Do this before creating an 'offer'

I was speaking to a cold email lead gen agency owner today.

He’s pretty good at it so we were exchanging tactics.

He mentioned that when he looks at cold email, he sees the lead list targeting as the highest leverage decision.

I thought this was interesting because in my opinion, the offer is the most important thing.

The reason I think this is because I once messed up the spintax on an email and it looked something like this:

{Hey there|Hello there|Good Day|Hi|How are you|Hello|Hey},

And people STILL replied positively to that email, because the offer was so good.

Obviously other things like social proof and having a presence online were a factor, but after this, it was my belief that the offer was by far the most significant piece of leverage.

But the agency owner (Matt) gave an interesting insight.

He said “based on the lead list you can create an offer for that specific target” and curate the list based on a common problem they would have, then create the offer to solve that problem.

Immediately I thought, “yeah that is true.”

Because even when I am creating an offer that I think will work on cold email, I will think deeply about who the ideal customer is, and create an offer that resonates with them.

Without knowing who you are targeting, it is impossible to make a ‘good’ offer.

For example:

1. If someone has never heard of cold email, and you tell them you will help them sell their stuff by reaching out to their ideal customers 2,000 times per day, they will be quite impressed

2. If someone has been spammed by 10,000 cold emails per day for 6 months, it is less likely they will be interested

So indeed the target market is a very big piece of leverage. I will go on.

If you founded a kebab shop, what would the fastest and most efficient path to creating a successful business be?

Would it be to make the best kebabs ever? Would it be to recruit the best chefs?

What if Gordon Ramsay himself was cooking the kebabs? Would that guarantee success?

What if you had the best pricing model, or the best chips?

The truth is, none of these matter when compared to putting the kebab store on a corner next to three pubs.

Because as soon as those drunkards walk out at 2am, they don’t care where the meat came from, they don’t care if it’s good or fast, they don’t care who’s cooking them and they don’t care what price they pay. 

They are starving and just want any solution that is available. 

Even when they’re saying “I can’t believe I’m eating this, I don’t even know where this came from” they still begrudgingly finish the meal.

The only way to find a problem this strong, would be to start talking to these bar goers, and finding out their pain points. Undoubtedly, at some stage they would reveal “far out, I’m starving, I would genuinely eat anything right now.”

If you wanted to look at the basic building blocks of a startup: the team, the product (offer), and the market…

I would suggest that these variables are similar to the game “Paper, Scissors, Rock.” Except if Paper (the market) was allowed to win every time:

• When a great team meets a bad market, market wins.

• When a bad team meets a great market, market wins.

• When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

Reference: Marc Andreessen’s 2007 blog which covers this topic in great detail

Without knowing the ideal customer, you can’t know the value you’re delivering and therefore can’t determine pricing, features or how to sell potential prospects.

The entire company falls apart, let alone the cold email.

Therefore, the market (or ideal customer) determines the solution (offer), the pricing, the acquisition channel and also the team you build.

You can re-build a team to suit a market but you cannot re-build a market to suit the team.

So before you create your offer, make sure you know thy customer.

Hope this helps.

Leo