Stack, name and price a guarantee

1. Stacking two guarantees

More than one guarantee can sit in a single offer, and the combination tends to do work neither piece does alone. The combinations:

• Option A — one conditional and one unconditional together. The unconditional piece asks nothing of them; the conditional piece pays out far more if they do the work and the outcome still does not arrive.
• Option B — two conditional guarantees, one on a small outcome and one on a big outcome, with different terms on each. The easier outcome carries the lighter conditions.
• Option C — two conditional guarantees on the same terms, one short and one long, to show the buyer what they could achieve over each timeline.

The shape that carries all three is a short duration beside a longer one. A worked pairing: no questions asked for the first thirty days, and, if after ninety days the named outcome has not arrived — a set number of sales, or a weight lost — a return of more than they paid, provided they attended the sessions and did the work between them. A first-outcome guarantee at thirty days can be paired with a second-outcome guarantee at sixty days. A 60-day conditional can be paired with a six-month one.

Two limits:

• An anti-guarantee cannot be stacked. All sales final is exclusive by definition. An unconditional guarantee stacks with a conditional one, and with a performance arrangement.
• Stacking is a calculated risk and you must do the arithmetic, with your own completion and outcome rates, before you offer it. It is an advanced move.

Tie each guarantee in the stack to the behavior you want during its own window: the terms of each are the things you want the buyer doing in that period, so the stack guides them toward success.

2. What a long term does to the buyer

The duration you pick does more than set a deadline. A six-month conditional guarantee implies the buyer will still be there in six months, so it sets an expectation of a long stay before they have paid anything. It also moves them from short-term thinking to long-term thinking, and buyers who arrive wanting a result that takes time are better buyers: easier to work with, longer staying, and more likely to succeed.

The same effect can be built into what you show them. One campaign filled the feed with video after video from clients who had been in for more than a year. The change was not only the testimonials themselves; new prospects arrived already thinking a year ahead, so they came in expecting to put systems in place over time rather than demanding a rescue by tomorrow.

Choose your term with that in mind. You are setting the clock in the buyer's head, not only the clock on your obligation.

3. Naming the guarantee

A guarantee with a vanilla name is forgotten; people lose track of what it even means. Satisfaction and its relatives do nothing. Use imagery strong enough to be repeated.

Strength	Wording
Weak	A thirty-day money-back satisfaction guarantee
Better	Thirty days in: unless you would walk barefoot over hot coals to keep it, every dollar comes back
Better	Love it or leave it
Better	The cold-shower guarantee: thirty days in, unless you would take a year of cold showers rather than lose your place, you owe nothing

The hot-coals and cold-shower wordings above are invented. The mechanism is plain. A generic thirty-day money-back line carries no picture, so a buyer does not retain what it means. An image does the retaining, and the guarantee stands out in the buyer's mind instead of blending into every other promise they have heard.

Dress it up in the same register as the rest of your marketing, and keep the terms underneath it exactly as specific as they were before you named it. The name is the wrapper, not the wording of the obligation.

Name it last. Fix the outcome, the window and the consequence first, then find the image that carries them.

4. Pricing a performance arrangement

Where the guarantee is implied — they pay only if the outcome happens — the structure is the price. The families below are the choice, and it decides what you are actually selling.

By unit. You are paid a fixed amount each time a defined thing happens.

Market	Typical unit
Business to business	An agreed amount per sale, or per appointment that shows up
Consumer	An agreed amount per pound lost

By share of revenue. You take a percentage rather than a unit price.

Basis	Example
Top-line revenue	10 percent of top-line revenue
Profit share	20 percent profit share
Growth over a baseline	25 percent of revenue growth measured from an agreed baseline

By share of profit. An agreed percentage of profit, or an agreed percentage of gross profit, which is a different thing because gross profit is the incremental sale rather than the whole account.

Two notes on the shape of that list. Profit share appears both as a revenue-share option and as its own family, and this page does not settle which reading is right — define in your own contract which number the percentage is taken from, because the two definitions pay differently. And the growth basis needs a baseline that both sides have written down before the work starts, or the percentage has nothing to attach to.

By step or by event. A ratchet raises your share as results pass set thresholds: for instance 10 percent over a first level, 20 over a second and 30 over a third. A trigger pays a fixed amount when a defined event happens.

A floor under the share. Either take the greater of a flat fee or a percentage, such as $1,000 against 10 percent of the revenue your work produces, so a client who earns nothing still covers your cost of service; or charge a flat $1,000 in the opening three months and switch to pure performance after that. The second suits work that is slow to start producing. A floor is the safer form; payment only on performance is the stronger one.

Every structure here needs a transparent way to measure the outcome, and the trust or the control to be sure you are paid when you deliver. Tracking and collection are their drawbacks, and they work well where the outcome can be counted.

The argument for performance pricing is that the buyer has no downside and you have no ceiling. That cuts both ways: a large outcome makes a fixed fee look absurd from your side of the table, which is exactly the situation performance pricing exists for.

5. The order of work

• First. Confirm the single guarantee you chose on SOP 7 and the activation points its conditions sit on.
• Then. Decide whether a second guarantee earns its place, and which combination you are using.
• Then. Set the two durations — one short, one long — and check what the long one implies about how long the buyer expects to stay.
• Then. Run the arithmetic on the stacked version before it goes anywhere near a buyer.
• Then. Name it with an image, leaving the terms underneath unchanged.
• Last. Where payment is on performance, confirm you can measure the outcome and collect what you earn, then choose the unit, the revenue share, the profit share, a ratchet, a trigger or a floor, and define in writing what the percentage is taken from.

6. What this page does not cover

Which guarantee to choose, how to write its conditions, and the refund arithmetic behind an unconditional guarantee are not covered on this page; they are on SOP 7. Limits on units and limits on time are on SOP 9, and the naming formula for the offer itself is on SOP 10.