Happy Thursday Reader,

I have a confession to make...

I think I might think about hot dog stands more than most people.

Shortly before writing this I was recording a lesson for... *have we announced this yet(?)*... a course we're launching soon. And I spent a solid 5 mins figuring out how to make it look like I've worked at a hot dog stand.

Recently I've been thinking about two phrases:

Both are possible.. but one is so much easier.

Which brings us back to our Hot Dog business, the hot dogs, condiments, pricing, experience, and branding are all incredibly important.. but a starving crowd is the difference between you having to convince people to travel all the way to your stand, and just trying to keep up because you're in the right place at the right time.

I like to call this the "context" of your buyers.

While your physical location or time might not matter in the same way it does to a hot dog stand, there's still seasonality, crossroads, transitions, dreams, etc that when correctly positioned you can make the difference between your offers being "water in a dessert" vs "snow in winter".

Let's chat about the firs 3 (of 7) context questions in the lesson:

1. What are their crossroads?

People rarely purchase things when everything is smooth sailing and going great - they purchase when they're delegating work, going in a new direction, fixing a problem, or asking for help. This is their crossroads, they're making a decision about what the best path forward is for them and looking for someone to help them.

In someways this is similar to a hot dog stand, they're just choosing a literal intersection, you're choosing a metaphorical one.

To be a good fit for your offers:

• Where are they coming from?
• Where were they most recently?
• Where are they trying to go?
• How can you position your offer as either the guide or shortcut on their route?

2. What are they saying no to if they buy from you?

Windows vs Mac, Pepsi vs Coke, famous sports team vs other famous sports team, chatGPT vs Claude, Matt Damon vs Jimmy Kimmel... there's tons of examples of rivelrys.

And while you probably don't have an arche rival - your clients don't have unlimited money, so they're making an investment decision between you and something else.

That could look like:

• you vs another web designer that could do the same thing
• you vs taking a course and figure it out
• you vs going to Paris for a week on vacation

Those are very different trade off decisions, but once you know what the most common alternatives are you can more directly talk about why you're the right (or wrong) purchase for their specific needs.

3. What are their dreams & priorities?

Your offer is one stepping stone on a path to your clients dreams.

Do you immediately make sense on the path to their dreams, or do they have to figure out if you're the right fit?

If you don't know what the most common dreams of your clients are, most people are more than willing to tell you their dreams if you ask. We routinely set up 15-30 min "market research" calls to get a better understanding of people who represent our dream clients for offers we're developing/refining. And understanding their dreams in context of what we do is by far one of the most helpful takeaways from these calls.

4-7 - inside the course

We're dropping module 1 of our new course Ready to Launch (which includes this lesson) inside of Creative Maven Society this week, and we'll be dripping out the other 5 modules over the next few weeks.

If you're intersted in being added to the waitlist for when we offer it as a standalone course next month, hit reply and you'll be the first to know!

See you next week!

Lyndon

Ps do you ever think about hot dog stands?