Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 30 - How To Sell a Bad Offer
Synopsis:
Selling a bad offer? In this Peaceful Profits podcast, Mike Shreeve breaks down why most offers fail and what you can do when you’re stuck selling something that doesn’t easily convert.
He explains the difference between good and bad offers, why improving the offer itself is always smarter than chasing “fancy” marketing tricks, and practical strategies you can use if you’re forced to move a weak product—like expanding audience reach, increasing follow-up, and leveraging referrals.
Packed with insights from 15+ years of experience, this episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs looking to sharpen their offer-building and marketing strategies.
Transcript:
How To Sell A Bad Offer
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Let's jump right into it. Today, we're going to be talking about how to sell bad offers. Now, there are a few reasons why you might have a bad offer. It could be because you are forced to sell it. Maybe you're here listening to this because your client just dumped a really bad offer on your table, and you're figuring out, how the heck am I going to make this work?
You could have a bad offer just because you don't know how to make good offers. And listen to other episodes where we talk about how to tell whether or not your offer is good or bad. There's plenty of signs that can point towards the offer being the issue. And then, of course, lastly, You may have a bad offer because you just [00:00:30] don't want to make a good one.
Now, that sounds strange and unbelievable, that somebody would not want to make a good offer. But the problem is that to make a good offer, it's very difficult. It is way more difficult than buying the latest, greatest marketing method, tool, training, course, program, etc. and saying, the reason my stuff is broken and I'm not making the money I want is because I don't have the quote unquote secret from so and so guru about marketing XYZ.
That's easy. What's hard [00:01:00] is to sit down and face the reality that your offer, that you spend all this time and this thing that a lot of people get caught in their passion. They say it must look like this and it must be like this. So they're stuck in they put the, they themselves put the mental constraints on what their offer could be, therefore containing it to only ever be a certain type of offer or have a certain level of appeal or a certain deliverability aspect or et cetera, et cetera.
Okay. So you might be in one of those three camps. Now before we go into how do you sell a bad [00:01:30] offer, I first want to teach you something that I try to teach everybody who comes in contact with me and it's very simple. If you pretend that you have a hundred units of time to distribute to all of the different aspects of your business, sales, marketing, operations, finance, etc.
Support and then you break it down even more. So within finance, there's taxes and cash flow and not investments And there's so imagine you have a hundred units of time to give to every one of the many pieces and parts of your business most people spend most of those units [00:02:00] of time on things that are the most difficult way to grow a business.
So for example, they spend the majority of their units on marketing and sales. They'll spend 60, 70, 80 of those 100 units, whether it's their time or their team's time or their energy or et cetera, trying to market their offer to new people. Okay. That is not actually the fastest way to grow a business.
The fastest, easiest, best way to grow a business is to spend 50, 60, 70 units of time on making a better offer. Because better offers, by [00:02:30] their nature, allow for easier, more effective sales and marketing strategies. They create referrals, and there's nothing more profitable than a referral. It's the highest level of close rates, it's the least price resistance, it's the et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And when you do this let me back up one second. Just think of it like this. What is the difference between an offer and how much easier it is to sell when it's a good offer versus a bad offer? Here's a bad offer. A [00:03:00] bad offer is, for a limited time, you can come over to my house, scrub my toilets, and you can pay me 150 for the privilege.
That is a bad offer. In order to sell it, you have to do a lot of things. You have to work very hard. You have to be very good at marketing and selling in order to get somebody to actually pay that. On the flip side, here's a better offer. Come over to my house. In my garage, there are gold bars stacked to the ceiling.
I want them out of my garage because I'm going to build a rock wall for my [00:03:30] kid. If you can bring a truck and buy us all a pizza to share so we can eat it, and you're willing to move the bars yourself, they're yours. Now, if in that offer, I don't have to get fancy with my marketing and selling, I don't have to tell that many people about it before somebody says yes, I don't have to spend money on all these ads and et cetera, et cetera, right?
So that's the difference between a good offer. Now I want to put that in this episode, because what I don't want you to do is come away and say, Oh, Mike said that there [00:04:00] are really effective ways to sell bad offers. The answer is, there isn't, there aren't effective ways to sell bad offers. What you can do is improve your offer, and then even, Half hearted attempts at selling can be significantly more efficient than even the best strategies to sell a bad offer But again, I'm making this episode because some of you don't have a choice whether you made it yourself You know in other words the mental constraints you put around your offer and Who you are and how you relate to that offer and all that kind of good stuff Or whether you've been forced to sell [00:04:30] a bad offer So I do want to give you some advice because I've been doing this for 15 years.
