One of the most interesting lessons I learned from Claude Hopkins is that you have to care more about serving than selling.
That sounds obvious.
Until serving somebody requires you to charge them more.
That's where it gets interesting.
We have a tendency to position our product against the amount of money someone currently wants to spend.
They want a $2,000 solution...
So we figure out what we can give them for $2,000.
But what if the thing we can give them for $2,000 isn't actually enough to produce the outcome they want?
Now we've made the sale...
...but we haven't served them.
I faced exactly this with our Money-Making Websites.
I could have sold cheaper websites.
But I knew a website by itself wasn't the answer.
There was a methodology behind it.
There was psychology involved.
There were things we needed to teach them.
There was work we needed to do to make the thing actually produce the result.
And all of that cost money.
So instead of asking:
“What can they afford?”
I started with:
“What will it take to get the outcome?”
Then we priced that.
That's a very different way of thinking.
Sometimes the most customer-focused thing you can do is refuse to sell them a cheaper version that you know won't get them where they want to go.
Sometimes the most customer-focused thing you can do is refuse to sell them a cheaper version that you know won't get them where they want to go.
Start with the outcome.
Design everything required to produce it.
Then figure out what that needs to cost.
That's serving before selling.