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courses
Offer Testing Mojo
Well hello. We are back, and this week we're getting into even more exciting stuff.
We're actually gonna be going out and testing our offer that we've been working so
hard to create and get surveys and going to actually go out there and put it out into
the world.
So this module's title is Offer Testing Mojo. And let's just do a little recap right
quick, I'm gonna make it really short. Up to this point, we've already increased the
frequency in which we're communicating with our audience and our list.
You should have constructed your offer, you should have a minimum viable product
put together and a pretty kick butt order page. Or, if you're promoting somebody
else's product, you may not have that order page, you're just using their order
page. Or you might have even a bonus page interstitial to go in between.
Either way, you've got a pretty kick butt order page or you've got a product you're
promoting that has a good offer on it and this week is where the rubber meets the
road.
One of the things I want you to think about, (chuckles) get zen with, is that if the
outcome of our offer testing isn't what we want, in other words doesn't turn into
sales, what we're really after is the feedback.
We really want to find out why the offer isn't working, so we need to have an ear to
the ground. So often, I notice that as marketers and business owners, we kind of
plug our ears, we put cotton in our ears and kind of (chuckles) go out there like a
carnival barker and we don't listen for the feedback.
So we're trying to get a new offer birthed into the world so it would be foolish for
me to say we don't want to make sales, but we don't want to be hyper focused on
that because really what we want to do is find out hey is this offer gonna work or is
it not gonna work so I can go back, if it's not gonna work, just go back and re-
tweak it, right? Go find out where it's going wrong so we can fail forward as quickly
as possible, okay?
So I don't want anybody to get derailed if the feedback isn't exactly what we want.
We'll just come back and go through and go look at our survey and tweak our offer
a little bit more and then put it back out there into the world again, right?
We're doing this extremely efficiently in that way we're not spending months or
years going to the trouble of building something that nobody really wants to buy.
Does that make sense? Awesome!
This is going to be a shorter module because there's going to be more practice. I
really want to get you to get out there and get your practice and get your offers
tested.
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Look below this video, there's going to be more practice, depending on how you
decide you want to go out and test your offer.
So I'm gonna give you some options for going out there and testing your MVP and
testing your offer and I'm gonna go from the most intimate to the least intimate.
I'm gonna talk about the advantages of each and I have to that are my favorites for
doing this. They're probably the only two options I would really recommend for you.
But let's go ahead and run into this here. The most intimate option that we can do
when we're making an offer, any kind of offer, whether it's testing an offer or any
type of offer, obviously is the face-to-face option, right?
So if we can do face-to-face, one-on-one, that is the most intimate offer that we
can make. It's not always feasible to do that, especially if you're running an online
business, but if you know anybody that’s your perfect target market or in your
niche market, face-to-face is a great way. Just invite them over for coffee and
make that face-to-face meeting.
It's more intimate. You really get to see their facial expressions, you get to see,
when you're talking or when you're asking questions, what they're passionate
about, what maybe turns them off a little bit.
So you get lots of feedback, and you can just simply ask them, right? And people
are more open to giving you feedback when their face-to-face with you. It's a little
harder just to run off, or hang up the phone or just close an e-mail, right? So you
get a lot more feedback and information if the offer is not accepted, right?
And that really, since we're looking for that feedback, is very, very valuable, we get
a very, very quickly.
So face-to-face, again, not always feasible, but it has a lot of advantages. And
then, probably the next most intimate, kinda stepping down the ladder from
intimacy is video Skype.
I've been doing more and more video Skype sessions, not only just in coaching but
in my sales, because it kind of gives you that face-to-face... again, there are things
you can still tell when you're live face-to-face, but it's about as close to face-to-face
as you can get.
So I'm gonna talk about how to invite people into these conversations here in a
minute, but I really, really love video Skype because you just get to see those facial
expressions plus people get to see your facial expressions and they will see your
authenticity coming across and it just makes it that much easier to say yes if you're
a solution to their problem. That's video Skype.
Then you also have the phone call or the voice Skype call, right? That is probably
one of the two ways I would recommend you making your testing offer. Video
Skype’s great if you're fine with that, but anything with Skype or a phone call
where you can actually have a conversation with somebody.