I've had tons of clients The number of times I've been forced to sell a bad offer is almost 50 50 with the number of times I've been Graciously blessed with a good offer when I could look at an offer and say okay, this is gonna be easy, right? So there are some things that you can do again. None of these methods are ideal These are if you have to you know Last stand you have no choice.
You have to make it work. Okay, Number one is you can increase the size of the audience [00:05:00] that gets exposure to the offer. It is, and please don't take this lightly, okay? It is this simple, yet this difficult. So if you have an offer that one out of 1000 people purchase. Okay, 1 out of 1, 000 people purchase and I have an offer that 1 out of 10 people purchase.
If I want to sell 5 offers, I only have to get in front of 50 people. If you want to sell 5 [00:05:30] offers and you sell 1 out of 1, 000, you need to get in front of 5, 000 people, right? It is that simple and that difficult. What a lot of people will do is they'll try all these fancy tricks and tactics and do everything to avoid what ends up being pretty hard work.
Building big, bigger and bigger audiences or exposing your offer to more and more people is very difficult because you really only have two choices. You can pay for it. And if you and I are in the same [00:06:00] niche and we both spend, let's say, let's just use clicks as an example. If we both spend a dollar per click, because that's just the general nature of the niche that we're in.
And that's the general pricing for whatever platform we're using. Again, think about those numbers. I spend 50 to make a sale, right? I need to get in front of 50 people, 50 clicks. Let's just use that as an example. You have to spend 5, 000. One in a want to sell five. So you're spending 5, 000. So paying for traffic.
If you're seeing [00:06:30] this is a really good way to find out if it's your offer, that's bad. If you're seeing that you're spending significantly more than your competitors or then baseline or what people in a program or et cetera, et cetera, you can generally get a feel for what other people are paying.
If you do a little bit of research and you're part of enough communities, if you see that your number is much higher than everybody else's, what does that mean? It means that you're trying to sell a bad offer. It means that you have to get your offer in front of more people to pull the same volume. So paid ads is one way to do it.
The other way to do it is [00:07:00] Manual labor, SEO, YouTube videos, podcasts, social media, whatever platform you use. If you have to hit five sales of your offer per month to sustain yourself, to pay your bills, etc. And you currently have a thousand people on your Facebook friends list. And every time you run this promotion, you're only making one sale.
Guess what you have to do? Next month, if you want to be able to pay your bills, you need to do whatever you need to do to get 5, 000 friends. Because right [00:07:30] now, you're selling 1 out of 1, 000. Okay? So that's really one of the ways you can sell a bad offer. is just make the math make sense for the response rate that you get.
A lot of people, and this is where, this is how you get overhyped copy, this is where you get over promises under delivery, this is where you run into a lot of the problems online of how people have sold stuff in the past. They're too smart for their ignorance. [00:08:00] Okay? A lot of people in the online community are too smart for their ignorance.
Let me give you an example. They are incredible at copy, very good at copy, very bad at making good offers. So what happens? You have this beautiful, brilliant, very smart copy, and they're too ignorant, and I don't mean that in a negative connotation, quite genuinely, they don't even know that the offer they're selling.
Is not that good, but they know enough about copy to overhype it to make it sound way better than it [00:08:30] actually is and et cetera. Okay. That is not how you actually sell a bad offer because to be frank there's a whole list of issues. One of the issues being it doesn't actually work. Overhyped copy doesn't actually work, not in the longterm and not in the short term.
We run. I would say we are in the top 5 percent of companies that run tests actively on paid media platforms. And we have found again and again, that straightforward, realistic, real [00:09:00] non hyped copy outperforms just laughable over the top type stuff, right? And that again is because when you focus on the offer and improving the offer, you just tell people what the offer is and your response rate is significantly higher than trying to overhype.
A dud. Okay? Number one, if you're trying to sell a bad offer, you just have to figure out, if it's with a client, you're going to have to figure out and help that client get more people to see the offer. If it's yourself, you need to get more people seeing your stuff. Again, the [00:09:30] example I used earlier, of you're going to pay me 150 to come to my house and to clean my toilets?
That offer would sell. Someone would buy that if I got it in front of what? Enough people. So I sit there and I figure out how can I get it in front of enough people if I had to sell it, right? Okay. Next is more followup. If you are unable to compete on the appeal of your offer, meaning that what you're selling just isn't [00:10:00] instantly appealing.
