Your Irresistible Offer - "Your Value vs. Values Proposition" - Part 3 of 19

Hey there,

I hope your week's been good.

I ended up having a friend fly me to California on airmiles for week last week. No kidding.

I'm excited about the topic of this week's "Your Irresistible Offer:.

It's particularly relevant for you as a green or conscious business.

Consider this question . . .

“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”

For green, conscious and holistic businesses there are powerful reasons to take a long and hard look at this question.

It has to do with the difference between your Values Proposition and your Value Proposition. The letter ‘s’ can make a big difference.

Imagine you go to an autobody shop with your broken down car.

You pull in and are delighted to find out that this autobody shop is a “green” autobody shop. They recycle everything. They’re union owned. They are an active community member and give steep discounts to those working in local environmental groups. They power their shop with wind power, bio-diesel and solar.

They give you a free bus pass for the year and encourage you to drive less. They greet you with a smile and you feel excited to be doing business with them.

You come back later that afternoon to get your car.

But, halfway home, it breaks down in the middle of the highway making you late for a critical appointment. You feel frustrated, helpless and angry.

This repair shop was in profound alignment with your values but didn’t deliver the value you were looking for. They didn’t do the one, central thing you wanted them to do. And no matter what else they did for you - all the other green stuff - you don’t care because they didn’t do the most important thing.

They didn’t solve the problem that you came to them with. They lived their values but they didn’t provide the value you were looking for.

VALUES PROPOSITION: Your values proposition is your statement of what’s important to you in your life and your business outside of making money. It’s the fact that you are green, serve only fair trade coffee, do carbon offsetting on your shipping etc. You value proposition is “here’s what you get for your money.” Your values proposition speaks to their values. This makes them feel good about themselves for doing business with you. It makes them say not just, “wow. what a great product or service.” but “Wow, what a great business.” Your values proposition is basically a, “do it because it’s the right thing to do” message.

“Niman Ranch will sell you four hormone-free, anti-biotic free, humanely raised beef based hot dogs for $7. Possibly the finest hot dogs in the world. It's not clear that the average kid eating a wiener can taste the difference, which is my point, the way we feel about what we eat accounts for as much as the taste itself.” - Seth Godin

**An Example of a Powerful “Values Proposition” from Whole Foods:**

We purchase wind power credits to offset our use of carbon. You can too! Visit a store to find out how.

We support sustainable farming practices that nurture the soil for future generations.

We prevent millions of pounds of waste from going into landfill through our recycling and composting efforts.

We won the EPAs Green Power Partner of the Year award in 2006.

We've been on Fortune's "Best Companies to Work For List" for 10 years in a row-- Number 5 this year.

We support local communities and economies by sourcing unique, artisan
and local products as part of our mix.

We give back 5% of our gross profits through regular Community Support Days.

Our Whole Planet Foundation gives micro-loans in developing countries as a way to fight poverty.

Our Animal Compassion Foundation works to change the way animals are raised for food.

We install energy efficient appliances and use green building materials in our stores.


“An open book policy in which everyone knows what everyone else makes, from the boss to the teenaged delivery boy, is an excellent idea, especially when the business genuinely tries to pay people fairly. Whole Foods also operates with a wide-open financial system. Sensitive figures on store sales, team sales, profit margins, even salaries are available to employees in every location. The company shares so much information so widely that the SEC has designated all 6,500 employees "insiders" for stock-trading purposes.” - Marketing Without Advertising

“La Blue's Cleaners in Sebastopol, California, has been in business for more than 40 years. In addition to providing pick-ups and delivery services to homes and offices, they are known in the community for extending a hand to the temporarily unemployed. If you are out of work, they will custom dry-clean and press one suit or one dress and launder two shirts or blouses at no charge. This information is posted on a sign inside the store which says, "This is our gift to you so you will look your best at your next job interview." Customers really appreciate it, and you can be sure that when they are back among the employed, they bring their business to La Blue's.” - Marketing Without Advertising


VALUE PROPOSITION: Your value proposition speaks directly to their self interest - it speaks directly to the problem they’re facing. The questions to ask yourself are, “Why did they come to us? What is the problem that brought them? What is the self serving result they’re wanting out of working with me?” And then make sure you at least deliver on that. That’s the minimum you must deliver.

And you need both.

I remember talking to the owner of a store that sold most of the green products in town - he was lamenting at how “people don’t shop at our store as much as they say they want to. They always say how much they love what we do but they don’t shop here. How are we supposed to survive if people only give us lip-service?”

It was heartbreaking to hear because he’s a really good man - but he doesn’t market his store. He just appeals to people’s values - he makes them no offer outside of that. He didn’t understand that appealing to people’s values (so that they can feel good about themselves when they buy from you) is only one component of your irresistible offer.

You might know people like him - well intentioned folks with good hearts. But they’re struggling and refuse to market their business.

In this series we’ll explore how you can go about crafting offers that are irresistible and get you more than mere lip service from your clients.

