Had a chat with a new client yesterday about selling to customers who don’t really know what they are buying.
At first glance, it seems like an unrealistic situation – that a client wouldn’t know what they are buying, but when you think about it, it’s probably the norm.
Last week, my car was in the garage having a windscreen wiper motor replaced. Only when I got the bill did I realise how expensive it was with me expecting a bill of around £60 and getting one for £120. A widget like this is a fixed price from the factory, so what must it be like if you are buying a product or service which is not identical supplier to supplier?
If I think about what I sell, for instance – websites – why should someone understand what they are actually buying and how much it should cost, especially when they are getting different sales pitches from different potential vendors?
From the client perspective, being objective when buying a website becomes a whole lot harder: A website is a website right? To me, as the vendor, I am potentially offering so much more, but:
- The client can’t really compare the projects – they are both just ideas still.
- If they go with me, they will have to wait until a few months after the delivery to wonder if they got value for money and even then , they still can’t compare it to the competitors solution because it was an either/or buy.
What’s the answer?
A sales pitch needs to change with every project – answering the wants, the needs and the pains of the client – not a generic product sell.
Testing this idea, I am finding that if I am marketing and selling products (or services), I need to refine the message more and more. On the web, this could mean multiple micro-sites for one company, each selling an appropriate message, eg. vertical markets. For lead generation, I am going for a more one-on-one approach, doing research before I even approach a prospect.
What’s more, it becomes very obvious that education plays a massive part in selling a complex product. We have been doing it for quite some time at The Escape with whitepapers and seminars and it can add a massive amount of weight behind your credibility as a potential supplier.
At the end of the day, no-one likes to feel stupid. Potential clients ( and I mean the individuals involved) are investing / taking a chance / putting their job or reputation on the line by choosing you – the more you can allow them to see the odds are stacked in your favour, the better the chance of winning the project – and delivering.
When I worked at Lenovo (sub-division of IBM selling the ThinkPad brand) the whole business shared this frustration of complexity and advantage not being picked up by what we considered a naive marketplace.
This isn’t a plug as I don’t work there anymore, but we had a great product, titanium to protect the vital bits, amazing software to manage wireless connections – the whole shabbang!!
The problem was our customers were ultimately consumers and they didnt work on this wavelength – for them, the shiny toys of vendors such as Sony were often more attractive – the world doesnt care so much about ROI anymore, generation Y just buys a new one online from Dell if it can be delivered tomorrow and does the job.
Most consumers ‘just wanna have fun!!’ (…no singing, please) which was a concept that perhaps hadn’t really penetrated the size of a planet lawyer engineer brains that our parent business employed…things have moved on alot since then, but the old world mantra of better specs = sales is hard to shake off. There are technically better Mp3 players out there, but few exceed the ease of use and sense of fun now associated with Apple gadgets.