Omer (00:11.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
Welcome to episode 200.
I can't believe that this is the 200th episode.
Some of you might know the story, but when I started this podcast, I wasn't even sure if anyone would listen to it.
It was just something that I'd always wanted to do and knew that it would push me outside of my comfort zone.
So I just started.
But it's grown into something much bigger than I ever imagined.
And it's all because of you.
All of you who listen to and support this show, thank you for listening.
Thank you for telling other people about the show.
Thank you for submitting your amazing iTunes reviews.
Thank you for the positive feedback you've sent.
It all means so much to me and I'm truly grateful for your support.
And if you're a new listener, welcome.
I hope this podcast helps you get better results with your SaaS business and and you become a part of this growing community.
Now, this is a special episode and we're going to do something that I haven't done before.
I actually have three guests on the show today, and we're going to teach you something that I believe is so important to building a successful SaaS business.
Yet very few people talk about it.
When you're asking for a sale from a potential customer, whether in person or on your website, you need to present an attractive offer.
You need to tell them about your product, how it will help them, and what you'd like in return.
It sounds simple, but most of us know it's not.
And when you're struggling to make sales, a poor offer can often be the cause.
And many businesses have actually seen dramatic improvements in their sales by simply creating a better offer without actually changing nothing in their product.
And a strong or power guarantee makes your offer even more attractive and helps close more sales.
So in this episode, I'm joined by two direct response marketing experts and copywriters who are going to show us how to create an offer and and power guarantee that your prospects just can't refuse.
And then we're going to look at a real life example with one of my SaaS club plus members and how he's developing an offer and power guarantee for his SaaS business.
It's going to be fun.
I hope you enjoy it.
All right, so welcome.
So today I am joined by Jimmy Ellis, And Chris Rizzo, the founders of of Prospecting Hub.
Jimmy.
Chris, welcome.
This (03:14.770)
Thanks, Omer.
This is Jimmy Ellis and we're super excited to be here.
And Chris Rizzo is also on the line.
Omer (03:21.170)
So can you guys just give us a quick overview of Prospecting Hub and what you guys do?
This (03:27.490)
Sure.
I'll jump in and let Chris add to it.
So our primary purpose is to do performance based marketing and to break that down very quickly.
It's we don't get paid and we don't make a dollar until we make money for our clients.
So what that tends to do is make us very particular about who we work with, what we do for those companies.
And a handful of ducks have to be in a row before we take a company on, because if there are breakdowns in the sales flow or the sales pipeline, offer landing pages, anything in the process, it prevents us from making our clients money and prevents us from making any money.
So.
Omer (04:09.600)
So with Prospecting Hub, you guys not only help to generate leads and do it in a way where you're not getting paid unless you know your clients are actually closing sales, but you also work with your clients to do a bunch of work in terms of really helping them get a lot clearer about their product, their, their offer and how to differentiate themselves, how to get noticed by prospective customers.
And that's kind of really a big part of what we're going to talk about here today is, you know, how to create that offer and power guarantee.
And as sort of a workup to this episode, the two of you got together with one of our SaaS club plus members who I can introduce now, which is Charles Kelly, who's the founder of Logic 54.
Charles, welcome.
This (05:09.850)
Hi.
Thanks, Omer.
Thanks for having me.
Omer (05:12.650)
Charles, just give us again, give us a kind of a quick overview of Logic 54, like, you know, what the business does and what problem you're trying to solve.
This (05:22.890)
Yeah.
So Logic 54, we're a student transportation management company.
So we have a SaaS product which is a platform that manages student transportation.
So we're talking yellow school buses here.
Our platform manages bus routing, route efficiency.
It also manages compliance.
There's a lot of state and federal compliance issues that are involved in that.
So it manages all of your compliance, labor management, scheduling, vehicle management, everything like that is wrapped up into our SaaS platform.
And we also have a service line where we do efficiency optimizations.
The real goal of that is to save school districts money in their transportation plan that they can then allocate elsewhere to educational programming and things like that.
So yeah, we have both pieces there.
We have the SaaS product which is a great platform for people to be managing their systems on a day to day basis.
And we also have the service line, like I said, which really saves them money.
There's a consulting piece of that to handle labor management issues, driver shortages issues, things like that.
Omer (06:35.830)
So what we're going to cover today is number one, we're going to look at what is an offer and power guarantee.
Like what is it?
Why should you care?
How is it important to you as a SaaS founder?
Secondly, we'll look at how to create your own offer and power guarantee.
And then thirdly, we're going to look at a real life case study of a SaaS business.
And that's where Charlie and Logic54 come in, that Jimmy and Chris went away and worked with Charlie to look at his existing offer and guarantee and went through the process of coming up with a bunch of ideas on what a, a stronger offer and power guarantee could look like.
That's going to make it much harder for his prospects to say no.
Okay Jimmy, like over to you.
This (07:29.370)
Sure.
So I wanted to retouch on what you said about how we dig in and the history of this digging in process is that when we started doing performance based Legion, we discovered that the number one problem is that we didn't have good offers to work with.
So you could put in a tremendous amount of hard work.
Whether it was email prospecting, which is typically our primary way of getting Leads, or Google AdWords ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook advertising, almost every channel, if we didn't have a great offer that someone would respond to, it didn't matter how much money we threw into it, it didn't matter how good the, you know, the post lead sales cycle was if we couldn't get leads in the first place.
So we had to really figure out, hey, what is a process that we can use and work with companies to really discover what's important to their, their client and their ideal client that they want to work with.
So that's where this kind of came about.
And Chris and I are both, both heavy direct response guys.
We've been, you know, since the late 90s.
I started doing Internet marketing around 98, but even then the same thing applied.
It was the principle based stuff saying why should anyone do business with you?
How is that relevant?
How is that clear?
How are you making this believable?
And stuff like that.
So our offer is what we're presenting to the prospect that gets them excited, makes them want to get on A phone call with you or respond to your offer, whether that's, you know, opting in for an email list, free trial, a demo.
No matter what the call to action is or the goal is, you got to get them to respond.
So.
And we want an offer that people won't refuse.
So for example, when Chris and I are doing lead gen, if we contact a hundred companies and only get one out of 100 companies to respond, and we're doing a good job with other pieces of the program of targeting and stuff like that, we know that we have an offer problem.
