Hey, happy Monday!
When you signed up for this newsletter, I did not ask you for too much information. In fact, other than your email address no additional personal information.
Today, however, I want to ask you a question: What are you selling?
You personally, or the company you work for.
What is your product?
A practical exercise
I happened in the last period to work on two projects that had one thing in common. There was no clear understanding of the product they were selling.
Boy a big problem you must be thinking!
It must have happened to you, too, that looking at the site you must have wondered: mhhh… nice, but what are they selling?
The equation is simple: if you don’t understand it, you can’t buy it.
From the feedback I get, I have realized that one of the most valued qualities of this newsletter is the pragmatism. The fact that by the time you finish reading it you can already change something in the way you work.
So I asked myself, how can I improve sales of your product/service in just 5 minutes of reading this newsletter?
I’m going to help you figure out if you’re selling one of these 4 things because if you’re selling something else you’re probably encountering difficulties.
These four things are:
- Money
- Time
- Sex
- Tranquility
The basics
In the meantime, it is important to agree that no one cares about the technology you own, the software you use, the decor of your office, the chemical ingredients in Latin printed on the label…
People care that you can solve the problem.
Design Thinking experts might tell you things like “people want to be better”-and that’s right because anything your product does outside of solving the problem just pisses them off, which is exactly the opposite of being better.
Then you need to be sure that everything about your product is aligned with that problem. From communication to distribution, from aesthetics to user experience…
Otherwise any effort will be in vain.
If you disagree you can unsubscribe right away or together we can simplify the issue and try to figure out if your product falls into one of these four categories and mark things to fix as early as today.
Imagine your product as a fruit. In the center is a seed and around it is everything else. The pulp, the taste, the smell, the color–it all depends on the seed. If the seed changes, the fruit changes. You can’t give people an apple that tastes like radicchio–even if you were good at selling it, they would spit it out, and they would change greengrocers.
So let’s find the seed…
Money
If your product solves the problem of growing, earning or saving money then this is your seed.
It is not just about financial products.
Think of the seed as the ultimate benefit of your product.
You could sell a tool to improve e-commerce performance, to get more people to a restaurant, or an app to save money on utility bills–the benefit is identical and is related to improving your client’s financial situation.
Get it right.
- Eliminate hidden costs.
- Is the gain/saving evident?
- Do you adequately celebrate the increases?
Time
Is your product able to do something long in less time or does it allow you to improve time management or even do something to free up more time for your customers?
Whether it’s a vacuum cleaner or an automation tool, of a grocery shopping or skip-the-line app, of a new person to hire that gets his boss home sooner-then this is your seed.
- It shows speed. The faster it looks, the simpler it seems even though there is something extremely complicated under the hood.
- Explain well how the time savings materialize and try to quantify it.
- Visualize how to make better use of freed up time
Sex
Here you do not need to be explicit. We understand each other 😉
Whether it’s a perfume, a car, a piece of clothing, or a social network, it falls into this category if it allows your customers to improve relationships with others.
Choosing one brand over another is a powerful tool that not only allows one to express one’s personality but to be a suitable alternative for mixing and evolving one’s genetic makeup.
A strong opinion on this is held by Scott Galloway, who in his book The four. The masters. The secret DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. reverse engineers the strategies that the four tech companies use to manipulate the basic needs of all of us. I attach a diagram that explains it all!
- Avoid clichés.
- Make the product a personal expression of the user.
- Make your customers proud to show it.
Tranquility
These products function like insurance to prevent something unfortunate from happening, and the value is usually related to the extent of the damage. Is this the case for you?
Whether it’s IT maintenance services, savings management, car insurance or a restaurant with twice the table spacing–this is your seed.
The fact is that we are inclined to place a very high value on the probability of losing something that we are willing to invest to prevent it from happening.
Unfortunately, or fortunately for you, our brains easily fall for these kinds of pitfalls when the messages are packaged well.
Daniel Kahneman was so good at explaining this concept and generally relating psychologies and economics that he won the Nobel Prize in 2002. I recommend his book Slow and fast thinking because his studies on decision-making processes could come in extremely handy.
- What stress can you reduce from your clients’ lives?
- Visualize how small the investment is compared to the possible damage.
- Constantly inform them of the risk and how much they are protected accordingly.
Next steps
I am sure that as you read you will have managed to place the right seed in your product or service.
Multiple benefits are likely to amplify each other, but for this exercise consider only one, the most important one, the one that instinctively came to mind as you read.
Rewrite the value proposition with this new angle.
Do you want [description benefit] ? Click here.
Paste this sentence into your email signature, which is essentially a sales letter you send 100 times a day.
Ask your colleagues to do the same.
You just improved your product sales, in 5 minutes.
Now the week is downhill.
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
