The Real Reason Your Sales Are Low (It's Not Your Ads)
Your ads aren't the problem. Alex Hormozi says 99% of low sales trace back to one thing — your offer. Here's how to fix it.
Hey marketer! 👋🏻
Think back to the last campaign that didn’t work. What was your first thought? Bad targeting? Weak copy? The Facebook algorithm being a pain?
Alex Hormozi would stop you right there. According to him, 99% of low sales cases come down to one thing — your offer. Not the ads, not the copy, not the timing.
So, Who Is Alex Hormozi?
Hormozi is an American entrepreneur who built companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars — from fitness chains to software to investments. And then he did something unusual: he started giving away everything he knew for free. Books, videos, podcasts — all openly available.
In the marketing world, some people compare him to a modern-day Philip Kotler. Kotler gave marketing its framework in the second half of the 20th century and taught businesses to think about customers in a structured way. Hormozi does the same — but for the internet era, for people who launched their own online store or sell services from home.
I find his approach genuinely interesting, so let me walk you through it.
One thing upfront — his framework works best for services, courses, or subscriptions. Anywhere you control the offer and can shape it to fit your customer. If you’re selling commodity products that someone can find on Amazon with a single click, you’ll get less out of this. But the core principles still apply — especially if you have your own product or layer in consulting and service.
It All Starts with Choosing the Right Market
An average entrepreneur with the right offer in the right market will beat a brilliant entrepreneur with the wrong offer. Every time.
Simple analogy — if you’re the only hot dog stand outside a sold-out concert at 2 a.m., your hot dogs don’t have to be good. They’ll sell anyway. The market is everything.
The right market has three qualities: people in it feel significant pain, they have money to spend on a solution, and you can actually reach them.
And one more rule — go narrower. The more specific your niche, the higher the price you can charge. A generic time management course? Hard sell. “Time management for self-employed contractors drowning in admin work”? That’s a targeted offer — and the right person will gladly pay more for it.
Cutting Your Price Is a Road to Nowhere
When sales slow down, the first instinct is to discount. That’s a mistake.
You can only go down to zero. You can go up forever. And on top of that — people automatically associate a higher price with higher quality. A customer who pays more will be more engaged, will work harder toward the result, and will ultimately be more satisfied.
The goal isn’t to be slightly more expensive than your competitors. It’s to be priced in a way that makes comparison irrelevant — where the customer stops shopping around and starts asking what’s behind the price.
Your Customer Doesn’t Buy a Product. They Buy a Result.
And they evaluate four things — even if they’re not consciously aware of it:
How much do they want that result?
How likely is it that they’ll actually achieve it with you?
How long will it take?
How much effort will it require from them?
Your job is to work on all four. Describe the dream outcome as concretely as possible. Increase the perceived probability of success through testimonials and guarantees. Shorten the time to result. Make the customer’s journey easier, not harder.
A practical example that illustrates this well — liposuction versus a year-long gym membership. Both lead to the same goal. Liposuction is expensive, fast, and effortless. The gym is cheap, takes a year, and demands daily discipline. Yet clinics are fully booked. Speed and ease have real value.
A Great Offer Doesn’t Need to Be Compared
The goal is an offer so specific and so loaded with value that the customer can’t compare it to anything else — not in price, not in value.
Here’s how to get there:
Map the full customer journey from first interest to final result. Where might they get stuck? What could stop them? What scares them? For each obstacle, prepare a solution — a template, a checklist, a guide, a consultation (think Value Proposition Canvas). Bundle it all in.
Add a guarantee and shift the risk onto yourself. A “30-day money-back guarantee” doesn’t move the needle anymore. Get specific. “If we don’t deliver within 21 days, your next order comes with a discount.” The more concrete the guarantee, the more the customer believes the result will actually come.
Don’t sell to everyone. Scarcity drives desire. If you take fewer clients than there is demand, the price naturally goes up.
How to Get Your Offer in Front of the Right People
Four ways to acquire customers — and all of them work:
Start with people you already know — your email list, your social media followers, existing customers. This is the most reliable path to your first sales.
Create free content — a newsletter, podcast, videos. The more you give, the more naturally customers come to you.
Don’t be afraid to reach out cold. But give them something concrete in the very first line — not a generic pitch.
Run paid ads. But ads amplify what already works. If the first three aren’t working, ads won’t save you.
Pick one of these four and stick with it. Hormozi recommends 100 outreach attempts a day — not exactly realistic for most of us, but ten solid outreaches a day for three months? That starts to mean something.
And when you manage to sell your premium offer to one client, you get two things at once — revenue and a testimonial that attracts more clients just like them. Some offers won’t land. That’s normal. But every attempt moves you forward — unlike waiting for sales to magically improve on their own. Don’t be afraid to sell.
What to Take Away from This
If your offer can’t stand on its own, no amount of advertising will fix it. But if you build an offer that speaks directly to your customer, solves their specific problem, and removes their risk — marketing stops feeling like a fight.
Hormozi’s style isn’t for everyone. He’s direct, sometimes blunt, occasionally overconfident. But looking at your offer from a different angle is always worth it. You’ll find his videos on YouTube and his books at acquisition.com.
See you in the next one 👋🏻
Jan Barborik
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