Episode 12 – Could You Refuse This Offer?

Introduction   00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu. The one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:24    Welcome to The Underground Marketer Podcast. This is the place where we deliver the real truth of our marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:37    I’m your host Tudor. And today we’re going to discuss how to go about creating an offer that your target audience cannot refuse. So in the previous episode, we went over the importance of choosing the right audience, an audience that has money is hungry and they’re proven buyers. Ideally. So now granted that this audience is well chosen, the next most important factor in making sure that you succeed in getting sales is the offer. So a lot of people here go wrong because they think that once you have the right audience and you’re targeting the right audience, all that matters is the copy that you use. You know, so they go about hiring great copywriters, or maybe they write the copy themselves, and they really focus on getting the copy right. But actually, the offer element is a lot more important than the copy. So if the audience and the market is number one, then the offer is certainly number two.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:43    So if you make them a bad offer, you know, even if you have the greatest copy on earth, you will likely fail, you know, to get proper traction and to make a lot of sales. So in order to understand what actually makes a great offer, we have to look briefly into what makes people buy, you know, and basically ask the question of why do people do anything? Because ultimately buying is a behavior, you know, and maybe we don’t want them to buy something. Maybe we want them to sign up to something, uh, do something for us or anything else, because I mean, making offers, isn’t just about getting money, right? So you could be making offers when you try to hire somebody or you could be making offers when you’re trying to get the attention of an investor, and you’re trying to raise money for your business.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:37    You could be making offers when you’re negotiating a certain position with your employer. So there’s a lot of places and a lot of times in life when we have to get other people to do things for us. So it’s very key that we actually understand. What’s actually getting people to do things. If we want to actually engineer this process. And the simplest answer here is that generally, people do what they do because they want to, and it may sound trite. However, wants are very important and I would say that wants are even stronger than needs, you know, there is a lot of things that people need to do, but they leave it undone. Somebody knows that for example, that they have to exercise, but they fail to exercise day after day after day, even though they know that they are obese, for example, and they need to do it for their health.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:37    And they still don’t do it because the want is not strong enough. So it’s those burning desires. The burning ones that each one of us has that basically gets us to do everything that we do inside our lives. And it’s very important to realize this, that your wants and how intense they are, are actually going to guide what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it, and the energy that you put into it, you know? So having, and being able to control your wants to a certain extent, even for your own person and for your own self is very important. You know, if you have a want and you have a way to make it stronger, that can actually get you to take action. For example, if you’re procrastinating. So how can you go about doing that? We’re going to explore that both for yourself and for other people.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:04:37    But the first thing to realize is that wants are basically emotional. You know, they are not logical. We do not want something for any sort of logical reason. You know, that somebody from the outside could pinpoint and refer to, we want things because of how it will make us feel, you know? So, um, we want to feel a certain way. And we think that through the fulfillment of that want, we are actually going to feel that way. And that’s why we want the things that we do. So ultimately the source of our wants is inside of our emotions. So our emotions are the core drivers of our buying behaviors. And also the decisions that we take, even though as human beings, we tend to like to think of ourselves as rational, but it’s not quite like that. We’re not as rational as we would like to think that we are.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:43    And great offers always tap into these hidden emotional wants that your target audience may have. And that’s how they really get the target audience to take action. So what actually happens is that we act based on our wants, but we also use the logical side of things to justify our wants, you know, so the justification comes afterwards, you know, eh, but the want is always there first. So, you know, it doesn’t matter if you have a great offer from a logical point of view, if you don’t get the emotion and the want to the right level beforehand, then that doesn’t matter. You know, they’re not going to take action because the logic alone is not going to move them to action. So first you have to go the other way around, raise the emotion, raise the want. And then after that is at a high level, then you can bring in the logical side to provide some justification.