$100M Offers Book Summary

$100M Offers is Iranian-American entrepreneur Alex Hormozi’s first book. Years after its publication, it remains an Amazon bestseller. As of writing, it has over 20,000 reviews (94% being 5 stars).

The author himself said the title and cover don’t even make sense and that he didn’t put that much effort and resources into promoting it. So why did it become such a big hit?

The book teaches readers how to get more customers to say yes to what you offer at higher prices and on your first try. That’s a pretty big promise, but based on the thousands of reviews out there, the author delivered.

In this $100M Offers book summary, we emphasize our 6 biggest takeaways from the book. Let us know which one resonates with you the most.

Takeaway #1: Create a Grand Slam Offer

Every business has an offer, whether it’s a product or service. But the problem with most offers is that they’re easily compared to similar ones, and most of the time, the price is the only real difference.

This results in a “race to the bottom” scenario, where you have to price your products lower so you’ll get the sale.

Here’s what Alex recommends:

This is what he calls the “Grand Slam Offer.” The goal is to create a differentiated product so you can sell in a category of one. This prevents you from going after price-driven purchases and from commoditizing your product.

Differentiating products is a huge part of all our brands and we’ve dedicated a whole module about it in our Finding Bestsellers Course.

Related Podcast Episode: How to Pick the Perfect Product to Sell in eCommerce

Takeaway #2: Market to the Right Audience

You don’t need to advertise your product to the whole world, but it’s important to identify the subset of people who need to know about it. The advice here is simple: Serve people who can pay you what you’re worth.

Here’s Alex Hormozi’s formula to identify the perfect target audience:

Let’s look into each of these indicators:

Pain. Your ideal audience should desperately need your product. To market to them, you need to paint them a picture of what their current problem is and how you can solve it. “The pain is the pitch.”

Purchasing power. This is common sense. Don’t go after people who can’t afford your product.

Easy to target. Some people like to form groups and gather. These are easier to target, so it’s helpful if your product addresses a specific group. So if you’re still considering a niche, opt for something with an audience that already has public groups, mailing lists, channels, etc.

Growing. Alex’s example of this is a newspaper business. It has a declining market, so no matter how much effort you put in, your audience is going to shrink as time goes on.

Takeaway #3: Pick a Niche, Commit to It, and Narrow It Further

There’s no such thing as a perfect niche. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, so you have to settle on one and stick with it. You will fail until you succeed, but you’ll fail longer if you continue starting over.

Once you’ve done that, continue narrowing it further. The author suggests that doing so will make it easier for you to charge more for the exact same product. Here’s an example of niche product pricing provided in the book:

Time management	$19
Time management for sales professionals	$99
Time management for outbound B2B sales	$499
Time management for outbound B2B power tools and gardening sales reps	$1997

Takeaway #4: Charge What It’s Worth

To understand this tip, you need to understand value. Your customers should believe that the value they’re getting is more than the price they’re paying. To do this, your client must actually get a deal, i.e., your product should actually deliver. It all starts with having a valuable product that will actually solve your customers’ problems.

After you create a valuable product, here’s how to price it:

• Price it high enough so that your customer thinks “This is much more expensive. There must be something entirely different going on around here.”
• Price it in a way that it stings a little when they buy. That sting will force them to pay attention.

Here are a few reasons given in the book to not lower your prices for the sake of making more sales:

• You will destroy the margin that will allow you to hire the best people, invest in growth, and pamper your clients.
• Pricing your product higher will increase its perceived value.
• Decreasing your price will attract clients that are never satisfied until your service is free.

Takeaway #5: Master the Factors of the Value Equation

Alex Hormozi introduces the value equation with the following formula:

This provides a simple explanation of what value is and what is consists of. Let’s delve into the factors:

1. Dream Outcome
   • A marketer's goal is to accurately depict the customers’ dreams back to them so they feel understood. Next, explain how your product or service will get them there.
2. Perceived Likelihood of Achievement
   • Perception is reality. You don’t actually need to reduce time delay or the customer’s effort and sacrifice. Most of the time, they will have no idea. But it’s important that they perceive it to be so.
   • People pay for certainty, i.e., “How likely do I believe it is that I will achieve the result I am looking for if I make this purchase?”
3. Time Delay
   • This is the time between the purchase and the client’s receipt of the promised benefit. Some benefits of what you offer may take time. To keep your audience interested, demonstrate small wins.
   • Example: If you’re helping a client lose 20 kg, celebrate losing the first 3 kg. This way, although you haven’t reached your goal yet, the win is emphasized.
4. Effort and Sacrifice
   • Definition: Other costs your audience accrued along the way
   • Example: To be skinny or fit, you can go for liposuction (you just have to be sore for a couple of weeks) or work out in a gym (sore for a longer time). Plastic surgery clinics can use this comparison to convince clients to avail of their services.

