Evan Carmichael and a guest answer Osvaldo's question about selling to satisfied customers. They explain that educated buyers respond to next-level benefits like saving money or growing revenue, and that superior service and relationship-building can beat out competitors already in the door.
Osvaldo writing in, how do I communicate and market to a customer who already feels satisfied?
Wow, Osvaldo, the good news is they know why your idea is a great idea. The half of the job is done. The next half of the job, because actually it's much harder to sell to a customer who doesn't know why they want your product, especially in a product sale. So typically, and I've done that, I did a startup and the first 2 years we were out there pitching the idea. And when I look back and reflect on that first couple of years, we were actually educating the market. We were educating the market to assume that they had a need at the time. And actually, I, you know, just kind of like an extreme example of that. Do you think when Steve Jobs sat there with the Apple board holding up an iPhone, wow, 10 years ago, was there anybody in the world that said we need an integrated camera, web browser, phone, computer? No, no. Everybody thought at the time it was pretty crazy and you had kind of BlackBerry and Nokia smashing it out as dominant players in the marketplace. So it's harder actually to educate a market. Now, the good news is if your customer's satisfied, then they know they had a need and that need is satisfied to a certain level. So it means you can kind of go in there and say, wow, if you did it with my product, it just takes you to the next level. You kind of obviously get it. You're a smart guy. You've bought a product that kind of does this. But why my product's so much better. And then you can be very explicit about what the benefits are to that customer. And typically, yeah, actually kind of some rules of benefits. We haven't talked about this before, Evan, I'm surprised actually. Some rules of benefits, either it saves them money, either it grows their top line quicker, either it makes their life easy, or it sort of appeals to, you could say, their ego, or it makes them feel better, or, you know, all those sort of things. So they're kind of the 4 principal things, almost anything you could do with a product. Actually, it's a kind of good discipline. If it's a product or even a service, you say, what is the need? And that sounds like in this case, it's pretty well established, customer satisfied. And then you look at your product relative to why they're satisfied and say, why can I give them additional benefits that will really appeal to them? Like I can grow their business faster or help them grow their business faster and feel better for themselves. I can take cost out of their business. All those so that I can make them more efficient. So there's a kind of standard kind of playbook of benefits that you can play in there. The good news is they already get it. They've woken up, they drank the Kool-Aid, and now you can take them to the next level and sell on the benefits and pitch the benefits explicitly of the product. And hopefully that will mean they're well-educated and they totally get it. And it actually could be kind of a very rapid sort of sales cycle to close them out.
What I would add to it is I would also really put some value into the relationship. You know, you might be in a market where there is no differentiation, where if you're selling, you know, financial products, everybody's selling the same thing. If you're a real estate agent, you're selling the same thing. Yes, there's differences, I guess, in your ability to sell, maybe, but really you're selling the same thing. And so the difference is the relationship. And so if they're with current supplier and you want to supplant them, then I would just try to really also build on top of everything Steven said, which is amazing. I would also look at what's the relationship. How do I out-service these guys compared to what they're currently getting and form a tight communication with them? So if they understand that I care about them and they feel like I'm gonna care more about them than whoever they're currently with, that could be reason enough to want to switch over and give me the next contract and deal. So servicing the relationship side on top of all of the, you know, clear, easy-to-understand benefits, I think would really help you win those deals.
