$100M Offers

by Alex Hormozi

This book is about how to make profitable offers. Specifically, how to reliably turn advertising dollars into (enormous) profits using a combination of pricing, value, guarantees, and naming strategies. I call the proper combination of these components: a Grand Slam Offer.

I give all these materials (this book, the accompanying course, and all other books and courses which you can find at Acquisition.com) for free or at cost in order to help as many people as humanly possible make more and serve more.

General Outline Section I: How We Got Here (You Just Finished It) Section II: Pricing: How To Charge Lots of Money For Stuff Section III: Value: Create Your Offer: How To Make Something So Good People Line Up To Buy Section IV: Enhancing Your Offer: How To Make Your Offer So Good They Feel Stupid Saying No Section V: Next Steps: How To Make This Happen In The Real World

So, then, what does it take to grow? Thankfully, just three simple things: 1) Get more customers 2) Increase their average purchase value 3) Get them to buy more times

Alright, let’s start by defining a Grand Slam Offer. It’s an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, an unmatchable value proposition, a premium price, and an unbeatable guarantee with a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers . . . forever removing the cash constraint on business growth.

This chapter illustrated the basic problem with commoditization and how Grand Slam Offers solve that. This gets you out of the pricing war and into a category of one.

When picking markets, I look for four indicators:

1. Massive Pain They must not want, but desperately need, what I am offering.

I have a saying I use to train sales teams “The pain is the pitch.” If you can articulate the pain a prospect is feeling accurately, they will almost always buy what you are offering.

2. Purchasing Power A friend of mine had a very good system for helping people improve their resumes to get more job interviews. He was great at it. But try as he did, he just could not get people to pay for his services. Why? Because they were all unemployed!

Make sure your targets have the money,

3. Easy to Target

Main point: you want to make sure you can target your ideal audience easily.

4. Growing Growing markets are like a tailwind. They make everything move forward faster.

There are three main markets that will always exist: Health, Wealth, and Relationships. The reason that those will always exist is that there is always tremendous pain when you lack them.

There is always demand for solutions to these core human pains. The goal is to find a smaller subgroup within one of those larger buckets that is growing, has the buying power, and is easy to target (the other three variables).

Commit to the Niche I have a saying when coaching entrepreneurs on picking their target market “Don’t make me niche slap you.”

No one can serve two masters.

So, pick then commit. Riches Are In The Niches The other reason to commit to the niche is because of how much more you will make. Simply put, niching down will make you far more money.

You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear.”

If you try one hundred offers, I promise you will succeed. Most people never try anything. Others fail once, then give up. It takes resilience to succeed. Stop personalizing! It’s not about you! If your offer doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you suck. It means your offer sucks. Big difference. You only suck if you stop trying.

In a blind taste test, researchers asked consumers to rate three wines: a low-priced wine, a medium-priced wine and an expensive wine. Throughout the study, the participants rated the wines with the prices visible. They rated them, unsurprisingly, in order of their price, with the most expensive being the “best,” the second most expensive being “second best,” and the third, cheapest option, being rated as “cheap wine.” What the tasters didn’t know is that the researchers gave them the exact same wine all three times.

— the goal is to be so much higher that a consumer thinks to themselves, “This is so much more expensive, there must be something entirely different going on here.”

That is how you create a category of one. In this new perceived marketplace, you are a monopoly and can make monopoly profits. That is the point.

Experience is what gives you the conviction to ask for someone’s entire year’s salary as payment. You must believe so deeply in your solution that when you look at yourself in the mirror at night, alone, your conviction remains unshakable.

First and foremost, charge a premium. It will allow you to do things no one else can to make your clients successful.

But none of that would have been possible without figuring out what people valued most, tripling down on it, and ruthlessly eliminating everything else.

After all, anyone can make a promise. The harder, and more competitive, are the Time Delay and Effort & Sacrifice. The best companies in the world focus all their attention on the bottom side of the equation. Making things immediate, seamless, and effortless.

