You need to determine your intro offer. This will be a one-time, low-risk and low-commitment service (from the buyer's POV) that you can use to "get your foot in the door," do a great job and then upsell them to your main service.
You will get a ton more sales with your intro offer than you would if you only had your recurring service.
To have what is known as a truly “grand slam” intro offer, you need to hit seven different criteria. It is important to note that all seven must be hit. If one isn’t hit, it exponentially loses effectiveness.
It either needs to make them more money or save them time. It also must be obvious how it does so to the prospect. Bonus points for both.
It needs to either be measurable based on concrete data, or there must be a clear deliverable. Bonus points for both.
You need to explain how it is possible they can get a 100x ROI. Cold traffic are the most “conservative” and hesitant buyers on earth. They need to believe that for every $1 they “risk,” there is potential they will get $100 back.
Completely eliminate the five types of risk. Financial risk (fee), financial risk (you messing up), time and effort risk (fixing whatever you messed up), reputation risk (consequences of you messing up), ego risk (trying and failing and becoming bitter).
It needs to be a productized service with the same process, training, deliverable, etc. for everyone. No super custom work. This is important because you need to have all of your processes, systems, trainings, hires, etc. all working towards getting better and better intro offer results over time and that is not possible if you’re doing super custom work for each.
It needs to be delivered at $250 per hour or more. This is very important because as you scale, you will incur expenses that you never even considered. You will have ad costs, software costs, labor costs, but also labor costs for non-revenue producing roles such as HR, finance, etc. You will also have tons of taxes, and if you are delivering at less than $250 per hour, there isn’t any money left over.
It needs to either naturally lead into your main service, or needs to be something of a “trial version” of your main service. If it doesn’t relate to your main service, it is pointless. The whole purpose of an intro offer is to get your foot in the door so you can upsell the main service later and build MRR. Without MRR, you are just chasing new clients every single month and going nowhere.
Let’s also go through these one at a time with some important nuance and information:
This one is relatively easy to understand.
The two main reasons that people buy anything in a B2B context is to either make more money or save them time.
99.99% of things people buy can be traced back to one of these two things.
It needs to do one of these two things (or both), but it also needs to be obvious to the prospect how it does so.
It doesn’t matter if it makes them more money or saves them time in reality, if they don’t believe it or understand how it works.
I didn’t know how to explain this concept without an example, so here it goes.
For example, in my last landing page and CRO agency, I sold about 200 landing pages per month. These were intended to reduce their paid ad CPA.
You may think that landing pages makes them more money and saves them time because they don’t have to build the page themselves, but I would not consider that to be the case.
Although it is true that if I am building the page, they don’t have to, but that is not the primary function or reason that someone would buy a landing page.
The primary reason is to make money. If it saves them a little time, that is just a coincidence.
On the other hand, for something like accounting or compliance, that is an example that saves them time. It doesn’t make them any more money. People hire accountants and compliance and things of this nature to save them time.
Whatever intro offer you’re running has to either be measurable based on hard, concrete data, or in the case that this is not possible, it needs to have a clear, tangible deliverable.
Without having one of these two options (or both), the appeal and desirability of the offer loses all its power because it just isn’t clear what they are getting and how to determine if it is successful or not.
If you can, you always want to make an intro offer that is measurable, but there are indeed certain cases where this is not possible, and it is what it is. Can’t try about it.
It is much easier to sell things that are measurable because you can paint a picture in their mind using facts and logic on how they will make more money or save time.
If you have an operations system that saves their team 20 hours per week and their average employee gets paid $30 per hour, you are savings them $6,000 per week, and over $300,000 per year.
If you sell them a landing page that converts 20% better than their previous one and they are spending $10,000 per day on ads, you are earning them $2,000 per day extra.
Those are just two examples of the power of offers that are measurable.
But, life is life, and there are certain times where you cannot measure it in this way.
Something like helping them make YouTube Ad Mastermind for example. There is no possible way you can measure things in the way you would need to be able to to offer some kind of guarantee or promise. In this case, the tangible deliverable would be “by the time you are done, you will have 12 high-quality YouTube Ad Creatives”
Cold traffic from ads, cold email, and even content to some extent is going to be much, much harder to convert in comparison to referrals and people from your network.
