Step-by-Step Instructions

Click to open worksheet

Problems It Solves

1. How do you ask for [your Victory] currency before you have a product?

This can feel awkward: how do you ask someone to give you currency when you have nothing to give them in return? You will learn how to do just that in this chapter.

2. How do you avoid losing/disappointing your customers in the process?

Imagine pre-selling your product to a few customers, only to discover you can't deliver the product to them. How do you save these contacts and customers that you have worked so hard to get?

In this chapter, you will learn not only how to avoid disappointing your customers, but how you can come out ahead even if you have to change course based on the results of your experiments.

Why Presell?

You presell so you can test whether you'll be able to achieve your Victory before investing heavily in building a solution.

If you are not able to meet your Victory Currency goals, there is no point in building your product.

How to Presell Anything Worksheet

Take out your How to Presell Anything worksheet.

The first few questions are very simple:

Steps 1 & 2

In the first step, write in your Victory Currency. That will probably be some sort of cash. If it is not cash, then write in what you are ultimately asking for from your customers in exchange for your product.

In Step 2, write in how much of that currency you need. In my example, I've written "cash" and "$99."

Step 3

Next, you will write in how you will ask. There are a few different ways to think about this:

• Pre-order

A Pre-order is any situation where someone will put money down with the promise of a product to come. Kickstarter is a good example of this type of "ask." This works for both B2B and B2C. In fact, this workbook series was originally sold via pre-orders using a service called Celery - which enables you to add pre-order functionality to any website.

Pre-orders often come with a policy that if you are not able to produce the product you promise, your customers will be offered a refund. Alternatively, you may not even take their money right away. When this book was in the pre-order phase, customers' credit card numbers were taken, but their cards were not charged until the books were finished.

One final note: a "pre-order" does not count as a pre-order unless you get their credit card information.  Nothing replicates getting your Victory Currency like actually getting the Victory Currency.

Just getting a customer's email address or asking if they'd like to be contacted when the product is available is not a pre-order. It may be more like a Priced False Door, explained below.

• Letter of Intent (LoI)

For enterprise sales, it may be more appropriate to ask for a Letter of Intent than taking a pre-order.

A Letter of Intent asks your enterprise customer to agree that when you provide a solution that meets their requirements, they'll pay you the agree'd upon price of the product.

The Letter of Intent is a non-binding agreement; in fact, it is usually spelled out in the document that this does not have legal weight.

The goal is not to contractually obligate the company to an agreement, but rather, it is to go through the process that it takes to get this letter signed by all the appropriate people.

Often, the process you will go through to approve the Letter of Intent is the same process that you will need to go through to get ultimate approval for your product or solution to be adopted. If they are willing to go through the process to sign a non-legally binding document, the likelihood that they will be willing to go through the same process for the actual process is high.

This is a really great way to get buy-in and test their commitment before you have spent the resources to build the product.

There are several reasons you can tell potential customers why you'd like them to sign a Letter of Intent:

• In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of your company, (for your customer's benefit and yours) you are ensuring you have at least ___ customers committed to the project before you proceed. As a business themselves, your customers will understand this perspective.
• Having a signed Letter of Intent will help you raise the investment capital you need to build the solution. Investors value LoIs, so your customers can help you fund your company without actually using any of their money.
• In a non-profit situation, you can invoke a similar argument. LoIs may help your organization acquire grants or large donations.

There are several examples of Letters of Intent available online. Find one that best suits your company and modify it as appropriate.

• Priced False Door

You may remember from a previous chapter, a "false door" is where you offer something interesting on once side of a "door" and measure how many people try to "open the door." Often times, what is behind the door is not yet ready and they will get a message that thanks them for their interest and perhaps offers to follow up when the offer is ready.

A priced false door is similar, but it puts a price on the front door. The idea being that if you put a price on the front of the door, only customers who are likely to pay the price will try to open the door. This can provide an estimate, albeit an optimistic one, of how many people could possibly give you money.

Here are a few examples of a Priced False Door:

1. App: If you are developing a mobile app, you could put a button linking to the app store to see if people are interested, but this won't tell you if they would pay knowing the price. Instead, you can put a link to the app with the cost prominently displayed on your landing page. By making it explicit, you have a much greater sense of whether they are likely to pay the price indicated.
2. Two Sided Markets: Imagining your building a site for buyers and sellers, you may wish to test whether you can get buyers to come to your site first. To do that, you can put something up for sale yourself on the site, with a price clearly indicated and see if people will try to buy it. Again, if they do click, you can give them a message that the item is not currently available but you will let them know when it is, or offer them something different in the interim.