Meaning that what we're saying, even though we may think we know what our ideal prospect will respond to the results that we're getting, the proof is not there.
So I said, number one, a good offer makes selling easy and automatic.
There's multiple pieces of that that make the offer easy and automatic, but that's absolutely number one.
So when we're asking companies like what your offer is, or really trying to dig into what the customers are responding to, the benefits of your product and service, what they actually care about, what are the goals, things like this, qualifying points and stuff like that.
So the reason we're asking for these things is that it's going to do things like shorten sales cycles, improve your conversion to lead, improve your response rate, and just be ultra relevant, like I'm trying to.
Chris, what would you add here before I just dig into actual questions that we use to draw out the offer for our clients, Another thing that we are looking at is what is it that our clients can do to reduce risk for their clients.
Omer (10:40.240)
A common way to do that is
This (10:41.360)
a guarantee or a free trial.
And the power guarantee takes that to a whole nother level, which we'll be discussing in a minute.
But we really want to understand their service and a lot of times we give them suggestions on how they can restructure their offer to, to essentially reduce more risk for their clients.
So that when a client sees that offer or potential client prospect sees that offer, they just can't refuse because there's nothing in it for them to lose.
Just like with Prospecting Hub, we're essentially doing lead gen and we're not gonna get paid until somebody closes that business with those leads that we got them.
Like I said, we'll go over some examples, but that's a really important piece of it too.
Omer (11:17.380)
Let's kind of start with what a typical offer looks like.
So we have this here.
Like we have the best accountant client management software in the world.
It has X features.
We have the most advanced system sign up to get started below.
So what's wrong with that?
That doesn't look too bad to me.
In fact, it looks like what you see on many websites.
This (11:41.030)
Yeah.
So you're looking at what we typically see across the board.
So one of the strategic changes that you have to think about and I would suggest everyone think about is think about your customer first and not what your software or tool can do first.
What is the specific problem that they're having?
Identify that before you start laying out the features and benefits of what you have.
So we have the best accountant, client accountant client management software in the world.
There's nothing specific that makes that believable.
There's no proof that's included with that.
There's no.
You're not describing the outcome that they're trying, that they really want, that they're trying to get.
You know, we have the most advanced system that has no meaning.
What, how is an advanced system going to help me?
You haven't addressed my specific needs.
So for example, if I'm having a hard time electronically signing tax forms for my 500 clients per year and every time I do more than batches of 10 at a time, it flakes out and I can't get them done, that causes a huge headache like you have to dig into to problems typically on almost that specific of a level and that makes it ultra relevant.
People are like, oh my gosh, I have the same exact problem every time I try to do big batches of tax forms.
The program doesn't work.
And you're saying you can do these big batches.
Okay, now you're getting my attention.
Then you know, sign up to get started below.
Like what's the reason for them to get get started?
You haven't identified a real pain point.
And you guys have probably heard this before.
You know, start with your bullets, start with pain points.
But really digging in and how to extract the pain points.
We're going to get to with Charles and Charles's offer and we're going to kind of dig this, this offer right here.
So this is the plain Jane.
This is the very generic note.
If I sent this out in an email or if I did a Google AdWords ad or if I did a landing page with this on there, you are not going to get a big response rate.
Your unique visitor to lead rate is going to be very low.
Unique visitor to lead quality is typically going to be low.
You have not identified your ideal customer.
Like I said.
All you're saying is what your tool can do.
You've said nothing about what makes your client ideal.
Omer (13:49.360)
Yeah, and I think that's, that's good because there's a lot, a lot of us get into the situation where you put up a homepage or a landing page and you're getting traffic there, but people just aren't taking the next step.
They're not following the call to action.
And it's really hard sometimes to figure out why.
So you describe like three levels of offers.
And so let's take a look through like how you can go to these levels and come up with a stronger offer here, just for this hypothetical example.
So level one you describe as a simple offer with risk reduction.
So just tell me a little bit about what that means.
This (14:34.730)
You got it.
So the risk reduction part is trying to get them internally to be like, okay, if I move forward with this, I am not going to be left off the dry.
You know, I'm not going to lose a bunch of money or a bunch of time.
The financial risk or personal time risk to me is limited or eliminated.
So we, we like to say reduce or remove as much risk as possible.
There's going to be some points we get to that make this really powerful that you'll see in just a moment.
But this format that we have on the page, this, if you are, you know, customer meets qualification, what we're saying is, who is your customer?
So if you are an accounting firm, so let's say you're trying to attract accounting firms, insert that.
And if you do this, which is the customer's part of the deal, so we're asking the potential client, like if you do this thing that we're asking you to do, which would be using our account client management software for 30 days.
So if you're an accounting firm, you use our system for 30 days, then we will deliver this result will help you save one hour of your time per client.
So this is the base, base one.
And actually there's very little risk reduction in this.
We haven't included anything like a guarantee quite yet.
But this is a typical type of offer.
It's probably a little bit better than the initial example that we had.
And it has this format that you're going to see us use throughout the process and we're going to really like nail this down.
Omer (15:59.770)
Okay, so let's just turn that into what the offer is offer would look like.
So in sort of how you just described it, it then becomes if you're an accountant and if you use our account client management Software free for 30 days, then you will save one hour of your time per client.
This (16:19.990)
You got it?
So the risk free part is that it's a free, like I said, it's a free trial.
And then like the what, the value that's going to be delivered to the, to the actual accountant is going to be one hour of time per client.
And this actually came, this example we're using actually came from a company that we worked with where we did an interview and we're saying, you know, hey, what would be valuable to you?
And he goes, well, actually most of my tax returns take four to five hours.
If you save me one hour, then I make 20% more money.
And that was a really big thing for him.
Omer (16:54.170)
Got it.
Okay, great.
So then you described level two as a simple offer with a guarantee.
This (17:02.430)
You got it.
So this is the format.
Yeah, this is the format with the guarantee.
So if you are, you know, this particular customer and if you follow what we asked you to do, so use the software for 30 days, then we'll help you achieve this result or you know, we'll give you your money back or you can, you know, use it for six months, some other thing where you're reducing their risk, whatever, whatever risk that may be.
So based on your particular niche.
Omer (17:29.320)
Great.
And that's pretty common.
I mean most people are familiar with the, with the idea of some kind of guarantee.
This (17:35.800)
Yep.
