Give me $1, and I’ll give you $2 back.
If I were to make that offer to you, what would you think?
First off, I’m sure you’d be a bit skeptical.
“What’s the catch?” You’d say, “How do I know you’re going to fulfill on it?”
“Fair enough,” I’d reply. “Give me $1 today. I won’t put it in the bank. In fact, I’ll leave it on the table. If I don’t give you $2 in return, you can simply grab your $1 back.”
Your hesitation quashed, you’d bite…
You’d put your $1 on the table, and I’d hand you $2.
Then, when you figured out it wasn’t a trick, you’d keep coming back for more. And more. And more.
Now let’s just assume this is all real. How many times do you come back today, exchanging every $1 for $2, before you’re satisfied?
Yesterday I revealed three universal desires: fast, easy, free…
And even as I was waxing poetic yesterday about how important it is to create simplicity and ease of results for your prospects, I was also thinking about what I wanted to write to you today.
You see, to offer results free or cheap is a particularly strong proposition, too!
But this isn’t just about “free shipping” or “buy one get one free.”
There’s a much more powerful proposition you can make tied to certain offers…
Selling money at a discount!
When your product or service helps your prospect make or save money, you’re in an interesting position.
If the amount of money they make or save as a result of doing business with you is more than the investment in your service, then you can essentially sell them money at a discount.
Let’s take copywriting services, for example. If you spend $20,000 plus 5% of sales to hire me to write a promotion that makes you $1 million dollars… You’ve just spent $70,000 to make $930,000. That means for every $1 you gave me, I gave you back $13.28.
Or investing. Let’s say you have an investment newsletter service that has delivered 10 winners of 100% or more in the last 12 months. And the service costs $49 per year. Using a $1,000 investment in a stock as an example, the next 100% gain will lead to $1,000 in profits. Compare that to the paltry $49 subscription price, and you’re getting $102.04 back for every $1 invested today — and that’s just on ONE winner.
The same thing applies to savings. Let’s say you have a business service that saved your average customer $100,000 last year. Your fees for delivering this service are $10,000. That’s $10 back for every $1 invested today.
When you put these things this way, they are ALL relatively easy decisions to make. At the very least, you’ve just cost-justified your offer well beyond the actual investment required.
The biggest challenge to selling money at a discount is believability…
Every single one of these examples — and any others like them — suffer from the challenge of making sure your offer is believable.
Just like when I offered to give you $2 for every $1 you gave me, your mind goes looking for a reason to not believe.
For copywriting, the objection may be, “But what if you write something that bombs?”
For the investment newsletter, “What if the whole market tanks this year and you can’t pull out a single winner?”
For the cost-saving business service, “But what if our situation is different and you can’t realize those savings?”
When you’re selling money at a discount, you’re certain to raise the feeling of “too good to be true.”
The good news is there are ways around it.
The simplest way to make this bold offer more believable is to reverse the risk of the transaction…
In other words, don’t ask the prospect to take on the risk. Offer to take it on yourself.
Now, this may not work in all situations, and I’m not necessarily recommending any of these offers, but…
In copywriting, you could offer to work “commission-only” with your client — maybe you negotiate a higher royalty, but you only get paid when they make sales.
For the investment newsletter, you can offer a money-back guarantee — invest in our 12-month subscription today, and if we don’t deliver at least one 100% winner, you get 100% of today’s investment back.
For the cost-savings service, maybe your offer is much like the copywriting — we get paid a percentage of the realized savings we’ve achieved for you.
Any one of these is a good example of how you can sell money at a discount — and address the objection of it sounding too good to be true.
Here’s one more powerful idea…
Maybe you’re not ready to offer your services on a performance-only basis. And maybe you don’t yet have the stature and reputation in your market to justify the fees paid in advance.
What if you were to structure your marketing and client-acquisition in such a way that your best prospects could get the results you promise before ever doing business with you?
At the risk of suggesting something that feels a little over-used, I’ll suggest offering a free report…
“38 conversion ‘holes’ that even smart, sophisticated marketers find in their funnels — and how to patch them for immediately-higher profits!”
That report could explain a ton of different ways to immediately increase your conversions. In many cases, doing work that a copywriter might do. And describe these methods in enough detail that a prospect could actually go out and implement on their own.
When they do that, and improve their results, you build believability in your promise. So that the next time you come knocking, they trust you to deliver on the “selling money at a discount” promise. Or, perhaps, they even proactively seek you out as the expert, to implement some of the 38 things for them.
It doesn’t have to be a free report. The principle stands.
Find a way to get your prospect results in advance of doing business with you — and you overcome the biggest challenge of establishing believability…
Many investment newsletters offer free email newsletters that offer more general market commentary, with a few good stock recommendations mixed in.
The portfolios aren’t tracked, and the research isn’t as detailed as in the paid services.
But if you’re following a free newsletter and making money… And you get an offer for a higher-level paid service… You’re going to naturally be more inclined to believe the promises about the paid newsletter.
Or perhaps with the cost-saving business services, maybe you’re able to identify the 3 most-common ways businesses waste money on whatever it is you help them save money on.
You share that information via a webinar, that establishes your expertise and creates believability in the mind of your prospect.
They look at their operations, realize that they are indeed wasting money in the area you pointed out, and look to you to help them solve the waste.
This is worth the effort of figuring out!
If you’re selling something that either makes or saves your prospect money, spend some time thinking about how you can shift your offer or its presentation to “sell money at a discount.”
And, because there are inherent believability challenges to doing this, find a way to make it more believable. Reverse the risk. Make your payment contingent on performance. Or perhaps find a way to get your prospects results in advance of them every spending a penny with you.
Do this right, and you may just create a big selling breakthrough!
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
