The Offer Stack

What's up gigging musicians this is Jared Judge. Today, I wanted to chat with you about something I discovered, that really helped me feel more comfortable selling my gigs. And any other thing to anybody who's looking to buy from me, you know, this is essentially the fundamentals of making a career in music is learning how to sell your music. So, some quick backstory, you know, I didn't discover this actually, until fairly recently. And when I was trying to sell anything, people, you know, I would have to come up with a price. Say, for example, it was a gig, you know, let's just take, for example, a solo violin gig. If I wanted somebody, you know, to buy my violin services for a wedding, I felt like often I was just pulling a number out of thin air to price myself, didn't really know how much to charge. And then when I did pick that number, if I ever got pushed back on that number, I didn't know how to justify it. So I always felt guilted that I was charging too much. And, you know, maybe sometimes I would concede on that price and lower it, thereby devaluing my services, and consequently, devaluing the services of other musicians. And so that was pretty, pretty bad. But then, recently, you know, I study a lot of marketing. And one of the people that I studied from his name is Russell Brunson. And he taught me this framework called the offer stack, which, once I implemented that, I was able to figure out and very specifically, and clearly lay out the specific parts of the offer that I was selling to somebody, and how much they're worth, and be able to really write that out and reference that in my conversations with them. And even in the marketing materials that I put out to get future gigs. And once I did that, all of a sudden, like, I felt armed and equipped to have these difficult conversations. I felt like I had a firm footing to stand on. And ultimately, I had more success in selling my music, which was super cool. Because you know, that's the goal. If you go to school for music twice, what a shame it is, if you don't get to actually use your training, or make more music. And so I have been, I coach students privately, you know, I mentioned that in the last episode, too, I coach students on the business of gigging and one of my students, he is a wedding piano player. And he was trying to raise his rates to$500 for a solo piano performance for a wedding. And he was struggling a little bit to to justify that price and asked him well, how consistently Have you been charging this price recently, and he said, not very, he's got some people who have paid that amount for the gig. But you know, he's still accepting gigs at like two and$300 for a wedding. And plus, he's not consistently closing all of the the opportunities that he's getting. And so I introduced this offer stack to him. And he said, instantly, it helped him feel more secure in asking consistently for his rate. And, you know, we're excited to use it. You know, hopefully, I'll give you an update on that, as he gets to have these more sales conversations, because we literally just worked on that the other day. And so I want to just share with you his offer stack, because it's super cool. Again, he is a solo piano player for weddings. And you know, you might think that's all that he does. But when I tell you his offer stack, it's gonna be super cool. And then I hope that you can find ways to apply this to your gigs and whatever else you're selling to just feel more confident when you're selling something to somebody who wants to buy from you. So when you book him for a wedding, what you're going to get is, and by the way, this is the offer stack, this is how you go through it just detail every piece of what they get, you're gonna get two hours of his personal performance valued at$150 an hour, for a total of$300 of value so far. But that's not all, you're also going to get set up and tear down, which takes about an hour for all of his equipment, again, valued at$150 for an hour. But that's not all, you know, for every single event he plays, he practices, he practices specifically for your event, to make sure he knows all the music, and that he's comfortable. And if anything goes wrong, he's confident that he'll be able to pivot and make everything work very smoothly. And he spends about two hours for every single wedding practicing sets, again, valued at $150 an hour, it's an additional $300 in value for you know what's included when you book. So, so far, we've got two hours of his time at the event $300 setup and teardown $150 And additionally, two hours of practice for 300. Right now you're getting a value of $750 for 500. But that's not all you know, he brings a professional instrument He paid $1,000 for. So he's you're bringing he's bringing 1000 additional dollars of value to your event. Plus he has a really nice PA system that he spent over $850 for. But you know, you want to make sure your wedding goes well. And really the only way for him to get to know your wedding, and you specifically is by consulting. And that's usually about an hour's worth of time between all the emailing phone calls and meeting up in person, again, another $150 of his time. And so when we add up all of those pieces, we get this offer stack, that the total value of what he's bringing for a $500 wedding is $2,750, which is insane. You know, that's like four times maybe almost five times as much. Yeah, it's five, five, something times the value of what he's charging you, which is awesome. And if you can think about it in terms of what you're selling, try to think of it and lay it out so that it's clear, what are these people getting? What's the value of what they're getting, and then show them that they're only spending a fraction of that to actually get it. There was another so one of the arts of marketing is copywriting, which is writing all the words the text, the stuff you say in videos, and this copywriter named Jim Edwards said that one of the best ways to sell something is by selling dollars for dimes. And what that means is if I offered you $1 bill, and I said, all you need to do is pay me a dime for this, you get $1. I mean, it's a no brainer, because you're getting 10 times the amount of value for what I'm asking. And so the one thing that I would try to encourage you is think about how can you demonstrate that you're giving at least 10 times the value of what you're actually charging. And that makes the sales conversations and the marketing a lot smoother of a process. And so that is the offer stack. I urge you to consider how you can use that in your own personal music career. And even if you're not in the business of selling music, maybe you are in marketing or sales or even in software, anything. Think about how you can use the offer stack to demonstrate your value and try to sell more dollars for dimes. And that's how you book more gigs. That's how we'll play more music and get paid what we're worth. So hope you enjoyed this episode of The Gigging Musicians Podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure you like and share it. Join our musicians, gigging musicians Facebook group, we have over 200 members almost 300 and it's all band leaders and people who play in bands who are looking to take what they do more seriously and get better. And we're all supportive. And yeah, just reach out to me if you have any questions, and if you're interested in in any lessons or anything, hit me up. I'm always down to take on more students as long as I've got the space for it. Alright, see you on the next episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.