Then the, then one thing you can do is rather than trying to compete on appeal, you can compete on attention. You can compete on attention. Let me see if I can explain this quickly. This in and of itself could be like a 10 part like seminar. If you are unable to compete on appeal, then one tool you have is being front of mind more successfully than your competitors who [00:10:30] have compelling offers.
Okay? So I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are trying to sell a really healthy food that nobody likes to eat. Let's say brussels sprouts or something. If you're competing, and by the way, I love brussels sprouts, but let's just say for sake of example, stereotype brussels sprouts, ew gross, they're healthy, I don't want to eat them.
Okay, so that's the offer that you're trying to sell. Everyone else is selling ice cream and cookies and soda pop and all of this stuff. [00:11:00] Very significantly more appealing even down to the biological level. Okay, so how do you sell in that environment when you don't have as awesome of an offer? You can be more convenient You can be more convenient When somebody's walking along you can literally just follow them everywhere and when they're hungry, would you like a brussel sprout?
Oh, I heard your tongue. I heard your stomach. I'm like, would you like a brussel sprout? And they're about to go in spend a bunch of money or whatever you say You can actually have this for much less and etc. Now. That's an extreme example You And it [00:11:30] sounds silly, except that's exactly what follow up is for.
That's what front of mind marketing is. It is being the most convenient choice because you are the most easily remembered choice. Don't underestimate people's laziness. You can use their laziness to your advantage by being the most convenient by having more touch points than everybody else. Checking in.
Every minimum of every month, if not every couple of weeks. Hey, you still interested in [00:12:00] copywriting? Hey, how's copywriting going? Hey, have you, et cetera. Again, you're not going to have a huge response rate. Okay. None of these things will increase conversion rates. None of these things will all of a sudden make your offer fly off the shelves, but these are the things you can do to sell your stuff.
If for whatever reason, it just isn't a compelling offer. So follow ups increase. the convenience of buying your offer over somebody else's. And that in and of itself, there is a group of buyers who just buy out of [00:12:30] convenience. Okay, so here's another one. So we got bigger audience, more follow up, which if you really think about it, more follow up is also what?
It's a type of additional exposure, isn't it? You're just re exposing your offer to the same people. Over and over again rather than necessarily trying to get a bigger audience you do both of them your offer will sell more. All right, third is referrals, endorsed traffic, and partnerships of whatever kind.
So if you don't have a great offer you can leverage the built [00:13:00] in trust of relationship based selling. Okay, so it's wrong to assume That people buy using logic. Okay? It's just wrong to assume. It very rarely happens, and even the people who know it's happening don't buy it. Still buy emotionally.
Now the thing that people get confused when they hear that people use emotion to buy is they think that people are like crying when they hit the buy button or they think that people are full of fear when they buy the buy button and that. But emotion is a very big broad range of things that [00:13:30] we feel and experience as human beings.
Trusting someone is an emotional action. Feeling safe to buy from someone is emotional. Okay? It's hardly ever logical. There may be elements of logic, but if somebody were to really sit down and logically think through, even the most compelling offers, they'd realize they'd be better off taking their money and sticking it in some safe, conservative investment.
That's, that, if we really drilled down logical thinking to the extreme. [00:14:00] So what does that mean for us if we have that offer? It means if we can develop a network, right? And you see this all the time. This was really big when I first got into internet marketing and doing stuff online. There was things like, I think they even called themselves the syndicate.
It was, this was early days. Salty Droid did a piece on them a long time ago. Where it was literally just a group of dudes really hammering each other's lists, selling each other's stuff. And they were selling a lot of stuff, which I think, under normal conditions, those things would not have sold.
They certainly would not have sold [00:14:30] without the endorsement of the other person. They were doing price fixing type stuff. It was wild. It was wild stuff. It was Wild West way back then. It's gotten a little bit better, but there's still that kind of thing going on. And here's what's really important about that.
Again, for whatever reason you might be stuck with a bad offer. If you have the ability to build networks and to call on networks, you will introduce a very powerful emotional tool that can help your offer. I wouldn't say it becomes appealing. Like it doesn't all of a sudden turn a bad [00:15:00] offer into a good offer.
What it does is it makes people feel safe buying an offer that they might not have otherwise purchased. Now hopefully again, I feel like I need to put a disclaimer every two minutes in this thing when I say bad offer I'm not saying scams ripping people off taking advantage of others I'm saying let's I'll give you an example if you go out on today's market and you say I'm a copywriter and I'll write your Copy that's not a great offer.
