If you are reading this you probably encountered a hurdle or two when trying to sell a product.

Well, the thing is you probably didn’t start off on the right foot. The most common mistake marketers make when trying to sell a product is precisely that: trying to sell a product.

What’s Wrong With Selling a Product?

Be it a software solution, an information product, or a service, your product can be the best in the market, but there are still chances that it doesn’t sell. There are a few reasons behind that.

A product will not be suitable for anyone who doesn’t understand the problem properly, or to someone who has other solutions in mind for that problem. Actually, these problems are referred to as the 5 stages of awareness of a prospect.

1. Unaware of the problem unaware of the solution.
   Your prospect is completely unaware of the problem, let alone the solution. They only have knowledge of their own identity or opinion.

2. Aware of the problem unaware of the solution.
   Your prospect acknowledges there’s a problem, but they don’t know the solution.

3. Unaware of the problem aware of the solution.
   Your prospect has clear results to mind, but they don’t know that your product could provide them.
   

4. Aware of the problem aware of the solution.
   Your prospect acknowledges the problem, they know you offer them a solution, but they are simply not convinced it’s the right product for them.

5. Aware of the problem aware of the solution and they know your brand as well.
   Your prospect knows your product, and what they need to know is “the deal.”

What’s also important to know when you are selling a product is to try and sell it to a warm audience. If you are trying to sell it to the people who know you already, chances are they are going to buy it. But if you really want to sale up, if you want to sell your product to a lot of people you will struggle with that. To overcome this obstacle what you need is an offer.

Offer > Product

An offer is actually a combination of different products. A product could be for example a guide on how to lose weight. An e-book that is 30 pages long that teaches people how to lose weight for a price of $19. This product might fulfill the needs of people who want to lose weight in 30 days. It’s the perfect opportunity for them to get this great product for an amazing price and start getting results with it.

But what about those people that are not trying to lose weight right now? Or those people that have tried a lot of different things and none of them worked out? You have to think about their objections.

Maybe one of their objections is they don’t know what kind of food to eat. They might not know how to eat good food on a budget (they can’t afford to go to whole foods all the time). Maybe they wish to exercise but they are bound to their computer screen all the time and they don’t know how to exercise while working.

If you think about all of these things, you will realize in fact, that you are not solving a problem, but several problems at once.

This is the key difference between a product and an offer. Whereas a product is only about solving one problem, with an offer you’re solving multiple problems. So you take one core issue, resolve it and if people are facing more obstacles you resolve them as well. You basically have one main component, then a second one, and a third one, and so on and so forth.

Constructing an Offer

When it comes to constructing the offer, you will still need one central killer product built. Then, you can add on to it. So go ahead and create your product, say a training, a software product, or a service. Do whatever it is you need to do to solve one core problem. Then, to sweeten the deal create an irresistible offer. Make this product the core center piece of the offer but also suggest additional services or deals alongside with it.

Check out our guide here on how you can build your next information product in 4 hours

Core Offer – The Main Objection

For example, let’s say you are offering a training on how to create webinar funnels, just like I did. Then your core offer would be “ learning how to create a webinar funnel”.  And the main buyer need/problem you’d be solving is not knowing how to build webinar funnels.

Objection 2

But what if your audience has never done a webinar before? For example, some of my prospects would know how to create a funnel on Kyvio, however, chances are they’ve never done a webinar at all. That would probably stop their progress in the buyer journey. So what I would do to help them solve their specific need is to offer them a bonus training on how to run a webinar in order to help them proceed further.

Objection 3

But what good is knowing how to run a webinar, if someone doesn’t know the first thing about writing? It’s your job to help your prospect get over that hurdle as well. You can, for example give them your webinar script.

Objection 4

Now that people got your script and got a sense of  how to run a webinar, they might be still facing an obstacle that a lot of people are struggling to overcome. Getting traffic. To solve this problem, you can offer them a training on Traffic on Demand – Webinar Edition.

Objection 5

But what if it is their first time doing internet marketing? Even if someone is prepared to create these webinar funnels, it’s all in vain if they don’t have a product. Again, it’s your job to step up. Give them an even better offer, give them a Done For You product. Include the sales pages and email as well and that’s already an irresistible offer.

In a scenario where you only solved the webinar funnel even for as low a price as $29, the sales wouldn’t be so high. This is all comes down to people having objections that you didn’t help overcome. All they got was a 2-hour course on how to create an opt-in page, a thank you page a replay page, and maybe even how to do some retargeting. But that’s it.

Concentrate on the Bigger Picture

As we already said, you might create the best product, but people might not value that enough because you’re still not solving their major problem. Their major problem is not how to create webinar funnels. It might be one of the key issues, but it’s not the overall issue. You have to look at the bigger picture.

The overall issue is – how do they get from not having done any webinars to doing webinars; and making money with that knowledge. To be able to do that you can’t just stop at hurdle number one, you need to take them through the entire process through the entire journey.

And it’s the same with every business, in every field. Just think about the days when you were starting out. Think back to the days when you were not an expert in something. We’ll go out on a limb and say that just solving one thing didn’t help your business. You have to give people additional things so they like it more. It is a universal rule, it’s how offers work.

The best thing about selling an offer is you can sell it time and time again. And here’s how. Pay particular attention to this if you want to sell your offer over and over again. What do you think, how many times could I sell the product? For example “the how to do a webinar” training, could I sell it in January and then in February and then in March? The answer is maybe. If you are a good salesman you could pull that off. But many people, especially those just starting out, would fail to do that. Most people struggle with selling only one thing.

Now, if you have an offer, what you can do is sell one component every month as the key component, and the rest of them become bonus components.

In February, for example, hit up the list of people that didn’t buy the webinar funnel, the whole thing. Then say hey, listen let me teach you how to run a webinar. Here’s this course for 99 dollars that shows you A-Z how to technically set up a webinar, how to invite people to it, how to add people to it, how to mail them. Basically, they will learn how to run the whole thing.

Then people might say: all of this is great, but I don’t have any webinars to run. What do I do? Or I want to offer this as a service what do I do? Then you can suggest that they add this as an up sell for their client, and give them the webinar script. Or, if you want to do this for yourself I’m going to give you the done for you product to sell. And that’s perfect. Already a 99 dollar offer.

The month after you could run a special training on how to write the email copy, the sales page copy, but most importantly, how to write the webinar script.

Invest Time and it Will Pay Off

This is a really time consuming task, but if you manage to break that down into a system people will pay 99 dollars for it. They’ll say perfect one day I want to do webinars so I’ll pay you 99 dollars. But once I’ve done that, how do I then create a funnel, how do I actually run the webinar because I’ve never done that before. If it is a more mature audience you don’t have to give them this, but if they are not, then you can sell them all these other thing s.    

So when you have an offer done you can sell it over and over again with different angles, different positioning. You can target it towards different kind of market segments. If you were to only do one product about webinar funnels you could only sell it to one type of audience: people who knew what webinars were, who knew how to run them, knew how to draw traffic to them.

They simply didn’t know how to create a funnel for a webinar. That training would only be good for them. But once you’ve created this offer, this whole package, it covers a wider audience. It is a lot of work but the reward is you could continue selling it month after month just by approaching it from a different angle.

Go ahead and create an offer your prospects can’t refuse :). Tell us whether it worked, and spread the word.