The “so what?” side of your products

One of the biggest mistakes common between sales and marketing professionals is that they think customers care about their products and services. The truth is that all customer care about is themselves. Talking about your products and services guarantees to put customers off and make them bored.

What they want to know is that how you can help them with their everyday challenges. How your products can help them grow, achieve their goals and cut costs?

Get away from talking about the features of your products and talk about the benefits. Benefits are what persuade customers to buy from you, they don’t care about the features of your offering. For example if you sell some advanced task lights with fluorescent bulb, then the fluorescent bulb is the feature of the light. The customer may not buy the task light because of the florescent unless he knows or learns the benefit of it. Florescent bulbs consume less energy; therefore, the result can be measured at the end of the month on the electricity bill.

What you need to do is to spend your next 30 minutes writing down the features of your products and services. When you have finished writing the features, read the features one by one, and for each feature, ask the question “so what?”. The answer to the “so what” question is the benefit of the feature.

When you are done, shortlist the 5 best reasons customers should by from you. The benefits are the reasons. But are the benefits you have discovered the core reasons customers buy from you? To answer this question you need to do a reality check.

Send emails to 10 of your best customers; ask them why they buy from you. What specific benefits have they gained from your products and services and how it has impacted their costs, productivity, life style and so forth.

Collect all information you can, write them down and compare the top 5 reasons with your list.

If all 5 are matching, then you have a very good knowledge of your products, but if not you will need to select another 10 customers, asking them the same questions, to finally learn about the benefits of your products.

Only after knowing about yourself, you can start marketing (which requires you to do even more research to learn about your customers and your competition).

Corporate Resume

How much do you know about your company?

There are much information we as marketers need to know in order to be able to successfully market our firm. Company philosophy, culture, products and services offering, customer information, competition and so forth.
Surprisingly many of us know very little about our organizations. For example since inceptions, what are the major achievements? Can you list your large clients/projects date wise with details of what you have done for them?

An interesting exercise is to create your company resume.

Imagine your company is a person looking for a job and your customer is an employer currently recruiting.

Create a resume and apply for the job.

Successful job hunters update and customize their CV to match the particular requirements of a recruiter. So imagine a particular customer (perhaps the ideal customer) and customize your company’s CV.

What if the CV is short listed? The employer (customer) calls you in for an interview. Do you have enough information to defend your CV and elaborate on details? (In reality you meet customer to interview him/her not vice versa).

Competitions: Should you drive them out of business or drive them crazy?

Imagine a world without competition. Your sales staffs need no making cold calls. You don’t need to pay for advertising. You need no direct marketing. Life is great and you are a billionaire. You don’t need to run after customers. Do not go to the office. Go to the beach instead, or go skiing. Keep your phone on for only an hour a day and customers keep calling you, begging you for your products and services.

Wake up now. That was just a dream! A sweet one? No, not really.

In reality no business lives in vacuum. There is no single business without a competition. Bedsides we want to have competition because :
. A good competitor forces you to improve your company
. Competing with a good competitor excites your employees
. Competing builds credibility for you in the marketplace.

Now hear this: Not only we want to have competition but also we don’t want a small one. We want a mighty competition, an industry leader. Why? Are we out of our minds?

Here are the reasons:

• Trying to defeat a small company is risky. If you are successful, the victory is insignificant and if you fail, the embarrassment is huge.

• Defeating a small company may be more difficult because it may be able to mobilize quickly, change directions on short notice, and fight a war as well as you can.

• You can define "victory" against a large enemy on your own terms. Victory can be as simple as a gain in market share. On the other hand, a true victory against a small company requires total annihilation.

A good enemy is usually an industry leader that is larger, older, and richer than your own company. A bad enemy is usually an upstart—aggressive and hungry and willing to fight viciously.

So now you have good reasons to have competition and (at least) a mighty one. Now what are you going to do with it? You don’t want to drive them out of business. If you drive them out of business you will a) never improve b) your employees will be demotivated and c) you’ll have no credibility in the market.
What you want to do is to drive them crazy. What do we mean by this?
Driving your competition crazy is disrupting your marketplace in order to create new advantages for yourself and to diminish the existing advantages of the competition.

We will talk about this subject more, in the future but here is the lesson we get from this article:
You don't have to destroy your competition or force it out of business—you just have to disrupt things.