You’ve decided your offer. You’ve got your first customers in.

Job done? Nope- now you over-deliver!

Let’s get started

Planned Surprise

Over-delivery

When you make a sale your customer will have expectations of the value they will receive.

These expectations will be set by your offer descriptions, sales pages and marketing copy. You’ve told them what they are buying and they made their purchase expecting what you’ve promised.

First up: deliver what you promised!

Sounds simple but it’s crucial. Keep a checklist of everything promised and damn well make sure it’s delivered! Don’t leave out anything.

But we don’t stop there. That’s the bare minimum. But we want our customers to not only be happy with their purchase. We want them to be ecstatic.

We do this by overdelivering. We aim to surprise and delight.

Make life easier

Your surprises should not just be more.

I’ve been guilty of this many times. When in doubt I just add MORE.

More newsletter, more videos, more courses.

The problem here is that by adding more you are asking more of your customer.

Just chucking in a free eBook isn’t necessarily a good surprise. That’s extra work for your customers- “you sold me a video course and now you want me to read this extra 200 page book?? Ugggh”

Instead surprises should make your customers’ life easier. 

They’ve purchased your offer because they want a certain outcome. It’s a solution to a problem they have. For the over-delivery to be valuable it should either make the outcome:

• more achievable

• cheaper

• faster

We don’t do that by giving people more homework!

Let’s now look at two types of surprises - planned and unplanned.

Planned surprises

These are surprises for our customers. But not for us. We’re going to plan them in upfront.

One way to do this is in pre-production when first putting your offer together.

As you construct the offer you could choose to hold a few elements back. You just don’t mention them in your marketing. But when customers receive the product - boom! - they get the extra bonuses.

You are providing exactly the same thing as before. You just didn’t mention one element and now deliver it by surprise. No additional work needed. Easy-peasy.

Second is to add to your existing offer. Look at at your offer and think of additional bonuses to release after purchase.

Here’s a prompt to get thinking

Act as an offer strategist. 
My offer is a [product/service/productised service/course etc.]
It contains [list offer details]

Help me brainstorm additional overdelivery items for my offer.

These items should
-compliment the existing offer by making it easier/faster/cheaper/more likely to achieve the desired outcome
- not require additional work/time from the customer

If I run my Forge offer through this prompt I get suggestions. Here are the first

Use this to come up with potentials to add to your offer a ways to massively overdeliver.

Serendipity

As well as planned surprises you can also listen to customers. This can lead to unplanned surprises. Stuff you didn’t know would be valuable but later add in

This is why group teaching and cohorts is a great way to initially launch. Because you get real time feedback.

Sometimes they’ll straight up ask you if you can add something or if there’s an existing resource. If there isn’t - make it!

Other times you’ll need to listen and read between the lines. Pay attention to what they are saying. For example if someone mention they love the resource database you gave them but wish it was in Google Sheets not Excel…easy. Spin up a Google Sheet version. Job done.

If you are running an early version of your offer keep adding whatever your customer say would be useful.

It seems like a lot of work now. And it is. But anything you add now is inside your offer from this point onwards, either as part of the core offer or as a bonus surprise.

Delivering surprises

Two options here - Christmas or Hannukah.

If we follow the Christmas model we overdeliver all at once in a frenzy of giving. We slam them with over-delivery, aiming for shock and awe.

This might be an email after their purchase with “by the way you also get all this”. Or maybe as soon as they access their purchase they see all the presents.

This works well if you aren’t expecting them to continuously be interacting with your offer. Hit them with everything fast.

It doesn’t work so well if you have huge amounts of presents. The individual value of each will be lost in the sheer volume.

The other model is Hannukah. We spread the present giving out over a period of time.

Each day or every couple of days we drop some new bomb of value.

This works great on cohorts, group coaching and any form of continuity offer.

It’s also better if you have a lot of over-delivery items. You can space it out and constantly be surprising and delighting.

Finally, it works best with unplanned surprises because it lets you drop them when ready.

Overall this is my preferred play but consider your offer individually to decide what fits better.

In the next Part we’ll look at securing customer wins. Not just for them (which we should!) but for our plans too.

Keep prompting,

Kyle