My exact same first thought as well. I'm surprised that this post isn't a "no duh," but I guess I forget that not everyone understands that what a customer wants isn't a bullet point of features: they want a solution to their problem.
Eons before I got into web dev, I was hocking HP printers in brick and mortar tech stores. One of the things I was taught that I would never forget is that you sell the experience, not the product. It's not an all in one printer. It's a way to get the photos from your vacation off your camera and onto paper. Or a way to privately print your own photos. Products don't exist to be a list of features (if they're good products). They exist to solve problems. The best ones don't even need to be "sold."
Exactly! I think there's this quality that separates entrepreneurial people from non-entrepreneurial people. That quality is to understand what the customer wants. People who naturally think this way do exactly what you do - they sell on value. Meanwhile those who don't have it end up selling based on tech specs.
I don't mean to imply that some people aren't meant to be entrepreneurs. What I am saying is that there's a certain way of thinking that comes naturally to some and allows them to excel at it faster. But the good news is that this is something that can be learned.
I'm reminded of the very stark difference in marketing I see between Apple and any other PC maker. Apple sells you the ability to listen to your music anywhere, use the web easily, get photos from here to there fast, share your life with your family, and on and on. Then whenever I see any kind of PC marketing it's all "processor speed this, screen size that, Gigs of RAM" and features that don't mean much to anyone. Consumers end up doing what a lot of these website clients do when choosing a product. They seek out the thing they were told is good. So you'll see middle aged men in Best Buy saying "I want a Toshiba laptop because I heard it has X gigs of RAM and blah blah" when really there's not much separating that Toshiba from the other cheap plastic laptops next to it. In contrast I've also seen middle aged women walk into a Best Buy and say "I want the Mac that lets me video chat with my son in college". The PCs in the store let you do that too but they forgot to mention it in the marketing because they were so busy droning on about hardware specs.
*In fairness, I've seen the marketing of PCs improve a lot in recent years and it has started to get away from this sort of thing but not enough yet.
Isn't this also a problem with the product that the PC vendors offer?
That Mac comes with Facetime and iTunes. If the PC laptop comes packaged with software, it's generally not the PC manufacturer's own, and they can't guarantee your laptop will be compatible with another.
Well, to be fair, what counts as value to computer enthusiasts is the specification and feature details. I couldn't care less if it comes packaged with some chat software that I'll end up formatting away along with the default OS (except to the degree that it makes the machine cost more), but let me at those specs. I and other people like me respond very well to this kind of features-heavy marketing.
Your point, however, stands. Most consumers really don't care/know much about what the specs mean, and this is very bad marketing to that demographic.
Sounds great. But websites touch everything so you have to get specific. You have discussions about how things will be maintained and integrate. Now these might be scheduled after a sale, but not always. Being vague creates suspicion to me, so you have to show me, I don't trust a salesman with a short list of rounded benefits.
Too bad in retail, the salesman is pretty much gone after the sale. Then you're stuck because the benefit of the technology doesn't actually work in practice because people have specific needs AND some processes are better than others.
So I'm not a huge buyer into the benefits sell. I think it causes people to get lazy about what they need to know about their product and I think it also puts them into assumption mode about their customer, that they don't think deeply, and that they are oblivious to any useful technical details. And those of us customers who have gotten burned before rarely forget it.
With that said, I think leading with the benefits is great, the trouble is, when everyone leads with the same general benefit "it will make x easier" it becomes time to again leverage something to set yourself apart.
Comments
My exact same first thought as well. I'm surprised that this post isn't a "no duh," but I guess I forget that not everyone understands that what a customer wants isn't a bullet point of features: they want a solution to their problem.
Eons before I got into web dev, I was hocking HP printers in brick and mortar tech stores. One of the things I was taught that I would never forget is that you sell the experience, not the product. It's not an all in one printer. It's a way to get the photos from your vacation off your camera and onto paper. Or a way to privately print your own photos. Products don't exist to be a list of features (if they're good products). They exist to solve problems. The best ones don't even need to be "sold."
Exactly! I think there's this quality that separates entrepreneurial people from non-entrepreneurial people. That quality is to understand what the customer wants. People who naturally think this way do exactly what you do - they sell on value. Meanwhile those who don't have it end up selling based on tech specs.
I don't mean to imply that some people aren't meant to be entrepreneurs. What I am saying is that there's a certain way of thinking that comes naturally to some and allows them to excel at it faster. But the good news is that this is something that can be learned.
I'm reminded of the very stark difference in marketing I see between Apple and any other PC maker. Apple sells you the ability to listen to your music anywhere, use the web easily, get photos from here to there fast, share your life with your family, and on and on. Then whenever I see any kind of PC marketing it's all "processor speed this, screen size that, Gigs of RAM" and features that don't mean much to anyone. Consumers end up doing what a lot of these website clients do when choosing a product. They seek out the thing they were told is good. So you'll see middle aged men in Best Buy saying "I want a Toshiba laptop because I heard it has X gigs of RAM and blah blah" when really there's not much separating that Toshiba from the other cheap plastic laptops next to it. In contrast I've also seen middle aged women walk into a Best Buy and say "I want the Mac that lets me video chat with my son in college". The PCs in the store let you do that too but they forgot to mention it in the marketing because they were so busy droning on about hardware specs.
*In fairness, I've seen the marketing of PCs improve a lot in recent years and it has started to get away from this sort of thing but not enough yet.
Isn't this also a problem with the product that the PC vendors offer?
That Mac comes with Facetime and iTunes. If the PC laptop comes packaged with software, it's generally not the PC manufacturer's own, and they can't guarantee your laptop will be compatible with another.
Well, to be fair, what counts as value to computer enthusiasts is the specification and feature details. I couldn't care less if it comes packaged with some chat software that I'll end up formatting away along with the default OS (except to the degree that it makes the machine cost more), but let me at those specs. I and other people like me respond very well to this kind of features-heavy marketing.
Your point, however, stands. Most consumers really don't care/know much about what the specs mean, and this is very bad marketing to that demographic.
Sounds great. But websites touch everything so you have to get specific. You have discussions about how things will be maintained and integrate. Now these might be scheduled after a sale, but not always. Being vague creates suspicion to me, so you have to show me, I don't trust a salesman with a short list of rounded benefits.
Too bad in retail, the salesman is pretty much gone after the sale. Then you're stuck because the benefit of the technology doesn't actually work in practice because people have specific needs AND some processes are better than others.
So I'm not a huge buyer into the benefits sell. I think it causes people to get lazy about what they need to know about their product and I think it also puts them into assumption mode about their customer, that they don't think deeply, and that they are oblivious to any useful technical details. And those of us customers who have gotten burned before rarely forget it.
With that said, I think leading with the benefits is great, the trouble is, when everyone leads with the same general benefit "it will make x easier" it becomes time to again leverage something to set yourself apart.