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You'll get that immediate feedback and not only that, but you have a chance to find
out exactly how you can maybe collaborate or add something in that they're
wanting that could be a big benefit to your offer down the road. Cool?
So, next to the phone call or the voice Skype, a Google hangout is pretty powerful.
I'm not gonna recommend for this course... for the offer testing phase rather, to do
Google hangouts, but I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention them.
Google hangouts, because they can see your face, you can do it in small groups, as
an intimacy setting there... is very, very powerful for making offers. I'm just not
sure... it takes up some time to put it all together, so that's the only reason why
I'm not recommending it is because we have prep time for Google hangouts and
you kind of have to prep that and again, the whole reason to do this is, how can we
test this offer efficiently and quickly, right?
So Google hangout, unless you're just a master at that already, doesn't really allow
for that super, uber quick testing time.
Webinar... so as we step down from a Google hangout, a webinar is a more live
environment, but they can't see your face, right? So it's a step down from that
intimacy level, but I absolutely love webinars.
While I wouldn't recommend the standard webinars that they do, the big long... I
call them the dog and pony show webinars... because they just take too long to put
together, I am... in the bonus section you're gonna have an FAQ webinar.
It's a webinar you can be ready to go with in 60 minutes or less, which I definitely
want you to have, but unless you're just comfortable already with the Go to
Webinar platform and you could be ready for this webinar, like, within 24 hours, I
probably wouldn't recommend this for testing the offer.
You can use it later on once the offer’s tested and you want to add it on to your
process and we'll talk more about that later. But if you are really comfortable with
webinars, FAQ webinars can be pretty easy and powerful way to test out your offer.
So that would become my third option there, only if you're pretty familiar with
webinars already.
The same thing with tele-seminars. Tele-seminar... you do an FAQ tele-seminar,
and only if you're familiar with the software and everything that's going on in the
tele-seminar.
But a tele-seminar is a little bit less intimate than a webinar. It's less prep time
than a webinar, so it's definitely a great tool, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend
it for offer testing unless... and this is the only reason I'm bringing it up here...
unless you're just super familiar with that software.
Then, a step down from tele-seminar would be just a straight video, right? If you
did a face-to-face video or like a VSL type video, if you're masterful with that and
can put it together quickly, then okay.
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But what I find is it takes a lot of time to put together well-thought-out videos,
especially with all of the competition out there. People have a high level of
expectancy on what they see in videos sometimes, so it's not really a great offer
testing mechanism in my mind.
I've used them to test offers before and it doesn't allow for the feedback, unless
you have a comment section, but then it's kind of open to where it's more public so
people aren't as willing to give feedback, like they are... that's one of the things I
didn't mention... in your webinars and tele-seminars you do get a chance to get
feedback.
You can actually ask them questions and you can ask their feedback and you can
see their feedback and how excited they are about stuff. So again, as the intimacy
level decreases, the less and less chance you have for feedback.
And the last one we're going to talk about is the straight e-mail... straight to the
sales or order page. Now since we've already got the order page, right, and we
already have a relationship with our list, this would probably be the way that a lot
of you guys go.
While I would highly, highly recommend for testing your offer to jump on the phone
or jump on video Skype with two, three, four or five people, you're gonna test your
offer so much more quickly and get so much more feedback than if you just go the
straight e-mail route... but for some reason (chuckles), if I haven't convinced you
to do that, I would recommend the straight e-mail to order page.
And then you could either exit pop, if people are not buying, and get their opinion
on why they're not buying… that's pretty intimate still. But you can also follow
along and just ask them for feedback if they're not purchasing and they're not
clicking and they're not opening and just kind of get the feedback.
But again, it's less feedback... much, much less feedback than if you were just to
talk to somebody on the phone and that's why talking to somebody live is gonna
compress and make your offer testing so much more efficient.
Some people feel like wow, where am I going to work in time to make these 20 or
30 minute phone calls and I really want you to understand that you're saving
yourself a bunch of time.