Why well listen to all of the other podcast episodes. I've done when I talk about offers It's very generic. It's boring. Everybody is a copywriter these days. [00:15:30] You're in a race to the bottom. It's there That's a bad offer You may be excellent at copywriting, but to just go out into the world and say, I'm a copywriter, hire me, I'm 100 an hour, that's a really bad offer.
Again, I want to make sure that we're clear. I'm not saying go out and make offers and here's how to scam people. But imagine this, you're a copywriter. You charge 100 an hour. If you have a huge network of people, You're going to be able to sell your services. People can refer you. There's the trust element.
People may not like the terms. They may think I don't really want to hire a full time, but I guess it's not, there's not a clear [00:16:00] outcome. There's not clear timing. There's the outcomes rather vague even in, in the sense that what happens if this doesn't work? And again, listen to the other podcast episodes where we talk about offers.
If you can. get others to endorse what you do, their requirement for all of those other things diminishes because you are using very strong emotional appeals to a rather boring, dull, and even bad offer. So that's something you can do. I've seen it all the time in [00:16:30] crazy high level Backdoor, I can't believe I'm sitting at the table right now with what these guys are talking about, type stuff, and I won't name any names.
It happens a lot, and you'll it's one of the, if you've ever been around whatever niche you're in for a while, you see sometimes products and offers being sold, and you're like, how is this happening? All you have to do is just trace it back to where the partnered promotion is. And he's oh, okay, for example, you may even see somebody running ads to an offer and you're like There's no way this offer is selling well, or you yourself may have the exact same offer You're like why isn't it working [00:17:00] for me?
It's because you haven't probably found their backdoor which is the partner promotions that are actually helping to subsidize the cost of the paid Traffic campaign. Okay, and here's the last little tip here if I was forced to sell Something like copywriting. I'll give you an example. Just a very bland, generic copywriting offer.
One of the things that I would do is I would stop trying to sell it myself as an offer. Instead, I would team up with someone and embed what I do into their more appealing offer. Say for example [00:17:30] they run a funnel service and they have a guaranteed funnel outcome blah blah blah blah blah blah. That's the kind of person that I would approach.
And I would say, look, I'm a really good copywriter. I just really don't know how to make good offers for myself, I don't know how to package this in a way that works really well for other people is there a way that we could partner up? I can be your copywriter, I can hit your I've seen your copy, I can write that good etc.
Now, your offer, what you offer people, is part of a compelling offer. And this is actually something I recommend to my clients. all the time. If you yourself are [00:18:00] unable to come up with a compelling offer, it doesn't mean it's the end of the road for you. There are plenty of people who are missing what you can provide in their offer.
And you can even keep it simple. It doesn't even have to be like a puzzle piece that fits with another puzzle piece. It could be this simple. You just bundle a bunch of offers together. So let's say for example, you are a copywriter and let's say that you wrote a ebook or something and you partner with a traffic person who has a video course and a [00:18:30] branding person who has a summit that they do and Whatever and you come out with this new offer for however much it is that is the complete etc And it has all these amazing things and you've made it more appealing By adding your offer to more than just what you can provide And that's a way that you know, you're technically you're selling that bad offer.
It's just embedded in a bunch of other things, which on the whole, when presented to the market is very appealing. And why do we care whether something is appealing? Cause we go all the way back to the first. [00:19:00] Thing that I said about bigger audiences, it's very difficult and it's very expensive to create a big audience.
It is much smarter, much more efficient, much easier much more profitable because you're not spending as much to just make a better offer that gets a better response rate. So you can be the person where one in 50 people buy it versus one in 1000 and et cetera, and everything that we talked about earlier.
Okay, my friends, that's it. Those are some tips on how to sell even bad offers. I recommend that you ignore them all, and you instead go work on your [00:19:30] offer. The better it is, the easier your life will be, and in every single aspect of your business. Every single aspect. It'll be easier to hire people, it'll be easier to hire sales and marketing people, it'll be easier to fulfill, and etc.
When you spend money. A bigger portion of those hundred units of time on your offer than you do on trying to figure out the latest fancy trick for sales and marketing. Okay, my friends, that's it. Hope you enjoyed this. If you'd help with your offer, we have a few very compelling offers ranging from do it yourself all the way to done for [00:20:00] you for helping people to make offers that practically sell themselves.
Simply go to PeacefulProfits.com/call book a call with us. We'd love to help you other than that. Hope you have a wonderful day and we'll talk to you later.