$100M Offers: 8 Actionable Takeaways for Entrepreneurs [With Examples]

It’s not often someone gives away truly valuable content for free, with no strings attached.

Alex Hormozi does just that in his best-seller, $100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying. [2024 Update: Hormozi has a new book out: $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers to Want to Buy Your Stuff, highly recommended!]

It’s one of the books that I constantly refer to for refreshers. It's that good.

In this post, I’ll summarise 8 key takeaways from the book that you can implement in your business today.

Inside we cover:

1. The importance of the offer.
2. Making your offer so good, the customer feels stupid saying no.
3. Growing or dying.
4. Never competing on price.
5. Choosing your market carefully.
6. The value equation [my 🔥 takeaway]
7. Building the Grand Slam offer
8. Naming the Grand Slam offer
9. Some Grand Slam Offer examples

The Grand Slam Offer: What is It?

If you haven't read the book $100M Offers, this is a quick TL;DR on The Grand Slam Offer.

The Grand Slam Offer is an offer that you would make a potential customer, that would make it very difficult for them to say no to buying whatever it is you're selling.

The key differentiators of a Grand Slam Offer are that it does not compete on price with its competitors - it makes the value proposition so compelling that the customer see's no potential downside in buying, and so the decision becomes a no-brainer.

We dive into the elements of a Grand Slam Offer below, as well as some example grand slam offers that you can use to build your own.

[1] The Importance of The Offer

The offer is the starting point of any transaction with a customer.

If your offer is bad, their attention is lost, and your transaction is over.

Sale gone.

You have to have an outstanding first offer to attract new customers.

That's why Hormozi refers to it as a $100M Offer. It's an offer so good, the customer feels stupid saying no.

[2] Make your offer so good, the customer feels stupid saying no.

Good offers just don’t cut it. Meh.

Alex refers to the best type of offer as a Grand Slam Offer (See 7 for how to build a Grand Slam Offer)

Takeaway: Reframe your offers until they are irresistible. Make all your offers $100M Offers.

[3] You are either growing or dying.

Never stagnate.

In business, to grow, you can do 3 things:

1. Find new customers.
2. Charge them more money on average.
3. Make each customer pay more times.

Never stop working on each of those 3 to ensure your business survives.

[4] Never compete on price.

You should aim to charge as much as possible. But, to be able to charge more, you have to offer superior value.

Link your price to value.

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” — Warren Buffet

If I charged you $10k but you knew you’d make $1M, you’d never say no, right?

Never get into a price war.

Not competing on price means:

1. You will never get into a race to the bottom.
2. You can pay more to acquire more customers.

But most importantly…

You compete in your own category. The value you provide means no one can be compared to you.

You’re in a category of one.

[5] Choose your market carefully.

Traditional startup advice says “Pick a problem to solve”.

While that’s true, if you’re solving a problem for a market that:

• Is too small or shrinking, or
• You can’t reach, or
• Won’t/can’t pay for your solution…

then you don’t have a business.

Choosing a killer market makes everything downstream easier.

These are Alex’s 4 key descriptors of a great market:

1. Big pain. They must need what you’re selling.
2. Purchasing power. They must be able to pay for it.
3. Easy to reach. You must be able to get it to them.
4. Growing. If it’s shrinking, your business dies.

[6] The value equation.

My biggest 💎 from this book.

There are 4 key elements to how valuable an offer is perceived to be:

1. Dream Outcome
2. Likelihood of Achieving the Outcome
3. Time Delay
4. Effort & Sacrifice to Achieve the Dream Outcome

Here’s how they all fit together:

• The higher the first two (top line), the higher the perceived value.
• The lower the second two (bottom line), the higher the perceived value.

The inverse applies too.

Example:

• Bigger dream outcome = more potential value.
• Low likelihood of achieving outcome = lower potential value.
• Very short time to achieve dream outcome = more potential value.
• A lot of sacrifice to achieve dream outcome = lower potential value.

When building an offer, remember each of these 4 value elements.

[7] Building the Grand Slam Offer…

First, something the book doesn’t get across super clearly:

The process below is as much about improving your product itself, as it is about how you package your product into an offer.

If you have a bad product, you can’t make a $100M Offer (a Grand Slam Offer).

In this process, you might think of new problems your customer could be facing that your product doesn’t solve.

NB: If you have a current product, don’t let it limit your thinking. Put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes, and let your brain run.

But first… what is a Grand Slam Offer?

Think of the Grand Slam Offer as the ultimate description of what your business offers its customers.

It will be the basis for all of your marketing & sales collateral.

It can be used for:

• Website
• Sales Emails
• Sales Copy
• Cold Call Scripts
• Ads

Here are the 5 steps of building a ($100M) Grand Slam offer:

1. Identify the dream outcome the customer wants.
2. List the problems they face in getting there.
3. List solutions to each of those problems, as if you’re offering them.
4. Decide how you deliver the solution
5. Edit, refine & stack

Step 1: Dream outcome

What does your customer experience when they arrive at the destination?

