in saying that all you have to do is just stand on a corner and say, I have this thing and here's what it's, but if you don't have that core idea. More importantly, if you don't have that core understanding, for those of you who are growing a business with team, if your team does not have that core idea or understanding of what it is that you are [00:02:30] offering, and they themselves cannot see the value in it, it doesn't matter what tricks you use.
It doesn't matter what strategies you use, it's just not gonna work. It's certainly not gonna work to the level that you want it to work. What's the difference between a funnel that does two X roas or a business that does two X roas and a business that does 10 x roas? Is it the marketing? No, it's not.
Same exact funnel, same VSL, length, same formula, same trick, same copywriter. And I know this because I, that's what most of my career has been, was, is a copywriter, [00:03:00] same everything and yet a five x different in results. Difference in results comes from the offer, not the marketing. And again, like I said, in this industry, we just don't think about that enough and it's a very serious problem because what's beginning to happen?
Is we're getting an overabundance of jaded buyers. Can't tell you how often we have people coming to us on the phone. They call us and they say, yeah, I bought from so and was wildly let down. Now what does that mean? It means that one, our competition is making business for us. So thank you.
[00:03:30] Competition. Number two, it means that your competition isn't just taking customers from you and taking their money. They're actually ruining customers for you. How do you combat an increasingly jaded marketplace? It's not marketing. Why? What are marketing? It's promises. It's claims, it's taking their attention.
What happens to people when they're jaded? They believe claims less often. They ignore the marketing more often. So it all, the solution is almost always the [00:04:00] offer. So lemme give you some very simple, this is brutally simple, but nobody does it. And luckily we're at a point in history right now where because so few people are doing it, the solution to improving an offer, the solution to making the offer more compelling is still really basic and simple.
So now is the time to improve your offer. Not in six months, not in a year. Really simple stuff here. If you just implement, and this can be implemented in a weekend, I promise you, you're gonna see better results. It'll be easier to sell. People will understand, okay? The first thing is who? [00:04:30] Who is your offer for?
Now? Of course, you think to yourself duh, that makes sense. Okay, I'm gonna be for dentists. What a lot of people don't think of though, is who is it really for? And is it for the right person to get you to where you want to go? So a lot of I have another business called the No PS project.
A lot of those people are starting their business for the very first time and they say, I wanna work with small businesses. [00:05:00] And then in a sentence later, they say, and I wanna charge premium prices. I'm telling you, small businesses can't afford premium prices. So what does that mean? It means the who that has been identified is not the correct vehicle for getting you to where you want to go.
And this is where if you have an existing business and you're frustrated with who you're working with, this is where you need to start. If you're constantly talking to people who don't have money, it means that whatever the [00:05:30] offer is that you built it for someone who is attracted to the marketing you've created.
Remember how I said marketing is simply the extension of what the offer is? So if you change the offer, if you change what it is you do, how you do it, who you do it for, the marketing will change naturally and as a result, you'll attract different people. If you go to the marketplace and say, I have created with these bananas an the biggest, most audacious [00:06:00] banana split in the world.
It's a 10,000 calorie banana split, and you go out to a boardwalk somewhere and you're out there hawking your 10,000 calorie banana split. Don't be surprised if health nuts aren't showing up to your stand. What you are offering is not what they want. Now, reverse that and say you came up with a zero calorie somehow with Magic and Chemistry, a zero calorie banana smoothie that tastes better than a 10,000 calorie sunda and it's banana based and plant-based and all this kind of stuff.[00:06:30]
You go out to the boardwalk and you start hawking that. Who's gonna show up? The hell nuts. What changed? Did your marketing change? Only in as much as what you are truthfully talking about changed, going from this is a 10,000 calorie banana split to, this is a zero calorie banana smoothie shake thing, right?
And then of course you know you have to think, go back to your business. Are the health nuts really the best people for keeping a steady flow of customers? Are there [00:07:00] upsells, downsells, cross sells core offers I can add to this banana smoothie. Or would having a 10,000 calorie banana sundae be better for my business?
Because people who like to eat those more than once and I can get steady recurring costs. Again, who you are offering your offer to and who it was built for can radically change the results of your business, the ease with which you're selling, the difficulty in collecting cash, the difficulty in retaining.[00:07:30]
Clients. I'll give you a really good example. If you're currently in the biz op world, retention over a long term is very difficult. Why? Because so many people who buy into biz op drop out just naturally. If eight outta 10 businesses fail, and your business is about helping people start a business, let's just forget for a second that if you're a course-based business, most people who buy your course aren't gonna complete it.
