I was recently chatting with an entrepreneur at Hyperplane portfolio company about some lessons from One to Ten. Their product has not really existed before and we were brainstorming their process and tactics on how they can go to market. It reminded me of a passage from the book on educating your customers and teaching them how to buy.
"Be prescriptive with customers.
Customers often need to be taught on how to buy your product. This is especially true when there are new technologies or processes involved. They won’t ask the right questions or have the right stakeholders involved to understand the value or ensure success. Be prescriptive and walk your customer through how to properly evaluate and buy your product. This can be in the
form of evaluation guides, checklists, sample RFPs, and other such material.
At Videoplaza, most of our customers had never bought an ad server, let alone known how to migrate to a new one. Doubleclick or whatever homegrown server they had was all they’d ever known. We quickly learned that we’d have to be much more prescriptive in spelling out what they’d need to consider to evaluate a purchase and the process for migrating to another system. This gave new prospects comfort in making the leap to our platform. "
In these situations, you'll want to invest in product marketing and sales enablement to create artifacts and tools that your team can use in educating customers. Many customers won’t even know the questions to ask. Help them with this.
In addition, cultivating relations with analysts and other thought leaders in your space will give legitimacy to the category you're trying to create. These shouldn't be ad-hoc but rather a systematic campaign to forge relationships (paid or not) with these players.
One artifact from Value Selling is the creation of a “Champion’s Deck” - a set of slides spelling out the vision and business case for the relationship including the objective, the problems being solved, your company’s solution, the value to be realized and the mutual plan to get to value, including an implementation plan. The idea is for your interlocutor to use a version of this when championing your solution internally. Again, it’s a tool teaching your customers about why and how to buy your solution.
If you don't educate your customers, they'll either stumble their way to figuring it out, resulting in lengthier sales cycles or your competition will do so while framing the narrative on their own playing field.
So don’t be afraid to be more prescriptive and to teach your customers how to buy.
Rags, great way to make market! Help the customer to specify and buy from you! Perhaps an additional next step can be to help him, the customer, to organize his supply chain and purchasing department to be more competitive with your product or services. This is what we are doing at www.rethinkingworks.com . AI and Agile enabled supply chain optimization! Check it out!