Omer (17:36.520)
Then the example becomes if you are an accountant and if you use our account client, client management software for 30 days, then you will save one hour of your time per client or your money back.
This (17:51.320)
Yep.
Omer (17:52.520)
Okay.
So that's pretty straightforward.
And then we get to the next stage, which is the idea of introducing a power guarantee.
And so before we look at sort of the next level, the level three, just tell us about how should people think about a power guarantee versus a regular guarantee?
This (18:15.280)
I think the best way is if you could think of your absolute dream client, the perfect client, or take from your current business who your absolute best client is.
And if you knew before you had them what that client was going to be like.
For example, whether it's the monetary value, how much you like to work with them, how much value deliver, how much revenue or recurring revenue or lifetime value you get out of that client.
If you knew that this client coming in was going to be this amazing long term customer, what would you be willing to offer them?
If you could read the future to me, that's kind of where it comes from.
Like for example, if I knew that we had a lead gen, a company that needed leads for the next three years.
And they were willing to give us a decent commission.
And we had previous success in that niche, driving leads that are easy, they're able to close pretty easy.
And we had a great win, win relationship for a long time.
I would bend over backwards and do almost anything, get them started because I know they're an ideal client, I know I can deliver value and I know it's going to be a long term win win.
That's what I'm going for.
And so it changes the way you think about the guarantee and it also changes how you qualify them and the criteria that you're going to use to say, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to offer this guarantee, but you also have to fit certain criteria.
And that's, that's a huge.
To me, it's the dramatic change that you're not expecting.
The dramatic change is not only the guarantee, but the requirements of the guarantee.
And I think it's going to be kind of eye opening to you guys.
Omer (19:59.030)
Yeah, I think that's, that's a great point because we need to talk about qualification and we'll do that.
But I think the sort of, the instant alarm bell that will go off in most people's head is when you start talking about some of these power guarantees, it's like, wow, if I start offering this to everybody, I'm going to be out of business.
This (20:18.310)
That's exactly right.
Yep.
So what you just said is usually when we first propose this, without the clients understanding the criteria, the initial reaction is, oh, I could never do that.
And once we explain the process and we identify these things, I think you'll be excited to work on your power guarantee and say, oh my gosh, look at this guy.
Not only am I able to offer this guarantee, but the quality of leads coming in are just spot on.
And it's kind of a magical process that happens, in my opinion.
And Chris and I said, we've been using ours for a couple of years and it does nothing but produce high quality leads for us.
And that's why we offer it as a service.
I mean, it was a game changer for us.
Omer (21:05.649)
One of the things that we notice is when you have a power guarantee
This (21:09.330)
going back to that first point, it makes selling simpler because the potential client, your prospect, is so interested, they almost are trying to sell themselves to you.
And it's much less work for us to actually close a client because of that.
Omer (21:26.250)
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.
Okay, so then we go to this level three, our simple offer.
Now becomes an offer with a power guarantee.
And basically what you guys are saying is you're taking your existing offer with, you know, with a guarantee or risk reversal and you're adding what to it?
This (21:48.200)
You're adding pain to the company that you're working with.
So it's almost like, oh, and to
Omer (21:55.600)
be clear, to be clear from a founder's perspective, you're adding pain for yourself, not for the customer.
This (22:02.280)
Exactly.
Because.
So it's like what typically happens is you work with a company, maybe it's an agency, maybe it's, it doesn't matter who it is.
But there's no, there's no shared risk.
So there's, you know, there's no, you know, I have, I have kids.
Chris has, you know, I have three, three little boys.
You know, if I say, hey, you know, you stop playing your iPad because it's dinner time.
And they don't.
There's no other repercussion besides me just saying that, you know, there's no time out or I'm not going to take it away or spankings and stuff like that, then they simply won't listen.
And that kind of comes into play in these offers.
What we're saying is if we don't deliver on what we promise, then there is going to be pain to us.
And so that could be giving a fee back.
So for example, I'll share the one that, you know, it's coming up, but the one that we use is if you qualify.
Yeah, here it is.
So like this is the accountant example.
So if you're an accountant, who files.
So there's these requirements, who files at least 100 tax returns per season.
So what we're saying is that for these accountants, they have to be a certain size that we know are ideal for our software.
We know they're gonna get the value.
So 100 returns per season.
And if you use our account client management software for 30 days, then you'll save an hour of time per client or we pay you $500.
So not only is it free to use the software, but we're gonna give you 500 bucks.
That's how confident we in on the value of our service and these types of offers.
An additional strength that they have is the difficult process of getting people to switch.
No one likes to switch service providers unless they are angry with them and can't stand the current service provider, regardless of the service.
It could be website hosting, it could be your SaaS product, it could be anything getting people to switch that already has a current service that may be good enough, but not excellent or not great.
That is a really tall order.
And these types of guarantees work very well to get companies to try something different because of the nature of them and because there's this penalty to them saying, oh yeah, if you waste my time and if you waste my team's time, you're going to pay.
That's kind of like.
And it resonates really well.
You'll, I think if you'll find even with your own staff, it resonates really well.
Put yourself in a situation where you're trying to evaluate a new product or service.
If you knew that if it just did not work for you, but you met these criteria, they would have to pay you money.
I'm much more likely, I've not only removed the risk, but I've actually added this potential to gain, to make a little bit of money, a little redemption on the back end.
Omer (24:45.740)
And just explain why, when you said, if you're an accountant who files at least 100 tax returns per season, why is it important to put in at least 100 tax returns per season?
I mean, I know this is hypothetical, but there's a reason behind that, right?
This (24:59.270)
Sure, sure.
So the value delivered to the accountants is because the company knows that if they have at least 100 tax returns, that's the ideal qualification thing.
We know that our software in this very specific scenario absolutely saves at least an hour of time, like based on what you already know, working with previous customers.
So if you know, okay, my ideal customer has at least 100 tax returns per season, that makes them a deal.
This is the slam dunk win.
There's no way that they're not going to see tremendous value that we could put this guarant with.
Then I can use a guarantee if they don't have at least 100 tax returns.
It actually opens up some other logic.
But basically you can see you can say no.
And Omer, you know, you and I had this conversation before.
A lot of companies just, they want to take every single possible client.
And the problem with that is that it eats away at your ideal client and it eats away at your focus.
And you know, some companies are very early stage where they kind of have to take on as many clients as they have.