If you're a coaching business, a lot of people who take your coaching program aren't gonna complete it. Let's forget all those, and let's just say eight outta 10 businesses fail within some whatever standard of time. Then that means eight out [00:08:00] of 10 of your customers just aren't even gonna have any possibility of buying from you in six months.
'cause they're not even gonna exist in six months. It's a customer base that basically eradicates itself. It's, for example, if you're really good at helping people go from really severe and extreme obesity down to let's say normal body weight, you have a customer base that eradicates itself, which is in my opinion, great and fantastic, but can your business model support that?
Do you have the upsells, cross sales down, sales continuity, and et cetera, to be able to [00:08:30] sustain who you are actually built to serve? Right now, if the answer is no, this is why you need to think about your offer more than you think about your marketing. We talked a couple episodes back about the five to one ratio.
This would be one of those examples where, you know, at your particular position in your company, you ought to be spending a significant. Amount of time working on the offer, almost more than you would work on the marketing? [00:09:00] Not almost that's what I would highly recommend is spending more time working on your offer than you do on your marketing.
Okay. Next is what? Next is the what? We covered this with the example earlier of the banana and the banana split. And the banana shake, but what exactly does your offer do for people? What exactly does your offer do for people? If, and here's the biggest thing, if you can't define it, you cannot expect a stranger to understand what the heck it is they're about to buy.
And I've said this before, [00:09:30] but if you, if you're struggling now to get people to find value in what you do, it's gonna get more difficult. Let's assume that all my predictions are wrong and that everything's gonna be fine in the economy. And nothing. And we're gonna just continue to go up and we're never gonna have a downslide ever again.
Highly unlikely. But let's just say that happens. You still have to deal with competition. You still have to deal with an increasingly jaded marketplace regardless of what you're doing. You're still gonna have to deal with the human factor and all these sorts of [00:10:00] things. And clarity is, in and of itself a selling mechanism that is significantly undervalued in today's.
Internet marketing world, selling stuff online, being clear about what you can do for people. And it's not just about saying it on the phone or it's not just about having it in your head. There are things you can do, right? Like when you write a case study, making sure that you clearly identify what the before and the after was.
And when you're creating podcast content and email content, like there [00:10:30] are obviously marketing tools and tips and techniques and strategies to help create clarity, but if you yourself don't know it. That it, it's not a, it's not a shiny object that's gonna save you from that. You are the one who has to get advice, get insight, get someone to review it.
Oftentimes when people come into a, say for example, our coaching program. We have four elements of our coaching program. One, we help you come up with an offer, then we help you [00:11:00] sell it using organic methods outsourced to a three, $4 an hour virtual assistant. So again, I want you outta your marketing as quickly as possible.
Third, we help you build a funnel so you can fill your calendar to sell your offer. And then fourth, we work you outta your business. This first section is where the meat of section two, three, and four really is you pay the price in section one, so that section two, three, and four can be incredibly easy for you.
But a big part of that section one is having people who know what the heck they're talking about and who actually create offers in real time. [00:11:30] Taking a look at your offer, giving you feedback on your offer, having somebody who is a buyer in the marketplace say, I have no idea what the heck this means.
Having them honestly and critically telling you, yeah, this doesn't make sense because you know this, I don't need to tell you this, but I'm gonna remind you. Buyers don't always tell you the truth. I don't think they lie. Sometimes they do. They don't lie, but they don't always tell you the truth.
They'll say I just don't really think we want to buy this right now, because they're too afraid, ashamed and embarrassed to admit they don't understand what it is you just told [00:12:00] them that you sell. They don't see the value. It's not their job to sit there and tell you let me give you some criticism on your sales call.
So here's what you could've done better. That's not the job of the prospect. That's the job of your team. That's the job of your coaches. That's the job of the people you employ. One of the things that we do is we help people walk through that process. By offering the insights, by offering the review, by helping you figure out is what I am offering clear enough to be valued by the person who needs it.
But there's another element [00:12:30] here is, which is if your what? Which is to say what your offer delivers is too small. Okay. If it's too small, and we'll talk about what small means, you can't expect to charge higher prices. There's this really strange thing going on in the world of marketing where everyone recognizes the need for increased margins.
Why? 'cause everything's getting more expensive. Okay? Gosh, we gotta raise our prices so we can actually stay in business. What hardly anybody is saying though, [00:13:00] is how to actually raise your prices in a sustainable way. And again, it's not about marketing. A fancier website doesn't allow you to raise your prices.
You can make micro price adjustments, you can do the mindset thing where you know, I can get myself to where I can stare you in the face and actually say, Hey, this is worth a hundred million dollars. That, all that kind of stuff. There's an even easier, better, more sustainable, long-term way of doing that.