But, there is infinitely more cold traffic than traffic from referrals and your network and you don’t have a real business if you can’t convert cold traffic.
A great line to remember is “cold traffic are the most conservative buyers on Earth. You need to clearly and logically explain to them how for every $1 they risk, they have a chance to make $100.”
The 100:1 ROI potential is somewhat arbitrary and just a round number, but the thinking behind it is not.
You need to use graphics, words, text, videos and more to clearly explain this. It doesn’t matter if it is true if they don’t believe it. People are not as big of “emotional buyers” as people would have you believe. You are not going to get any sales without logically explaining to them why they should buy.
If I have a landing page agency that serves Ecommerce Stores spending on average $3,333 per day, which is $100,000 per month, here is what this explanation might look like:
- Our landing pages cost $2,500
- We have a guarantee that if our landing page doesn’t beat your current one by at least 10%, we will give you a full refund.
- You spend $100,000 per month on ads.
- With a 10% increase, that is like saving/earning $10,000 per month or more, not including the revenue from repeat purchases.
- Once you get the right landing page, you can use it for 2-3 years.
- If nothing else changes except the 10% increase (the minimum for the guarantee), that is like earning/saving $240,000 - $360,000 extra over the next 2-3 years just from this one landing page.
- If it doesn’t beat yours by at least 10%, we will give you a refund.
- Both of these options are risk-free. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain. The only thing guaranteed not to lower your paid ad CPA is to do nothing at all.
There are five types of risk associated with buying anything in a B2B context:
Financial Risk (Your Fee)
Financial Risk (You Screwing It Up)
Time & Effort Risk (Fixing Your Screw Up)
Reputation Risk (Consequences Of You Screwing It Up)
Ego Risk (Trying & Failing)
The main reason why intro offers are so important is that it is possible to completely negate all five types of risk.
This is not the case with main recurring services.
This is the number one reason to have an intro offer, and this is what makes it so much easier to sell intro offers in comparison to recurring services. They are lower commitment with less risk. If you do a good job and prove yourself, you will earn their full trust.
The financial risk associated with them paying you a fee and not getting the desired result is the easiest to understand.
This is where all the “I will do X or you don’t pay’ guarantees come from that plague the internet.
These type of guarantees look very, very nooby and pathetic to bigger, more experienced people because the fact that they are doing them like that implies that the person does not even consider or understand the other four types of risk involved.
The truth is that your fee is the least of their concerns.
If you screw up bad enough, they will lose infinitely more money than they paid you.
For example, an average Ecommerce Brand could not have their Facebook Ads screwed up or mismanaged for three months. Most Ecommerce Brands simply are not that well run or resilient where they can afford their ads not to work for an extended period of time.
They would go bankrupt.
Going bankrupt and shutting down operations is much worse and is a much bigger “risk” than paying an agency their little $5k per month fee.
If you screw it up, not only are they not getting the result they want and paid for, but now they have to spend a lot of time and effort fixing what you screwed up.
This is another type of risk that is a big problem.
The greater the potential for things to go wrong, the greater this time and effort risk will be.
Something you learn over time when working with bigger companies is that once you get past a certain level where the CEO or Founder isn’t the one hiring, the person hiring you to do XYZ doesn’t care that much if you succeed and grow the company.
They just want to hire someone reputable so if you screw it up, they won’t get fired.
This is the number one reason why people hire the huge companies such as Deloitte or Ogilvy or Ernst and Young or McKinnsey.
They may know the experience might not be great, but at the same time, they know it won’t be terrible, and that is a very, very powerful thing.
This is why case studies and proof and a reputation are very important and you should take care to collect these over time.
Even if you don’t work with large companies where this is the situation, reputation risk will be present in companies of all levels.
At smaller companies, the founder will look dumb in front of their employees and peers if you screw it up.
They may look stupid to their shareholders or investors.
It is always present and is a type of risk that must be minimized.
The final type of risk can be called “ego risk.”
Everyone has an ego to some degree. Some are of course a lot bigger than others, but the ego is always present.
The best way to describe ego risk is that if they hire you and it fails, regardless if they blame you outwardly or not, they will begin to develop internal doubts and self-limiting beliefs about themselves and their business.
