Why you’re not making sales
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
I like to think of each product feature as a "marketing event". Before you add a feature or do a release, you design things around how you are going to sell it, how people will use it, and what the messaging might be for it. Then, when you launch the feature, you email your users, blog about it, drop press releases, go on podcasts, tweet the news, post to Facebook, and in general get the word out.
This might seem basic to some people, but I'm continually surprised by just how very little this is done by most companies or products. It is rare to see a company that nails the basic concept of "do things and tell people".
Github seems consistently good about this. Their pattern is launch a feature, blog about it, tweet about it, and their passionate users probably post it to social media or write about it on their blogs.
Now, imagine if Github shipped the same features, but never blogged about them. How much exposure would they miss out on?
There are absolutely companies that have succeeded wildly without taking this approach, so it is not definitive by any means, in addition to not being novel.
On the other hand, there are plenty of great products that people are struggling to market effectively, for a number of reasons. Please, stop misleading people with the notion that marketing is easy if one simply "builds the right product".
When you're out there hustling and trying to solve tough sales and marketing problems, it's frustrating to keep seeing the same watered-down pablum on offer as advice.
It's even worse when the advice ends with "buy my product".
Also: examples of great products that people are struggling to market effectively?
Virtually any company that created a new product or product category. See what others have posted on this thread as examples.
>Also: examples of great products that people are struggling to market effectively?
Well, I could, but the likely subsequent quibbling over products of which you've probably never heard misses the point. So, instead, why don't I just state the corollary to the implication in your question: everyone is aware of every product that could be of great interest or use to them.
Because, that is effectively the corollary to this article as well.
There are marketing challenges that are completely divorced from the viability of the product itself.
Companies like Apple, Amazon, google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or developers of things like WhatsApp did NOT do it this why.
They build something for their own needs or something they think someone want to use.
So what is now right and what is wrong?
That doesn't mean that there wasn't a more fundamental pain that people were feeling: getting around more quickly.
So no, it's not always the best idea to solve the problem the person has, as they literally describe it. But if you are not solving either their perceived problem or their underlying real problem, they are not going to buy your solution.
Few people imagined an iPhone before they saw one, but it did solve real problems.
Yes, the product ultimately needs to be something that people need or want, of course. But, that is so self-evident as to be a non-statement. Certainly no need to write an article about that.
It's the advocated approach/conclusion that is nonsense. Failure to ask people what they need or want as this article and many before it advocate, is not the problem. In fact, such an approach can be counterproductive.
What has gotten old (and was never true) is people advocating this as the way to build a product/company.
The reason this matters is because it obscures the real point: Marketing is hard and is its own animal. There are many other moving parts involved in getting a product to market in a manner that reaches and compels the intended audience. To say that people aren't selling because they didn't build the right product is so simplistic and misleading that it does earnest entrepreneurs a disservice.
Second if there is a goldrush for something, instead of becoming a miner, become a general store and sell them tools, picks, and shovels instead. If you write programs write libraries, development tools, templates, websites and ebooks on the subject, and other things. Remember that in most goldrushes miners will find fool's gold or not find any gold at all. But the ones selling them the tools will always earn money.
Third take care of your customers so they become repeat customers. You might have to offer them discounts or free stuff, as long as it helps them decide to keep coming back.
Fourth do a SWATT analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Analysis, Threats, Trends. Focus on your strengths, cover your weaknesses, analyze everything you can, look at threats like competitor's products and tech that can make your product obsolete, and then watch trends so you know how to avoid threats by innovating your products and services.
We used SWOTT, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, and Trends. Trends was added to SWOT because if a startup is not paying attention to trends their products and services will get very old fast and lose their customer base in an instant.
"Build something people want" and "find a pain that people need solved" are the same things. While I don't think the four examples OP gave are the only things people care about, they're great examples:
- How will this make me more money? - How will this save me more money? - How will this save me more time? - How will this make me look good?
Those questions address real needs that people have. Anything that doesn't directly address a need your customer has is just a feature.
Implicit in this is that you have to figure out who your customer is. Your customer is the first person you'd ask to use your product. That's the person whose needs you need to address.
For example -
A $10k per month email marketing service will need to go through many different stages of approval and have multiple buying influences involved.
On the other hand,
A $10 per month Gmail add on could be purchased on a corporate card or even one's personal card and then expensed.
Scenario 1 - no, building ONLY for the users is a bad idea because they aren't the only ones buying.
Scenario 2 - yes, the purchase is small enough to be handled by the user or at the highest the users boss (because they sign off on the expense reports).
We touch briefly on the subject in a blog post from last year: http://blog.voltagecrm.com/mapping-the-sales-process-part-36...
Hope that helps.