But as soon as you're able to kind of cherry pick, I highly suggest it.
And this enables you to do that, these types of offers and guarantees and enable you to really hedge your bets on only getting the high quality leads that you want to focus on, deliver value for and grow your Business with.
Omer (26:14.820)
Yeah.
And number one, it rules out people who are not accountants but would like to sign up for your product free for 30 days and get 500.
This (26:21.380)
Absolutely.
Omer (26:23.070)
It also rules out people who are accountants but maybe only have a handful of clients and for whatever reason, the way that the product is designed, it wouldn't help them to see the benefits as well as somebody who was working on a larger scale.
So it's a good way of again qualifying people.
And we'll talk more about that as we, as we go along.
So you also had another example of the Power guarantee with a competitor factor, which I thought was really interesting.
So tell us about that.
This (26:52.520)
This is my favorite.
My favorite, My favorite is the competitor power guarantee because there's a little shock and awe to it, especially if people are familiar with the competitors in this space.
So an example I would give would be like Salesforce for example.
Everybody knows Salesforce is like a high end CRM system, whatever.
If you're a smaller company, you're growing, you're trying to switch someone from Salesforce.
What you could say is, you know, try our, you know, I'm going to call it Chris Force.
Try Chris Force for 30 days and if you don't, you know, believe it delivers more value than Salesforce, then we'll pay for three months of Salesforce for you to go back.
So you'll pay the fees for them to go back to their original product or solution.
And that type of a guarantee is dramatically different.
Almost no one that you know of has ever seen something like that.
It also ensures that if you take the risk of trying the new software or product or service, that the repercussion is going back to what you previously knew was working or was good enough.
So we're trying to get people out of this good enough or mediocre or, you know, I guess I won't cancel it to trying this new thing.
And if for any reason the new product doesn't work out, you can always go back and there's going to be no additional fees to go back.
This company is so confident that they're going to pay the fees for you to go back.
I'm already feeling sold just listening to you say that, Chris.
For software, it's a very special software.
Chris actually answers every single lead and every single call personally.
Omer (28:21.730)
So I mean, it's a good point because finding a sort of a standard guarantee is not that unusual.
You can go to a lot of places and be like, yeah, I try for 30 days for free.
Or you try it and you Get a refund if you're not happy.
But it's really unusual to see this type of guarantee.
And I think it really gets people to pay attention because instantly you're like, well, it's a really ballsy kind of offer and there's got to be a good reason for that.
Otherwise you know, these guys wouldn't be saying something like that.
This (29:07.420)
You're absolutely right.
So when we use our offer and we send it out, the main comment that I get is, you know, we noticed that you're basically super confident in your offer and that you'll do it based on performance and that, you know, if it doesn't work out, you're going to pay me.
These people are getting offers like this.
I mean, the email prospecting that we're doing is becoming extraordinarily popular, but it's not hindering our success at all because we.
Because it's not the, the tactical strategy of outbound email prospecting.
It's the crafting of the offer used with it.
Same thing happens with, with Google AdWords to landing pages or Facebook ad to landing pages.
The reason we're so excited about these types of offers and power guarantees is it's not limited to just like these email offers.
It's any landing page, any offer across almost, almost any medium.
I mean, yes, there are certain instances where you're just trying to build a relationship and nurture that relationship over time.
But when it comes to making an offer, having an offer like this will get you a much larger response, will hedge towards your ideal customers.
If you try it.
I mean, we're encouraging you obviously take this formula and this little structure and use it and try it.
And if you don't get a, I'm going to describe it as shocking increase in response rate from anything that you're doing, I'll be blown away because we have yet to not see, you know, something like a 50, 100% increase in response rate, if not higher.
I think ours is 3 to 500% more more leads and then the leads that we get, we close.
You know, we're closing like, you know, one out of 10 leads and that's not a good close rate when we're charging up front.
And now that we do risk free, I mean, if they qualify, almost everybody says yes because why, why wouldn't they?
I'm not, you know, I'm.
What I'm excited about is to show you what we did for, for Charles Logic 54, because I think his is a pretty interesting offer as well.
And I think you're really going to love the pieces we pulled out of his.
His clients information.
Omer (31:04.530)
So the third key takeaway was that, you know, really is that you're reserving your best offer for your best clients and you're telling them who they are.
And that really leads to the question of like, qualification.
Like, how do you make sure that you are coming up with a qualifying criteria that's going to get the right people in and it's going to exclude or repel the wrong people.
This (31:33.080)
We always do an interview.
A lot of times we'll do multiple interviews.
So one would be, we're gonna do an interview just like you guys should, with an ideal current client.
So if you have an ideal current client, that's gonna be one of your best interviews.
The other person would be like, like the business owner, so to speak.
So for example, we interviewed Charles to really get a good idea of his customer.
But the other version would be to interview one of Charles's clients.
And the reason we're going to do that is because Charles has a specific understanding of his client based on dealing with them.
And then talking directly to the customer and hearing it from them directly has a different impact and usually get a slightly different response.
We like to try to use the same words.
So for example, when we interviewed Charles, he had a handful of things that he constantly heard people say.
And we use those and work those into the offer.
Because if we use those same words and the same problems going after new customers, the people that respond to the offer will be very similar and have the same problems and will receive the same value in Charles's solution because they identify with the same problem.
So I would highly recommend not guessing.
I did AB split testing for 8 years at A.
At a B split testing company, a marketing agency up in Jacksonville.
And we did value proposition testing.
A lot of.
But a lot of times we use kind of a formula and we're like, okay, what are some of the benefit points of your product or service?
And that's probably what you guys are familiar with, is you're taking the product and you're analyzing the product.
What does this product do?
You're not saying, what does this customer need?
What are these very specific problems that my customer has?
And if you can get the list of problems and complaints and stuff like that that they're having on a daily basis, and then you address them with, with your product, it really, really changes the process.
So we do this.
I would highly suggest every.
With every single new offer that you present, you do one of these interviews and so we have a handful of questions that we use that helps us extract this.
So, for example, with Charles, we said, what is something that your customer hates?
What is something your customer hates?
Sounds like a crazy, crazy question to ask.
But they'll typically go into all the problems.
Oh, I can't stand, like the accounting.
I can't stand what I'm trying process these tax returns, and it takes me so much longer than it should.
