Tag Archives: customers

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

Safe Assumption: Your Customers Aren’t Paying Attention

Just because your customers are buying from you, it doesn’t mean they know what else you have to offer.

Last week the president of GameStop, the leading brick-and-mortar video game shop in the U.S., announced something pretty surprising: “Believe it or not, only 40 percent of the people who walk into a GameStop store today know that we accept trades of games.”

For anyone who has ever been inside of a GameStop, at least one-third of the store is dedicated to selling used games for PlayStations, Xboxes and the like. Their loyalty program promotes a bonus for trade-ins. Their opening line to customers is “Thank you for choosing GameStop, where we buy and sell used games, how can I help you?”

And despite all of that, more than half of the customers – people who are ALREADY in their stores doing business – don’t realize they can trade in games for cash or credit. And, given that 70% of those trade-in credits go right back to the store on new purchases, it’s a pretty important part of GameStop’s business model – to the tune of $1.2 billion annually.

That’s Interesting, But I Don’t Run a Video Game Store

GameStop realizes this, and is putting even more emphasis on its trade-in program, but there is a valuable lesson here for every company: you need to assume that your customers are not paying attention.

Your customer is doing business with you for a reason, maybe even more than one reason. There are certain goods and services they value and that you deliver. But if they are not already utilizing one of your offerings, they probably aren’t paying attention to it.

Think about fast food for a minute. When they debut a new menu offering, they make a huge marketing and advertising push to build awareness. While this is undoubtedly in part an attempt to lure in new customers who are attracted to the new offering, it is just as much to clue in their current clientele that they should exit autopilot and try the new chipotle-avocado-ranch chicken sandwich on a pretzel bun instead of just getting the double cheeseburger they order every Tuesday.

They’re not just doing this to expand the palate of the double cheeseburger buyer, they are trying to get that person to come in on Tuesday AND Thursday because they associate more value and variety with their business.

How Do You Get Them to Pay Attention?

An existing customer is always easier to upsell compared to landing a new customer. And just like we have all been asked if we “would like fries with that,” we should make sure that everyone interacting with customers is making sure that are highlighting additional services as part of those interactions.

It can be as simple as “while I have you on the phone, have you heard about our new XYZ service?” or as sophisticated as segmenting your customer base to identify which customer types are already buying XYZ, which customers of that type have not yet bought XYZ and launching a targeted outreach campaign leveraging case studies and promotions to build awareness.

Regardless of how you attack the problem, the important thing is that you are doing SOMETHING. Adding a new tab to your web site or throwing something on a shelf in your retail locations may snag the occasional open-minded customer, but breaking through the autopilot mentality usually requires some effort.

You spent the time doing the research, developing the offering, pricing it and getting it out there to address the needs of your customer. Don’t forget the last mile of actually getting it in front of them when they are paying attention.

Kevin Costner may have built a baseball diamond in a cornfield with the promise “If you build it they will come,” but if he was adding corn dogs to the concession stands he would probably need to run some ads on the Jumbotron or use a T-shirt cannon to get the fans to look past their peanuts and Cracker Jacks.


The Downsides of Leaving a Legacy

Don’t let your early triumphs drag down future sales success.

When you are working for (or starting) a new venture, you hope your solution is widely used, if not ubiquitous. You want millions of people utilizing your products, relying on your services and promoting your wares throughout the marketplace.

Truly successful firms may see this come to pass, while others may manage to penetrate and leave a mark on pockets of the market. With each new sale, that success grows and more and more of your “things” take their place in the world.

While you are in growth mode, every unit you move out the door is a good thing. You are not worried about what is going to happen three, five or ten years down the line because you’re worried about what’s happening this quarter and you are selling the latest and greatest.

Your R&D department may be working on the next version, and your account teams are reporting issues that you know must be addressed in the future, but those are problems for tomorrow. However, with every success today, tomorrow’s problems loom larger.

The Windows XP Example

… Windows XP, now 13-years-old and still the world’s second most popular operating system. It currently runs nearly 28% of the world’s PCs. Market research firm Gartner reckons up to a quarter of business systems and 10% of large organisations are still running XP.”
– From The Guardian

Since Windows XP debuted, they have released a number of new versions of their OS. But just because something newer and, theoretically, better came along didn’t mean everyone instantly upgraded. So now they have a legacy issue since, after 13 years, Microsoft finally announced they are no longer providing security updates for XP.

Of course, when you are Microsoft, legacy issues are a revenue-generating opportunity as they can sell $200 per desktop security upgrade plans and then eventually just force everyone to buy Windows 8 anyway. But when you are a smaller operation, your legacy can create some other issues.

Three Legacy Negatives & How to Mitigate Them

“Why Can’t I Buy More of the Same Kind I Already Have?”
Despite the fact that “Version 2.0” has 29 new features and improvements, it is still something new and different for your customer. It also may not “match,” creating aesthetic concerns.

