Understanding what your customers are actually buying from you is one of the most important things that you can knw about your customers. Seth Godin nails this in a post from a short while back... …a clean towel is a clean towel.
A decent (read: “lucrative’) way to understand what version of “clean towels” your customers are buying from you is to figure out what they love, what they hate, and most importantly – what their goals are.
How? You’ll need to talk to them. Ask them questions about what they want to use your product for. Questions like “Why did you buy this?”, “What are you hoping to achieve when you use my product?” and other results-oriented questions will be the most useful. Don’t settle for “Well, I just want a web page.”. Push them a little bit, ask them “why” they want a web page. Sooner or later, you’ll get at the emotional reason – “I want a web page because I want to promote my business so that I appear more sophisticated to my clients so that they will pay me slightly more which will make it easier to send my kid to college.”
By figuring out what their goals are, you’ll be very close to understanding what they are really paying for when they give you money. This will help you improve your products and sell them from a much more powerful position.
I mean, if your product is rock climbing gear, you might find that your customers are buying “Accomplishment”, not “power cams”. This is true for most products. Not too many people walk into Home Depot with an explicit intent to buy a drill, no – they walk in with the explicit intent of buying a tool that lets them put a hole in something.
I talked about this in fair detail in a presentation I did earlier this year. You can download the source files for the Powerpoint, as well as a fairly accurate rendering of my verbal presentation (which are included as speakers notes).
BTW – do you have any pointers on how I could make Powerpoints more accessible and useful when I upload them? There’s something about uploading a big zip file and linking to it that doesn’t sit very well with me. Any pointers you could pass along would be helpful.