I have such a hard time getting feedback from my clients back and forth for them to e sign their documents so I can finish their tax filing and deliver their refund.
Even though they're getting a refund, there's no urgency there.
How do I.
You know, these are the very specific problems with Charles.
You know, one of the things he said was, we can't stand seeing half empty buses.
You're like, well, why would that.
Why would half empty buses have any impact?
Well, that means that they're not efficiently using their bus routing.
They could be potentially using less buses and have less cost to the actual school or area in terms of bus costs and school costs.
So something you.
Something your customer hates is something that we like to use.
Something your customer loves is another question that we like to use.
And they might be like, oh, we love when clients respond on time to get back to us quickly, and they give us all the tax filing documents up front.
So we just have to do our work.
All these questions, they tie directly into what makes an ideal customer.
With Charles, he had a handful of responses that he came back to us with something.
Another one thing their customers hated was budget cuts.
You're like, why is budget.
You know, yeah, the administrators have these budget cuts for schools, and I'm in Florida, and there's.
I mean, we have some of the smallest budgets for schools there is, and the budget cuts come down the line all the time.
I have three kids in elementary school.
I see these all the time.
And we were raising money to keep the air conditioners on at our schools just a month ago.
Yeah.
Which is.
Which is crazy.
You think, well, how much could that cost?
Well, it's typically pretty expensive, but if a budget cuts coming down the line and you could potentially save them a big chunk of money with your bus routing software, then that's a really great way to get their attention and offer up a service that they probably never expected could help them with the budget cut.
So we'll.
We'll dip into that.
So.
So number one is.
Is asking these very specific questions to your clients to extract those results that are very they're more on the emotional, day to day level.
They're not on this broad spectrum.
We want to save time and money.
That means nothing.
That means nothing.
Save time and money and efficiencies, whatever means nothing to them.
Prevent me from having to cut classes and teachers from budget cuts.
That is a very specific reason.
These accountants guys are like, you know, yeah, it saved time and money, but save me the frustration of having to go back and forth with over a hundred clients on a monthly basis in March and April.
That's what accountants do.
That is their deep seated pain point.
It was not the will save you time and money.
It's the frustration with having to go back and forth with your clients to get documents, tax documents, e signing all these little things that make an impact to help the accountant do their job.
And when you dig into that, you instantly attract them.
But making them ideal is based on your history.
So if you look at your current ideal clients, the ones that you love the most, what makes them ideal?
Sometimes it is not a company size.
It may be something like their temperament.
It may be something like they are fast, high growth instead of a consistent monthly like I know we have a handful of, we work with sales trainers and every single one of them wants to work with high growth.
The reason why they want to work with high growth companies is because they constantly have sales training needs.
They're hiring new salespeople on a regular basis.
They need to train them and retrain them on a regular basis.
If they are not high growth, then he trains the salespeople one time and maybe once a year, every couple of years, he does a refresh.
He doesn't want that.
He wants to be able to do things monthly or quarterly with a growing sales team because every new person that they have to train is another training fee and ongoing working with those clients.
Omer (37:51.370)
So there's a bunch of questions that you really need to ask your customers or clients that you have, you know, to really get some deeper insights into what they love, what they hate, and so on.
And it sounds like a power guarantee to get it right.
You really need to be in a place where you already have customers, you have already helped them, a number of them get great results.
And then it becomes a lot easier to then say, okay, what results do we get?
Do we help these people achieve?
And then sort of reverse engineer that and sort of figure out, okay, what characteristics or attributes do these customers have that we get the best results for?
And so that kind of helps us to figure out the qualifying criteria.
Now, if somebody is at kind of at an early stage.
Maybe they've just launched.
Maybe they just have, you know, 10 customers or something like that and they haven't really figured out what that power guarantee is or what that ideal customer is or etc.
You know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're probably not ready to start offering power guarantees, but maybe you can go down a level.
So, you know, we talked about these three levels.
Like first one was a simple offer with risk reduction.
The second was a simple offer with a guarantee.
And then the third one was a simple offer with the power guarantee.
So would you say if somebody kind of isn't at a point yet where they have enough customers or enough results to be able to clearly come up with a qualifying criteria, then maybe they just start with a simple offer with risk reduction and sort of work up from level one to two to three as and when they have enough customers and results to show.
This (39:50.070)
Absolutely.
Nope.
I think eliminating as much risk as possible for the initial offer would be good.
You know, we talked to quite a few companies that don't qualify for our program because they don't meet our criteria.
So for example, if you don't have a proven sales process, so you don't have currently, you can't give me like what's your current cost per acquisition, what's the current lifetime value of your customer or life cycle, like recurring revenue life cycle of your customer.
If you don't have some of these metrics, we already know that you're still trying to work out those kinks in your sales process where if we get you the qualified leads, you're not going to be able to, you're not going to be able to follow up and close those leads.
So we make some, so we can, we can actually make any kind of revenue on the close new business.
So the risk reversal works really well.
A lot of times we suggest that they especially early, early stage if you're able to let as many people use the software for free as you can, like free free.
So you can, you can collect a handful of case studies and testimonials for the site and really learn what makes them an ideal customer.
Once you do that and you can see the value and you can interview them after you use the software where they can say, oh my gosh, the best part about using Logic 54 was, you know, we cut our busing fees like 20% and we didn't have to, you know, apply our budget cuts to teachers and programs and you know, they will gush about the value of your product or service.
Even if there's hard cost, it's worth letting someone use your product or service for a few months to get those because all that stuff goes right back in your marketing materials and can help you craft a stronger guarantee or a power guarantee when you're ready to.
Omer (41:28.340)
Great.
Okay, so let's just pull all this together and just summarize it for everybody who's listening to this in terms of how to create your offer and power guarantee.
And we can also look, before we talk about Charlie and Logic 54, we can actually look at your own offer and power guarantee with Prospecting Hub.
So number one, we sort of have touched on this in terms of there's a right way and a wrong way to approach this.
And so just kind of sum that up for us in terms of what's the key takeaway here.
This (42:08.250)
The common approach that we see is that people are taking their product features and benefits and then trying to find a customer that kind of meets those features and benefits needs versus what we call like a more frictionless approach, which is you really deeply understand their needs and their problems and then you associate your product those problems so it's leading with them and with the customer's need first and then with what your product can do.
