My other concern is that your (final) stat is "number of HP appointments set". This little detail gets misapplied very often. When measuring an offer effectiveness in Appointments Set, we can easily start writing and delivering offers aiming for more appointments, frequently without realizing that we're drifting between paradigms. Of course for someone who is using HPS but is being compensated for appointments set, say as an SDR role only, then you gotta do what you gotta do, until you decide otherwise. HPS can "work" for that but using "Appointments Set" as a success metric will require a Zen Master mindset, to thread the proverbial needle every moment of every day you're prospecting. What I mean by that is that the principles and fundamentals of HPS are about finding High Probability PROSPECTS. The appointment is only a place in which a sales conversation continues, NOT a measure of success. Trying to apply HPS while in the back of your mind you are really wanting more appointments, in my experience, can make one's head spin, prospects included. Constantly straddling the Traditional and HPS sales ways of being is not recommended. The real estate offer samples originator did not measure offer effectiveness in "Appointments". She measured them in terms of (real estate) listing agreements signed (aka business consummated). She designed offers and associated steps that REDUCED the number of appointments for the purpose of INCREASING profit. While the sample have been effective offers, without the associated INTENTION of her overall process, and who she is being while using the offers, they are just an attractive collection of words, Werthian or not. If you are aiming for more appointments, HPS isn't likely to help much, no matter how perfectly written the offer. Using someone else's words, without understanding their intention and way of being, will probably end up sounding like someone else's words. I tried for at least 5 years to copy Jacques Werth's words and phrases. I learned all too slowly that all I was doing was blocking my personal way of being and communicating. Didn't work. It took me a long time to finally give up on my own search for the master script. I already had my own words the whole time. I just needed to get clear and real about my intention, grounded in the principles. Then my own words simply appear when needed. Other people's words are not the answer.

I had to look up the term "straw man". I agree with your ideas around creating separate categories for comment threads. As soon as someone, including me, figures out how to do that on Skool, please share it ASAP. On one hand, having 32 comments for one post can be a good thing. The detriments being that the original post context can be lost in long threads, and written communication of this kind can have too much latency and associated misunderstandings. Tyler, it would be perfectly OK to create a fresh post within a context of "Sharing your offers", which might work better in this platform. I started this HPS Skool platform but I was and still am a Skool platform beginner. Anyone's ideas on making it work better for the members are always appreciated.

There's wonderful mountain stream fly fishing in NC.

@Tj Shepherd When and where they're likely to be feeding

One key distinction in Mike's post is the last word in the first line; combine. Many of us spend significant time, energy, and angst trying to craft the perfect email, the perfect phone offer, like that ONE event is THE only communication that we will have to lift our entire business into an overnight success. Queue Hollywood movie closing soundtrack... The combination is the key. Not only prospecting. Not only this call. Not only this one email, not this one reel in Instagram. The endless search for the one set of magic words that will compel every reader into a sale or agreement or approval of our ideas. It's the combination of all the efforts, all the offers, all the calls, the accumulation of the snowflakes, and the collective timing in some of your prospect's lives is the only magic.

Some of you HPS'ers, myself included, may initially wonder about Mike's choice of words like "interested" and "objections". Many of us were trained long ago to believe that words like these are "poison words". That training and the beliefs behind it were well intended but missed an important element. Context. And choice. Your choice of how you receive those words when you hear them. For example, if you are hearing similar reasons "why not" to your offer, those could be called objections. Not to be overcome. To be used in crafting or modifying your offer. "Product does X without INSERT COMMON OBJECTION..." Is your intended audience "interested". You will hear interest or dis-interest in the prospect's tone of voice and reaction to your offer. Sometimes, we have what we believe to be a textbook perfect offer, and it falls completely flat to a mismatched target market or prospect. Relevance is discerned in a similar way, but it is almost always expressed in terms of "interest" by prospects. If we are listening well, as HPS recommends, we will gain immediate valuable market and client intelligence from using the phone, even from cold calling. Of course, while you're gathering all that intelligence, you'll also be finding high probability prospects that are ready to do business. It's all about context and choice.

Digital marketing is very effective and at the same time, can be part of the automated noise that we all hear every moment of the day. 30 years ago, the founder of HPS called the abundance of exposure to offerings in markets Information Overload. That abundance of information helped educate and inform prospects, making a salesperson's need to educate before selling in most cases unnecessary and counterproductive. In current times, prospects can self-educate using AI in a couple of keystrokes. There still is Information Overload, that has become Information Overwhelm and just plain noise. And businesses are so enthralled by the idea of automation and AI, many prospects are craving human connection like never before. As Mike says, this creates opportunities. If you are skilled in HPS communication, simply your presence as a human in a sea of bots, actually listening and interacting from a place of respect and trust, can make you quite remarkable. This ocean of automated inhuman noise makes the HPS way of being more distinctive in the marketplace than ever before. If you use HPS and come from the right context, simply showing up and making an offer can be enough to start a connection. P.S. The author of this series of posts, Mike Ralph, is a lifelong entrepreneur and has been using and studying HPS for the better part of the last 30 years. He has made hundreds of thousands of HPS outbound prospecting calls in a variety of businesses, from real estate to jet cards. He is the originator of "Do you fly private jets?" which changed the rigid HPP template forever. I learn from him every time we meet.