In other words, if you can reduce your prospects’ true time delay to receiving value to zero (aka you realize your immediate dream outcome), and your effort and sacrifice is zero, you have an infinitely valuable product. If you accomplish this, you win the game.

Perception is reality. It’s not about how much you increase your prospect’s likelihood of success, or decrease the time delay to achievement, or decrease their effort and sacrifice. That in itself is not valuable. Many times, they will have no idea. The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.

Our goal is not to create desire. It’s simply to channel that desire through our offer and monetization vehicle.

People generally, and our clients specifically, want: . . . To be perceived as beautiful . . . To be respected . . . To be perceived as powerful . . . To be loved . . . To increase their status

Then I realized people pay for certainty. They value certainty. I call this “the perceived likelihood of achievement.” In other words, “How likely do I believe it is that I will achieve the result I am looking for if I make this purchase?”

#4 Effort & Sacrifice (Goal = Decrease) This is what it “costs” people in ancillary costs, aka “other costs accrued along the way.”

Putting It All Together As I said earlier, these elements of value don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen together, in combination. So let’s look at a few examples that utilize all four components of value at once. In an effort to quantify the value, I’ll rate them on a binary scale of 0 or 1. 1 being value achieved. 0 being missing. Then I will add all four together to give you a relative value rating of a type of service. Our goal as marketers and business owners is to increase the value of the dream outcome and its perceived likelihood of achievement, while decreasing the time delay of achievement and the effort and sacrifice one has to put in to get there.

And that is why Xanax is a multi-billion dollar product while I know of almost no multi-billion dollar meditation businesses . . . value.

This is also the reason that the supplement industry ($123B, Grandview Research) is twice the size of the health club industry ($62B, IHRSA). They both accomplish the same perceived objectives — “being healthy,” “losing weight,” “looking good,” “increased energy,” etc. — but one is perceived as more valuable because it has lower “costs.”

stumbled on Dan Kennedy’s books,

Step #1: Identify Dream Outcome

Step #2: List Problems

When listing out problems, think about what happens immediately before and immediately after someone uses your product/service. What’s the “next” thing they need help with? These are all the problems. Think about it in insane detail.

So, to recap, just list out each core thing that someone has to do. Then think of all the reasons they wouldn’t be able to do it or keep doing it (using the four value drivers as a guide). Now we get to the fun part: turning problems into solutions.

Step #3: Solutions List

PROBLEM→ SOLUTION PROBLEM: Buying healthy food, grocery shopping . . . is hard, confusing, I won’t like it. I will suck at it→ How to make buying healthy food easy and enjoyable, so that anyone can do it (especially busy moms!) . . . takes too much time→ How to buy healthy food quickly . . . is expensive→ How to buy healthy food for less than your current grocery bill . . . is unsustainable→ How to make buying healthy food take less effort than buying unhealthy food . . . is not my priority. My family’s needs will get in my way→ How to buy healthy food for you and your family at the same time . . . is undoable if I travel; I won’t know what to get→ How to get healthy food when traveling PROBLEM: Cooking healthy food . . . is hard, confusing. I won’t like it, and I will suck at it→ How anyone can enjoy cooking healthy meals easily

I have always lived by the mantra, “Create flow. Monetize flow. Then add friction.” This means I generate demand first.

But I wanted to make sure they got way more than they paid me. So here’s what I ended up doing to fill their gyms: I would fly out to their gym for 21 days, spend my own money on hotels, car rentals, eating out, advertising, generate the leads, work the leads, then sell for them. I would even do the first onboarding meeting with clients to get them started. In short, I did everything. I took on all the risk.

They only had to put down $500 to “reserve” their date, which I made refundable at the end of their launch. So they had 0 financial risk, 0 time risk, 0 effort, and the deal was, I got to keep all the up front cash collected from selling their services, and they got clients for free. You can imagine how this was a pretty compelling offer.

