A great product launch starts with a great product – but being great just isn’t enough anymore. You’ve got to know how to make your product perfectly suited for your audience. An amazing product that sells itself requires very little salesmanship.
I stumbled upon this post on Medium by Sean Smith (Sean also publishes his writing on @HuffingtonPost, @TNW, @99U and @Copyblogger).
It’s a great read. The author talks about one of the most important things you should consider when selling any product.
He Writes:
What is the most important thing you should consider when selling?
Emotion.
Emotion creates the sell, not logic, not information, emotion.
Your logic needs to be sound, the information needs to add up, but if someone isn’t emotionally connected to what you’re selling, your sale will fall flat on its face. Who is buying your product or service, why would they buy from you? What’s the intrinsic connection that would set you apart?
People don’t buy Apple products because they are connecting logically to the information, they buy because they are emotionally connected to the brand, the vision, and the idea behind the products Apple creates.
Apple follows through very well by giving all the information you would need and all the logical necessities that you should get from their products; but they sell you on an emotion.
What are you going to get from buying?
That’s the question they answer by the emotion that they give you. They show a beautiful person loving life using their products to either have more fun, do their craft better, or generally have a better life.
We all want technology to give us a better life, so no-wonder we all emotionally connect to this idea. It’s a gut reaction, and the only reason someone would buy a $1,000 phone when there are so many alternatives on the market.
There is no way to get a person more emotionally connected to a sale than expressing the outcome from the outset.
If they feel an emotional return on their investment, and can attach a value to what you’re pushing, they will immediately be invested in what you’re selling.
So, how can you initiate this?
Whatever you’re selling, find the intrinsic value that your customer would want from you and immediately dive as deep as you can empathizing with that value. This is a really hard process that comes from a ton of introspection, asking people, and asking customers.
The famous “1,000 songs in your pocket” tagline sold the original iPod.
This wasn’t just the information making the sale, remember at the time you had a walkman with 14 songs on a CD, the CD would skip, the CDs were annoying to keep up with, the product was cheap feeling. This was a life changer. This was an emotional punch to the gut. 1,000 songs in your pocket, why the hell would you buy anything else?
The same can be said about some more contemporary examples, things aren’t necessarily as in-the-spotlight as the iPod example.
“Create professional client proposals in minutes” by Bidsketch is a perfect value proposition.
The time saved is an obvious implication, but also that they will be professional — which implies the attention to detail of the system. You’ve already beaten the competition because that’s all I really care about, and the fact that you knew me well enough to solve my problems from the outset means that you will probably do everything else right by me as well.
“Be a hero” from GoPro is pure gold.
Vague, I grant you, but no-less gold.
If you think about the time at which this headline took them from small single product startup to a billion-dollar valuation, the “self-shooting” sensation was a bleak scene. Nothing captured the emotion quite like GoPro, Canon and the others simply missed the mark, their marketing focused on the features, the specs. They were geared towards the camera geeks that were used to DSLRs, not surfers that simply wanted to watch themselves rip up the waves. GoPro inspired people to be a hero, they caught on to the intrinsic value that their customers wanted, to simply show off, to be seen, to be recognized, to be revered for what they love to do.
All of these examples lead the sale with the outcome. They showed you what you could be, what you could have, what you could accomplish, the only thing standing between you and the finish line is buying the product.
Obviously a lot of other points play into performing the perfect cut-back on a wave, or setting up the perfect proposal, or figuring out which new songs to buy with all that space — but the job of selling was done by that initial kick of emotion.
So, learn what intrinsic value your product or service can offer, lead with the outcome, and sell to your hearts content.
I’d also like to add that you will always forget to do this when it matters. Put it somewhere you will always see, write it down. Continually refer to it, follow up with it, use it in everything you do from your website to your business cards.
Execution is everything, so when you’re designing your next homepage, or you’re writing your next blog post, remember to refer to it.
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