If it takes you a week or 10 days to test by e-mail and to gather all that feedback
and everything, and then you have to tweak the offer after that, you've got another
week or 10 days into it after your tweaking, it's not nearly as efficient as having
that phone call and somebody saying "Yeah, I'm not sure if this is gonna work for
me... what I'm really looking for is X." or "What I'm really looking for is Y" or
"Here's the big problem that I have with it."
And that's so enlightening... I'm hoping that's making sense to you guys and why
I'm pushing so hard for doing the actual live feedback by Skype or by phone.
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So let's rap a little bit about offer structure. No matter which one of those you pick,
whether it's face-to-face, the most intimate you have, or whether it's straight e-
mail to order page, all of the offer structure is really based from face-to-face
selling.
And I wanted to give you this... this is part of the business owner section here. I'm
gonna be doing the sales mojo section, you'll see that in the practice session of
actually how to have that face-to-face or telephone call or video Skype call, but I
wanted to make that so that you could give this to your outsourcer as well, but I
wanted to talk some stuff about with the owner first, to kind of understand the
whole structure of what's happening here, and it's all based on face-to-face selling.
So, almost every structure, the bare-bones, the skeleton of the structure is this...
and we've kind of talked about this a little bit before... but it's where are they now,
where's your prospect now, what's the nightmare, what hell are they in, right?
Where are they at in Hell Island? So you talk to them and you find out where they
are at right now.
And then you want to look forward or into the future or across the water, right, and
find out what their heaven is. What is Heaven Island for them and how does it look
for them? That's kind of where they're trying to go.
And then we want to find out what's stopping them, right? How have they tried to
get across from Hell Island over to Heaven Island and why didn't it work before?
What have they tried, why didn't it work for them?
And then we position what's different now? What's different, right? What's different
with the offer that we're making and why is this gonna help them get across more
efficiently, in a different way, or help them succeed to get off of Hell Island and
over to Heaven Island where maybe they have not before, right?
In essence, I don't care if it's a VSL or a webinar or a face-to-face, this is the most
powerful structure, the most powerful conversation that naturally flows into place
every time that you make an offer, whether it's testing an offer or any type of offer.
This is kinda what goes on naturally in our heads, right?
So let me just throw a really quick example in there. Again, we're gonna get into
big detail in the sales mojo training, but let's just say you help people cure their
acne, right, adult acne.
Let's say your avatar is somebody that's in their mid-20s, early 30s and they still
have acne. The nightmare is, obviously, the acne... the pain of their acne, the
embarrassment of their acne. When they take pictures, they don't like the way they
look in their pictures.
And obviously... I won't say obviously... but what might be heaven for them is to
have that clear skin and not to have the pain from it or maybe the itching from all
the astringents that they’ve been using or the dry skin from all the astringents
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they've been using and to just look fresh and healthy, right? And again, this is why
it's so powerful to have this conversation live and to really understand your market.
But a lot of times, where the "offer’s accepted" or made is "Darlin', where have you
tried, what have you tried?" And let them talk about what they've tried.
"Well, I've tried Proactive, I've tried X product that you put on, I've tried Y product,
I've tried changing my diet, thinking maybe it's something that I'm eating, trying to
eat healthy and there’s its own problems right there..."
And you let them talk about all the different things they tried to get from nightmare
Island to Heaven Island and then you just kinda have a discussion about why they
don't think that's working.
"Well, I've tried the diet thing, I can't stay on it. It does help minimally. The topics
dry my skin out and it still leaves zits, there are still things there."
And then... again, we talked about the braingasm, right? And then comes the big
discovery or the what's different now, right? What your solution may be is the
ultraviolet light, and you educate them, right?
I help people going through the same very thing that you're going through, and the
problem is that the topical solutions work on the surface of the skin and doesn't get
down very far. The very top gets only... Proactive only goes down a millimeter or 2
mm through the skin’s surface.
Eating is helpful because it helps you cleanse your system as well as create less of
the bacteria that causes acne, but the trouble is, more than a few millimeters down,
there's bacteria pockets and bacteria build up that the Proactive can't get to and
that it can take months or even years for a diet to even start working on and still
even that's not always guaranteed.
