Tag Archives: content

Quit Talking About Features & Start Talking About Benefits

No business is immune from living inside its own echo chamber where their world starts revolving about their own product or service. This can lead to lots of unfortunate side effects, but one of the most common is to focus its messaging and sales efforts on “features.”

The problem is that most people don’t care about features, they’re not buying features, they’re not putting them on their wish lists or begging their account managers for them. What customers care about are “benefits.”

Why Care About Benefits?
Your product may be fast, but its actual speed isn’t meaningful to a customer; it’s about empowering them to maximize their resources or shrink their timelines. Your product may have more storage, but customers don’t care about gigabytes, they care about how many apps they can have or hours of video it can hold or transactions it can support.

Of course, customers have been forced to adapt because technology has gotten so spec-heavy in its messaging. They have had to do the math themselves to interpret arbitrary measurements into meaningful widgets of knowledge. But they shouldn’t have to.

A prospective car buyer shouldn’t have to figure out how many suitcases they can fit in the trunk based on the cubic feet listed on the window sticker; the car manufacturer should be boasting about how the car is great for vacations because it can fit all of your gear. A potential purchaser shouldn’t be sifting through supported APIs; they should be told that the built-in Salesforce.com support means sales commissions will be automatically calculated once payment is received.

Read the entire article at HourlyNerd

How to Optimize Your FAQ page

Companies obviously prefer to have salespeople closing deals and sales support staff answering every possible question with the latest and greatest data delivered with a positive spin, but the lowly FAQ page is a critical stop in the path to purchase for many prospective customers.

There’s plenty of reasons a prospect might be spending time with your FAQs. They might be following up on a sales presentation or outbound campaign to get more information. They might have stumbled upon an intriguing solution and are looking to learn more. They might be an approver in the purchasing process that didn’t get the initial pitch but is doing their due diligence. Or they might even be an existing customer considering an upgrade or trying to figure out how to use what they’ve already bought.

Unfortunately, the FAQ page is sometimes an afterthought when a company is building out its online presence and almost always becomes one after the site is up and running. This can quickly lead to stagnant information lingering on the site, giving customers a false, outdated impression of what your company has to offer.

Read the full post at HourlyNerd

3 Ways to Head-Off the Naysayers

Proactive preparation for the people who can’t say yes, but can say no.

It is essential for a sales team and the marketing folks supporting them to understand who their actual customer is. We’re not talking about “car dealerships” or “universities” or “software companies,” but rather who within those organizations is actually going to want to buy your product or service. Another important step is identifying who within those places actually has the money to pay for your stuff, which may or may not be the same people who want to buy it.

Once you understand who these two sets of people are, it is pretty straight forward to begin creating value propositions, sales presentations and marketing materials to convince them why you can fill a need and why it is worth their time and money.

However, in many organizations there is a third set of people that neither want what you have to offer nor have the money you want to get your hands on, yet they are often equally important in the sales process. These are the potential naysayers; stakeholders who cannot actually say “yes” to making a purchase but are empowered to say “no.”

Depending on which type of organization you are selling into, their roles may vary. If you are selling any kind of technology, they may reside in the IT group. When I was creating products for retailers, they were in the loss prevention organization and store operations. When I was creating solutions for cities, they often were public works officials concerned with angering the unions or disrupting the status quo.

In none of these cases were these potential naysayers going to pay for the solutions out of their own budgets, nor were they the people in the organization that the salespeople wanted to be spending their time with. They don’t have purchasing power, and they usually don’t make decisions on products and services unless they are directly related to and limited to their own specific areas.

Worry About What THEY Are Worried About
Like everyone else, the naysayers are looking out for their own interests. The account management team wants to license a new CRM tool, but how much IT resources will we have to dedicate to it? Will we have to do upgrades? Will we have to provide access through the firewall? Will we have to buy new servers? Will we have to increase our bandwidth? Will this be a security threat?

The questions can go on and on, and even though your CRM solution is proven to increase customer retention by 10% and has a dashboard that the VPs are drooling over, the IT department doesn’t really care. They have their own metrics and KPIs to hit and this is just going to be a distraction.

And while your “real” customers may be willing to fight for getting your solution purchased and in place, there are three things you can do to make their lives easier and shrink the sales cycle:

Keep the Naysayers in the Loop – No one likes being blindsided, particularly at work. To avoid the naysayers being on the defensive and coming up reasons to shut the project down before anyone cuts a purchase order, make sure that you figure out who needs to know about what you are proposing and that they feel included in the process from the early stages. As soon as you start to see heads nodding in the line of business, don’t end a meeting without asking who else you should be talking to that might have questions or concerns.

Create Content for the Naysayers, Too – When creating collateral, technical specs and case studies, keep this audience and their potential concerns top of mind. They want to know that you have through these issues through, addressed them in some way (standard operating procedures, escalation paths, usability studies, etc.), and made things work at customers who they view as their peers. Most people don’t want to be the guinea pig, especially the naysayers.

Be Prepared for the Questions You Don’t Want to Answer – There are very few products or services that don’t have some imperfections, be they system requirements or tricky installations or parts that can rust. Addressing those questions up-front and proactively demonstrates you are not afraid of covering these topics and gets things out on the table well ahead of the final decision making meeting, when you are often not even in the room. Make sure you are armed (or arming your teams) with a thorough set of FAQs addressing every objection you can think of, as well as references or examples of similar customers that have already dealt with and worked through these issues.