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:06:45    And this process is actually called transferring emotions. And this is how you actually activate hidden wants that people may already have inside of them. So it’s very important to know that the want has to come from inside the person. And if it’s not there, it’s almost impossible to create it in a cost-effective manner, you know, changing what people want, that’s sort of the role of education. And it takes a long, long time, you know, that’s why school lasts so long, for example, and education lasts so long. It’s, it’s hard to do. You can’t do this cost-effectively. You can’t do it through marketing, through advertising, at least not in the short term. So, um, the secret is actually identifying wants that are already in there and then using the transference of emotions to activate them. So as human beings, we naturally pick up on the energy of those around us.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:07:46    You know, we feel a certain energy, a certain vibe, and that transfers onto us. You know, you, you may remember the situation when you were feeling a bit down, for example, and then you saw this really positive and upbeat person and that sort of rubbed onto you. You know, even if at first you may have been a little reluctant over time that sort of attitude may have rubbed onto you and you stopped feeling sad or whatever, and you started also feeling into it and more joyous. So, um, transferring emotions is I would say one of the most effective ways to communicate with each other. So, um, when it comes to sales, I would say that the key that really facilitates the transference of emotion is enthusiasm. So if you have enthusiasm, even if you don’t have the right words, even if you don’t have the right techniques, just with enthusiasm alone, you can convince people and you can convince people because you really activate their emotional side and you drive the emotional side through the roof as it were, and they get very, uh, the, your enthusiasm transfers over to them and it makes your offer and everything that you say a lot more appealing, you know, enthusiasm transfers certainty and desire from you into your customer and gets them ready to take action.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:16    So I would say that that’s one big key, however, it’s not enough, you know, so we talked that there is also a logical component for it. So why is it not enough to just get somebody ramped up in a high emotional state where he’s ready to take action? And the reason why that is not enough, he goes back into the science of how the brain works. So, um, the lower parts of your brain let’s call them the reptilian parts of the brain, the parts of the brain that are emotionally nature, those parts they’re older, and they’re closer to the center, the geographical center of your brain. And that means that they, the stimuli that you receive is processed there first. You know, so that’s why first you have to get the emotional side of things ready in your customers. You know, you have to get them to really want something.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:11    Once you do that. However, and once the information gets into that stage in their brains, the logical side will quickly scan through the information to see if there is any reason for skepticism or for worrying, or for further investigating the information. And if there is, you know, then the logical side will try to intervene and tell the emotional part of the brain, you know, hang on. You know, that’s true. This is a really good thing, but we need to investigate it more. And, you know, that’s where a lot of times people make offers, things go haywire, you know, because they basically don’t get the logical side of the brain to remain dormant, you know, and remain asleep because the way you actually get the logical side remain dormant and the sleep so that it lets the emotional side take over and move through with the action is that you need to help your customer or whoever you’re trying to influence, create a justification for his strong want, you know, that’s basically where the logical side comes in.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:11:22    So he really wants this, but he must have a reason, a justification that he can provide to his logical brain. Uh, and if that is provided, then the logical brain doesn’t get activated, you know, and it lets basically the emotional side carry things on and to go through with a decision. So we also need to look at this point at what makes an offer great from a logical point of view. So to start with, I say that the big thing here is the obvious one, a great offer is one that provides a big, unique benefit, or maybe more than one big unique benefit. So, um, I cannot emphasize enough that it must actually be big and it must be unique. You know, you can’t actually trick people, you know, you can’t just get them into a high emotional state and then sort of try to trick them that your benefit really is unique when you are the same as everybody else.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:23    Right? The other key trait here is clarity. So if your offer is not clear and provided in simple language, then a large segment of your target audience will not even understand it. And you have to remember that when the logical brain does not easily understand something, the alarm bells start going off, you know, and you don’t want that to happen. You want to bypass the logical brain. And in order to do that, you need to make it feel safe and comfortable. And you do that by providing clarity and also by making sure the benefit is big and unique as we were saying, you know, so a useful way to think about it is that from a logical point of view, a great offer is a no brainer for the customer. You know, and that basically means that it’s a no brainer for them to give you their money in exchange for the value that you’re providing in the form of your service, your product or whatever it is.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:24    You know, sometimes this can actually be in exchange for them doing something, you know, they’re going to get value by taking a certain action. So that’s also a form of influence. That’s also something that can come in really powerfully at this point to actually influence the logical side of the brain. So to make this work, remember that you need both the emotional and the logical side, but the emotional one is definitely more important. You know, in a way, a metaphor that I like to think about is that sales is like fishing. You know, when you go fishing, the most important thing is to pick the right spot. You know, that old fisherman who always goes fishing for so long and he just has an intuition and he just knows where the right spots are, where there’s a lot of fish and where you can always find fish.