* * *

“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”

But, of course, the simplest questions are often the most difficult to answer. After all there are many layers to that question. One name for the answer to that question is a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). One of the simplest and best known examples is Dominoes Pizza: “Hot, fresh pizza to your door in 30 minutes or it’s free.”

“When an idea can’t be articulated simply, crisply and accessibly there is usually something wrong with it. When I hear a great idea, it usually has an affect on my mind and body. Sometimes I feel it in my stomach, other times in my throat, still others on my skin - a kind of instant truth detector test.” - Michael Eisner


COMING NEXT:
Next week sometime I will send you the fourth in the series focusing on the your "USP" - it's one of the most important things you can learn as a business. I tell you more about it next week.


Hope you're having a wonderful summer.


Warmest,

Tad Hargrave
Founder
Radical Business
"helping conscious folk make more money"
tad@tadhargrave.com
www.tadhargrave.com



P.S. REMINDER: Are you interested in getting $400 worth of my marketing coaching time for whatever you want to pay me? If so, check out - www.tadhargrave.com/consulting

This offer is only available until the end of August.

Your Irresistible Offer - "Avoid the Grammy Factor?" - Part 2 of 19

Hey everyone,

Welcome to part 2 of Your Irresistible Offer.

Today's will be pretty short. It's a brilliant article by Robert Middleton about creating offers that have more substance to them.

Enjoy!
_____________


Avoid The Grammy Factor
Robert Middleton
www.actionplan.com


I admit it. I watched the Grammy Awards last night. The whole thing. Let me give you a very quick rundown:

There were wall-to-wall musical performances. Some awards were given out. Heartfelt thank-yous were offered. Everyone looked beautiful. But the show is already fading from memory.

The Grammys, like most award shows, value style over substance. Lots of flash and glitz and "look at how passionately wonderful I am." It all gets a little overwhelming after awhile as one thinks, "But I don't even listen to this kind of music, anyway!"

However, I took away a valuable marketing lesson that I'd like to share with you: Most marketing messages are much like the Grammys: the substance is missing.

Everyone's trying to get the perfect marketing message, the perfect look, the perfect mind-blowing information that will compel prospects to respond in droves.

But it usually falls flat. Why?

Because it's often missing the most important thing of all: What the client actually gets from working with you. Don't think this is all that important?

Let me tell you a story...

One of the people in my current Marketing Action Group had been struggling with her marketing message. Nothing was really working. But finally she applied some of my ideas on creating a marketing message and told someone the story of a recent client success.

And the immediate response was: "Wow, I need your services. Will you work with me?"

And the great thing is that it wasn't a fluke. Now almost every time she uses the message, people want to work with her. Hey, her message was so great that I even decided to work with her!

How do you create a message with substance? Here's a 5-step process that will work for you.

1. Identify your ideal client
Your message will not work for everyone. You need to be clear exactly who your message is for. Who can you help the most? Who do you understand the best? Where do you have the most experience? Think all of this through and develop your message specifically for this ideal client.

2. Identify a client challenge
What does your ideal client want to do but doesn't know how? What's missing for them? What are they struggling with? What is confusing or frustrating for them? Clearly articulate this: "I work with these kind of clients who have this kind of challenge."

3. Identify a service and outcome
What specific service could you offer to address the client problem and provide a desirable outcome? Keep it simple: "I offer this kind of service and when clients use this service they will get this result." A service without a promised outcome is a wast of time.

4. Prove you can deliver the outcome
If you haven't offered this service before, then find an ideal client and perform it for them. If you need to cut your price or even offer it free to validate the outcome, so be it. But you need to be confident you can produce that outcome consistently.

5. Use your story as your message
The most powerful marketing messages are simple stories that demonstrate that you delivered a desirable outcome. "This was a client who came to me. They had this frustrating challenge. I implemented my service. These were the results."

This is the process my Marketing Action Group participant went through. She now has a reliable marketing message that's all substance, no style. She doesn't have to worry about perfect words or the "magic phrase." She just needs to tell her outcome story and get a positive response. Every time.

The actual response you get will depend on who your clients are, the depth of their challenge, their interest in getting an outcome, the actual service you develop and the kind of results you can deliver consistently.

But I promise you that if you follow these five steps to the letter, you'll emerge with a marketing message that's a quantum leap beyond what you're using now.

And that will always translate into more clients.



COMING NEXT:
Next week sometime I will send you the third in the series focusing on the most critical strategic mistake that conscious, green and holistic entrepreneurs make in their marketing . . .

Your Irresistible Offer - "Why Should I Bother?" - Part 1 of 19

Hey everyone,

It’s an innocent enough question:

“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”

This is the first installment of the "Your Irresistible Offer" series of emails. Approximately once a week you will receive my latest thoughts on how you can make your business more irresistible to your ideal clients.

Before we get into the mechanics of creating an offer - let's take a look at what an Irresistible Offer is and why it is the heart of any marketing you will ever do.

Let's get right to it:

Every purchase is essentially an investment - and the prospect wants to know - “what’s the Return On Investment (ROI)? What do I get for my money? Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”

Can you tell them?