What we found is ultraviolet light helps eradicate these pockets of bacteria. Now it
used to be, several years ago, it was way too expensive to do it. But now, we have
these devices where you can just hold it up to your face and get the ultraviolet light
on your face and it's very cost-efficient, right?
So that would be the new boat that gets them across from Hell Island over to
Heaven Island. Obviously you have to make a case for it and they have to feel like
it's gonna work for them, but you could easily do that in e-mail, right? And the least
intimate levels, if you understand your target market, you can get that across an e-
mail or VSL or in a webinar, right?
Obviously you'd have to add more proof into it, but that's the basis or the crux of
what you would talk about in a webinar. You have this acne and here's what you're
going through and I know you've probably tried this and that and maybe you could
even poll the audience... what have you tried to get rid of your acne, right?
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They say I've tried this, and I've tried that. Oh and why didn't that work for you?
So this becomes the core of your sales message, regardless of how intimate it is.
Does that make sense?
So as we're talking about the offer structure, I want to point out that the more
intimate that you are, the more you can ask for as a general rule.
So, we were talking about starting with $100 or $97 a month continuity program
and we'll talk a little bit more about this, but if we're launching that from e-mail to
order page, that's less intimate, obviously (chuckles), than having a phone call,
right?
So I would lower... not lower the price, but lower the barrier of entry. So I would
highly recommend testing an offer doing a dollar trial. Not a free trial, we want
them to pull out their wallets.
A dollar trial, $4.95 trial or maybe $19 for the first month and a $97 for the next
month, but it would be less of a barrier of entry. If I have somebody that I'm
talking to on the phone or talking to live, it may seem a little bit weird, right, to say
"I'm gonna give you a trial for $4.95."
You might have to go there, you might want to go there, but what I would likely do
is say "I'm launching"... again, we'll get into detail in the sales mojo... but "We're
launching my product and it's going to be $100 a month so that would be $1200
per year, but I would like to make you a special offer. I'd like to offer you unlimited
access or a lifetime access for $600. That's 50% of what you would pay for a year
and I'm gonna give you unlimited access to that. How would that work for you?"
That way you can kind of monetize your time as well and if they say "Oh that's a
little bit much for me to swing", then you can kind of narrow down on the price,
right? Then you could say "It sounds like... correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds
like you like the idea, it's just a matter of the money. So why don't we..."
Give them a chance to answer, I'm kind of talking quickly here. But if they say
"Yeah, I would like to try that ultraviolet light, it makes sense to me, I just can't
come up with $600 right now."
"Awesome! Well, why don't we do this... why don't I offer you the same unlimited
plan, but let's just do it with payments for $97 a month or $100 a month. Would
that work for you?"
"Yeah, that would work for me." Or maybe they say "No, that's still a little rich or a
little steep for me" or "I would like to give it a try first" and then you could dial it
down.
"Well, why don't we do this... if you give me your permission, I'll go ahead and
send this out to you and if you just pay the shipping and handling, I'll let you have
it for the next month. If you don't like it for any reason, if you don't see any
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results, then ship it back to me or send it back to me and you won't be charged
anything more. How does that sound?"
"Awesome, that sounds great."
So, if you start out in the intimacy and you can kinda dial that back. If you're doing
the less intimate, like with e-mail, I would recommend just going straight for the
trial as far as testing your MVP. Cool? I hope we're on the same page there!
So if you're paying very rapt attention (laughs) you're probably saying "Hmmm,
well, that's great Travis, but how do I invite them to a conversation?"
I'm so glad you asked because that's exactly what we're going to talk about. If
you've been following along with the course and going through the practices and
doing everything, you've already run a Northstar survey.
So that's the first place I would start. Take the survey results and they've already
told you what their biggest challenges are and they've left you their e-mail address.
I would e-mail some of your hyper responders... again, those are the ones that are
having a very difficult time finding a solution, the ones with the big long responses.
I would send them just a really short e-mail, very, very short... you want it to be
very short. The first thing I would do is just thank them first, right? "Thank you
Don, for filling out the survey."
