A dad wanted to buy a car for his daughter who was graduating from a prestigious university.
There were two options for him. Both the options were quite similar in almost all aspects except this one. Option with Dealer A, was, the car would be $15,000 fixed price - take it or leave it.
Option with Dealer B, was the price was going to be $17,500. But the second dealer said that he wanted the daughter to try out the car for a week, before they make a decision on which car to buy. Afterall, this decision will not be made again, atleast for the next couple of years. He offered to find the car with the right color and options for the daughter, and was also going to give free gas refills for a week. He also made a technician available for an hour to do a walk thru showing all the features of the automobile. Also at the car pickup time, he offered the services of a professional photographer who would take pictures of the car and its new potential owner. Not to mention, it came with a giant red bow and ribbon to celebrate the graduation.
After a week, the dealer offered the dad to make a decision. If the decision was to purchase the car they can pay $17,500 to keep the car, if not they were under no obligation to pay a dime, when they returned the car after a week. Finally the dealer also offered FREE oil change for first 2 years, FREE AAA membership for 2 years and 15K/30K/60K service for upto 2 years, easily an additional 3,000 value when you add it all up.
Which dealer do you think the dad bought the car from, for his daughter? Obviously, it was a no-brainer choice.
The reason why the choice was clear was because of the strong risk-reversal offered to smoothen the transaction and the above and beyond customer service and quite a full value added package.
When you incorporate these principles in your offer, you will also blow away your competition and charge a fair price for above-and-beyond service.
One of the biggest secrets to success for your business is that you would always strive to maintain a differentiating edge in every thing and every transaction you do.
Doing this will allow you to build a better brand, and will also allow to you not become a commodity. If your product or service becomes a commodity, then price becomes the only differentiating edge, and in my humble opinion, unless you are ready to roll up your sleeves and get to do some serious volume, its a race to the bottom.
One of the biggest leverage you can get is when you can work hard to make it very easy for the client to say yes to your offer. You have to do two things to get this end result. You have to add tremendous value to the transaction, and you have to remove the slightest hint of any risk that the client may have to take.
When you are able to do this, you will be the most obvious choice in your marketplace.
For Selling Websites:
You can get a website for cheap that may not help your business or you can get a professional online presence that will help you get better exposure for your business.
Let me design and develop a $5,000 website for you. You try it for a first month just for $500. If after 3 months, if you feel that this website is not doing its job, you just drop me a line and I will refund you your $500 deposit and will take the website down.
However if after 3 months you want to keep the website, you can pay me the remaining amount of $4,500 as a one-time payment, or you can chose to pay as you go. You can pay a licensing fee of $250 every month or you can pay $500 every quarter.
Also included in the price is a custom logo design from our design catalog and upto 25 professional royalty free graphics included. You will get upto 50 email accounts, and custom built contact us form.
The following features are included for your business:
1. Custom Logo Design (Value $750-$5,000)
2. Professional Website Design and Layout (Value $1,000)
3. First 20 pages included (Value $4,000)
4. 50 email addresses (Value FREE)
5. Incorporating maps and contact us form (Value $199)
6. Privacy Policy page (Value $99)
7. Ability to add blog (Value $500)
8. SEO optimized pages (Value $2,000)
9. Upto 25 royalty free professional Images (Value $500)
10. Embedding a Video for better engagement (Value $500)
11. Local citations (upto 5-10 directory) (Value $500)
12. Responsive design to be mobile compliant (Value $500)
13. Optimizing each page and its content for faster downloads (Value $300)
14. 2 new 500-1000 word blog articles every month (Value $200)
15. And a whole lot more (Value $3,000)
When you add up the individual elements that you are going to get, the total cost would come to...about $15,000. Using this promotional offer you are able to get all this for a ZERO risk deposit of $500.
Why do I do this?
I do this for ONE main reason. The reason is, I learnt long time back that whenever two parties come together to engage in a business transaction, both parties are asking the other party to assume most of the risk in the transaction.
So by me offering a extended 90 day trail period, I am assuming all the risk in this transaction. If at the end of 90 days, if you are not totally delighted by the results, just ask and I will process a full refund of your deposit amount.
So then you may ask, "Soumil, why do you charge $500 upfront, if you are assuming all the risk?"
That's a fair question. I ask for small token of a deposit to differentiate the tire kickers from the business builders. To build a website, it does take over 80 hours of my teams time and I need to be able to know quite early who would be serious and who are just curious.
Why should you not go for cheap site you or worse yet a template site?
Simple reason, you get from a website what you put into it. Most of the online website are nothing more than an online graffiti that litters the online landscape. You don't want a website that looks cheap and does nothing. When a visitor arrives at your site, you don't what them to be turned off by what they see.
A cheap website not only looks terrible, but it potentially hurt the chances of your success. Don't you want to do everything in your power to raise your chances for success? Well then instead of going for a cheap website, go for an effective and dominating online presence.
