Stop thinking in terms of what you sell and start thinking in terms of what your clients buy or think they buy.
I also touched on this in my Sticky Services slide deck that I presented at ISPCon earlier this year. People don’t buy laptops, they buy learning (amongst other things).
Its imperative that you get inside your customers heads to figure out exactly what it is that they are buying from you. I’ve found that one of the best ways to accomplish this is to talk to them about what their goal are – i.e. *why* did you buy my product? What were you seeking seeking to achieve?
Once you have an understanding of what their goals are, it becomes much easier to sell to them – simply help them achieve their goals and they will give you money.
Apple has this nailed. They’ve had it nailed for at least 20 years. Here’s how they sold their Mac’s back in the eighties –
The bottom line? A Mac makes it easy for you to publish great looking reports that will make you more successful at the office.
Here’s what they were selling against at the time…
Commodore’s bottom line? Our computer is a totally flash piece of equipment that has all sorts of geeky features that people still don’t understand 20 years later.
So here’s my bottom line with this post – unless your customers understand how your product or service going to make them more sexy, smarter, successful, productive, or otherwise help them achieve one or more of their goals, you may as well pack it in now and free up your operating capital for some other entrepreneur that does understand this.