On my own, I was able to sell about $100,000/mo in upfront cash for myself.

So these deals were very lucrative for me. Over time, I scaled that to a team of 8 guys selling every month. But this began to wear on me and the team. It was at that point that I realized that if I were to simply teach them how to do what I did, I could charge maybe a third of what I would normally make, but I would be able to help hundreds of gyms a month instead of eight. And, I could do it all sleeping in my own bed every night.

My promise was fundamentally the same: I will fill your gym in 30 days. It was simply the how and what I did that changed. The how and what is what we are breaking apart.

create cash flow by over-delivering like crazy at first. Then use the cash flow to fix your operations and make your business more efficient.

As you see, the list can really go on and on here. This is just to illustrate the many ways to solve a single problem. Now do this for all of the perceived problems that your clients encounter before, after, and during their experience with your service/products. You should have a monster list by the end of this.

If there’s one type of delivery vehicle to focus on, it’s creating high value, “one to many” solutions.

Enhancing The Offer: Scarcity, Urgency, Bonuses, Guarantees, and Naming

“When demand increases, cut supply.”

People want what they can’t have. People want what other people want. People want things only a select few have access to.

Desire comes from not getting what you want.

from Naval Ravikant: “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

1. Use scarcity to decrease supply to raise prices (and indirectly increase demand through perceived exclusiveness) 2) Use urgency to increase demand by decreasing the action threshold of a prospect. 3) Use bonuses to increase demand (and increase perceived exclusivity). 4) Use guarantees to increase demand by reversing risk. 5) Use names to re-stimulate demand and expand awareness of my offer to my target audience.

Physical Products Having limited releases is a tried and true method of using this psychological bias to your advantage. You can have limited releases for flavors, colors, designs, sizes, etc. “This month, we are releasing 100 boxes of mint chocolate cookie flavored protein bars.” Important point: to properly utilize this method you should always sell out.

Honest Scarcity (The Most Ethical Scarcity) The easiest scarcity strategy is honesty. Wait, what? Let me explain. I’m sure right now, you probably couldn’t handle 1,000 clients tomorrow right? But how many could you handle? 5? 10? 25? Well, you might as well define a number that you are willing to take on in a given time period, then advertise that.

If you wanted to juice it up a little bit, you could say: “I actually had a client who signed up a few weeks ago drop out, so I have an opening for our next cohort that kicks off on Monday. If you are pretty sure you’re gonna do this sooner or later, might as well get in on it now so you can start reaping the rewards sooner rather than paying the same and waiting.” Those two tweaks above have pushed so many sales over the edge by just reminding a potential customer that if they sign up, they will be starting on Monday, and if they do not, they will have to wait a week.

Obviously the less frequently you kick off new customers, the more powerful this is.

2. Rolling Seasonal Urgency

Example: Our New Year Promotion ends Jan 30! Next Month: Our Valentines Lovers Promo Ends Feb 30! Next Month: Our Sexy By Spring Special Ends March 31! Next Month: Our Fools in Love April Promo Ends April 30!

Deadlines drive decisions.

The main point I want you to take away from this is that a single offer is less valuable than the same offer broken into its component parts and stacked as bonuses (see image).

