Selling Stuff People MUST Buy

Hey there,

It is Matthew Larsen, back with my newsletter.

Today, we are talking about offers, and more specifically, why the smartest move is to stop trying to make a genius offer and simply sell stuff people MUST buy. Let’s get into it.

When talking about offers, we need to realize something very important. No matter what we sell, there are three things that must be true if we want someone to buy anything:

If all three are not true, they will not buy it.

So many people only focus on their offer, but there is something that matters much more, and that is your industry.

Your industry is so important because it is the sole thing that determines your potential.

I want you to visualize that you are a marketing agency and you generate leads for your clients. You do the following:

All the client has to do is close.

All in all, your fixed costs and your overall offer is basically going to be the same. You generate leads with Facebook Ads. The process to go from Facebook ad to client is generally the same in every industry.

But, who do you think will pay you more?

Wealth Managers, or dog walkers?

You essentially have the same costs, processes and offer, but one is significantly better than the other. This is a very important thing to understand.

I have seen it so many times. The same offer, skillset, process, team, etc. switch their industry and instantly 2x, 3x, 10x, and sometimes even more.

You see this quite a bit when someone switches from coaches, consultants and agency owners into a better niche such as home services, insurance, health care, law, etc.

You can quite literally do NOTHING except change the industry and get a result that is orders of magnitude larger. This is why I feel very safe claiming your industry is the most important part of every business.

Note: Of course, not everyone can simply change their industry so easily. It is more possible with skilled white-collar services.

A lot of people will lump your ICP and industry together and call it your "niche." I do not necessarily think this is a good idea because when you lump it together, a lot of important thinking gets lost in the process.

Your industry is the overall market you serve. Your ICP is the person you sell to inside that industry. This is a very important distinction when we go deeper into the course with our offer creation, big idea and messaging.

Something important to understand alongside this is that your offer is only good or bad in relation to your ICP. The same offer could be great or it could be horrible, depending on who you are selling it to.

If I was in the agency industry and my offer was “how to get your first agency client in 90 days,” that would be an amazing offer for someone trying to get their first agency client, but would be horrible and wouldn’t even make sense if my ICP was agency owners between $1-3m per year.

So much of the discourse surrounding online marketing and business is all about “make a great offer.” “The offer is king, bro.”

This is generally quite correct, but I question why you would spend so much time and effort trying to “make a good offer” instead of just selling stuff that people MUST buy. Sounds a lot easier.

Instead of trying to be a genius, choose something that your ICP MUST buy and is already buying.

Then, in a very real way, you will “have a good offer” by default.

The natural question becomes, “okay, what are the things that people MUST buy, or how do I go about thinking of this?”

To me, I separate this into three unique buckets:

In an ideal world, you would be selling things that they legally must buy, as in there would be consequences such as a fine, penalty or even jail time for not buying it. That would kind of be the ultimate scenario, wouldn’t it? Believe it or not, there are things like this out there.

If you cannot achieve that (and most will not), the next best thing would be to sell things people functionally must buy. This is basically the same thing as legally must buy in the sense they are things that you really cannot live without, but there is no law or anything compelling you to buy them.

If you cannot achieve either of the first two, you will have to settle for things people competitively must buy. This is where most businesses will be at. This is the third best option, but still infinitely better than selling things people do not have to buy at all. These are things that no one technically has to buy, but they will never have a great business or life without buying. There are very strong reasons and factors as to why they “must” buy this in theory, but they are just one level below the very strong reasons and factors someone must buy the legally required or functionally required things.

Let’s quickly go back to the three conditions that must be true for someone to buy from us from before:

The reason that we want to sell things that people must buy is that when we do so, the first and second conditions are taken care of automatically.

If they must buy it, they will go through the process to educate themselves (ie. understand the offer).

If they must buy it, they will obviously believe the offer is the solution to their problems simply because it is the solution to their problems.

Then, we can spend ALL of our time convincing them that WE are the person to do it for them.

That is an infinitely better position to be in than having to educate someone from zero, then convince them it is the right solution for them, and then still having to convince them that they should hire US to do it. Yikes. That is a lot of work, and very costly and time consuming.

So, the three levels are legally must buy, functionally must buy, and competitively must buy. All are good because they take care of 2 of the 3 conditions.

Let’s get into each of these one by one so you can see which level you are at.

How amazing would it be to sell things that people are required by law to buy? Pretty amazing. These are things where you will either be fined or penalized or maybe even thrown in jail if you don’t buy. That sounds perfect, and like it would be very easy to sell this kind of stuff. Sadly, there are only a few industries where this is the case.

