“This is one of the most important… and most valuable marketing lessons I can share with you,” I said to David.
We had just kicked-off his 15-week Apprenticeship Experience. We were on Zoom. And I was getting ready to show him some stuff on my screen.
“It can make a mediocre marketing campaign convert like crazy. It can double, triple, even quadruple sales conversions. And, it’s the ultimate shortcut to having a marketing campaign that produces the sale. But, its not what you think.”
I had David’s complete attention.
That’s when I shared the marketing tale of the two cars.
Let me give you a quick overview…
One is a brand new 2018 gun-metal Jaguar F-Type coupe. Gorgeous. Fully loaded. Outfitted with every bell and whistle you can have. Valued around $90,000.
The other one is a discolored 1973 Volkswagen Thing. 163,000 miles. Original parts. No air conditioning. And a blown gasket. Valued around $7,500.
My instructions to you: Sell each car for $30,000.
How much marketing and sales skill do you think it takes to sell a brand-new $90,000 Jaguar for just 30K?
Yeah, not a whole lot.
How about the Volkswagen Thing? How much marketing and sales skill do you think it takes to sell a beat-up $7,500 vehicle for 30k?
Yeah, A LOT! If you’d even be able to sell it.
With the Jag, it’d actually be difficult to screw-up the sale. A simple ad on Facebook and maybe a little landing page would likely do the trick.
You wouldn’t have to be a master copywriter… a slick salesman… a tech wizard… or some marketing automation guru.
And you’d probably have more calls and interested buyers than you could handle.
But, the Thing… man o man, you better have some serious chops to sell that bad boy.
Why? What’s the difference between these two?
Simple. The offer!
The offer for the Jag… over the top. A no-brainer. A slam-dunk.
The offer for the Thing… garbage.
And, with every commercial proposition, the offer plays the biggest role in making the sale.
The better the offer, the better sales conversions will be.
The worse the offer, the worse sales conversions will be.
And not just that…
The better the offer, the easier it is to generate those conversions.
Meaning: There’s an inverse correlation between the quality of your offer and the quality of marketing needed.
A higher quality offer can get away with lower quality marketing. Because the offer does the heavy lifting.
A lower quality offer requires much higher quality marketing to get the job done.
That’s why the savviest marketers start working on any new marketing campaign by, first, assembling the right offer. Before choosing the funnel model. Before writing a headline. And before setting-up any web pages or doing anything else.
And the offer is NOT just your product and price.
Your product is only one piece of the offer. One of seven pieces to be more precise. Just like price. There are other elements (e.g. terms, bonuses, guarantee, etc.)
You’re not selling your product. You’re selling your offer.
And your job is to start with a great offer. Because the offer will make or break your entire marketing campaign. And make your job easy or brutally difficult.
When assembled correctly — as a S.I.N. offer (superior, irresistible, no-brainer) — the right offer can double, triple, even quadruple your sales.
When treated as an after-thought — something thrown together in a few minutes — it can be the single cause of in-the-toilet sales.
That’s why putting together the right offer is one of the very first things I teach all new apprentices. It’s that important.