It's about making what you deliver bigger and being clear in what it is that you offer so that the person who [00:13:30] is on the other receiving end of what you're telling them, they can understand why it costs what it costs. Now, what's the difference between small and big? Do we mean if you have a coaching program, you need to add 90 more videos?
Oh, heavens no. People don't want 90 more videos. They want fewer videos. They want faster results. I'm gonna tell you one of many, but I'll give you one for now. The number one way to make your offer bigger is to solve a more urgent problem [00:14:00] if you can solve a more urgent problem in someone's life. There is nothing more clear to someone than their desire to solve urgent issues.
Lemme give you an example. How many, and it's almost always dudes and it's almost always dads, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna make some generalizations. How many dads do you know that avoid going to the doctor for minor chronic [00:14:30] pain, right? That's oh yeah, that's, it's so common. It's a stereotype, right?
How many humans do you know that get an extremity chopped off a foot? Lobbed off. Sorry, we're getting a little graphic here. It's my old EMT days coming back to me. Some, some major bodily injury that they treat with the same laissez-faire. Ah, it off attitude, right? The answer's almost nobody. If it's like a big gaping wound, they [00:15:00] know exactly what they need to do.
Think about those dads, right? That, that have chronic pain. Like you need to go to the doctor. Oh where's my insurance? I don't even know what insurance card to use. Who am I even supposed to call? Think about those excuses, right? They find a way to dilute the clarity on how to solve the problem, and it's a subconscious thing.
But the second their arm is gashed and thing, they're like, check me to the er. Go now. Call 9 1 1. The clarity is built in to the urgency of the problem. When you have that [00:15:30] clarity in the mind of the prospect already, and you can say, oh yeah, by the way, that incredibly urgent problem that you have, here's how you can solve it.
The thing that I have will solve that very urgent problem. You're gonna make life really easy for yourself when it comes to selling and marketing. You'll also be able to increase your price because in full transparency. Okay. Solving chronic back pain versus solving a gaping wound does have two extremely different [00:16:00] end values.
There's a difference between I saved you some, low dull pain that you might experience after sitting at the table for, sitting at the computer for a couple hours versus, I just saved your life. Those are two very different values that have been delivered. And what is the pattern there?
It's the now problem. It's the urgent problem versus the eh. It's I guess it's a problem. I don't know. It's a problem. So that's just one way to make the what [00:16:30] of what you offer significantly bigger. In other words, that the person who is looking at what you have to offer, making it feel and seem significantly better.
There are plenty of other strategies and lots of other things that we help our clients with. When we go through, but, so first we have who, what? And now here's the last one. Why? Now, this is something that's really interesting in the world of offer design and creation that is [00:17:00] missed so often by the offer creators.
And so I'm gonna talk to you as a copywriter for a second, rather than as a business owner, whenever I get hired to come into a business to write copy for someone. One of the things that's very difficult is when the business owner themselves doesn't really understand why their offer exists.
Because as a copywriter, in order for me [00:17:30] to do my job really well, I'm gonna have to figure it out myself. And oftentimes I can't truly figure out why the offer exists, 'cause I'm not the one who created it. So let me give you an example. Now, this may or may not resonate with you, but let's just give you a quick example.
Peaceful Profits. The business that you are interacting with now by listening to this podcast exists because of the, what I [00:18:00] believe to be a chronic illness in the entrepreneurship community where business owners create for themselves. Incredibly toxic, dangerous, and in some cases deadly businesses. You don't have to be a scientist to understand the side effects of cortisol, lack of sleep conflict oriented relationships, money stresses, et cetera, right?
[00:18:30] Peaceful Profits exists because I myself made big mistakes in my business. And the result of those big mistakes cost me almost more than I could pay. In other words, I had health issues. There were strains on personal relationships with thank heavens I caught before. They were completely torn and broken there.
There's probably about six or seven years of the past [00:19:00] 14 where I just think those were totally wasted and not wasted in the, because I was la because I was lazy but wasted. 'cause I was working 90 hours a week. Yeah, and running my wheels and not actually making the progress that I was hoping I could make and et cetera.
So the Peaceful Profits, the funnel and the coaching program, it's not about the funnel, it's not about the coaching program. What I do for people is not about getting you more profit and getting, yes, those are things I'm going to help you to do, but I'm helping you to do those because I genuinely [00:19:30] and sincerely believe.
That this particular business is on a mission to save entrepreneurs from themselves. Now, again I don't know if that's gonna resonate with you, and to be frank, it doesn't matter if it does or not, because I only wanna help people for whom that resonates. But so many entrepreneurs who are good at these things don't realize that there's this sort of arc where being good at hustling and grinding and coming up with ideas and running your business day to day da, that gets the [00:20:00] rocket going.
