Pick the market before the offer

1. Rate the three levers, in order

Three things decide whether money gets made, and they are ranked. Work down the list, and stop at the first one strong enough to carry you.

1. The buyer group itself. This outranks everything else.
2. The offer. This is second.
3. Your ability to persuade. This is last.

Give each of the three a rating of plus, neutral or negative. A plus or a neutral lets you move to the next lever. A negative stops you there.

1.1 The buyer group

Some groups are so short of supply that anyone holding stock sells out — protective masks at the opening of a pandemic, or household paper goods during the same weeks. Nothing but having the item was required. Most of the time you will not be in a group like that, and you should not wait for one.

A normal group is one growing at the same pace as the population. Normal is enough. A group that is shrinking is the one to walk away from, and §2 gives you the test.

Flag: what a normal group keeps pace with. One reading, used above, measures a normal group against the population. A second reading measures it against the wider marketplace: a normal group grows as fast as the market overall, and its unmet needs are common ones that fall under health, wealth or relationships (§3). The two can part, because a group keeping pace with the population can still lag a market that grows faster. This page does not settle which reading is right.

1.2 The offer

If the group rates at least normal and sales still are not happening, look at the offer next. An outstanding offer can carry the whole result on its own; a middling offer passes the problem down to the third lever; a bad offer will most likely sink you whatever else is true.

1.3 Persuasion

Skill at persuading is the smallest of the three, and you only need it to be exceptional when the first two are unremarkable — a normal group plus an ordinary or weak offer. Businesses have been built on persuasive skill alone, but the skill takes a long time to acquire, and the ranking here is that the group usually decides the outcome. Fix the group and the offer before you pin your plan on persuasion.

2. Check four variables before you enter a group

All four have to be true. Miss one and the right move is to go and find a different group.

Variable	What you are checking	What failure looks like
Pain	They desperately need the result, not merely find it convenient or pleasant	A nice-to-have purchase that slides to next month forever
Purchasing power	The people with the pain hold the money	An offer aimed at people who cannot afford it
Reachable	You can put a message in front of them: platform targeting, the groups they belong to, lists you can rent, or somebody who has already gathered their attention	Your message lands on people next to your buyer instead of on your buyer
Growing	The group is getting larger, not smaller	Growth you win gets canceled by the group shrinking under you

Pain. Selling hot food at two in the morning as the bars empty in a college town is the picture to hold: the want is immediate and it is not negotiable.

Purchasing power. A résumé service sold to people who are out of work is the trap, at least where you reach them while they are on unemployment benefit and have no money; the group is not ruled out, that route into it is. The pain is real and the service can be good, and the people carrying that pain still cannot pay for it. Check that the payer and the sufferer are the same person before you go further.

Reachable. If the only channel you have reaches nurses and the buyer you want is a doctor, your message falls on people who cannot buy. A group you cannot target is a group you do not enter.

Growing. Newspapers were shrinking at 25 percent a year for the last nine years — a compounding decline that roughly halves the market about every three years. An owner selling advertising software into them had a strong offer: nothing down, a share of the revenue produced, easy to say yes to. Growing his own sales 25 percent a year would only have held him level, because the shrinkage took back what he won. No offer quality fixes this variable.

3. The three markets, and your sub-market inside one

Nearly everything for sale sits in one of three markets, and they map to three standing human problems: health, wealth and relationships. Pick the one you are in, then go down a level, because the money is in the sub-market rather than the market.

Market	Who it is usually sold to	Notes
Wealth	Both consumers and businesses	Consumer side: a new income route, a better job, a skill that raises pay. Business side: making an existing business more money, which is where marketing sits, and where a service such as information technology sits indirectly by improving the back end so more money comes in
Health	Consumers, with workplace fitness as the exception	Nutrition work, and every sub-group under it
Relationships	Consumers almost without exception	Coaching founders to communicate better counts as wealth instead, because the payoff is money

The test that sorts a borderline case is the so-that: you are doing this so that they make more money, or so that they are healthier, or so that they have more love and are less alone.