What are some examples?

Auto insurance: You legally must have valid auto insurance if you want to drive/own your car. You will lose your license if you don’t.

Tax-related stuff: The IRS (USA) will throw you in jail if you mess around too much with your taxes. They need their cut.

Cybersecurity related stuff: In a lot of industries, if you don’t secure your customers/patient/client data, you risk huge fines.

Again, remember the three conditions that must be true. You don’t need to educate someone on auto insurance. They will know what it is and they will educate themselves. You also don’t need to convince them to buy it. It is required. They will buy it. So, if you sell auto insurance, you can just spend all your time convincing them to buy it from you.

This is almost as good as legally must buy, but there are a lot more examples and offers in this category than the legally must buy one, so that is good. For these, there is no law compelling you to buy, but these things are quite simply so necessary that there may as well be a law as you can’t really go without them.

Mortgage/homeowner insurance: In order to get a mortgage or buy a home, you usually will need to have homeowner insurance or they will not lend to you.

Medical insurance (in USA): This one is unique to the USA (lol) but you functionally need to buy medical insurance or you will face medical bankruptcy and/or die.

Food: Obviously, there is no law saying you need to buy food but without it, you will eventually starve to death.

Shelter: Likewise, there is no law saying you need a home (shelter), but unless you want to be homeless, it is pretty important.

Accounting: When you are a business owner, you will not be able to understand your business, file taxes or manage your money without accounting.

Car: Most people (especially in the USA) could not really conduct their daily lives such as go to work, raise their family, etc. without a car.

Again, remember the three conditions that must be true. You don’t need to educate them. They know what a car is and how it works, and they know that it will solve their problem. You just need to convince them which car is best for them and to buy it from YOU.

Especially in the context of skilled white-collar B2B services such as agencies and similar fields, this is kind of the best most people can hope for, as there are very few things that someone legally must buy or functionally must buy.

In this context, most of the things people must buy are required if they want to be competitive. They don’t necessarily have to buy it like in the legally required or functionally required example, but they won’t succeed or have a great quality of life without it.

The problem (and where this gets weaker than the legally required and functionally required) is that in this phase, there are usually more, or a number of different possible solutions to solve their problem where it is legally required and functionally required, that is as true (although it can be to some extent)

Lead Generation: All businesses need leads. There will always be a market for lead generation services. This is competitively required if you want to have a great business. The negative side is that there are many, many different options and ways to generate leads, so it is not like they MUST buy YOUR specific way of doing it.

Email Marketing in Ecommerce: There is no law saying that Ecommerce Stores MUST do email marketing but ads are so expensive, margins are so thin, competition is so fierce, and retention is so important that there is little hope to succeed without it. The negative side is they can do DIY, DWY, DFY, and they could do it in-house, with a freelancer, with a vendor, etc. so there are different options.

Air Conditioning: No one is going to fine or arrest you for not having air conditioning (obviously), but especially during the summer in hot places, your life will be miserable without it. If you want to have a nice quality of life in this case, you must buy air conditioning.

One last time, you will not usually need to educate an Ecom brand about email marketing (unless they are an absolute beginner, not likely to be in your ICP anyways). They will educate themselves on it, and they will inherently understand how it works and why it is valuable. You just need to convince them that YOU are the one to do it for them.

Important: There is a very important phenomenon here that we need to know about. There are many situations where something will change from competitively required to functionally required, mostly as your ICP gets bigger and bigger.

For example, a lead generation service can probably be classified as Competitively Must Buy for almost all businesses out there, but there comes a point where a business gets so big and has so many sales reps, fulfillment staff, etc. that it eventually no longer is Competitively Must Buy and shifts into the Functionally Must Buy category.

Now, in many ways, they MUST generate leads. What are they going to do? Lay off all their sales reps and fulfillment staff and basically burn their business down? No, they are not. That is why now, they FUNCTIONALLY must buy lead generation services or get leads in some ways. It is now in an entirely different category, much more important than simply having a good business or quality of life.

There are many examples of this happening, but that is just one. There are often situations where something goes into the Legally Must Buy once a certain threshold is reached, such as once you get 10,000 customers, you now have to do XYZ to better secure their data or some crap like that.

This changes your entire evaluation of your offer and is important to keep in mind. Something can be in a different category of the three based on the ICP you are going after within the same industry.

So, we know the three main categories of things that people MUST buy, and I think it would be beneficial for our learning to contrast this against things that people commonly sell that are just not required to buy at all.

This will represent most things. Most things are simply “nice to have.” They are not required, and the list of reasons people will buy them are much smaller and less powerful than any of the categories above.

