Ian Peterman breaks down how to add value around your core product through services, tools, content, and partnerships. He highlights "services that aren't services," where a sales rep's recommendation adds value without a direct charge. Strategic partnerships can extend reach, build credibility, and create cross-promotion opportunities, especially for new businesses seeking differentiation.
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Hello and welcome to today's episode of Conscious Design. Today we're gonna talk about launching a product. I wanna talk about being the value add to your own product and how you can do that in order to create more value for your own product. To your customers, you know, being beyond just a product and entering into a world where you can provide more than just a product and you're able to really help your customers even more than just your product might. So I want to talk about what is value-add, ways, ways that you possibly can add value. Obviously this will be from a high level. There's an infinite number of ways you can do that. Services that aren't exactly services and partnerships. So first, what is value-add? So I've talked about this in terms of retail, and basically it's where you have a product and you have something that is around that product, whether it's your customer service helping people figure out which product to buy. If you have a say questionnaire or quiz on your website that helps people determine which product fits them best, uh, or what's going to be most valuable to them. If you have a sales process where you have a sales rep that talks to someone and helps identify their problems and which products are going to help solve them, whether it's yours or not, those are things that you can do to add value around a product. So you sell them the product, And you have these extra things that you do. Often they have to do with a person being involved or non-products. Occasionally they can be additional products that you sell or add in free attached to a product or accessories, things like that. But oftentimes it's more a service-related, you know, human interaction or some interaction, even if it's automated. Based on around your product to help increase the value that you're providing to your customers. This can even include things like a blog or a podcast or some other outlet where you're providing free value, additional value that the customers can get from you and around your product or even service. So second, ways to add value. So I talked a little bit about this, but there's kind of these high categories. You can provide a service, so you can provide— you can write some kind of service. You can provide some kind of tool or assessment that goes with products, or you can add additional products that are included with or attached to your primary product. You can also do things like have partnerships. So you can have a partnership with a company and say, well, when you buy our product, you get access to this other product at a discount or for free or something like that. So you can add value even through creating partnerships where you have multiple companies all working together. You're offering a product and they— your customer then is able to get value from these other companies as well. And that That kind of partnership is really smart, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But these are different ways you can add value to a product. Another way that you can do it is simply curate your products. So say you have a long SKU list, maybe you have 50 SKUs that you sell, you have 50 products, individual products that you sell to your customers, and typically customers buy certain products you know, these 5 products together, or they'll buy a couple products here and then they will order this repeatedly. So offering things like a subscribe and save or ways to add value for your customers without adding additional products. So keep in mind, there's, you know, there's a long list that you can go through, but these are just some of the few, few different ways that you can add value to your customers. Around your product. Third thing here, services that aren't services. So this is what I was talking about before, of your sales rep being able to talk through and help identify the problems that your customer is having and then provide product recommendations. So anything that's a product recommendation, anything that it requires a— especially if it requires a human involvement where you're building a relationship around something. So this is where, you know, especially bigger purchases where you would have more sales reps, you would have more one-on-one conversation between your customer and someone on your team or yourself. That is where that is a service, but you're not charging for it. And then so when we talk about services generally, it's something you charge for. Well, this is— I do consulting, or We do X and we charge for it. There are these many little services that you can provide that nobody really charges for, or people often don't charge for because it's an easy way to add value. So last thing I wanna talk about is partnerships. So this is something like what I mentioned before and ways to add value, finding products or services from other companies that actually pair well with your product or service. This can be something you typically— this needs to be something that you don't plan on offering yourself, or even, even if you do down the road, but right now it's something that you can't offer or don't want to offer. This is a great time to find those companies that, hey, people, people buy your product, they use your product, and then they also use some other product around it. So this is something that you can easily partner with another company and say, well, I want people to buy— when they buy my product, I want them to get your product at a discount, or I want to give them access to your product, can you give us a deal? And so you can partner with companies, and it also gives you an ability to cross-promote, and because they're going to want to promote, hey, well, if you buy this product, you get our service, or you get a discount on our service. So there's a lot of things you can do, and that partnership can be a great way to just add more value to your own product than you possibly could on your own. And, and by doing that, it doesn't mean you're gonna, you know, rely on their marketing. You're still gonna market your product, you're gonna sell your product, but it's a way for customers to come to you and you're giving more value attached to your product than just your product by itself. So this is really— this can be really important, uh, in terms of especially if you are starting out, you want to add as much value to your product as possible. And the more things you can attach to, the more service you can give, the more value you can provide, the more people are going to want to purchase your product. And if you have smart partnerships and you get attached to bigger names than yourself as partnerships with your product, or things that you can add value that are associated with someone else, that can also help grow your business and grow how much people are going to trust your brand, especially if you're new. Having the right partnerships can help your brand stand out and have more effect on people and be more recognized and more accepted by your customers. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed, and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.