* * *

To quote Seth Godin, “In the coming years, there will be more clutter, not less. There will be more interactions between customers, not less. There will be more upheaval, more inventions, more technologies, and more fashions, not less. And consumers have always wanted more than they say they want anyway ...”

In short - expect a lot more competition in your industry - not less.

“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”

When people ask this question, they want a real answer - not hype. Not slick marketing or fancy salesmanship. It’s a straightforward and totally legitimate question.

* * *

Sadly, all too often business owners create their products and services and then ask themselves, “now, how should I market this?” It’s much more powerful to start with the marketing first and ask yourself, “what is it that they want and need - and how can I give that to them?”

We need to start with the offer. The steak, not the sizzle.

I thought I would start off this series of emails with something really special.

It's hard medicine - but it's good for you.

* * *

An Edited Summary of the book:
Free Prize Inside!
by Seth Godin

Here's the quick definition of a Purple Cow: a product that's remarkable.

“Remarkable" simply means that a customer is willing to make a remark about it. If you can create memorable products, people will talk about them. If that happens, the word will spread and your sales will grow. That explains the success of most every fast growing company of the past ten years.

Lowering you prices without doing anything else is a game for desperate people lacking in imagination.

Most of the time, people are looking for marketing to serve as a magic elixer. They want to know how to use marketing techniques to make the business they've chosen work more profitably with the customers they're targeting. They want to change better-that commodity prices for their commodity products. They usually believe that it is the job of marketing to focus the spotlight on the things they've already decided to sell.

People want marketing to solve their product problems.

But today - it's all marketing because the product or service is the marketing. Marketing is no longer a separate division. It's the whole company. We’re living in an era where the real marketing happens inside the product, not in the ad pages of a magazine.

I say, if your product is not distinctly different, don't come up with better ads. Come up with a better product.

The simplest, fastest way to grow is to make your product remarkable. To make it worth talking about. If you make your product your service, your school, your church or your career worth talking about, the word will spread.

The only thing that leads to real growth is person to person conversation, word of mouth. And these only come about when you do something truly remarkable. Differentiation is not, by itself, remarkable. To be purple, you have to be more than different. You must be extreme. You must be on the edge.

Ask yourself: Are you invisible? Or are you remarkable?

In the world of the Purple Cow, where the product is the marketing, the winners are the people able to champion remarkable ideas and make them happen. And the astonishing revelation is this: Innovation isn't just fun, it's free!

If you can't make your product remarkable by changing the utility of the product or service, you must do it by one of three things . . .

1. creating a story: A story that transcends the utility of the product and instead goes straight to the world view of the user. See my book, “All Marketers Are Liars” for more information on how to do this.

2. by adding a free prize, a bonus, something extra, something worth paying for. What really works? No surprise, it's the soft stuff. The commonsense, creative stuff that requires initiative and curiosity, not an advanced degree to do. Most successes, though are actually the result of what I'll call soft innovation. Stuff like fast lube job shops, cell phone pricing plans and purple ketchup, or

3. by changing the way someone feels about what you do.

Here’s the good news: It turns out that there's a huge amount of inertia left in almost every category. Every product, service, feature, benefit is open for improvement. There's nothing that's finished, nothing so complete that it can't carry another free prize. No, not carry a prize, be transformed by a prize, transformed so completely that the product category finds new life.

Don’t Be Average:

Most companies focus on creating average products for average people.

The goal in Edgecraft is figuring out what people really want to buy, what they want to talk about and then giving it to them.

So, what you need to do is add a second benefit, a new edge, something your product or service does that is truly remarkable. You can only do that by going to the edges.

You must go all the way to the edge. Accepting second best doesn't make sense.

• Running a restaurant where your the free prize is your slightly attractive wait staff isn't going to work. They've got to be super-models or weightlifters or identical twins. You can only create a free prize when you can go all the way to the edge and make something remarkable. (note; the white hot essence, you need to fan it.) You don't create a better restaurant by serving better food. You can do it by serving remarkable food, or a remarkable location, or a remarkably famous chef. You don't build a better car but building a faster car, you do it by building the fastest car, or the least polluting car or the biggest car.
• Ergonomics that are slightly better are useless. Your product only becomes remarkable when you define the users experience.
• Ten percent more stock is invisible. When you have triple or ten times the stock of the competition (or 1 percent of their selection) people will notice. (note: be obvious)

Your innovations only matter when you can deliver an overwhelming distinction. Being somewhere near the edge is a very market-centric, self-aware thing that marketers do when they think people care enough to really dig deeply.

You can't achieve rapid growth by being just a bit better that the competition. It's not enough to get people to switch. You'll be ignored in favour of the incumbent.

The bottom line: If people aren't blown away, they won't talk about it. If they don't talk about it, it doesn't spread fast enough to help you grow.

Many people don't want this to be true. They don't want innovation to be the only path to growth. They believe that the market should reward earnest efforts at incremental improvement. Alas, it doesn't matter what you want... what we see is the market rewards innovation.

* * *

I know - it sounds intimidating and perhaps impossible.

But I assure you it's not. This series of emails will break down exactly what you need to do to get from wherever you are now to being 'absolutely irresistible'.

That's it for today.