Do you value "Value"?
I know. The question doesn't make sense. Allow me to expound.
How many of you have been told: "We don't market products. We market solutions.". Of course, what they mean is that they don't sell MS Word, they sell MS Office; a complete solution to all of your needs as it relates to desktop productivity. And then, once that is established, they talk about all of the fantastic features the solution offers like spell check, object linking between applications, and on and on.
Did ya see my point? Did ya get it? Was I too subtle?
Nowhere in that paragraph did it talk about the value to the end-user -- the paying customer -- of having a complete solution. How does it make their life better? What is their experience? What is their current pain and how will that go away? How will their career improve? How will it impact their next promotion or salary review? How will it help them achieve the metrics for which their boss or their employer measures them against?
Speaking "value" means making it personal! Consumer brands get this. That's why I roll my eyes when experts from consumer brand companies come and speak to technology marketers. They're not speaking from the same frame of reference. Technology marketers, brought up in traditional engineering-centric companies, will never understand or relate to what is being said. The concept of "brand" is foreign and lost on technology marketers, especially in Canada.
So why do I care about "value"? Afterall, it's the cool features that help me differentiate myself from my competition, right? Wrong. Most users use less than ten percent of the actual functions of the product. Features, after a while, don't matter. In fact, in a future blog I'll talk about dumbing down your product and removing features for competitive advantage.
You care about value because you're gonna use the benefit to create a business case for the consumer so that they can justify purchasing your solution. Huh? Let me explain. If a complete Office suite makes you five percent more efficient, and your salary is $50K per year, that means we just saved your employer $2,500 per year. Over four years that's $10,000. Now, if you have one hundred employees at your company, you can multiply the savings by one hundred. That means, over four years, you save your employer $1,000,000. That money can be re-invested into other strategic initiatives (like a company health club!) that will increase productivity and make you more competitive. It's like found money. And what you did was help the purchaser justify the investment. And we did it without a single demo, a single whitepaper on technical capabilities, or a single dissertation on the academic merits of our algorithms verses the competitions'. You've created a barrier to competition that your competition is completely unaware of and will never respond to in the sales cycle.
And that's why you should value value.
Unless, of course, you'd rather not succeed.
I know. The question doesn't make sense. Allow me to expound.
How many of you have been told: "We don't market products. We market solutions.". Of course, what they mean is that they don't sell MS Word, they sell MS Office; a complete solution to all of your needs as it relates to desktop productivity. And then, once that is established, they talk about all of the fantastic features the solution offers like spell check, object linking between applications, and on and on.
Did ya see my point? Did ya get it? Was I too subtle?
Nowhere in that paragraph did it talk about the value to the end-user -- the paying customer -- of having a complete solution. How does it make their life better? What is their experience? What is their current pain and how will that go away? How will their career improve? How will it impact their next promotion or salary review? How will it help them achieve the metrics for which their boss or their employer measures them against?
Speaking "value" means making it personal! Consumer brands get this. That's why I roll my eyes when experts from consumer brand companies come and speak to technology marketers. They're not speaking from the same frame of reference. Technology marketers, brought up in traditional engineering-centric companies, will never understand or relate to what is being said. The concept of "brand" is foreign and lost on technology marketers, especially in Canada.
So why do I care about "value"? Afterall, it's the cool features that help me differentiate myself from my competition, right? Wrong. Most users use less than ten percent of the actual functions of the product. Features, after a while, don't matter. In fact, in a future blog I'll talk about dumbing down your product and removing features for competitive advantage.
You care about value because you're gonna use the benefit to create a business case for the consumer so that they can justify purchasing your solution. Huh? Let me explain. If a complete Office suite makes you five percent more efficient, and your salary is $50K per year, that means we just saved your employer $2,500 per year. Over four years that's $10,000. Now, if you have one hundred employees at your company, you can multiply the savings by one hundred. That means, over four years, you save your employer $1,000,000. That money can be re-invested into other strategic initiatives (like a company health club!) that will increase productivity and make you more competitive. It's like found money. And what you did was help the purchaser justify the investment. And we did it without a single demo, a single whitepaper on technical capabilities, or a single dissertation on the academic merits of our algorithms verses the competitions'. You've created a barrier to competition that your competition is completely unaware of and will never respond to in the sales cycle.
And that's why you should value value.
Unless, of course, you'd rather not succeed.
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