Inside wealth, sub-markets include property investing, the stock market, advertising, building a sales team, and building offers. Inside health, nutrition alone splits into approach after approach — restricting carbohydrates, restricting the hours you eat, a points system, prepared meals delivered to the door. The same problem is being solved several ways, and repackaging a method people are already following is often all a sub-market needs.

The positioning sentence. Write it out for your own business before you go further:

Help one specific kind of person solve one specific problem in a way nobody else does, and have that way answer the objection they are most worried about.

Each clause is doing a job. The specific person makes them look up. The specific problem makes them believe you understand it. The unusual method answers the but will it work for me they are already holding.

4. Narrow the audience before you raise the price

The same instruction set, retitled for a narrower audience, carries a different price. Take a general course on managing your time and walk it down:

Who the title names	Price
Nobody in particular	$19
Sales professionals	$99
Outbound business-to-business sales	$500
Outbound business-to-business sales representatives for power tools and gardening	$1,997

The content barely moves between rows; the language inside it and the audience named on the front are what change. End to end that is roughly 100 times the opening price, which is the whole argument for narrowing. At the bottom row the buyer is looking at something with no substitute on the market — a category of one. One row up, the buyer's own reasoning is that a single extra deal pays for it.

Flag: the ladder's prices. SOP 149, section 3 walks the same product down with other prices, and there the last step falls rather than rises. Priced off this page, the narrowest title sells at $1,997; priced off that one, it sells for less than the title one step wider. Another reading gives this page's ladder, rising at every step, with $499 rather than $500 on the third rung. This page does not settle which reading is right.

More comes with the narrowing. Your advertising gets easier to write, because the wording can name the buyer's situation instead of gesturing at everyone. And you stop fighting the large established companies at the general end of the market, where dislodging them is close to impossible; against a generic solution you can argue, credibly, that you fit this buyer better.

4.1 Stay with the group you picked, and know when to widen

A common error is to run one offer at one group, watch it fall short, and blame the group. Usually the group was fine and the offer was not yet good enough. Another normal group would have worked just as well, but not both at once, and every group has its own annoyances, so moving does not escape them. What moving does do is send your trial and error back to the start, which makes the failing last longer. Pick one group, then keep rebuilding the offer inside it until it works.

Widening is a later question. A rule of thumb here: for most businesses under $10 million a year in revenue, narrowing almost always earns more, and the case is strongest below $3 million. Past that point it depends on how narrow the group is, because no business grows past the total size of the market it serves. Only when that ceiling is what holds you back may you need to widen: to bigger buyers, to smaller ones, or into a neighboring group your current service can also help. SOP 93 — Choose a market direction sets out those moves and how to judge one. Many businesses grow past $30 million a year inside a single group.

5. Write so the buyer feels understood

Ordinary writing succeeds when the reader understands it. Sales copy succeeds when the buyer feels understood, which is not the same goal. You are not teaching on a sales page.

The mechanism is worth knowing. If you can state someone's situation and their difficulty more sharply than they can state it themselves, they conclude that you must also know the way out better than they do — and the price you can ask goes up with that conclusion, because what you are selling now looks built for them.

6. The order of work

• First. Rate the buyer group. If it is shrinking, stop and pick another.
• Then. Check pain, purchasing power, reach and growth. All four, or start again.
• Then. Name the market, and go down into a sub-market.
• Then. Write the positioning sentence for that sub-market.
• Then. Narrow the audience named on the front of the offer, and set the price against that narrowed audience rather than against the general market.
• Last. Stay with that group. When an offer fails, rebuild the offer rather than move, and widen only once the size of the group is what caps you (§4.1).

7. What this page does not cover

Pricing method and guarantees are not covered on this page. Take price to SOP 2, which sets out how far above the market to sit and why; take the contents of what you deliver to SOP 4 and SOP 5; take risk reversal to SOP 7 and SOP 8.