But if you keep going that way and you keep burning the engine that hot and you keep at the angle you're going towards and eventually you're, you are going to be the reason the rocket breaks up. You not your team, not the market, not the offer. You, and my goal with Peaceful Profits is to help people to see that, to put into place things that prevent them from.
Making these horrible mistakes that I made [00:20:30] to allow them to be not just an entrepreneur, but to be who they want to be. The full package, a happy family, a happy life balance, Peaceful Profits. That's why I deliver the what to the who, and this is missing in almost every offer. That we help client.
Like when a client comes to us, [00:21:00] I hardly ever see this. I hardly ever see it. Now why is that a problem and is it really a problem? And the answer is if you want to sell to someone in the help business, not having a why for your offers is a major problem. And it's a major problem because the. Real reason that people buy [00:21:30] is because of a deep emotional need.
Now I'm talking about the help Bill. I'm not talking about e-commerce. I'm not talking about going to what you buy, your groceries. I'm saying when somebody engages in a coaching service or a consulting service or a a freelancing service, there is some deep emotional need that must be satisfied. Now, let's be clear about what we mean by emotional need, because I think sometimes people hear emotional need and they instantly think [00:22:00] drama.
That's not it at all. I'll give you an example. Some people will choose you because emotionally they trust you. Some people will choose you because emotionally they want to hire the best. 'cause if they know if I just hire the best, most expensive person I can lay in my head in bed at night and I know I've got the best team and it, maybe it tickles my pride, but also maybe it makes it so that I can sleep better at night.
Just knowing, okay, we got the right people on there. Those are all emotional reasons. Fear, pride things that have happened [00:22:30] to people in the past experience. And so when you're in this world of increasing competition. What ends up happening when you have increasing competition is people don't become more logical.
The opposite occurs. They become more emotional. If somebody been screwed is, this is the funny thing about human beings. Somebody got screwed in transaction. They don't then start making spreadsheets every time they get on a sales call. What do they tell themselves? What's the story they tell themselves?
They say, I should have listened to my gut. I knew it was bad last [00:23:00] time. That's the same thing as saying, I'm going to rely more on my gut, which is an emotional reaction in the future when I buy. Okay. These are just examples of how important the Y is in offer creation, and then there's another element.
There's another element. If you are in the help business and you don't attach a why to what you're doing, you're going to miss out on what's more important than selling, which is fulfillment. If you have a service coaching [00:23:30] consultant, et cetera, and you don't know why that thing exists, how in the heck are you guiding what you should be doing for that person?
If I know, for example, for my coaching offers that I'm trying to introduce this concept of Peaceful Profits into the lives of the people that I work with, to take these overworked entrepreneurs, give them freedom, help them to preserve their relationships, help them to et cetera, then I'm going to mindfully create a coaching program.
That delivers that specific outcome rather than [00:24:00] just, ah, put whatever I can in there and just keep stacking and stacking, which for me in my why is literally the opposite of what I want to have happen to the people who are in my stuff. I want them to have clarity, not just more homework to do.
I don't care if they think my program is too small or too big, or two. It's the why this offer exists allows me as the offer creator to properly structure. What I'm supposed to be delivering in terms of the outcome that I [00:24:30] guarantee the what for the who. And so it's not just a guiding principle for selling, it's a guiding principle for fulfillment.
And this is where if you want the case studies to bring in the right people, you need to give the people the right results. And we get back to this sort of ever living circle of running and growing a business, which is, if you want this thing, you have to do this thing first, which you have to do this thing first to get this thing.
But this sort of circle of life of case study, testimonial, marketing [00:25:00] fodder, et cetera, begins with the outcome and fulfillment of what it is that you offer. So just some ideas for you today, my friends. I think that's probably enough for today. A lot to think about if you would like help from us. To help you to achieve these specific things.
You can always hit reply to the email I sent you to get you here. Or you can also go to Peaceful Profits.com/call. Book a call with one of my advisory team. They will see where you are at in your business, see what you need help with, [00:25:30] and we have all sorts of different offers and different configurations of offers and different price points and all that kinda good stuff to help you get to where you need to be.
If it's to create an offer from scratch, if it's to reconfigure an offer that you have, if it's to take an offer, make it more compelling and start selling it, or if you want the full package deal of introducing Peaceful Profits to your life and all that kinda good stuff, that's all available to you.
But first you need to schedule a call. Have a chat with our team so they can. Recommend to you what you need. Alright, my friends. That's it for today and we'll see you the next one.