To address this particular conundrum, you can take one of two routes: Offer to replace the existing models with the new ones for free or at a significant discount or give customers adequate notice so they can stock up on the old model before it is no longer available. But that second option may cause some problems downstream when you consider the next two legacy negatives.

Legacy Compatibility Issues
If your solution relies on a third party and they go away or stop supporting something you relied upon, you now have to upgrade everything in the field, often at your own cost. And your design has changed significantly, that may mean designing and building new parts just for old devices, or writing new code for things you don’t even sell anymore.

You can minimize the impact of this by doing a full technology lifecycle assessment before your first version hits the street, including talking to your vendors and getting a commitment from them for ongoing support. You should also be fully prepared to upgrade anything you have let into the wild that your customers expect will still work, which might be a big expense for products that are no longer generating much direct revenue.

At BigBelly Solar, we would have been happy if every customer who had bought this version would have retired them… but they didn’t.

Tarnishing Your Image
Once you sell something to your customer, you can’t stop them from using it and in many cases it may be something you don’t really want people to see anymore. So even though you are thinking “we’ll sell this for a year and then put something way better out,” every unit that ships will stay out there, somewhere, giving potential and current customers a negative impression of your brand.

If you are only releasing a small number of products into the wild for a proof of concept or limited “version 1.0,” you should plan on replacing all of them with version 2.0… on your own dime. Additionally, your customer service and account management teams should be constantly keeping up with the elder statesmen of your install base and not just focusing on the shiny new customers. Proactive support, cleaning, upgrades, etc. will avoid those early sales successes from coming back and torpedoing future enterprise deployments.

These older customers will be references for you… even if you’re not actively promoting them as such since careful buyers will reach out to them to research how your products hold up over time.


The Customer ISN’T Always Right… And Sometimes You Need to Tell Them

Making sure the customer is happy AFTER the sale is often more important than closing the deal.

The old maxim of “the customer is always right” has been around since the 19th century, used by retail tycoons of yesteryear such as Harry Gordon Selfridge (who is so famous there’s a TV show about him). At the time, it was probably not a bad practice for those manning the various desks in department stores, and even today there are worse philosophies to embrace.

“The Customer is Always Right” is a great mantra… when you are selling clothing in the 1800s.[/caption]However, there are times when a customer doesn’t actually know what they need, or worse, they think they need something they actually don’t. And while you can usually make the initial sale by nodding vigorously when the zaftig customer tries on the skinny jeans, you are not really creating a relationship as a trusted partner, but are rather acting as a mercenary looking to ring up the sale and move on.

A Missed Opportunity

Thinking back to my household’s own purchase history, there was one purchase in particular where we would have benefited from having our salesperson challenge us vs. just processing the order. We had just bought a new house and had gone to Sears to stock up on appliances. My wife was excited that our new place had natural gas and she wanted to get a gas-powered clothes dryer since they are cheaper to operate.

Weeks later, we had moved in and our appliances arrived. The delivery guys brought in our new washer and dryer, stacked them up and asked me when the plumber would be coming to hook up our dryer. I looked at them like they had just asked if I was planning to use a spatula to start my car. They explained that we did not already have a gas hookup for our dryer, so we need to hire a plumber to run a new line to where the dryer was located.

This concept was completely foreign to me. While this wasn’t our first place, we had not had gas before and didn’t know the nuances of leveraging natural gas to dry your clothes. At no point had the salesperson asked us if there was already a gas dryer in the house or if we knew about the requirements for powering a dryer with natural gas. Nor had the store brought any of this when they called to confirm the delivery several weeks later.

This was an opportunity where the store could have actually helped a customer by questioning if this was really the product they wanted. Instead, I had to send the dryer back with the delivery guys and wait several more weeks for an electric dryer to be delivered (I was not interested in paying hundreds of dollars to a plumber to save a few cents per load at that point in time, nor in having my dryer located permanently in that exact spot).

Avoiding Preventable Negative Experiences

There are plenty of other examples of customers ordering or buying products that they don’t really need, only to have a negative (yet preventable) experience when they get it home, or back to their office or when the install team shows up. Equipment requiring more energy than the building can supply, bike racks requiring a trailer hitch that your car doesn’t have, a television that doesn’t fit on the wall you had planned to mount it on… all unpleasantness that could have been avoided if a salesperson took the consultative approach instead of taking the short money.

At some of my former companies, this has been a difficult thing for some of our salespeople and channel partners. A quick sale (or even finally closing a long deal) means success, closing the gap on your quota and getting a commission. But if you sell someone the wrong thing (or the wrong quantity or configuration), then you are often passing up the bigger opportunity that comes from a successful initial deal and a satisfied customer that sees the value of your solution, not to mention the value of the salesperson who has partnered with them to make them successful in the long run.