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:14:21    And he goes into that spot. And even with a bait, that’s worse than the more modern fisherman, let’s say he can get more fish because he’s fishing in the right spot. So, um, as we said in the previous episode, the most important thing in sales is to pick the right audience. But the next most important thing is to have the right bait, you know, and that’s basically what we’re talking about here, that your offer, you know, and it has to be a bait that they simply cannot refuse. So basically you need something that the fish already, like, you know, if I try to make the fish, like let’s say a bait that they generally don’t like, you know, like I try to give them instead of a worm, I give them a leaf for example, right. Or something like that. And they’re not interested in the leaf.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:16    They don’t like it. I can spend ages trying to get those fish to like the leaf so that they bite onto my hook and I can get them out. Right. But that’s a waste of effort. You know, that’s the same for you when you try to create wants inside of your customers that are not already there. And you sort of try to educate them into desiring a certain thing that they have no desire for. You know, it’s not effective a lot more effective is to actually find a bait that the fish already like, you know, and then you have to ramp up their desire for it and their want for it and provide a logical justification for it. And they will bite, you know, it’s basically an offer that they cannot refuse. A good way to think about this whenever you’re trying to make an offer to someone is to remember that people are always calculating, you know, they’re always weighing the options and they’re putting them on a balance inside their minds.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:16:17    And whenever you’re basically making a pitch, they weigh the positives against the negatives or the sources of pleasure against the sources of pain. And these don’t necessarily have to be very obvious, right? So I mean, some of the negatives, they are not obvious at first, you know, you may think that your offer has no negatives. You know, you may say, oh, this is a great offer. It has no negatives, but there are always negatives. So risk uncertainty, distrust, skepticism, these are negatives. And in addition to those, you have negatives such as opportunity cost, you know, in order to give you their time. For example, they have to give up spending time on something else. So those are also significant considerations in this calculation that goes through their head. And of course the other big one is price. You know, we could say that price actually includes all these negatives, you know, so you can think that they’re not just paying you money, you know, they’re, they’re paying for all the other stuff.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:17:26    You know, they’re paying for the uncertainty, they’re paying for their distrust, for the skepticism, for all these negatives that we talked about, you know, price can be thought of not just in monetary terms, but as the complete package. So, um, that’s how I tend to think about it. And the more compelling and clear and unique, the benefits of your offer are, if you pack a lot of them in a short space, you can be a lot more convincing and they basically run this calculation of let’s say value. You know, the benefits that they’re going to get the positives versus the price that they’re going to pay. And the price remember doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary. And a lot of people who are new into sales and new into this field of making offers, they tend to focus a lot on the price and they think, oh, how can I give this person a discount?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:18:26    How can I make the price more appealing? And they basically try to compete in one way or another on price. And that’s a mistake. You know, that’s a strategic mistake in business and competing on price is very, very difficult. You know, there’s very few businesses in the world that have managed to compete on price. You know, so Walmart is one of them. Dell is another one, but these are exceptions. You know, most of the big businesses that you see out there don’t compete on price, you know, Apple, Microsoft, and so on. These businesses compete on differentiation, on value, which is the opposite spectrum of price. And the reason they do this is that competing on price is zero-sum game. You know, there is only so much you can lower the price. So that’s one side of it. The other is that when you compete on price, you ignore the fact that if there is little desire or want, you know, basically the value side of the equation is, is low.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:19:31    Then there may not be any price that somebody is willing to pay no matter how low, you know, even if you give it away for free, they’re not going to take it because it’s a waste of their time or whatever, you know, basically you can’t bring, there’s a limit to how low you can bring the price and how effective that can be if there is low desire or want. And that’s why it’s a lot more effective to work on the value side of the scale, you know, and basically try to ramp up the value, you know, increase the value of your offer, make it more appealing to them. And that’s what tends to give better results. That’s why strategically for businesses, especially for new businesses, that don’t have a lot of capital competing on differentiation and on value is the winning strategy. I have a nice quote or a segment from Nietzsche that I remember with regards to this.