Afraid your idea’s too much sizzle and not enough steak?
The Forehead Slap Test is an awesome copywriter’s trick, originally by a famous, wildly successful old school copywriter named Clayton Makepeace.
(Old school here means direct response marketing — aka mail you receive in your real, physical mailbox. Crayzee!)
The Forehead Slap Test tells you if your product is too anemic and under-endowed to score sales… or if it’ll be the product your customers swoon for.
With the Forehead Slap Test, you’re testing the punch of your pitch. You’re testing for URGENCY and DESIRE, immediacy and obviousness.
Applying the Forehead Slap Test for Fun & Profit
Here’s how you do it:
Imagine your potential customer, leaping out of bed one morning because of an epiphany – the kind that solves itself in your dreams.
She leaps up, slaps herself resoundingly on the forehead, and shouts,
“Holy shit, I …………”
You fill in the blank with what your product does for that customer. That’s the awesome revelation that your product should be creating, or delivering, for the suddenly awakened customer.
Positive Examples: Yes!
“Holy shit…I gotta stop wasting my time hunting down this damn bug! I can get help!”
“Holy shit…I gotta stop chasing after more traffic, and squeeze more money from the traffic I already have. Cuz I already HAVE it!”
“Holy shit…I can sell something new to my EXISTING customers, cuz I already know where they are!”
“Holy shit…if I could just negotiate a 20% pay raise, I’d pay down all my debt!”
“Holy shit…I should master the crap out of Rails so I can take advantage of all those poor bastards tweeting how they can’t find anyone to hire.”
“Holy shit…I might get more play if my breath wasn’t so funky.”
“Holy shit…I’m sitting on a gold mine of material. I could sell this to other people just like it is!”
The Anti-Slaps That Get No Play
“Holy shit…I should learn proven strategies for hunting down bugs.”
“Holy shit…I could read everything about how to do split-testing on web sites.”
“Holy shit…I could read a book on negotiation and learn how to increase my value to my employer.”
“Holy shit…I should evaluate customer retention strategies.”
“Holy shit…I can learn how to build simple CRUD apps in Rails.”
“Holy shit…I gotta brush with twice the flouride.”
“Holy shit…I could learn to monetize pre-existing content.”
Ummmm…
As we say on the mideastern seaboard:
Yeah… no.
Can’t you just feel how badly this second set falls flat?
Successful Slap == Killer Sales
No slap == slow or no sales. It’s that simple.
Without the forehead slap, it’s soooo much harder to motivate people to get off their butts and buy. Not impossible – not always. But much, much harder.
The anti-slaps above are snooze-worthy because they’re riddled with faux benefit-speke.
Theoretically, it’s a benefit that your toothpaste has twice the flouride, or that your screencasts cover EVERYTHING to do with Rails.
But factually? Nobody cares.
There’s no urgency. There’s no burning need. There’s no desire. There’s no clear end result.
Nobody’s going to pop out of bed one morning and slap themselves over it.
The Forehead Slap uncovers weak central pitches…and gives you a mechanism to improve them.
Slap Some Foreheads Today
Try the Forehead Slap today. You can apply it to:
- the way you sell an existing product
- concepts you’re working on for future products
- your blog posts, tweets, & other freebie content
It works on everything.
Holy shit…I could kiss clients goodbye for good!
Yup, that’s right. There’s a slap in here for my 30x500 Launch Class workshop. The workshop that’ll help you learn how to create forehead-slap-approved product concepts, as many as you want, whenever you want.
And the class that’ll teach you how to spec ‘em out, break ‘em down, price ‘em up, and get ‘em shipped and selling. Without giving up your day job.
This blog post is an excerpt from one of the lessons. There’s sooo much more where this came from.
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