- Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm going to share with you how
to create a limited time offer.
Maybe you've got a Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday,
Black Friday sale that you're trying to figure out,
or you're trying to sell kind of like a launch,
or pre-sell your product.
Or maybe it's just an end of year campaign
you want to crush.
That is what I'm gonna dive into,
and be sure to stay to the end where I've got
an exclusive download for you.
Which is essentially my limited time
offer builder worksheet,
where I go into the characteristics, how to define it,
and really package it so you don't blow up your business.
Trust me, do this wrong and you will fail.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat bass and percussion music)
The offer, how do you create a limited offer
that explodes, gets you high quality customers,
generates a cash injection into your business,
and doesn't cripple it?
Because the challenge I've discovered,
I coach a lot of software founders
that do Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
you know, end of year offers, pre-sell
their next big launches.
And the truth is, is for many of them
that don't understand the frameworks I'm gonna share
with you in this episode, they create a situation
where they literally break their business.
How does that happen?
Well, they pre-sell their software.
I've seen people do, you know,
what are those called?
Not limited, but lifetime offers, lifetime offers!
Where it's like a fixed price forever.
Well, there's a lot of things wrong with that.
One, those people are definitely not looking
to solve a problem, they're just looking for a good deal.
Many of them are going to not be willing
to invest the time and energy to deploy your software,
and ask your support team to do all the heavy lifting.
A lot of them are gonna complain over time
that the product isn't meeting their needs,
but they're not even paying for the product.
So what I want to share with you today is kind
of five key strategies that you need to consider
when designing your limited time offer.
So that it not only is successful,
but also doesn't break your business.
Here's what I got.
Number one, know your cogs.
Cogs stands for cost of good sold.
So most entrepreneurs when they're busy selling
if they're lucky enough to market,
and get the product being bought,
they never even think about asking themselves,
what's the unit economics?
When I sell one software licence,
and they think, well, software's free.
It literally costs me pennies to deliver more software.
No, it's not true. You have other costs.
You have support costs,
you have infrastructure costs, et cetera.
So you need to understand that if I sell one new customer,
and they pay me a hundred dollars a month,
what amount of money do I need
to spend per month to support that customer?
That's your cost of goods sold.
Most software companies, if you're good,
most people aren't okay.
If you're good, you're at about 80% to 90%,
what's called gross margin, or 10% cost of goods sold.
If you do this wrong, you may end up like my buddy,
I'm not going to call him out, I almost called them out,
I should hold myself back.
But, and it wasn't his fault.
He worked at a company that sold jewellery,
this is just a fun story.
Worked at a company, selling jewellery,
they had Walmart as a big customer.
They did this multi-year contract.
They were all excited, high five,
it was a multi-million dollar deal.
You know, they ramped up production,
they got lines of credit from the bank.
And you know, really worked with Walmart
to deploy their jewellery line.
And then the price of gold went up.
Well, what they didn't consider when they sold the product
was that their contract had
a fixed price per piece to Walmart.
And they didn't think well,
could the price of gold go up three X?
Well, here's what happens.
All of a sudden now they have to fulfil
on Walmart's contract or they're gonna get sued.
They tried to go find new contracts
that were higher gross margin, higher,
that was more profitable,
because now all of a sudden they weren't profitable.
And then the banks, because they lent the line of credit
to the business are monitoring,
essentially their inventory levels.
And the bank at one point,
because Walmart got so much product,
they didn't have enough inventory
to essentially secure the line of credit.
My buddy came in to his job, he was working there
as essentially the marketing director.
And there was, I think it was,
it was like Accenture, one of the big accounting firms
literally took over the business.
The CEO was kicked out.
I mean, the bank called in their loan,
and took over the business.
And all they did was start liquidating whatever assets
they could sell from the business
to be able to cover the extended line of credit.
And that is an extreme case.
But I just want you to know that I've seen
this happen over, and over and over
with software founders that do not understand
that selling lifetime deals,
and not understanding the cost of that customer
over the next five years, and the cost of your brand,
the cost of your pricing strategy,
the costs of your engineering team is expensive.
So number one, know your cogs.
number two, pay more, not less.
So what a lot of people do when they do a deal,
they do an offer, they want to give like
this incredible, irresistible offer.
They take something really expensive and they discount it,
'cause it's easy, literally I sell something
for $250 a month, I'm gonna discount it to $50 a month.
It's five times less.
If you buy during this time period, et cetera.
Here's why that totally fails.
Is what you're trying to do with a limited time offer
is actually increase what's called the average order value.
That means that the amount of money
that would normally be spent,
let's call it $250, is increased.
So how do you increase the AOV?
How do you increase that first time purchase?
How do you put stuff together to figure out,
like instead of somebody paying me $250,
how do I get them to spend $500?
And there's a bunch of cool ways to do that.
But that is the big idea is don't discount.
It's like on my sales team, right?
We used to do allow for discounting.
And what I said instead is like, "No, don't discount.
Let's just add more value.
Instead of discounting the price by 20%,
why don't we throw in something
to keep the price what it is, but create more value?"
That to me is more interesting, it's more creative.
And it's actually gonna net out that your business
is gonna win bigger, because you did the effort.
You went through the exercise to figure
out how to get them to pay more not less
on that first time purchase.
Average order value, Google it, search it,
figure out how to increase it for your offer,
'cause that's where the unlock's going to come from.
Number three, bundle the outcome.
So bundling means kind of,
and that's why I didn't talk about it,
when I said increase the average order value.