A lot of times we just see this product first approach where they're saying take a look at the 27 benefits of my awesome product.
You need to use it because we're the best versus you know, we help accounting firms resolve problems with communications, with their frustrating communications with their clients back and forth, e filing, online document storage and things that prevent them from doing their job better.
Omer (43:05.280)
And I think that that common approach in terms of if you, as long as you're going beyond features and you're talking about advantages and benefits, that's not a bad place to be.
But it might not get you the kind of results and growth and leads that you hope for.
Whereas if you switch to more of a customer driven approach where you're really doing a much better job to understand what their objectives are with their priorities and the criteria and so on, and then kind of reverse engineering that, then you're going to be in a much better place.
So to recap like the four key elements that, that you need to be able to build an offer and a power guarantee like number one is knowing exactly who your customer is and who they're not.
And we've talked about that.
We want to, we want to kind of do this kind of self qualification process where we make it really easy for our ideal customers to know who they are and to basically filter out everybody else.
Number two, we're clear about what your customer must do in order to qualify.
And we've looked at a number of examples of that.
And number three is what your customer will achieve as a result.
And then fourthly, what you have to do for the customer to achieve that.
And so that really kind of goes on to the idea of the power guarantee and the risk reversal and those kinds of things.
This (44:39.120)
Yep.
Omer (44:40.880)
Let's talk about prospecting Hub, because your offer and power guarantee is also something that's evolved.
And you talked about this a little earlier, but tell us about like what happened when you went from just say, you know, kind of a standard offer to having this, this offer empower guarantee in place for your own business.
This (45:06.940)
Sure.
So when we, when we started, we were doing outbound email or you know, pay per click to a landing page and basically saying that we'll do risk free lead generation, but it was just with a standard guarantee.
So we talk to you, we'd figure out what kind of leads that you're looking for.
And you know, we would basically say we believe we can get leads for our contact this many companies for this price.
I'll give you just a rough example.
We'll contact a hundred companies for you to get leads and it'll be $1,000 for every 100 companies.
And if for any reason you don't, you don't get any leads.
I didn't say sales, I said you don't get any leads, then you don't pay.
We'll send you your money back.
And then usually was like 50% up front.
So they send us 500 bucks.
We go through the process, we craft their offer.
We would contact the 100 companies, we' feel the responses, send them the leads that we got.
And if they didn't get any leads, we send the 500 back.
If they got the, if they got leads, then we would invoice them for the second $500.
And you know, that's like the quick and dirty example.
And this is where we discovered all the problems with the sales process and the offer problems.
Because they didn't have great offers, they didn't have a well defined sales process.
We would send, you know, a company's 10 or 20 leads in the first couple of weeks and we would follow up and say, hey, what's the quality of those leads?
How's it going?
And they'll be like, oh, we haven't gotten to those yet.
So this is what helped us determine, okay, what makes an ideal an ideal customer.
Ideal customer has a sales process.
An ideal customer can follow up with the leads within 24 hours or so.
An ideal customer has a way for us to track where they're at in the process.
So if they get 20 leads, I can see, oh, this was a low quality lead.
Oh, this person said they already had a solution and they're not looking for anything else.
This one said they're not interested.
Whatever it may be.
There's a way for us to kind of have an idea because we're in a win.
We're looking for this win win where we win when our clients win.
And if they're not even doing a good job following up the leads, then we know it can't be successful and we're just wasting our own time.
And we're not even doing them a quality service.
We're not delivering any kind of value because they're not closing new business.
And the second part was that some of them had very long sales cycles.
So an eight month sales cycle, a one year, a two year sales cycle.
Well, how long can we do this?
Then determine that the quality of leads really isn't ideal for the client and they're actually not closing any of them.
So six months later they're not going to say, hey, I want all my money back.
So there was a bunch of those experiences that we had.
It's the same thing you guys have probably dealt with or are dealing with early successes and failures really help you define what the ideal customer should look like.
Omer (47:50.260)
Yeah.
And if people want to get kind of a better sense of the prospecting hub offer, just go to prospectinghub.com and take a look at the homepage.
And then we've talked about this earlier anyway in terms of a qualification, but you know, I think you guys have done a good job there in terms of identifying like who is a good customer and who isn't.
And so again, from looking at your homepage, it's pretty clear that you know who this is going to work for.
And then beyond that, when you talk to people, you're able to lay out more detailed criteria to make sure that you know before you get any further in terms of a relationship, you're able to identify whether you're working with the right people.
So I think that's a really good thing.
And so, you know, check that out, take a look.
I think just from looking at your homepage, you know, there's a lot that people can learn.
I want to Move on to talking about Logic 54.
Charlie's been sitting there very patiently and want to start talking.
This (48:52.910)
Absolutely.
Omer (48:54.110)
So what we did here was.
So, as I mentioned, you know, Charlie is one of our SaaS Club plus members, and I introduced him to you guys and basically we said, okay, for this episode, we're coming up to doing episode 200.
Let's do something special.
And it was really about, let's see what this process looks like in practice.
And so you guys have been working over the last few weeks on sort of laying out the logic for 54 business what the customers are like.
You know, you've done a number of things, so let's just set the context.
Charlie, you explained a little bit about what Logic 54 does.
Just give a recap here of in terms of your ideal customer.
What kind of results have you been able to deliver for those people?
Because I think that will help to set the context for when we start talking about the power guarantee.
This (49:45.980)
Yeah.
Our ideal customers is typically a public school district, you know, looking to save money on student transportation.
As Jimmy mentioned before, you know, maybe something like a budget cut, which is a big catalyst for them to need to save money.
Also things like just knowing that their operation is not.
Not efficient and they know there's money that can be saved there.
So generally speaking, what we do is we go into a school district and we'll do a bus route optimization, you know, an efficiency study.
And our results are generally a savings between 20 and 30% on average for a school district.
So that can be quite sizable.
I mean, if you're talking about a
Omer (50:26.140)
million percent of their budget.
This (50:27.980)
Yeah.
Of their transportation budget, which is generally what we find.
So it's a very significant savings and a good project for them to do.
So that on average, you know, just summing that up, you know, they spend around a million dollars a year.
And you're saying that logic 54 year study could save them potentially 200 to $300,000.
Is that about right?
Yes, absolutely.
Yep.
Yep.
That's big.
Great.