This is a hard thing to conceptualize and most people couldn’t put this concept into words like I just did, but the number one reason people don’t try new things is for fear of failure.
Think of this as how you will minimize the long-term effects of potential failure.
If you think of it that way, you will be very successful in minimizing this type of risk.
Here is how I minimized all of these types of risk at my previous agency and why I sold over 200 units of my intro offer (landing pages per month).
Financial Risk (Fee): If my landing page doesn’t increase your revenue per session by 10% or more, I will give you a full refund (in a legally binding contract)
Financial Risk (Screwing Up): In order to protect the downside in case our page performs worse, we will split the traffic 90% to the original and 10% to our page until it’s proven to convert at the same level or better
Time & Effort Risk: If it doesn’t work, we can just turn off the test in one click and give you a refund. It doesn’t take any time to fix.
Reputation Risk: If it doesn’t work, we can just turn off the test in one click and give you a refund. It doesn’t take any time to fix.
Ego Risk: This is just an experiment. If it doesn’t work, no harm, no foul. We always need to be testing and trying to improve. We will just give you your money back and we will go our separate ways.
Your intro offer must be what is called a “productized service.”
If you Google the definition of this, here is what comes up:
the process of developing a process to sell packaged services. The idea is to step away from traditional customized services, and instead bundle popular services into a package that can be easily sold, marketed, and delivered.
A service is a specified service packaged like a product with clearly defined characteristics and pricing.
I think both of these do well to explain it.
The idea of selling productized services is so valuable for a bunch of reasons:
All of your processes and SOPs will be around that productized service so you can get more done with less employees and costs.
All of your internal employee training and hiring can be based around providing that productized service so your client results become better and better over time as your team learns and improves.
All of your messaging and marketing will be based around that productized service so it will be very clear to the market what you do and more people will book calls.
All of your sales calls will be based around that productized service with the same sales process, assets, etc. which means your close rate will improve over time.
You can run ads, cold emails, etc. all based around that productized service and you can improve these things incrementally over time instead of trying tons of different things.
It is going to be a lot more scalable because of all of the reasons above.
You will get so many more clients “in the door” with this productized intro offer and you will still/always be able to upsell a percentage of them to your main service. You will get more people in the door, pay y our fixed costs with the revenue from these clients, and then still get the same amount (or more) clients for your main recurring service you’ve been selling all along.
One of the most important aspects of an intro offer is that it can be delivered at $250 per hour or more.
For example, if something costs $5,000, it has to be delivered in 20 hours or less.
$5,000/$250 = 20
If your intro offer was $1,000, you would need to deliver it in four hours.
If it is $500, you would need to deliver it in two hours.
If it is $2,500, you would need to delivery it in 10 hours.
The reason for this is that you will have a lot of different costs involved with scaling an intro offer:
Labor costs to fulfill service
Software costs
Misc costs
Non-revenue producing labor costs such as finance and HR
Customer acquisition costs such as ads
Sales commissions
Taxes (payroll, income, etc.)
While $250/hour is somewhat of an arbitrary round number, if you are delivering your service at less than $250 per hour, there is going to be no money left over as you grow, and that is not a good thing.
Something that should be obvious but is not always obvious is that your intro offer must naturally lead into your main service as an upsell.
For example, if you have a landing page agency, you would never have an intro offer for Facebook ad creatives.
There are two main categories of intro offers:
The intro offer is somewhat of a “lesser” or “trial version” of your main offer.
The intro offer is a one-time thing that leads into something similar that is recurring.
Honestly, it has to be one of these two things, and they have to be related. The entire purpose of your intro offer is to get more clients in the door so you can upsell them for your main recurring service. Without this key part, intro offers lose their purpose.
Lesser/trial version: For an Ecommerce Email Marketing Agency, you may do a Welcome Flow A/B test. Test their current Welcome Flow vs. your new Welcome Flow and see which one is better. If you can improve their Welcome Flow, they will make more money and they will hire you for the rest.
One time thing leading intro something similar: For a CRO agency, a one-time service of a paid ad landing page leading into sitewide, monthly CRO
Determine Your Intro Offer - Month 1 · 10k Per Month Agency