Steps to Implement the Value Equation:

1. Identify the dream outcome
2. List problems + limiting thoughts around the problem
3. Create a solution list for each problem. This has two steps:
   1. Transform the problems into solutions.
   2. Name these solutions.
4. Create your solutions delivery vehicles.
   1. Think of all the things that might enhance the value of your offer. So much so that they would be stupid to say no.
   2. Figure out the different ways to deliver those solutions.
5. Trim those ways to only the things that are highest value and lowest cost
6. Put all the bundles together into the ultimate high value deliverable

Takeaway #6: Enhance Your Offer

In the last part of the book, Alex Hormozi talks about different techniques to enhance your grand slam offer:

1. Use scarcity to decrease supply to raise prices (and indirectly increase demand through perceived exclusiveness)
2. Use urgency to increase demand by decreasing the action threshold of a prospect.
3. Use bonuses to increase demand (and increase perceived exclusivity).
4. Use guarantees to increase demand by reversing risk.
5. Use names to re-stimulate demand and expand awareness of the offer to the target audience.

Let’s discuss these points in more detail.

Scarcity

There are different kinds of scarcity, including

1. Limited supply of seats
2. Limited supply of bonuses
3. Never available again

It’s important that you always sell out and tell people you sold out.

The author also gives examples of how to create scarcity for services:

1. Total business cap – only accepting X clients
2. Growth rate cap – only accepting X clients per week
3. Cohort cap – only accepting X clients per class or cohort

Urgency

Deadlines drive decisions.

Flash sales with countdown timers create a sense of urgency.

Here are a few examples in the book on how you can use urgency in your offers:

1. Cohort-based rolling urgency
   • Example: “If you sign up today, I can get you in with our next group that kicks off on Monday, otherwise you’ll have to wait until our next kickoff date.”
2. Rolling seasonal urgency
   • Example: Our New Year Promotion ends Jan 30!
3. Pricing or bonus-based urgency
   • Example: “Yes, let’s get you started today so you can take advantage of the discount you came in for. I’m not sure how long we will be running it as we change them every 4 weeks or so, and this is one of the better ones we have run in a while.”
4. Exploding opportunity
   • This type of urgency is often inherent in the opportunity, i.e., the more people delay to take action, the more the benefits decrease. Example: Buying stocks of a certain company may be a wise move today, but it might not be for long.

Bonuses

Lesson: A single offer is less than the same offer broken into its component parts and stacked as bonuses.

Things to Remember When Offering Bonuses:

1. Always offer them.
2. Give them a special name that has a benefit in the title.
3. Tell them
   1. How it relates to their issues
   2. What it is
   3. How you discovered it or what you had to do to create it
   4. How it will specifically improve their lives or make their experience faster, easier, or less effort
4. Provide proof – stat, past client, personal experience
5. Paint a vivid mental image of what their life would be, assuming they have already used it and are experiencing the benefits
6. Always ascribe a price tag to them and justify it
7. Add scarcity and urgency to bonuses.

Guarantees

There are different types of guarantees:

1. Unconditional guarantees
   • These guarantees allow customers to pay first then try out the product. This may result in having to refund some of these customers after the trial period.
2. Conditional guarantees
   • These guarantees include terms and conditions. You want these to be better than money-back guarantees.
3. Anti-guarantees
   • These are usually for consumables or those whose values are massively diminished once given
   • Anti-guarantees are when you explicitly state “all sales are final.”
4. Implied guarantees
   • These are performance-based offers. These guarantees may come in the form of revenue sharing, profit sharing, bonuses, etc.

Note: You can stack guarantees.

Naming

Here, you’re not changing the offer. Just the wrapping paper.

There’s a difference in response for the same product with different names, e.g., Free Six-Week Stress Challenge vs. Float Tank Center Session.

The author recommends the Magic Headline Formula:

• Make a magnetic reason
  • Tell them why you are running the promotion. It can be anything as long as you believe it.
  • Examples: Summer, Back to School, Giveaway
• Announce the avatar
  • Be as specific as possible. When in a local area, the more local it is, the more it will convert.
• Give them a goal
  • This is where you articulate your prospect’s dream outcome.
  • Ex: High Ticket, 7 Figure, Pain-Free
• Indicate a time interval

Rule: The shorter and punchier, the better.

The Reason Behind $100M Offers

In Section I, Alex Hormozi tells the readers what he wants by publishing the book. He talks about two archetypes of entrepreneurs that would find value in what they’re reading:

• Archetype I: Entrepreneurs under $1 million in profits per year
• Archetype II: Entrepreneurs with at least $1 million in profits per year

For the first archetype, the author’s goal is to help them “get there while earning [their] trust.” On the other hand, he’s encouraging readers falling under Archetype II to allow him to invest in their businesses.

In essence, he wants to tell businessmen how to grow their businesses and eventually invest in them so they’re both coming into the transaction from a place of mutual trust.

No matter which archetype you belong to, we can confidently recommend this book. We’ve used most of the principles here in our brands, so we know they work. We hope you found this $100M Offers book summary useful. You can buy the book here.