Omer (50:53.350)
That's good context.
So this is a really good example because, I mean, you have some really good results to, to show for here.
And that helps us sort of figure out who those ideal customers are.
But let's look at the current offer.
So just kind of describe this to us, Charlie, in terms of, like, what the offer looks like today.
This (51:14.560)
Yeah, I'd say we are currently, you know, somewhere around a level two offer where we've definitely, you know, recognized the risk involved with these types of projects.
If you can Imagine if you're going to restructure an entire student transportation system.
There's a lot of risk there, right, for a school to do that.
There's a lot of, you know, in terms of how they're serving the school community, there could be parent upset based on changes made to the system.
So there can be a lot of risk for a school district to take one of these on.
So we've recognized that and we've put in a guarantee.
And our guarantee essentially works.
You know, we will ask them to send us their, their bus routes and their data.
Then we'll review it, we'll come up with a projection of what we can save.
And then our guarantee was just simply if we don't save you X amount of money, then you don't pay us at all for the project.
So it was really at like a level two, trying to remove that risk, giving them that guarantee to say, you know, okay, if this doesn't work, then I'm not going to have a big expense here that I need to pay for the project.
But we never moved into the power guarantee to the level three guarantee.
So that was kind of a shift in working with Jimmy and Chris and understanding what that was and how it worked.
Omer (52:32.590)
Yeah, and so I think the level two is a great place to be and that's working for you.
And the real goal for here, for us was really to figure out what can we do to accelerate that growth.
So Jimmy, what kind of questions did you ask Charlie?
What sort of process did you go through?
I know you did a lot of stuff together, so give us like, you know, the sort of the one minute version of that.
This (53:02.450)
The question that we almost always lead with is tell us what's worked best in the past, like so far, so far in your journey with Logic 54, like, give me the context.
How did you get to where you are today?
And Charlie had a great history of how the product and service started and how it's kind of molded because the SaaS portion of what he's doing.
So he told you about the assessment, but that initial assessment turns into a monthly software charge to manage the new bus routes, which was, you know, so we discovered this on the call and so he told us the story about how he, you know, he originally started doing the assessments.
He had great context about the process problems that the administrators had.
And some of those points that came up, for example, were the things that I kind of alluded to earlier.
I said, you know, the half full buses.
Another thing that he mentioned was angry parents because if their bus shows up late and their kids have to get on the bus late and they have to miss work to stay with their child until the bus gets there to pick them up, these are very real problems.
And when a parent calls principals and administrators at schools who then run it up the line of whoever manages the bus routing and manages transportation, those people kind of get lit on fire a little bit and get.
And that is a regular concern.
Another thing that said Charles brought up, you know, I said, hey, what, what, what is the main reason when you're talking to them on the phone, what are some of the things that they are saying?
Like what are the actual words that they're saying that leads to a good fit and one of these assessments and stuff like that, that leads to a great client?
And he was saying things like cuts.
He also said things like when new people take over that transportation role and they're looking to make a change or improve.
That's a very, it was a very interesting piece that he said that he brought up because a lot of older individuals that may have had the job for 10 or 15 or 20 years, they.
They just want it to run smoothly and that's it.
Whereas some new people will dig in a little bit and they'll be looking for a change to see if they can make improvements in transportation or in that niche.
And that, that could even potentially go into the, you know, how we qualify leads, or how you'd qualify leads.
Hey, who do we go after?
Do we know of any schools that has a new person responsible for transportation?
That would be a great way to pre qualify a lead and stuff like that.
So we also ask the questions like, what does your customer love?
What does your customer hate?
Those things really get to the core, emotional core of what's going on.
That's where things like, I hate angry parents, I hate when buses show up late, I hate when I see a half empty bus.
Things like that came up.
Chris, do you have any other kind of key questions that we asked in the initial interview?
Yeah, I think one question I really
Omer (55:51.290)
like to ask is what are the
This (55:52.610)
most common complaints you hear from your clients that your service solves?
That kind of turns the question around a little bit.
And I think that's an easy way to think about that question.
The other thing I wanted to throw in there is if you're developing this power guarantee internally for your own company, talk to the people up front who are talking to the clients a lot.
That might be you as the owner, but it also might be a salesperson it might be a client, customer service type person.
They may hear this stuff all day
Omer (56:19.990)
long and have ideas and have answers.
This (56:22.230)
These questions you may have never thought of even as the owner of the company.
Yep, absolutely.
So we also find that things like live chat records and customer support requests and customer support tickets and customer support calls are fantastic ways to really get to the emotional core of your ideal client or customers are going to respond to your offer.
So those are the people, like I said that Chris said, they're on the front lines feeling those responses, getting those questions asked.
The support tickets are huge.
Support tickets are going to really tell you what people are concerned about and what they're having problems with.
Omer (56:59.030)
Great.
And then so you came up with two versions of the offer, Empower guarantee.
And so let's look at the first one, which was really around the monetary pain.
I'll quickly read this out for everybody.
So need to cut $300,000 out of your next year's budget.
Bus optimization system means you don't need to cut teachers or programs and continue to make teachers and parents angry.
Again, you can save.
We can save you that money by saving on transportation while improving your busing and saving you time.
On average, we're saving you 300,000 to $500,000 within 12 weeks.
Our services are 100% guaranteed to work.
If you don't save what we promise, then we don't get paid.
Our services will be free to you.
In fact, if you implement our simple system and we don't save you money, which has never happened, we'll pay you $5,000 to start.
We'll do a free data study.
And then if it makes sense to you, we'll set up the system and get you started quickly.
Setup costs you nothing.
So, Charlie, how does that sound?
This (58:13.920)
As he bulks like now, Charlie, we also put in things like.
So to be upfront with everybody on the call here, we did not like verify this through Charlie before because I don't know, for example, 300 to 500,000 within 12 weeks, that's actually not correct because it's actually across a year.
Based on the examples that we said.
If they make, let's say in this instance, 300 to 500,000, they'd have to be doing at least a million in transportation costs at the minimum.
And it would be, what, 52 weeks or a year, whatever, whatever those criteria are, you'd customize them for the offer.
But this would be basically saying, and this is also taken from our conversation with Charlie where he said, hey, if we give you A free assessment where we say, we're going to save you.
Let's say it's $200,000 and they don't actually save $200,000.
Then the fees for that service, he.
