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Brian shares a story from an old friend and offering a Morgan dollar.

Transcription

Why should you use bonuses?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I’m holding in my hand something that is nothing more than a piece of paper. But it represents a Morgan dollar, which I don’t have next to me right no but it reminds me of a story.

And the reason why this story came to me is that one of my dearest friends, who is one of the people that I think of when I think of veterans because this guy served in at least two wars, he served in Vietnam and in Desert Storm. And he taught me one of my first lessons on bonuses on the power of a bonus.

It’s a really simple concept.

Sometimes it can get really complex, depending on what it is that you’re offering. Sometimes the bonus becomes the real thing that the person’s after, and they end up with the, with the real thing that you’re selling as a bonus, it’s funny, it’s a funny thing.

There’s a whole lot of psychology to providing bonuses but the main thing to understand is having a bonus gives you one extra shot of getting a person interested and willing to pull the trigger on purchasing whatever it is that you’re selling.

It goes across the board, it doesn’t matter what it is. It especially works for higher ticket items, though, because that’s the type of thing where people really need to think about whether they want to purchase it or not.

You know that they have to be kind of controlled and convinced into purchasing. And sometimes the bonus pushes them over.

So here was the situation. This was not a high-cost situation. We had a thing where we were reaching out and meeting some new people. They were friends of friends if you might say, third-party contacts, and my friend’s name was Richard.

Richard was talking to these gentlemen over the phone and he and he said this a few times, is one of the first nights I hung out with him.

He said, Listen, I’ve got a Morgan dollar here in my hand do you know what a Morgan dollar is?

And he tells him a little bit of the story about what a Morgan dollar it’s a type of silver dollar that was minted by the US. And he goes into that, and he’d say, I have one right here in my hands and it is yours.

If I see you at that meeting tomorrow night, it was like tomorrow night or the night after something like that. And he said it was such conviction. It doesn’t matter whether you knew what a Morgan dollar was or not.

It was like, Oh, really, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get this if I go and he has it there. It’s sitting there. And he described it over the phone. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I wanted the darn Morgan dollar.

And I didn’t even care what a Morgan dollar was. I wanted to say that I got a Morgan dollar because he wrapped such a story around it and such a fantasy about it. It builds a bonus that can be like a talisman.

It could be this magical thing. If you put enough behind it, and you really put emphasis, it’s really about emphasis.

If you put emphasis on a bonus, then it can be very powerful.

Even if it doesn’t even have all that much of a promise to it or anything else.

It’s just the fact that wow, okay, yeah, I want that. I want that thing. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be valuable. It doesn’t have to have great resale value. It just it’s the magic feather from Dumbo.

It’s the thing that just stands out that has some type of magical properties unto itself, even though it doesn’t. I’m not saying you lie, you don’t need to lie or fabricate.

What you do need to do though is tell a story.

If you got a story wrapped around a bonus. That’s why it can oftentimes push a person over to purchase the original item that you’re trying to sell to begin with.

Simple idea, sometimes it has to have a very similar sometimes all it needs to be is a and I’m seeing if I have an example here of something that is an example would be Gumby here. Okay. I could probably purchase a lot of these gummies for a very small amount of money.

But if I wrapped a story around the Gumby and I said if you have this Gumby at your desk people are going to ask you about this Gumby and here’s the story that you’re going to tell them and you give them a great story or joke that’s wrapped around the Gumby finger.

All of a sudden they want the Gumby just so they could tell the stupid story. Now they can all go out on Amazon and buy their own stupid Gumby but you’re the one offering it to them right now. And you’ve got all this other stuff that you’re selling. This is just the bonus, this is the cherry on top of the sundae.

That’s the concept behind a bonus in its simplest form. Like I say you go a whole lot deeper on this, and talk about all the different ways of providing a bonus and talk about all the different historical situations where bonuses were offered, like the football phone that was offered to get a subscription to Sports Illustrated, or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue was a bonus to get you to purchase the subscription to Sports Illustrated had nothing to do with sports.

Here’s a famous magazine that we put out once a year with a bunch of girls in bikinis. And you’re going to, we want you to buy a full year. So you get this one magazine and it worked. It worked over and over again, we you could always talk about those things. But really all you have to do is understand is that it doesn’t take much to get people over once they’re already convinced that they want what you have the bonuses, just that thing to help push them over the line.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you. I’ve got a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business talks more about strategies versus just these tactics like bonuses.

But if you’re going to build up if you’re going to have a long-term strategy that can really take you far. This is a great place to start, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Get a Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com. It’s a short book.

You can download it, have it tonight. That’s all I got for you. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.