How do you build an offer that clients won’t compare on price alone?

A client compares prices alone when your offer looks like everyone else’s. To change that, name the result the client gets, show how they can tell it will work for them, shorten the time to the first result, and take as much effort off them as you can. You can check these four things in any service offer.

Why does the client look only at price?

Alex Hormozi, an American entrepreneur, puts it simply in $100M Offers. If a client looks at two offers and decides they are basically the same, they buy the cheaper one. When everything is equal, the cheapest wins by default. He also notes that two firms can do exactly the same work, and one still sells on price while the other sells on value. The difference lies in the offer, not in the delivery.

Before you start improving your offer, check your market. Hormozi spells out the order: first, clients who have an urgent problem and the money to solve it; then the strength of the offer; and last, the skill of persuasion. A great offer aimed at people with no problem or no budget gets you nowhere.

Four things the client pays for

Hormozi writes the value of an offer as an equation. The numerator holds the result the client wants most and how likely they think it is that they will get it. The denominator holds how long they wait for that result and how much effort it takes and what they have to give up. You want to make the numerator bigger and the denominator smaller.

Each part answers a question clients ask themselves before they buy:

• what will I get;
• how do I know it will work for me;
• how long will it take;
• what will it ask of me.

In my view, two practical points follow from this equation. First: when two offers promise the same result, the promises cancel out. The client then chooses on the other three parts. Hormozi writes that beginners try to outdo each other with ever bigger promises, because that is easy. The harder work lies in the denominator: faster and with less effort. There is less competition there, and the market, as he puts it, rewards that work more. Second: what counts is what the client sees. If you shorten their path to the result and they don’t know it, for them it never happened.

Offer teardown, step by step

Take a hypothetical accounting office with five people. Today its offer reads: “Full accounting for small businesses.” The competitor down the same street says exactly the same.

1. Write down the result in the client’s words. Hormozi’s image is that you are selling the trip itself, not the plane ride to get there. The client doesn’t want accounting; they want to know where they stand. A sample promise: “By the 10th of each month, you know how much you earned and how much tax you’ll pay.”
2. Write out the steps the client has to go through, and next to each one, their worries. Hormozi sorts them into four buckets that match the equation: it won’t pay off, it won’t work for me, it will be too hard, it will take too long. For the accounting office: “moving my documents over is a nightmare,” “they’ll be chasing me for invoices again.”
3. Turn each worry into an answer that starts with “how,” as Hormozi advises. How to move documents with no effort: the office collects them from the previous accountant itself. How to stop chasing invoices: a photo taken with a phone and one reminder a month.
4. Work out what each element costs you. Hormozi first throws out the elements that are expensive and worth little, then the ones that are cheap and worth little. What stays is cheap and valuable, and expensive but valuable.
5. Ask clients what is essential, what is nice to have, and what they won’t pay for. In Monetizing Innovation, Ramanujam and Tacke call that third group killers: an element the client would have to pay for against their will can stop the whole sale. In my view, five to ten conversations with real clients are enough to start.
6. Next to each of the client’s four questions, write the proof they can see today. For the office: a sample monthly report (result), the name and experience of the person who will keep the books (chance), the first report after the first month (time), invoices from a phone photo (effort). An empty field means that is where you start fixing.

AI is useful for step two. Paste in anonymized call notes and client emails and ask for a list of worries grouped into the four buckets. Then add what AI couldn’t have known from the notes.

When it doesn’t work

A teardown won’t fix a weak service. If clients leave because the work is done badly, better packaging will only bring the disappointment sooner.

Nor will it help in a market with no problem or no money. Then you first change who you sell to.

Don’t keep adding elements without end. A bonus nobody wants, which the client pays for in the price, works against you. If you want to add a guarantee, work out its worst case and have a lawyer check the wording.

For tomorrow

Take your main offer and, next to each of the client’s four questions, write down one piece of proof the client can see today.

Read next: how to price your service · how to decide without all the data

Send us your offer, and we’ll take it apart together

How this text was written: the research, the choice of sources and the final version are mine. AI helped me prepare a draft; I checked every fact, and I am responsible for this text. — Maciej Chmura

Sources

• Alex Hormozi, $100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No, ch. 3 “Pricing: The Commodity Problem”; ch. 4 “Pricing: Finding The Right Market – A Starving Crowd.”
• Ibid., ch. 6 “Value Offer: The Value Equation.”
• Ibid., ch. 9 “Value Offer: Creating Your Grand Slam Offer Part I: Problems & Solutions”; ch. 10 “Value Offer: Creating Your Grand Slam Offer Part II: Trim & Stack.”
• Madhavan Ramanujam, Georg Tacke, Monetizing Innovation, ch. 6, the principle “Leaders, Fillers, and Killers.”