Let’s use 3 hypothetical examples:

• “I lost 20lbs”
• “I can run 5km in 30 mins”
• “I just earned $10k/m revenue”

Step 2: Hurdles

What is stopping them from achieving the outcome?

Let’s stick go with the first example:

Here are some common hurdles to weight loss:

• “Eating healthily”,
• “Snacking”,
• “Hate exercise”,
• “Staying motivated”

Be aware of bundling problems in this step. Each hurdle should only have one challenge in it. An example of bundling a problem would be “Unhealthy snacking”.

Don’t stop there. For each problem, there might be multiple sub-problems associated:

Example: Eating healthily involves:

1. Buying healthy food
2. Preparing healthy food
3. Eating healthy food

And for each of those sub-problems, there might be different versions:

• Buying healthy food is hard. I don’t know what’s good or bad.
• Buying healthy food is time-consuming.
• Buying healthy food is expensive.
• It’s hard to buy healthy food when you’re hungry.

Remember the value equation? If you apply each of the 4 elements to each problem, you can probably get at least another 4.

🚨 More problems = more opportunity to create value.

Step 3: Solutions

Now, what are all the solutions to each one of those customer problems?

A good framework for this is:

Imagine you’re explaining to someone the solution to “problem x” in a blog post. What would you title it?

Do that for every solution.

Examples:

• “How to know what to buy when eating healthily”
• “How to quickly buy healthy food”
• “The best low-cost healthy foods to buy”
• “How to avoid the snack aisle when trying to buy healthy food”

The key to brainstorming solutions?

There are so many different ways to solve a problem. Put yourself in each one of your different customer’s shoes. How do they think differently from you?

Write everything down, no matter how ridiculous they seem.

In step 5 we weed the bad ones out. Go wild, we’ll refine.

Step 4: Delivery

You’ve got a list of solutions now. The question is, how do you deliver those solutions?

There are a few factors affecting the “difficulty to deliver”.

The 2 most important ones are:

1. Level of attention per customer per sale,
2. Level of effort required per sale.

Example:

1. Delivering 1on1 coaching is a lot more effort than 1to200 live video.
2. Selling an eBook with your best info in it is a lot less effort than delivering a live class for every sale.

Your initial solutions will fit somewhere on the scale of “Difficulty to deliver”, depending on the possibilities for each of those factors.

Step 5: Refine

You’ve got your long list of potential solutions and you know how you’re going to deliver them.

Now, we rank each by:

1. Cost to deliver, and
2. Value.

First, remove these:

1. All low-cost, low-value solutions, and
2. High-cost, low-value solutions.

Not sure how to decide on the value for the customer?

Use the value equation:

1. Does it match their dream outcome?
2. How likely is it to contribute to the outcome?
3. How much sacrifice is required?
4. How much time investment before seeing results?

Consider the high-cost, high-value list. This will likely be down to your personal preference on what you leave inside the list.

For example, moving into someone’s house for 6 weeks and coaching them step-by-step through the weight loss process would be both extremely high value and very high cost.

But would you do it?

Strike those solutions that you wouldn’t. Keep the ones that make sense for a customer to actually buy. Consider your market in this step, too.

After this, we should have a list of solutions that have an excellent value:cost ratio.

Now it's time to bundle them all together into an ultra-high value offer for the customer.

For each of the solutions you have chosen, give it a name and explain the value:

“The Foolproof Healthy Grocery System”

which…

“Saves you hundreds of hours per month on food and time, and takes the difficult decisions out of your hands. $1000 value for what it costs.”

Elaborate further:

“You get:

• DIY Grocery Calculator
• 12-Week Grocery Plan
• Weekly Shopping Lists
• Grocery Buddy System
• Weekly Text Check-In”

Do this for every solution in your offer. You will likely have a lengthy document.

This is the sum total of the value you create for your customers. Each of these elements can be used in marketing and sales collateral.

Now, we’re going to package it.

[8] Packaging the Grand Slam Offer

We know what our $100M offer is. We now need to make it irresistible.

Our goal is to: Increase demand with persuasive communication while… decreasing supply by selling fewer units at a higher price.

We do this with:

1. Scarcity
2. Urgency
3. Bonuses
4. Guarantees
5. Naming

Each of these affects the psychology of a buying decision.

To make a person part with their money right now, each should be used in describing your offer.

Scarcity

When there’s a fixed number of units or a fixed supply of services available, it creates higher demand because the commodity is more scarce.

You can create scarcity in 3 broad ways:

1. A limited supply of slots or seats (Normally for a certain period: Month, Cohort, etc.),
2. A limited supply of bonuses (Only qualify for value-adds for x period), or
3. Never available again.

The best way to apply scarcity in your business?

Be honest.

Define how many clients you can handle in a month, and then advertise it.

“Currently at 80% capacity for new clients, and won’t be accepting for the next 6 months”.