My Agency Program: The very thing that I sell in my pinned comment and description called Lead Generation Academy teaches businesses to generate more leads. Quite frankly, no one really MUST buy this. It is nice to have, and will help you get results faster, but there is nothing forcing you to buy it.

Most SaaS: Almost every SaaS can be done in a Google Spreadsheet/Excel or an OpenAI wrapper if you really wanted to. They are just wrappers. Even if they are not, there are very, very, very FEW SaaS that are true “must haves” for your business.

Courses & Consulting: Courses and consulting offers are usually even more optional. There is nothing forcing them to buy, so zero out of the three conditions are met. You need to get them to understand what it is, then that it is the solution and then that they should buy it from you.

After you have decided to sell things people must buy (hopefully anyways), the topic becomes how do I convince them to buy it from me?

If we heed my sage advice and sell stuff people must buy, then condition number one and two are already taken care of. They will educate themselves on it and they will know that it is the solution to their problem(s). Now, it is a matter of who they will buy it from, and we need to do our best to make sure that is us.

There are two parts that I think are important for this:

I still go back to Alex Hormozi’s Value Formula frequently as I think it is just so perfect.

The thing that I think most people do not do well as it relates to this Value Formula (as it is not like it is secret, it is one of the most well-known ones out there) is that they forget that perception equals reality for prospects going through their funnel.

Think about it.

Before someone buys from you, they have no idea if your offer is good or bad or what is inside it.

This is not complicated in any way. It is common sense.

But, many people act and execute like it is not.

It is actually quite humorous how many times people’s offer is actually quite a bit better in reality in comparison to how they market and present it in their ads, landing page, sales process, etc. There are plenty of cases where the opposite is true (ie. every info product), but for a lot of service-businesses, it happens quite often.

Before we give some examples, let’s go to Alex Hormozi’s Value Formula and quickly go over it in case you have forgotten or never seen it before.

Value = (Dream Outcome × Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time Delay × Effort & Sacrifice)

Dream Outcome: What life-changing result are they going to get?

Perceived Likelihood of Achievement: How certain are customers that this will work?

Time Delay: How fast do they see results?

Effort & Sacrifice: How much work do they have to do?

We have Dream Outcome and Perceived Likelihood of Achievement on the top and Time Delay and Effort & Sacrifice on the bottom.

Essentially, we want to completely nail the desired outcome that they want and solve it completely and we want to stack proof, evidence, and other stuff to increase their uncertainty that it will work.

Then, on the other hand, we want to decrease the amount of time this will take, and the amount of effort it will require on their end.

This is what gives an offer value, and remember back to our three conditions:

We should take care of 1 and 2 by selling stuff people must buy. That is the ideal solution for this. But, we will still essentially have to “compete” on number 3 and the Value Formula, and its application is a big part of this.

This is mostly true because there are going to be many other people (let’s call the competitors) who are selling what is essentially the same thing as you are, and they can probably do more or less the same quality of work as you do.

And basically, you need to beat them, both in reality but also, which is the title of this part, in terms of PERCEPTION.

Let’s go back to where I said I would provide an example.

A lot of people will have a great offer in reality, but they will do a terrible job of conveying this.

This is the problem.

Perception = reality.

I said before that people don’t know how good or bad your offer is or even what’s inside it until after they buy it. That is a big problem, because as a total percentage of people in your ICP, maybe 0.1% of them will buy it if you’re lucky? For most people, more like 0.0001%.

This is where it falls apart for most people.

The ICP understands the offer. They understand why they need it. They just do not believe YOU are the one to do it, and they go to someone else.

If you feel like you are constantly getting “shopped” on sales calls where they are deciding between you and someone else or multiple vendors, that is how this manifests. You did such a bad job at this part, they need to talk to someone else.

So, remember. Perception = reality. Go look through EVERY part of your funnel and make sure it matches the reality.

So many people will read marketing books and come to the conclusion they need a "unique mechanism." Then, because they have a very surface-level understanding of a very important concept, they will create a stupid-sounding name for their offer and claim it is a Unique Mechanism.

"We help Ecom brands maximize email through our Six-Step Email Revenue Vortex" or something equally stupid.

Do not do this.

The only thing you need to know about your Unique Mechanism is that your goal is to get the customer to watch your ad or VSL or read your sales page and think:

"That makes sense."

Your mechanism is simply the believable explanation for why your offer should produce the result. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not need to be (and usually should not be) fancy. You do NEED to have this though. Your Unique Mechanism needs to answer the very common question or objection of “I’ve tried this before and it failed. So why will this be different?”