But think of this, you want to you want to ask yourself,
what is the outcome somebody's buying?
If somebody's buying your software,
or your service, or whatever it is you have for sale,
they're actually not buying that.
They're buying the solution to a problem.
So for example, I'm selling tents.
What else do you need to go camping?
Because you're not buying a tent to not go camping,
you're buying a tent to go camping.
So if I sell you a tent can I bundle other stuff
to make it more attractive?
Can I add a free, you know, burner,
so that you can cook on, a cook burner?
Can I add what else?
If I'm buying a tent, maybe I want a light.
I can add on a bundle, I can put the light in there,
the light that goes inside the tent.
If I'm buying a tent I probably need
a light for at nighttime.
The way I think about software is software really,
SaaS should stand for software as a service,
instead of software as a service,
should stand for success as a service.
So SaaS to me is success as a service.
What's the outcome they want to achieve,
and how can I bundle more stuff?
And I'm gonna tell you how to get access to my worksheet
that covers the four key areas that you need
to understand to find those bundling opportunities.
But one of them is templates.
If I invest in your software, if I want to buy this offer,
what is something I'm gonna be missing
to actually get even more success out of it?
And for a lot of software products it's best practises,
it's templates, it's scripts,
it's, you know, whatever it is.
It's the thing that's gonna go into your software.
It's the schedule,
if you have a project management software.
If you sell HR software,
it's the job posting template structure,
whatever it is, ask yourself that question.
How do I bundle a better outcome
as a success outcome to make my offer
that much more desirable?
Number four R&D copy.
So R&D stands for most people research and development.
I like to think of it as rob and duplicate.
Now I'm not advocating you steal other people's stuff.
I'm advocating that you try to do it ethically
in a way that you can model.
If you've never written copy,
and you're trying to create an incredible offer,
you could literally have the most amazing bundle
price point, like just crazy, amazing value.
And because you can't write the copy
to communicate it it's gonna fall off,
it's just going to fail.
So what I want to encourage you to do
is go find people today that are in your market
that are doing offers and understand from a copy
a positioning, a benefits point of view,
how did they structure it?
Now, that can take time.
If you're in for speed,
I'm a big fan of investing to go fast.
If that's you, then go check out funnelscripts.com.
I am not getting any affiliate, no association,
you can literally Google it and go click directly.
Here's why I like it.
One, I coach the team at ClickFunnels,
they're the creators of funnelscripts.com.
I bought the product myself.
It is jam packed with examples of not only sales letters,
and offer templates, and Facebook ads,
and literally email scripts,
everything that you could possibly want.
It's just gonna allow you to get there faster.
So I don't care if it's Funnel Scripts,
or another product, or whatever you need
to find people model it where I call R&D, rob and duplicate.
But really just be inspired, tweak it for your own case.
'Cause you don't want to literally copy paste,
people do this and you will get called out,
and it's unethical.
Tweak it, change it, and know that that's a better place
to start than for you to sit down,
to try to come up with great copy.
'Cause if you don't know how to do this your offer could
be the most incredible thing and fall flat,
because of the way you've positioned it with words online.
Number five, promote the deal.
So there's this great saying in content marketing
that 20% should be around production,
80% should be around promotion.
I believe this is the same for creating
a limited time offer,
creating a Black Friday, Cyber Monday offer,
an end of year offer.
If you want to do a lifetime offer
you just got to price it right.
Those are all things that require you to promote the deal.
So in the retail world, when you go to
a retail store to buy some jeans,
or buy some clothes or whatever,
you're out to buy some sunglasses,
they typically have a promotions rack.
A promotions rack is stuff that they're trying to clear,
they're trying to move and it's discounted,
it's last year's.
It's great product, it's just not the current seasons stuff.
My question to you is where is your sales rack?
Where online are people aggregating deals?
'Cause I know when there's a Black Friday,
Cyber Monday deal, there's literally lists,
and communities, and marketplaces and websites dedicated
to aggregating different bundle offers,
and limited time offers,
and all these different deals, right?
There's a deal site for it.
If you're not spending time trying to figure
out who's got one, can I partner with somebody?
Can I create my own?
How do I promote this?
How do I get other people involved?
What's my paid ad strategy?
If all you do is create the offer, put it online,
send an email to your current list,
and think that that's a good idea,
it's gonna fall flat.
You literally need to think about what is the effort,
and promotion I'm gonna put into this,
so that I can succeed in creating a limited time offer
that creates a cash injection into your business?
So five strategies to create
an irresistible limited time offer.
Number one, you've got to know your cogs.
Number two, pay more, not less, get them to pay more.
Number three, bundle the outcome for success.
Number four R&D your copywriting skills,
and number five, promote the deal.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode
I want to share with you the limited time offer builder.
This is the worksheet that I use with my clients.
So watch the episode again, or listen to the episode,
and go through the worksheet.
Answer all the questions,
design the perfect limited time offer using that.
And click the link below to grab a copy,
to make sure you don't break your business.
I'm gonna ask you the questions
to make sure that you can get clarity.
Talk to your team, talk to your accountant,
figure out what you've got.
Maybe you have other partners you can pull in
to create a really compelling bundle
to ensure that the customer gets even more success.
Just click the link to download
that limited time offer builder worksheet.
It's my gift to you.
And if you found this episode value,
be sure to subscribe to my channel,
share it with somebody that you care about.
And as per usual, I want to encourage you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
One thing I noticed in my videos
is I've always got my neck up.