Urgency

While scarcity relies on quantity, urgency relies on time.

In the same way we limited the amount of access to your product or service in step 1, we now limit when potential clients can get access.

You can do this by using things like:

• Cohort-based delivery running periodically,
• Seasonal urgency — “New year promo ends Jan 30”
• Pricing urgency — “Price goes up every day until Jan 30. Get in now to lock in your price”
• Exploding opportunity — “One-time offer that won’t come around again”

Use these to decrease the time frame over which your service is delivered.

Bonuses

One way to vastly improve the perceived value your clients receive when they buy from you is to include a comprehensive pack of bonuses in the deal.

What’s a bonus?

Well, remember where we created our offer, and in each section, we had a list of “What you get’s”?

We’re going to use those elements and “stack” them as bonuses on top of our primary offer.

Bonuses rely on this concept:

“A single offer is less valuable than the same offer broken into its component parts and stacked as bonuses” — Alex Hormozi

So instead of presenting our Grand Slam Offer as one chunk, we present our main sell at a certain price and then bolt on bonus after bonus after bonus.

By putting a price-peg into the ground, and attaching that to your main product or service, the customer has an idea of what they are getting for that price point.

Now as you list each bonus attached, the perceived value of the overall bundle far exceeds the price point originally proposed until…

It becomes stupid to pass up the offer.

A great way to work bonuses into your product is to work with other service or product providers in your niche.

If you’re selling weight loss solutions, go to:

• Your local gym,
• Grocery store,
• Equipment supplier

etc. and tell them that you have an audience of people that will want their products. Ask for a discount code.

That will have a monetary value attached to it.

If you get $100 worth of discounts to include in your offer, you’re immediately increasing the value of your overall offer by $100.

Guarantees

I believe this is the most powerful of the offer enhancements.

Guarantees are a way to derisk the decision your customer is forced to make. This is especially prevalent in B2B sales where the ticket price is high, and therefore the risk is too.

There are four types of guarantees:

1. Unconditional: No matter what guarantees,
2. Conditional: You must do some minimum thing to qualify,
3. Anti-guarantee: Sales are final,
4. Implied guarantees: Performanced-based revenue models.

Example guarantee:

“Earn $10k in 3 months or you don’t pay”

Naming

In naming your offer successfully, you are capturing your buyer’s attention.

Then once you have it, you can use the solution packages we’ve previously built to get them over the line.

For some inspiration, here are some example offer “names”:

• “60-Minute Make Your Friends Jealous Model Hair System”
• “$2000-Off Celebrity Smile Transformation”
• “5 Clients in 5 Days Blueprint”

They all use components of Hormozi’s MAGIC formula:

M — Magnet — Make a magnetic reason

A — Avatar — Announce the avatar

G — Goal — Give them a goal

I — Interval — Indicate a time interval

C — Container — Complete with a container word

You will see that the examples don’t always contain all 5 elements. Normally 3 is good enough to create a compelling name for your offer.

Alex Hormozi's Grand Slam Offer Examples

So, what are some examples of Grand Slam Offers that you can use as inspiration to build your own.

First, lets start with the one that Hormozi uses in the book:

Pay one time. No recurring fee. No retainer. Just cover the adspend. I'll generate the leads and work your leads for you. And only pay me if people show up. And I'll guarantee you 20 people in your first month or your next month free. I'll also provide all the best practices from all their businesses just like yours. Daily sales coaching for your staff, tested scripts, tested price points and offers to swipe and deploy, sales recordings, and everything else you need to sell and fulfill your customers. I'll give you the entire playbook for [insert industry] absolutely free just for becoming a client. So in a nutshell, I'm feeding people into your business showing you exactly how to sell them so that you get the highest prices, which means that you make the most money possible. Sound fair enough?

Although I like this, and after I am finished reading I feel like my decision is made simpler, I feel like it can be improved.

Let's build some Grand Slam Offer examples:

Grand Slam Offer Example 1: SEO Business

Here's an (imperfect) example of a Grand Slam Offer for an SEO business:

Your Leads-on-Tap SEO Partner

We'll turn your website into an asset that generates non-stop leads for your business using SEO. Every day when your team sits down at work, there will be a stream of leads waiting for them to convert into customers. The bets part is we only get paid when you get results. No bulky retainers, no recurring fee's. When your CRM starts filling up with leads - that's when we get paid.

As soon as you sign up, you'll get:

• A custom SEO strategy designed specifically for your business
• A list of actionable steps from a full site audit to improve your technical performance
• 20 low-hanging-fruit keywords that will increase your traffic fast
• 3 backlinks delivered within 14 days.
• A set of SOPs built by industry experts that your team can use to help them deliver content that ranks, and maintain your current website performance

Because we position ourselves as your SEO partner (not an agency!!), we only have bandwidth to service so many clients. We have 3 slots available for the month of July.

In a (quite long) summary, that’s it.

The 8 key takeaways from Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers.