What Does A Mafia Boss Know About Marketing
Austine Itebalumeh
Project Management Support Specialist | CRM & Business Process Automation | Flowchart | Project Assistant | Administrative Assistant
Lots. Read on to find out…
Do you remember in the movie “The Godfather” when Don Corleone says, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”? And it’s this simple concept that’s the backbone of any successful sales proposition you make. (However if I were you, I’d probably leave out the threats of violence in your sales piece.)
From now on, your job is to create such powerful offers that anyone reading it would say to themselves, “My goodness, I’d have to be a complete idiot not to take them up on this deal!”
And creating a powerful offer like this is easier than you think.
Let me share with you one of the most compelling offers I’ve seen. It took a dying hotel on the wrong side of the Vegas ’strip’, where you had to watch your wallet at every turn, and transformed it into a super moneymaker. This is from a very successful ad that used to run for Bob Stupak’s Vegas World hotel. Listen to this deal and see if you wouldn’t act on this even if you were just an occasional gambler:
“Act now, to receive a virtually free Las Vegas vacation. For $198 per person or $396 per couple I will:
1) Put you up in a luxurious mini suite in an exciting Las Vegas hotel right on the famous strip.
2) I will give you free tickets to a show with name entertainers.
3) I will put a chilled bottle of champagne in your room for free.
4) I’ll let you drink as much as want for free, whether you’re at the gaming tables, playing slots or in one of the lounges.
5) I’ll hand you $1,000 of my money to gamble with for free.
6) I’ll let you keep all your winnings.
7) I’ll guarantee you’ll win a color TV, VCR or a faux diamond ring.
Obviously I’m not going to give this incredible deal to everybody in the whole world. There can only be (small number) of these vacation packages available. First come, first served.”
If that’s not an irresistible offer, I don’t what is. The closer you can get to something like this, the more customers you’ll have falling all over themselves to give you their money.
Does this give you a few ideas?
Using The Bonus Pile On
Vegas World’s offer uses a concept I call “Bonus Pile On”. And the way it works is to keep piling on bonus after bonus until finally you have to say “no mas” and whip out your charge card.
It was the same thing with the famous Ginsu knife commercials a few years back. They used this technique perfectly to sell millions of dollars of cutlery. The announcer would say “And if you act now you’ll also get…” and then about 15 different knives and kitchen gadgets would pop up on the screen.
It made you think about how much value you were getting for such a little price. That’s the power of the “bonus pile on”.
So what’s the best way to start using this in your business? Well, one of the best ways I know is using paper and ink. You can give away a series of valuable reports with any purchase. What’s more, you could even make this information available as a download from your website so you’d have zero distribution cost.
Or you could make deals with other businesses where they’d let you give away a product or service from them to your customers. If you really use your imagination here you’ll come up with lots of ways to create a “bonus pile on”.
Make Prospects Take Action Now!
There’s no doubt about it – deep down, everyone of us is a lazy procrastinator. That’s why you need some kind of deadline or scarcity factor to make prospects take action now. If your prospects believe an offer is going to be around forever, there’s no reason to take action.
That’s the reason deadlines work so well. In one of my businesses, I’ll stamp a red deadline on the order form for the last day prospects get over $2,000.00 in free bonuses. And believe me, it’s not unusual to get people ordering right on the very last day of the deadline just because of this stamp.
100% No-Risk Guarantee
Finally, the last component of a powerful offer is to make your deal as risk-free as possible. Nobody wants to make a mistake and be stuck with something that doesn’t deliver as promised.
That’s why you should make every effort to lift the risk from the prospect and place it squarely on your shoulders.
Make a bold guarantee and make it for as long as possible. If you have a quality product, you shouldn’t worry because most often return rates will drop the longer you extend guarantees for.
Another strategy to try is offering a 30-day “hold-your-check or charge slip” trial. That means people will send you checks postdated 30 days out or you won’t charge their credit cards for 30 days. Joe Karbo used this to sell tens of thousands of copies of his book “The Lazy Man’s Ways to Riches”.
Now you have all the keys to creating your own irresistible offer and watching your sales soar. Just keep adding value and more bonuses until you come up with an offer than makes your prospect feel guilty for not ordering.
Source
Yanik Silver
InternetLifestyle.com