Yesterday, I teased what I call the Most Valuable Offer.
Today, I want to tell you all about it. Let me start with my very first experience with a Most Valuable Offer:
The date was Friday, Oct 22 2021. I was walking along the sea in Opatija, Croatia, where the numerous and warlike Bejakovic clan makes its fair-weather camp.
As I walked along the sea, keeping an eye out for pirates, a bright idea suddenly penetrated my dim brain:
“All these people keep telling me I’m so good at writing emails. So why don’t I finally offer a training on how I write emails?”
Yes! I took out my phone, and wrote down a bunch of ideas for the offer, the sales page, and the actual content of the training.
Later that evening, I sent out an email about it to my list.
For the rest of the evening, I watched in wonder as thousands of dollars poured into my PayPal account from people who decided to preorder this training.
I called that training Influential Emails. I delivered it live on Zoom over the next few weeks. I charged $249 for it.
I had 38 people take me up on the offer before I was done promoting it, for a total of around $8k in profits (I offered a discount to the very first people who signed up).
At that time, my email list stood at a mighty 800 subscribers.
Let me reiterate the numbers, because they are important:
$8k in profits from an email list of 800 subscribers. That comes out to $10/subscriber.
So there you go. Most Valuable Offer:
A workshop or a series of workshops (my Influential Emails was three calls over three weeks), delivered live on a specific, publicly announced date in the near future.
The “live” and “specific date in the near future” bits are the magic here. They explain why this type of offer is Most Valuable:
#1. A Most Valuable Offer makes you money, even a good deal of money
A Most Valuable Offer provides live contact with you, which is something that people on your list value. Plus there’s implied scarcity because this is a live event happening soon.
Put those two things together, and it means people are willing to buy, and they are willing to pay, often much much more than they might be willing to pay for the same info delivered in any other format such as a book, course, checklist, etc.
(Again, my first Most Valuable Offer brought in $10/subscriber.)
#2. A Most Valuable Offer is easy to deliver
On a live workshop, you don’t have to be perfect. People are there with you live, and that’s a big part of what they paid for.
In my experience, people are also understanding, and flubs can even make the experience more human and fun, unlike in a book or a course.
Also, this isn’t a talk on a stage. You can have notes to consult, you can make the audience do part of the work, you can play YouTube videos instead of talking, and you can wear pajamas if you like. (I did it all for Influential Emails, minus the pajamas.)
#3. A Most Valuable Offer is quick and forces you to deliver it
This third point is perhaps the most important.
Like my first experience with a Most Valuable Offer shows, you can get an idea today and sell it by tonight.
You can start with nothing right now, and end the day with thousands of dollars in pocket, out of nowhere, by the time the clock chimes and the little cuckoo bird comes out and counts off 12 chirps.
And crucially, the publicly announced date of a live workshop forces you to put out the training in a matter of days or weeks, even if it’s not perfect, but which is likely to be 96% as good as you could ever make it, even if you kept working on it for years or decades.
Win-win-win, right? Win win… win win win… win…
So what’s missing? Why doesn’t everybody make Most Valuable Offers all the time? Why don’t I do it every month?
I can think of a number of reasons.
The number one “what’s missing” I can think of is that folks simply don’t take the first step and make that public announcement and commitment.
It’s too easy to say, “Yeah that’s a good idea, I should do that some time soon,” and then go on doing other stuff, whether fiddling with that new course you’ve been working on… or delivering your 1-1 services or coaching… or dreaming pipe dreams about how you will get to 10k subscribers by the end of this year, at which point your list will somehow magically make money on its own.
I could tell you to just do it, to just take that first step, and to make your list an offer for a Most Valuable Offer tonight.
But I have a better, more practical message, in fact an offer, a Most Valuable Offer, a Spectacularly Valuable Offer. I am frankly a little nervous about it, but maybe that’s a good thing. I will share it with you tomorrow.