They're free.
So that was part of this process.
So, Charlie, definitely continue where you're, you know, ask questions and tell us what you're concerned about most with a guarantee like this.
You know, I think initially looking at this guarantee, the first part of it, you know, we're going to save you 3 to 500,000 in 12 weeks, or our services are free.
That's.
That's part of that level two that we've been doing, and that's been working really well for us.
You know, then you get down into the pair.
The power guarantee, right, where, okay, if this doesn't work, we're gonna pay you five grand.
So as a founder, that's pretty scary because you get, you get to the point, you know, that Omar pointed out to where, oh, am I gonna give away the company here?
Right, right.
That's sort of your initial gut reaction.
You're like, oh, wow, okay.
But as you really look at it, if we were to need to honor our guarantee, services would be free.
I mean, we're going to be out more than five grand to begin with, just based on the work we put into it.
And it really forces you to start to think about who that ideal customer is.
Because as I start to think about that, I can really say, oh, it actually makes sense for that person.
Right.
So I think the criteria and having a qualified customer is what really makes it palatable for the founder to say, oh, we can actually do this.
This makes some sense.
You know, and then we, when we talk there, there are some additional criteria because, you know, we're not just limiting to, to this.
For example, when we were talking to Charles, I said, hey, how many bus routes do they have to have for them to save approximately 200 grand?
And you're like 20 bus routes.
Oh, okay.
So we can say if you are a school administrator and you have at least 20 bus routes, blah, blah, blah.
So I think that leads into our next version of this Omer, because I think we do have that criteria in the second version of this offer.
Omer (1:01:09.660)
Yeah.
So the second one was sort of a competitor name.
This (1:01:16.060)
Okay.
Omer (1:01:17.100)
You know, I just sort of put some notes together.
I don't know if I missed that specifically.
This (1:01:20.580)
No problem.
Omer (1:01:21.100)
Yeah, we definitely, I mean, you know, this is not, I want to be clear.
This is not something that is a final version that Charlie's going to start putting on his website tomorrow.
But it's clearly getting us to figure out how we get to that level three.
And I think it's important to show the listeners and viewers the process that we're going through to get there, because that's just as important.
And so with this one, what's different here?
This (1:01:51.570)
So this one, the main part is a second paragraph.
So we go into.
Our services are 100% guaranteed to work.
If you don't save what we promised, then we don't get paid.
Our services will be free to you.
In fact, if you implement our simple system and we don't save you money, you owe us nothing.
And we pay for three months of Bus Boss, which is Charles, one of Charles's top competitors.
So we're saying if this doesn't work, we're going to pay for our number one competitor.
Or if you knew that they were already using BusBoss, you know, the company that they were already working with, that they were already having success with.
So to me, this is the crazy guarantee where you're saying, we're so confident that you're going to love it and we're going to deliver these results and we're going to do it with, within this time frame, this framework, as long as you meet this criteria or we're going to pay for three months of your previous service or a service that we think will suit your needs better.
Because you know, for whatever reason, it didn't work out with us and you gave us that opportunity.
So this type of guarantee like that, once again, when we send these types of guarantees out and these types of offers out, they get a bigger response every single time.
It's just unusual, it's different.
It's not just because it's different, it's relevant.
So we're not saying anything, we're not just saying give you $5,000 back.
We're saying we're going to pay for a competitor because no matter what happens, we're gonna put you in a better situation.
So think it, think about that.
Regardless of what happens with leads, when you talk to them on the phone, your goal is to deliver the best possible service.
And if that is not yours, you're gonna help them get to that best service.
That is a principle based way to deal with clients where you're truly after their best needs.
And that's where we try to come from.
Because if someone's not a good fit for us, we try to recommend what they should do next because we know they're not a Good fit for us.
We know we can't really deliver the value, but we may know someone that can do exactly what they need because they've shared with us their history.
Same thing with, with Charles and Logic 54.
Let's say they had 5,000 bus routes and for some reason his Service couldn't handle 5,000 bus routes.
Well, he probably knows a service that, that could.
Omer (1:04:05.470)
That's great.
So we need to wrap up here.
Charlie, just one quick question for you.
Is like in terms of these two versions we looked at, in terms of paying people $5,000 or paying three months for them to use your competitor or keep using your competitor, which one do you think resonates would resonate the most with your customers or prospective customers?
This (1:04:29.550)
With our particular customer base, it would really be the competitor model.
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's a function of working with public school districts too in terms of how they can receive money and all those kinds of things.
Omer (1:04:42.130)
Right.
This (1:04:44.250)
But certainly, yeah, they have a challenge they're looking to address and they need a solution, you know, so in terms of a guarantee, you know, like Jimmy said, if we're not able to provide that solution, you know, we're willing to get you in that right direction to make sure that you can get those challenges met, you know, so I think definitely the competitor model would resonate more.
Omer (1:05:05.630)
Great.
And so in terms of next steps, you guys are going to keep working together on this and Charlie, you're going to be figuring out what that sort of ideal offer and power guarantee looks like to help you take Logic 54 to that level three we talked about.
And then, you know, what I would love to do is to get you guys back at some point, maybe in a few months time, and let's do a follow up and maybe just talk about some results and what you learned from the process of doing that.
But beyond that, you know, I want to thank you guys for joining me today.
Jimmy, Chris, thanks for helping sort of take us through the process of, you know, what an offer is and a power guarantee, the different three levels we talked about and sort of step by step how to create your own offer and power guarantee.
And Charlie, thanks for joining us and being, you know, willing to share what you could do with Logic 54 and hopefully how this new direction we're heading is going to just mean good things, you know, more good things for your business.
Now if you guys want to check out more about Prospecting Hub, you can go to prospectinghub.com and if you want to take a look at Logic 54.
It's Logic 54 and Jimmy and Chris, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
This (1:06:27.540)
Well, we have very easy email addresses.
It's just Jimmy, ProspectingHub.com and Chris@ProspectingHub.com you're welcome to send us an email directly or go through our site.
Omer (1:06:37.220)
Awesome.
And Charlie, what's the best way for people to reach you?
This (1:06:41.940)
Yeah, same here.
Email is great.
Charles kelly@logic54.com or of course, our website.
Omer (1:06:48.810)
Awesome.
Thanks guys.
It was a pleasure and really appreciate you making the time to join me and share everything here.
