How To Give People What They Want While Giving Them What They Need

You've probably heard of the old "bait-and-switch" scam. Here's how it works: You tell someone you're going to give them something for their money, and then once they pay you, you switch the item out for something cheap or useless. That's evil, and shame on you if you try it. But what you can do, completely aboveboard and legally, is sell them exactly what they want -- and give them what they need along with it.

At my company, we love hosting seminars and similar live events for our clients. We believe these events offer one of the best ways possible for us to share our marketing expertise. We provide valuable content at these events, and usually the people who attend them end up loving them. But here's the thing: if we were to promote only the event itself, most people probably wouldn't come. Events, as such, are hard to sell.

That means we have to find creative ways to offer these events to our clients, so we always wrap them around an opportunity we know they'll want to respond to. In this way, we've taken they need and combined it with something they want. Once they're there, we know they'll have a good time and benefit greatly. That's an excellent way to cover both sides of the equation.

In the movie Mary Poppins, there's a song that goes, "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down... " Modern pharmacists have taken this to heart by combining medicines and vitamins with Gummi bears or other candy, or at least by adding attractive flavorings to make children's medicines more palatable. You can use the same principle in your business.

Suppose that in your business, you've got things you know your prospects and customers really need, but you have a hard time providing those things to them at a profit because they just don't want to buy them. You can use this strategy to give them what they need by combining those items with what they want, all in one acceptable package. That way, you cover both sides of the coin; and if you think about it, you're serving them in a higher way than if you were just giving them what they wanted. It's perfectly legal, moral, and ethical, and it's a way you can use what would ordinarily be an unthinkable concept in a constructive manner.

Here's one way to use this method. Let's say you sell a great program at a great price, and then throw in a free seminar -- one that would ordinarily sell for thousands of dollars. That's an excellent way to get people to come to seminars who normally wouldn't. They'll see the offer and realize that except for travel expenses, they can attend this expensive event for free. Even the food is usually taken care of. Their response? "I'd better go!"

Just about anyone can adapt this model to their business. And keep in mind that it's still based on giving people what they want. It just so happens that in this case, their desire is creatively combined with a shot of what they need. This puts a unique twist on the whole thing -- a twist that can be worth some very good money to you.

You're giving people what they need, even while we're selling them what they want. You're incentivizing them to step up and take some medicine that will keep them healthy, even when they don't want to.