Again, you need a Unique Mechanism that explains this. Without one, your offer will not have as much appeal. When you are selling things people must buy, and condition 1 and 2 are taken care of, you still need to take care of condition number 3 (why they should buy from you) and having a real Unique Mechanism will help you stand out here.

Again, a simple explanation that elicits a “that makes sense” is all you need. Usually this will take place in the form of a philosophy on how to run your business (which is a standalone part of this entire philosophy which we will talk more about in that specific part).

Guarantees have become so played out and increasingly unrealistic that they have kind of killed themselves for the entire market.

The truth is that, in my experience, guarantees don't really help much once you actually get into the sales process. Where they can help is getting someone to click your ad and book a call.

The fucked up part is that a huge percentage of people get on the call and don't even remember what the guarantee was, or whether there was one at all. If you are using a guarantee for this purpose, go ahead. But especially over time, you want to accumulate enough proof, reputation and perceived likelihood of achievement that you don't need some insane guarantee to get people to buy.

The guarantee should be the cherry on top. It should not be the reason they believe you or your entire offer. This is where most people go wrong in my opinion.

To me, there are a few “rules” that, I suppose, are my own personal opinion more than actual rules, but they are things over the years that I would really, really recommend you either do, or don’t do. Failing to do so will just lead to pain (lol).

These are not randomly made up. These will all have a negative impact on people choosing YOU to be the one to help them which when we sell stuff people must buy, all of our efforts should be focused on.

Let’s go through them one at a time and give a brief explanation.

You should seriously avoid selling done-for-you offers to beginners, and the term “beginners” doesn’t necessarily mean people who are just starting their business.

It could mean people who have successful businesses, but are beginners at the thing you do in your offer.

A good example of this is businesses who have grown to $3m/year but have simply never done paid ads before. In this scenario, they would be a beginner at paid ads.

Although they have had success in their business (obviously), a lot of the time, this group would just not be well-equipped to handle paid ads. They will have an experience issue, many self-limiting beliefs, many wrong opinions, and overall, just less likely to succeed.

You will spend about 5x the time overcoming their BS and teaching them in comparison to if you only worked with people who had previous experience with the thing you sell in your offer. The funny thing is that even if they had SOLELY negative experiences and failed every time they tried it in the past, they will still be LEAGUES above someone who has never done it before at all.

Do not guarantee some massive range like:

“We will get you 5M–500M views or your money back.”

Or:

“We will get you 5–50 booked calls per month.”

What the fuck?

Your offer could either be terrible or incredible depending on which end of the range they get. In the example above, if I pay $10,000 for 50 booked calls, that is a pretty good, reasonable offer. If I pay $10,000 for 5 calls, that is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in the world.

I understand that most of the time the range is supposed to reflect different customer circumstances, but from the prospect’s perspective, it looks REALLY stupid.

Cold traffic is not going to take the time to apply nuance and think deeply about your offer. They do not know, like, trust or care about you in any way. They will just see something stupid like this and move on with their life.

Guarantee something specific or not at all. This range causes confusion and a lack of clarity, which makes it less likely they buy from you.

This is the strangest thing in the world for me. You see these types of guarantees all the time.

Let's think logically.

If you just fucked up and didn't get them the result you promised to the point where now your guarantee is in play, why the fuck, would they want you to keep working for free?

Either have a real guarantee, or don't have one at all. You look stupid doing this. This kind of guarantee makes you look like a complete moron who doesn’t understand the problem from the previous sentence. If you do not understand that, you could not possibly be the one who can help them solve their problem. That is what people will think when they see something like that.

A very important thing is that you should never guarantee what you cannot guarantee. Many services and offers will have parts that must be either largely or fully be done by the customer and these things are out of your control

A good example of this is basically any lead generation offer. You can do everything such as the paid ads, content, funnel, pre-call flow, appointment setting, etc., but at the end of the day, the customer is the one getting on the sales calls and is the one who has to close.

If you are doing lead generation in this example, you would never want to guarantee clients, as you can do everything right and still have to refund them. You could guarantee booked calls, but never clients.

There is a piece of nuance here that comes with a lot of experience. If you know that you will get the promised result with your offer like 9/10 times for example even if you promise a result you don’t control, it is often worth it even if you have to refund 1/10 times or something like that. The increased marketing capacity from having a guarantee will usually be a net positive.

Watch more on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mattlarsen1000x

Hope this email was worth your time,

Matthew Larsen

PS. Work with me in my Skool group at https://skool.com/leadgenerationacademy