And then you follow it with a short follow on question and it goes in this format:
"Would you be open to discussing _____?" Or alternatively, depending on what
you're doing, I'm gonna give you a couple of options to make sure we cover all of
our bases. "Would you like to brainstorm how to _____?"
And what we put in those blanks? Well, we look at the survey results, right? And we
put some of the same exact words, their very own pain words when possible, right?
So, it might be, if we're using our acne example, it may be "Thank you Don, for
filling out the survey. It means a lot to me. Would you be open to discussing how to
get rid of that stubborn acne?"
And I would only use that if they said they had stubborn acne, right? So you want
to use their words in their survey. That's the most powerful. If he said stubborn
acne, you want to say "Would you be open to discussing how to get rid of that
stubborn acne?" If he uses something else then you'd want to use that wording.
Also, I find "would you like to brainstorm how to" can be useful as well. Now, you
really don't want to sit there and brainstorm how to get rid of your acne, right?
That doesn't make much sense. But if you're in, like, a consulting niche or a
coaching niche or some other, the brainstorm can work very, very well where you
have to help people come up with ideas.
Maybe one of your big frustrations was I don't know how to find a niche, right? I
don't know how to find a niche that I'll be passionate about. So it might be "Don,
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thank you so much for filling out my survey. Would you like to get together and
brainstorm together how to come up with your first niche?"
Oooh, wow. And I use this in one of my e-mail follow on sequences actually. I ask
people in one e-mail what business are they in and then I ask them some
challenges they’re having. Maybe... it could be getting leads... just depending on
what they come back with and I come up with "Would you like to brainstorm how to
get more leads?" "Would you like to brainstorm how to sell more of your product
through e-mail?"
Who's gonna say no to brainstorming, right? It's very, very friendly and very, very
open... especially if they've taken the time to fill out the survey and they said they
have this challenge and they've talked quite at length about it and they said they're
having a hard time finding an answer to that, obviously they're gonna want to talk
with you. So I would take those survey results and that would be a great place to
invite them into a conversation.
So alternatively, I want to give you another method, just for some reason if you
don't have a Northstar survey or maybe you didn't get very many survey responses
because maybe your list is very small, but for whatever reason I wanted to give
you an alternative.
I have to give props to Dean Jackson who's taught me a lot of this. This is called a
spear e-mail. S-P-E-A-R... spear e-mail. He calls them a nine word e-mail, but
(chuckles) very often they're not exactly 9 words.
Spear stands for Short, Personal, Expecting a Response. A little warning... if you
have a fairly large list size, and I mean if you're over a list of 500 people, you might
want to test it out to a segment of somewhere under 500 first, because you can get
lots and lots of responses back from this. It's very, very powerful, but it's a great
way to start up a conversation.
Alternatively, I've used this on Facebook as well, in my warm audience, and if I
know they're having a specific challenge or I may suspect they're having a specific
challenge, I've used this to open up conversations with them as well.
So, just a little warning, again, you don't probably want to use this... it'll require a
virtual assistant or couple of virtual assistants if you send this out to 50,000 people.
But these are short, personal, expecting a response e-mails, courtesy of Dean
Jackson.
They typically start out like this... "Are you still"... there are a couple of methods
we can do it... "Are you still". So, it may be
"Hi Don, are you still looking to get started in a business of your own?
Travis"
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Okay? So, that's it. If I'm sending that out to an e-mail list of people that have
raised their hand that they're trying to get started in business or do affiliate
marketing or something like that... "Are you still looking to _____?" Or "Are you
still _____?"
Maybe they signed up to your list because they were interested in learning how to
build their first iPhone app, right? So you could be…”Are you still looking to get
started with your first iPhone app?” That’s kinda looking for right now, in the
present.
There’s another form where we just come straight out and say… and we’re kind of
looking more forward now… “Are you ____?” Like if I'm going to do a business
consulting for somebody that I know that it would be perfect for if they're launching
a product soon... they want to do some e-mail swipe... let's say I'm gonna do some
done for you copy on some e-mail swipe, I might ask:
"Hi Don, are you launching a new product in the next few months?"
