I love great reads, especially those that help bridge the marketing-sales gap. Which is why I was so excited when a friend recommended Mark Joyner’s book The Irresistible Offer. This book took many of the think-and-feel aspects of the buying process, and broke them down into great topics to consider. This book was filled with so much great information pertaining to marketing strategy! Which is why I’m presenting to you, awesome marketing reader, this article: The Irresistible Offer – The Book Review!
The Four Questions
Joyner opens by asking you to consider the four questions buyers make when considering an offer:
What are you trying to sell me?
How much does it cost?
Why should I believe you?
What’s in it for me?
We ask ourselves these questions every time we open our wallet. Buying a coffee? Taking the kids to dinner? Purchasing a new copying machine for the office? Choosing to host a four-day conference for your whole team in Las Vegas? All of these situations pertain to the above. And they’re some of the most important pain-points that marketers need to address when convincing a customer to buy.
Emotion v Logic
Joyner’s major focus in this book emphasizes that the four questions each pertain to either emotion or logic, with special emphasis on the emotion part.
What, why and how-much are each concrete, logical questions with concrete, logical answers. But the final question is purely emotional. It addresses how the customer will perceive their purchase, how they anticipate they’ll feel after the purchase, and the status or solutions that will come from the purchase a result.
Customers decide with emotion and justify with logic
Despite a full 75% of the reasons people purchase being logically based, that final, emotional 25% is the factor that ends up dictating most buying decisions. That’s why this book places so much emphasis on developing something that impacts the buyer on the emotional spectrum, and maintains strength in the other three categories as well: the irresistible offer.
Joyner’s research and experience tell us that we mainly purchase with the intention of impacting our emotional state. We like how we feel after we purchase the nice coffee from Starbucks. We use the previous three questions, then, to make sense of our purchase. Liking how Starbucks makes us feel helps justify the cost and the quality that Starbucks claims to provide.
What is the irresistible offer?
The irresistible offer, as Joyner describes it, is that product or service, wrapped in a promotion, that makes the customer feel like they must do business with you. Not should, not would-like-to, but must.
An irresistible offer begins with an identity-building, status-creating, emotionally-relevant product or service. The customer doesn’t just want this product, but they feel they need the value that having the product represents.
Once the customer is in the mind-state of having or wanting, they’ll then consider the actual product itself, the cost, and whether or not they believe you can deliver. They’re evaluating whether the juice of this fruit is really worth the squeeze.
In an irresistible offer, all the points justify the purchase. No, more than that – they create additional value on the purchase. The irresistible offer is the offer that helps everyone involved. The offer that’s so good, people will be banging your door down just to do business with you.
How does it happen?
The crux of Joyner’s book isn’t what an irresistible offer is. It’s about how to create an irresistible offer. And this is where the reality of the situation must come into play for marketers.
The offer must create true value for the customer. Not perceived value, not possible value, but true value. The customer must come away from the meeting knowing they’ll be in a better place if they make the purchase.
That value, at the right price point with the right social proof from the salesman, is the irresistible offer. And it happens when marketers take into consideration the four questions when they put together their product’s promotional package. When meaningful value is on the table, people win.
As marketers, it’s up to us to understand our audience and deliver a package that resonates with the audience. If it resonates at 25%, you’ll get 25% of the purchases. 50%, 50% of the purchases. But if you’re at 100%, meaning every box is checked, every i dotted and t crossed, then you get 100% of the business. You have an offer that no one can resist.
What can this book teach you?
This book will show marketers how to create that perfect package. If you consider the old ‘Four P’s’ of marketing – Product, Price, Place, and Promotion – then you’ll realize that only one of those is the actual thing you’re selling. Yet all of them play a vital role in the decision to purchase, the marketing process, and relate 1:1 with what this book teaches you.
Remember, it’s about knowing your audience so well that the product or service sells itself. So, while this book is primarily about sales, where I’ll say it falls short is on the comprehension of mass audiences. Sales is often one-on-one, and knowing your face-to-face audience member so well is a completely different ballgame from knowing the audience at large with as much familiarity. Still, as marketers, it’s up to us to know that audience, and to create that irresistible offer that resonates with the masses. That’s where Market Research comes in!
Read this book
Without question, I recommend this book to anyone looking to get more people to buy. If you’re in sales, if you’re in marketing, or anything in between, you can do more by employing the thinking in this book.
Do you have a book you’d like to recommend to me? Let me know! I love to hear what everyone’s reading, and I love to learn more about this ever-evolving chaos that we call marketing. Send me an email at matt@S2Research.com, and let me know what book I should pick up next!