Bonus Bullets That being said, there are a few key things to remember when offering bonuses: 1) Always offer them (you can use the bulleted bundle we came up with at the end of Section III) 2) Give them a special name that has a benefit in the title 3) Tell them: a) How it relates to their issue b) What it is c) How you discovered it, or what you had to do to create it d) How it will specifically improve their lives or make their experience i) Faster, easier or less effort/sacrifice (value equation) 4) Provide some proof (this can be a stat, a past client, or personal experience) to prove that this thing is valuable 5) Paint a vivid mental image of what their life will be like assuming they have already used it and are experiencing the benefits 6) Always ascribe a price tag to them and justify it 7) Tools & checklists are better than additional trainings (as the effort & time are lower with the former, so the value is higher. The value equation still reigns supreme). 8) They should each address a specific concern/obstacle in the prospects mind about why they can’t or won’t be successful (bonus should prove their belief incorrect) 9) This can also be what they would logically realize they will need next. You want to solve their next problem before they even encounter it. 10) The value of the bonuses should eclipse the value of the core offer. Psychologically as you continue to add offers, it continues to expand the price to value discrepancy. It also, subconsciously communicates that the core offer must be valuable because if these are the bonuses, the main thing has to be more valuable than the bonuses right? (No, but you can use this psychological bias to make your offer seem wildly compelling). 11) You can further enhance the value of your bonuses by adding scarcity and urgency to the bonus themselves (which takes this technique and puts it on steroids). a) Bonuses With Scarcity Version 1: Only people who sign up for XZY program will have access to my Bonus #1, 2, 3 that are never for sale or available anywhere else other than through this program. Version 2: I have 3 tickets left to my $5,000 virtual event. If you buy this program you can get one of the last 3 tickets as a bonus. b) Bonuses With Urgency Version 1: If you buy today, I will add in XYZ bonus that normally costs $1,000, for free. And I’ll do that because I want to reward action takers. c) With hope, you can see the subtle differences. The first two examples aren’t constrained by time. They state that if you buy the program you will get things you normally would not be able to. The bonus with urgency is about them buying today, and if they do not buy today, they lose those bonuses. Minor difference, but worth noting. 12) You can also make a guarantee itself a bonus. Ex: “I want to remove any fear you have about making the decision today. So, if you decide to move forward today, I’ll also give you a 30…

Advanced Level Bonuses - Other People’s Products and Services You can get other businesses to give you their services and products as a part of your bonuses in exchange for exposure to your clients for free.

A world class affiliate marketer Jason Fladlien (who did $27M in a single day) recently used an amazing guarantee for a course he sold. He said “if you buy this course and spend $X on advertising your ecommerce store using the methods herein, and don’t make money, I will buy your store from you for $25,000 no questions asked.” He claimed that an additional $3M in sales came from this crazy guarantee on a $2997 course. What’s more, he only gave 10 of these $25,000 refunds out. So the refund generated $2.75M in extra sales. That’s what a crazy guarantee does for you.

[Conditional] Service Guarantee What the Client Gets: You keep working for them free of charge until X is achieved. My Take: This is probably my personal favorite guarantee of all time. It essentially guarantees they will achieve their goal, but it eliminates the element of time. You are never at risk for losing the money. The guarantee is around the outcome.

[Conditional] Wage-Payment Guarantee What the Client Gets: You offer to pay their hourly rate, whatever that may be, if they don’t find your call/session with them valuable. My Take: This is also an ancillary cost guarantee, just a very original one. If someone ever actually asks for the wage payment, just ask them for their tax return and divide it by 1,960 (number of working hours at 40 hrs/wk for a year). But no one asking for a refund will actually do that, so you will never actually have to give one of these out. Like ever.

[Conditional] Delayed Second Payment Guarantee What the Client Gets: You won’t bill them again until after they make or get their first outcome. Ex: Lose your first five pounds . . . make your first sale . . . get your website live, etc. My Take: I like this a lot, especially if you have a very systematized process for getting the first result. It gets the prospect thinking in fast action terms and gets them moving.

My Take: Performance, Revshare, and Profit-shares aren’t guarantees “per se”, but for all intents and purposes, they are. There is an implied guarantee whenever you enter into a revshare or performance partnership: if you don’t make money, you don’t have to pay me. In my opinion, this is one of, if not THE most desirable setup.

This is a part of the offer we teach our agencies who use our software. We help them switch from a retainer model to a performance model and wrap that into the Grand Slam Offer I walked through earlier. I’ve seen countless agencies go from $20k/mo to $200k+/mo in a matter of a few months.