These scenarios bring you powerful data to distinguish who is simply interested in the offer, and who is so interested that they might be willing to pay. The Priced False Door is very similar to a Pre-Order, but in this situation you would not take their money.

Again, ideally, you'd do the latter and actually take their money, but if that's not possible for some reason, Price False Door testing is the next best thing.

Now, fill in your preferred way to "ask" in Step 3 on your worksheet. In my case, for the book you are reading now, I tested my currency by a Pre-Order.

Step 4

In this space, write or draw in the actual ask: what words will you use, or what will your landing page look like?

In my example, I drew an Order button, and then the dialogue box it links to, with the price, a picture of the book and a place to put in credit card information.

Step 5

Step 5 is your Heroic Recovery Plan.

What is Heroic Recovery?

What happens if you do your pre-selling, but it turns out that your experiment fails?

It may happen that you are not able to get enough people to pre-order your product or sign your Letter of Intent. How do you save face? How do you not disappoint or piss off your customers who have given you their currency commitment, and solve their problem in a different way?

That's where Heroic Recovery comes in.

This concept comes from a retailer I worked with in the UK - John Lewis. This retailer has phenomenal brand loyalty and brand affinity, and it's not because they're perfect or have the best product or even the best prices. They're not necessarily the best in any one thing...except Heroic Recovery.

Here is the concept:

To err is human. To fix those errs beyond expectation is heroic.

In other words, when you screw something up or something does not go as planned, you not only meet people's expectations in terms of recovering from that mistake, but you exceed them.

You may have been in a situation before where a company sent you the wrong item or mis-calculated a payment. Think about the company that responds by not only fixing the error, but going above and beyond to make sure that you know their goal is not only to "not piss you off", but actually make you have a good experience as a customer.

Many companies are very good about this. For example, Amazon will almost automatically refund you for any package that goes missing and send you a new one without questions. Similarly, AirBNB will not only refund you for any issues that you've had but will give you an additional credit for your future stay.

In other words, Heroic Recovery is a way to turn a bad experience into one that actually builds more brand loyalty and a better customer experience.

How can you leverage this in your Presales?

You will come up with a Heroic Recovery plan. If something happens and things do not go as planned or you are not able to build your product for whatever reason, you are going to come up with three alternate ways that you will be able to solve your customer's problem.

The reason they are coming to you is because they have a problem. At the end of the day, you will still help them solve their problem, even if it means that you will not make any money, or even have to spend a little bit of money. This is the way you will provide a Heroic Recovery.

In my case, if I had not met my Pre-Order success metric to build these books, I had three possible alternative ways to solve my customer's problem.

1. Mentoring Sessions: If I were not able to build the books, I was going to offer everyone a mentoring session to help them solve the problem that had inspired them to buy the book.
2. Customized Blog Posts: During the mentoring session, I could come up with a specific list of my blog posts that pertained to this customer's problem, sort of a "lite" version of the book you are reading now.
3. Refer to Other Programs: There are other programs that are doing something similar, though not the same, as what is offered in FOCUS. Referring a customer to another program that may help them to solve their problem is also a strong way to show that you really care about them as a customer.

By offering these alternate ways of solving their problem, I am not giving up on them as customers just because the current product did not work out. In this way, I can maintain my relationship with them even though my initial currency test failed.

It is worth noting that if you are in a situation to leverage your Heroic Recovery plan, it means that your experiment did not work and you did not get a lot of people committed to giving you currency. This means that there will not be a lot of people to "recover" with. In other words...

You won't be disappointing that many people.

So don't be afraid of this. Having the plan in place will allow you to face a possible failure with grace, and keep your relationships with those customers you worked so hard to get.

What's Next

These are the 5 steps to How to Pre-Sell Anything. You now know a few ways to ask for currency before you have a product to give in exchange. You also know what to do if you cannot deliver on your promise, and how to not only not piss off your customers, but actually come out ahead with even more loyalty by enacting your Heroic Recovery plan.

Next you will learn the Science of Pricing: how to determine what the optimal price point is for your product.