Product Development
Capture the Attention of Key Decision Makers with a New Twist on Your Products
The benefits your product offers users are not enough to close sales
You're getting rave reviews on your products, but your sales are not growing as quickly as you think they should. What's the problem? Chances are you are missing the boat with some key decision makers in the organizations to which you are selling. Miller-Heiman's classic "Strategic Selling," identifies four types of buying influences in a complex sale: User, Technical, Coach, and Economic. You need to create wins for all of the buying influences in order to reliably close a sale. Unfortunately, many technology-based companies cater more to User and Technical buying influences than they do to the person who makes the final decisions and hold the purse strings -- the Economic buyer.
Connect your product with knowledge that is important to economic buyers
By looking at your product in a new light, you may be able to get the attention of the Economic buyer as well as develop a different type of relationship with him and his organization. The Economic buyer is often the CEO or another high-level executive, and he is usually looking for knowledge about his business that will help him "steer the ship." You probably have plenty of insights in your head that you can share, but how will that knowledge translate into a sale? In other words, you can be an expert in the industry and still not convince the Economic buyer that buying your product is a good thing for his organization. However, by leveraging product usage data to create knowledge, you have the opportunity to make your product and its ongoing use a business necessity for the Economic buyer.
Take a lesson from Amazon.com
If you have a product that offers the opportunity to track user activity, you have a built-in resource for generating knowledge about your client's organization. Like Amazon.com, you can collect data on your users and transform it into a valuable selling tool. Moreover, you will be in a unique position to draw conclusions based on the behavior of users across multiple client organizations. Economic buyers want real-time, industry-wide perspectives, but they are usually unable to obtain them. You can be the one that delivers unique insights to them -- in a way that makes your core product indispensable.
Presentation is everything
Focusing on the presentation of product-derived knowledge will produce tremendous returns for your business. Your Economic buyer will likely have a different mindset than your traditional product users. So make sure that your information is quantitative, visible, and actionable. If you can deliver knowledge in a way that gets and keeps his attention, your product sales will follow.
You're getting rave reviews on your products, but your sales are not growing as quickly as you think they should. What's the problem? Chances are you are missing the boat with some key decision makers in the organizations to which you are selling. Miller-Heiman's classic "Strategic Selling," identifies four types of buying influences in a complex sale: User, Technical, Coach, and Economic. You need to create wins for all of the buying influences in order to reliably close a sale. Unfortunately, many technology-based companies cater more to User and Technical buying influences than they do to the person who makes the final decisions and hold the purse strings -- the Economic buyer.
Connect your product with knowledge that is important to economic buyers
By looking at your product in a new light, you may be able to get the attention of the Economic buyer as well as develop a different type of relationship with him and his organization. The Economic buyer is often the CEO or another high-level executive, and he is usually looking for knowledge about his business that will help him "steer the ship." You probably have plenty of insights in your head that you can share, but how will that knowledge translate into a sale? In other words, you can be an expert in the industry and still not convince the Economic buyer that buying your product is a good thing for his organization. However, by leveraging product usage data to create knowledge, you have the opportunity to make your product and its ongoing use a business necessity for the Economic buyer.
Take a lesson from Amazon.com
If you have a product that offers the opportunity to track user activity, you have a built-in resource for generating knowledge about your client's organization. Like Amazon.com, you can collect data on your users and transform it into a valuable selling tool. Moreover, you will be in a unique position to draw conclusions based on the behavior of users across multiple client organizations. Economic buyers want real-time, industry-wide perspectives, but they are usually unable to obtain them. You can be the one that delivers unique insights to them -- in a way that makes your core product indispensable.
Presentation is everything
Focusing on the presentation of product-derived knowledge will produce tremendous returns for your business. Your Economic buyer will likely have a different mindset than your traditional product users. So make sure that your information is quantitative, visible, and actionable. If you can deliver knowledge in a way that gets and keeps his attention, your product sales will follow.