What makes a product truly valuable in today’s market? How can you design an offer that attracts customers while maintaining sustainable business growth?
Grand slam offers begin with products that deliver exceptional value to customers. The key lies in understanding how to create something that fulfills deep desires, provides quick results, and overcomes common obstacles that prevent success.
Keep reading to discover Alex Hormozi’s essential steps for crafting a high-value product that can support a grand slam offer.
The Foundation of a Grand Slam Offer
An offer, as Hormozi describes it, includes everything you’re presenting to the customer to get their business. The foundation of a grand slam offer is a high-value product that can command premium pricing.
What exactly makes a product high-value? Hormozi says that a high-product value makes customers believe it will fulfill their deep desires with minimal effort on their part. It also minimizes how long it takes to achieve those deep desires: If the process to achieve the end result takes a while, there should be smaller gains along the way to keep them engaged. This caters to people’s general aversion to delayed gratification.
To illustrate these components of a high-value product, consider the following example: You’ve created a comprehensive online course and mentorship program to help people start and grow an online business.
- The product appeals to deep desires, such as financial freedom, being your own boss, and creating wealth and legacy.
- It provides a quick path to positive results via a proven step-by-step system that takes a beginner from an idea to a profitable business in six months.
- The program also minimizes the effort required through extensive training videos, user-friendly templates and tools, and personal mentorship from successful entrepreneurs who can answer customer questions.
- Lastly, it highlights shorter-term wins like building an online presence and generating the first revenue stream within weeks to keep people motivated.
| There Are Different Kinds of Value In defining a high-value product, Hormozi assumes that the end goal is high profits. However, others advocate business models that prioritize positive community impact alongside profitability. For instance, a product or offer might be high-value because it sources the product materials ethically—making it more environmentally sustainable. This suggests that the criteria for a high-value product may depend in part on your larger goals. With that said, social good and financial profit aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive goals. Some experts assert the key to a successful business is balancing profit with social good. They argue that when businesses support social and environmental causes, this can improve the company’s profits by attracting loyal customers who want to support businesses that align with their values. So, in addition to the various benefits a product offers to you and your customer, you might also consider how it could help a particular community. |
Designing Your High-Value Product
With these characteristics of a high-value product in mind, we’ll walk through Hormozi’s steps for designing your own high-value product and, later, modifying it to reduce your workload as your success grows.
Step 1: Identify a Customer’s Deep Desire
Hormozi’s first step in designing a product is to decide which desire you want to fulfill for your customers. Naturally, before you can design a product, you have to know what that product’s purpose will be.
(Shortform note: When determining what product or service you want to sell, it’s often helpful to choose something that you yourself are passionate about. In Purple Cow, marketing expert Seth Godin explains that the highest-quality products are often made by people who are personally interested in those products because they make things that they would want to buy. For instance, if you’re really into football, you might design a piece of sporting equipment or fan merchandise that you’d purchase yourself, if it existed.)
Step 2: Identify Potential Roadblocks
Make an exhaustive list of all the different roadblocks that might prevent customers from fulfilling their deep desire. In the previous example with an entrepreneurship program as the product, this might include things like the inability to travel for a training program, or a busy schedule that generally makes extra time commitments difficult.
(Shortform note: Although this step is part of the process for designing your product, it may also help to repeat this step regularly; the roadblocks your customers face may evolve over time, which may require you to review and refine your company’s offerings. For instance, if your product is an in-person group workshop, the Covid-19 pandemic would have necessitated new solutions, since meeting in person wasn’t an option during that time. However, you could turn that roadblock into added value for your workshop by creating an online option for participants, thereby making the workshop more convenient and more accessible.)
Step 3: Turn Roadblocks Into Solutions
Next, Hormozi advises you to write down a solution that corresponds to each challenge in your list from Step 2. Then assemble these solutions into a product that’s not only unique, but also addresses every potential roadblock related to the customer’s deep desire. This will significantly increase your product’s value.
For example, to address a customer’s time constraint, the entrepreneurship program might include training materials available in audio format, so they can listen while they’re driving or doing other tasks.
| Alternative Approach: What Task Does Your Product Accomplish? In Competing Against Luck, business consultant Clayton Christensen suggests a different approach to increasing the value of your product. Instead of trying to predict the challenges customers will face, Christensen suggests asking yourself what task people are trying to accomplish by buying your product—and in what context—then designing the product with the entire customer experience in mind. To continue the previous example, someone purchasing an entrepreneurship course is most likely trying to start their own business, and you’ve already identified that they’re doing so in the context of a busy life without a lot of free time. Therefore, instead of offering an audio version of your training program as an afterthought, you might design the program from the ground up to be something that people can do quickly or that they can pick up for a few minutes at a time whenever they have a moment to spare. |
Step 4: Adjust for Sustainability Over Time
Once you’ve built up a loyal customer base, Hormozi’s last step is to modify your product to reduce your workload while maintaining a good value for the consumer.
By addressing all possible challenges for the customers, you’ll have created a highly attractive, user-friendly product that’s hard for people to turn down. This will help you establish credibility and a high demand for your product. However, this kind of product may be difficult to sustain in the long term due to the resources and effort it requires from you. Therefore, it will help if you can make changes to your product or business model to make things easier on yourself.
For example, you might create a series of Frequently Asked Questions pages to ease the pressure on your company’s helpline and reduce the time it takes to assist customers.
(Shortform note: Tweaking your product or business model to reduce your own workload is a good start, but many entrepreneurs would argue that Hormozi’s suggestion doesn’t go far enough. In The 4-Hour Workweek, serial entrepreneur Tim Ferriss says your goal should eventually be to automate your business so that it runs with little to no input from you. To accomplish this, Ferriss suggests that you automate your business in phases as your company grows (and, therefore, as you can afford more automation). By doing so, you can gradually transition from personal involvement in every aspect of the company to outsourcing tasks like order fulfillment and customer service.)
