Asking Leads To Build The Offering They Actually Want

This week, we launched a new video offering at K&J (deck here).

We wanted to test whether it would hit the market well, so we sent it to people who weren’t our clients and got them to give us feedback.

We did this for two reasons: to test it before it went out to clients and hopefully pick up new ones.

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile:
   
   - Select “My network”
   - Select “Connections”
   - Select “Search with filters”
   - Select “All filters”

   

2. Select under “Title” the title of the job profile you want to share your work with - for our offering at K&J, this was “Marketing Manager”

3. Send them this message:
   
   “Hey (first name),
   
   We’re building a new video offering (insert your offering here) at our agency for our existing clients.
   
   I was hoping you could be exceptionally critical of it and help us with some feedback before I send it out.
   
   We want to use this to get better video content from our clients to run as ads and organic content for their socials.
   
   Two quick ones:
   
   1. Does it make you want to buy at that price point?
   2. What would you change in it?
   
   I am happy to pay you for your time on this, too.
   
   Cheers,
   Kale”
   

4. Here is an example reply we got:

People are happy to be critical of your work when they’re not being pitched.

Getting real-world feedback allows you to refine your offer and make it more enticing.

Then, once you’ve got that feedback, you can build a product that people want to buy from you.

How To Do Less Work & Earn More

Here’s a theory that’s been helping us break through with Gravy and it applies everywhere.

We get caught up fussing over ideas. Thinking the million dollar fortune awaiting us sits in the delta between our big idea and every other idea on the market.

But it's not in the idea. The lamest, most unoriginal idea ever can make a killing. Where the delta actually sits is in the customer experience.

Lets say you're a landscaper.

There's twenty other providers that can do what you do. So how do you cut through. You could be cheap, but being cheap sucks when you're looking at your P&L each month.

Instead you want to be better....

But how do you do that with undifferentiated products and services.

The landscaper thinks they'll be better by using a higher quality grass seed, or modern landscaping designs. 

You see this all the time.

Premium blah blah blah. But it doesn't work, no-one cares.

You know what folks hate about their newly landscaped garden?

Remembering to water it. Remembering to feed (fertiliser) it.

A good customer experience takes the jobs to be done (cue jobs to be done framework) by the customer and makes them less painful. 

The "better" landscaper, in this case, waters and feeds the garden to full health.

They ask their customers to do less work.

You can do this anywhere.

I remember back in the day when flatscreen, smart tv's were becoming a thing. Dad wanted one. So off we went on a special trip to Dunedin to buy one.

We spent hours in Dick Smiths, Noel Leeming's and Harvey Normans looking around. They were ~$10,000 then, so it was a big decision.

But in the end, it wasn't the hertz rate, colour profile, or apps that won Dad over. It was the guy who offered to deliver and install it for him.

When all the TVs looked the same, Dad chose “less work”.

It's a simple as-shit idea that seems to have gotten lost in the post. We don't need to get all fancy to make our businesses stand out.

We can just ask our customers to do less work.