Some offers are so hot that they are picked up like hot cakes. You always wish that your offers belong to that category.
Good offers pass the I.V.O.R.Y test:
- They are Intuitive to Understand
- Their Value is Unquestionable
- The Opportunity Cost is Minimal
- Their ROI is justifiable and
- Yesterday is When They Were Required
Let us look at each one of them closely.
Intuitive to Understand
When you are introducing a product or a service, if how you are describing it not intuitive to understand, you are making it easy to ignore. Nobody has time, mindshare and energy to invest to work hard just to understand what it is that you are selling.
When Steve Jobs introduced iPod, he rarely focused on features. His pitch was that you could carry a 1,000 songs in your pocket. Intuitive to understand and rarely requires any work on the part of the audience.
In fact, the moment you hear a pitch like that, your mind stops wondering whether you need something like that, you start wondering what you can do when you use that.
Value is unquestionable
It is common for you to quickly assess the value of what you are considering to buy.
Everyone else thinks the same way.
When you buy a home, you check the price of the home by comparing it to the value of similar homes in the same area. People use a similar strategy elsewhere too. Knowing this, you need to take the responsibility to show that the value someone will derive will be unquestionable.
There are exceptions, mostly in the luxury market where the buyers are competing to show off how cool they are with their purchases.
Opportunity cost is minimal
The price that someone pays for taking up on your offer is only part of the price they pay. The partial list of items that will contribute to the opportunity cost are as follows:
* change management
* training
* dropping other projects that could have been taken up instead
The buyer is mentally making calculations about the overall opportunity cost.
It is your responsibility to not only design your offers to keep the opportunity cost to be minimal, but also tell the right story about it.
ROI is justifiable
Your buyer may be the decision maker, but he or she typically has a Boss to whom the buyer has to justify with an ROI calculation.
Your interface is probably only with the buyer and his or her Boss may be in the background.
Your job is to think about the story that your buyer has to tell his or her Boss and craft that to make the life of the buyer a bit easy.
Yesterday was when it was required
One reason people act is when there is an urgency to act.
It is not easy to create an offer that will create a sense of urgency to buy.
But…
That is not the reason to stop working towards it.
If your offer is a “nice to have,” it becomes difficult to create the urgency that’s required to make someone buy.
Take the time to craft an offer and an accompanying story to make what you are offering required by the buyer yesterday.