Mafia Offer Development

Common Sense is prepared to work with clients to develop custom “mafia offers” for their business or other organization.

A mafia offer is a compelling business offer structured so that the benefits clearly outweigh any potential downsides, making it difficult for the prospect to decline. It’s crafted to provide immediate, noticeable value that discourages hesitation.

Key characteristics of a mafia offer are:

Irresistibility – The offer must provide such significant value that customers feel compelled to accept it.
Competitive Edge – It leverages operational improvements to deliver something unique, making it difficult for competitors to match.
Value Alignment – The offer must solve the customer’s core issues, offering equal or greater value than the price charged.

While the name given to this kind of offer is playful, it’s important to understand that the offer is inherently a win-win, and it is the prospect that concludes that the offer is “too good to refuse.” The seller never needs to push the offer on the prospect.

True mafia offers are most easily realized when the businesses competing in a given market (for example, the set of muffler shops in the Seattle area) are all offering roughly the same set of services and on the same terms.

When this happens, the market becomes a race to the bottom where the businesses are generally forced to compete on price because there are no other criteria on which they differ materially from each other. To a prospective customer, they all seem roughly the same, and so the prospect seeks the best price or fastest delivery.

It’s very different when one business in the market has a materially different offer than all the others. If that offer is attractive to prospective customers, that business can take a large share of the market, and maybe even dominate it.

The development of lasting mafia offers requires an analysis process that dives much deeper than usual when trying to determine what to offer the market. This is important to ensuring that the offer will be of real value to prospects and will also not be easily copied by competitors.

At a high level, the development of a true mafia offer follows these steps:

Identify Core Customer Problems – Understand the fundamental challenges your customers face in your industry.
Assess Capabilities – Evaluate current operational strengths and potential improvements to enhance delivery and service.
Operational Improvements – Implement changes to create a competitive advantage, such as reducing lead times or increasing quality.
Presentation – Use a structured, three-step approach to present the offer effectively, ensuring clarity and appeal.

A good mafia offer allows a business to get more sales with less effort. It allows a business to compete on something other than price and thus helps to prevent price wars. A good mafia offer also allows a business to be more selective in terms of which prospects it agrees to take on as clients.

Note that a good mafia offer also places demands on the business providing it. It will often be necessary for the business wishing to provide a mafia offer to improve its own performance so that the Mafia Offer is almost always fulfilled. Finally, there is the potential for customers to become spoiled: once a business has a due-date performance of 95% or more, dropping back to 75% even for a while is likely to anger customers who have come to expect on-time delivery all the time.

If you would like to know more about mafia offers and if we might be able to develop one for your business, contact us for a relaxed discussion.