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:20:29    And Nietzsche said that basically, every man has his price. And then he was thinking about this statement and he contradicted it. You know, that’s not true, you know, not every man has a price, but he said for every man there exists a bait, which he cannot resist swallowing. And that’s very important because it really drums on this point that I was previously making that the value side of the equation is a lot more powerful than the price one, you know, rather than decreasing the price side, most of your energy should be focused on increasing the value side because just as Nietzsche says, for every person out there, there is a bait that is sufficiently appealing, that he cannot resist swallowing. You know, that’s why you’re a lot more effective if you work on the value side of the equation. And I mean, if you think about this, even from a logical point view, we know of many people who do whatever it takes for their burning desires and their burning wants.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:21:35    Even if those things are harmful for them, you know, so people sometimes actually sacrifice everything to get what they really want, including their lives. Think about all the martyrs through history and so on, who are willing to sacrifice their lives for what was actually important to them. So what, what they actually wanted. So wants can be very powerful and you should never forget this when you’re working on your offer, you know, that’s why I always advise businesses. Let’s focus on differentiation, how we can be different and better than the other side, rather than on price, on offering discounts and all these other things that people are tempted by. So that’s pretty much what I will say when it comes to making a great offer. So remember that there are two sides of the equation that you need to fulfill here. There is the emotional side, uh, which you have to fulfill first because that’s just how our brains work.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:22:38    The emotional center gets activated first. You fulfill the emotional centers via transference of emotion, you know, and we talked about enthusiasm being a real key here. If you’re enthusiastic about something, you’re likely to get the other people to also be enthusiastic and to take action about it. And we also said that the logical side is also crucially important because the logical side can intervene even when there is a high emotion and a high desire for something. And it intervenes, if it finds that there exists something potentially dangerous, what does dangerous mean to it? Well, the offer is not very clear. The benefits aren’t really unique, uh, and they’re not big, you know, those are the three reasons. So that’s why you need to make sure that your offer offers big and unique benefits. And it’s also clear and compelling. It does so in a short amount of space, and that’s basically how you keep the logical side of the brain dormant.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:23:44    You offer that logical side a justification for the wants and desires that the desiring side has. And then it remains dormant and lets the person move ahead with the action. And we also covered how this whole equation that we are discussing is like a scale. You know, you have value on one side and then you actually have the price on the other side. And the value is basically all the sources of pleasure that you can think about while the price includes all the pains, all the negatives, all the opportunity costs all the time invested into it. And all of that, that’s all included in the price. And at every moment the customer is weighing or not necessarily the customer. It may be an employee, maybe an employer they’re weighing the scales of your offer. You know, they’re weighing your offer against the scales. They’re, they’re putting the positives on one side, the negatives on the other, and they see what comes out of that.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:24:47    And we also talked at the very end. We also talked about the importance strategically to focus on the value of your offer rather than on diminishing its price. And for two reasons, number one, we said that there’s only so much you can decrease the price, you know, because there’s always going to be a price, you know, in terms of the missed opportunity cost of doing something else, for example. So for whatever you’re doing, there’s always going to be a price and there’s only so much you can do to diminish it. And a lot of people and a lot of companies don’t have a lot of resources to truly, truly work on competing on price. So that’s the second reason. That’s why you want to focus on the value offered. There is almost no limit to increasing the value of your offer and to coming up with a better offer.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:25:40    And the, the good analogy that I love and that I will end with is that an offer is like a bait. You know, it’s like the bait that you put on when you go fishing and if you have the right bait, then you can catch a lot of fish presuming that you know, the right locations where you should be throwing the bait. Of course. So that pretty much covers what we wanted to go through today. It’s all about making them an offer that they truly can’t refuse. And it’s the second most important factor apart from targeting the right audience or market in the success of your marketing campaigns and of your advertising. So, um, I hope I gave you a lot of insights here and you can go ahead and apply those successfully in your business and in your life.

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:26:32   And I will say stay tuned for the next episode. And until next time, remember, keep growing your business and providing massive value to the world because you are the reason why we’re all growing richer. Our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Till next time!