And that's gonna get responses back...
"You know what Travis? I am launching a product in the next few months."
Then I can follow-up... "Great, what are you launching?"
"Oh, I'm gonna be launching this, this and this." Right?
Then I can follow-up... "Hey, would you like to get together and brainstorm some
ways we could sell more of your product at launch?"
Ooooh, right? And then we could go in and I could talk about my e-mail copy, right?
So that's to give you an idea of how those follow along.
There's another form of that and that is... would you be interested? Or just... would
you?
"Hey Tim, would you be interested in working with me on building and selling your
first software?"
You don't want to add to it. You just want it short, personal, and expecting a
response. And these work magically. You can use them in e-mail, I've used them in
Skype, reaching out to people in Skype that I knew might have particular issues
and I've used it in Facebook, so they work great across the board.
I just wanted to give you some alternate if you have a very, very small list and
maybe your survey responses, you didn't have a lot of survey responses, this works
very, very, very well.
So now is the time we roll up our sleeves and we get into the actual practice, right?
So by now (laughs) you should probably know what the practice is... that's when
we're gonna get out there and we're gonna test our offer.
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And we're gonna what? We're gonna listen for feedback. Test and listen for
feedback, right?
So the most positive feedback is an order, right? An order is the most positive
feedback, but a flat out no and why it's a no is also very useful feedback, right? So
I would like to have either one of those. I would like to have a strong yes, a hell yes
or a hell no and why.
What we don't want is either maybes... a maybe is kind of really, really tough,
right? So we want to get out of the maybe mode and then we do want to get some
feedback. So if we're making offers and getting zero feedback, that's not useful.
Let's go two routes... if you choose to e-mail, and send them straight to the order
page, that's awesome, that's fine. I would much rather you take some time out and
actually talk to some people first, but I'm not here to arm wrestle you. If you
choose to e-mail to the order page, use the MDMS, the Million-Dollar Marketing
Sequence to launch it and send it to a trial offer, okay?
The less intimate we are, the lower we need to make that barrier of entry, so make
the trial offer $4.95 or shipping and handling or something very low barrier of
entry, depending on what the solution you're solving.
So if you're solving, if it's $1000 a month program, obviously $4.95 may not be the
right price range for that, the right trial offer for that, so you have to use your own
judgment there.
Or just jump on the call, that's when we can brainstorm out your trial offer there.
But around $100, if you're doing $100 a month, $4.95 would be a perfect trial offer.
Throw some bonuses in there with that and just run it like you're doing an MDMS,
right?
Get that opening e-mail out, see how it goes. If people are saying YES to your
offer, then go ahead and run out the rest of the sequence. If they're not saying yes,
then tweak and modify and get that feedback as you go along.
So now if you choose the live, I would highly recommend the video Skype, if you
can pull that off, if that doesn't bother you too much or just on the phone or voice
Skype is perfectly fine.
But before you do that, I want you to go through the sales mojo lesson first. It
should be underneath this, in the practice session. I'm designing it and teaching it
so you can give it to your outsourcers if you want to continue selling by phone.
Or actually, it's great training just for... as a foundation for what they're selling for
for a webinar, but it's mostly gonna be for, if I'm having a live conversation over
the phone.
I wouldn't outsource this for testing the offer, because you really want to have your
ears open for the feedback so you can tweak your offer and then once you have
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your offer tweaked and people are saying yes to it, then you can eliminate if it's
your outsourcer that's not making good sales calls but you won't have to worry
about is it my offer, right? Because you will already have it tested and you will
know if your offer is working or not, plus, you're gonna learn so much.
So I highly recommend you do the offer testing mode yourself. I still do offer
testing myself, testing out the prototypes. I just really don't think that offer testing,
testing the prototype or the MVP is something you can outsource out. You need that
feedback.
So, why I'm not including the Sales Mojo in this is because I want to separate it out
for your people, but go through that, make the first few offers yourself. I've showed
you how to invite people to a conversation that works really extremely well, and
then just have some conversations and you'll do just fine.
Awesome! I'll see you at Sales Mojo.