No One
is Interested in your Product
You’re a product manager with a budget,
a deadline and a hankering for the smell of fresh
ink. You want to get your message out to the market.
You want a brochure. Yet as you read this, forests
of competitor sales brochures are rolling off
the presses – and heading straight for recycling.
Answer the questions in this no-holds barred memo,
and you’ll increase your chances of grabbing
a share of mind, and with it, share of budget.
Q1. What's the objective?
80% of sales collaterals are produced to…
produce sales collaterals. The cry goes up: “We
need a brochure!” So we make one, and it
looks great. And we tick the ‘to-do’
list, and we move on. And at no point does anyone
ask: “What are we trying to achieve?”
If you’re going to spend your precious
budget and your valuable time on any activity,
you have to start with the end in mind. Identify
the business objective, with as much precision
as possible. Once you have that nailed down, you
might find that a brochure isn’t the best
solution. Maybe it’s an event, or an email,
or a site visit, or a press release, or a song,
or a ‘phone call.
Q2. Who's the audience?
“Customers, dummy!” (I asked this
of a particular product manager, and he looked
at me like I had asked him what the rhythmic thumping
was in my chest.) But identification of the audience
– and identification with the audience –
is the most important selection decision you can
make in creating your collateral.
Who are they? If the answer is general, like
‘financial institutions’, ask the
question again: Who are they? Who in the financial
institution? And while we’re in exploratory
mood, which financial institutions? Retail banks;
merchant banks; private banks; corporate banks;
investment banks; insurance companies; insurance
brokers; re-insurers; life companies…you
have plenty of choice. So who is it that you want
to address with your new sales collateral, and
in what market sector?
Describe them, in detail. Their budget, their
team, their projects, their boss, their responsibilities,
their priorities, their goals, their pain. Because
if you don’t understand them intimately,
you can’t communicate with them. You can
talk at them, but not with them.
Q3. What action do you want?
If Q1 is a general objective, Q3 is the time
to get very specific. Your collateral must be
a call to action. Someone must do something after
reading it. What is it?
Again, be specific. Build the response handling
into your costs (remember Hoover and the free
flights?). Your answer will not only focus your
mind on the tactics; you might reveal a few gaps
in your process. A colleague was once asked to
produce some lead generation materials and told
that respondents would call a toll-free number.
The campaign yielded a 0% response rate. No one
had registered the number.
Even if you are ‘just giving information’,
rather than generating leads, there must still
be an action after the collateral. If not, why
are you spending the company’s money?
Q4. What's the route to market?
Yes, I know this looks a rather pedestrian
Issue. It’s just that I have seen –
or rather
found – so many boxes of unused collateral
sitting in stationery cupboards or in storerooms
that it is a vital question. And we’re not
talking end of print run; this is flagrant waste
because the process hadn’t been thought
through.
Before you create your materials, ask yourself
how they are going to get to market. The answer
could be very simple: “Each salesperson
will get an envelope with 50 sets, and a note
telling them that additional copies can be ordered
from the website”. It could be much more
complex, with multiple languages, multiple locations
serviced by a centralized print capability.
Do whatever fits your organization. Just take
some time to think it through, and make sure that
all the relevant players know what they have to
do. No matter how interactive, sales collaterals
need to be propelled by human energy.
Q5. What's the proposition?
Now we start to get to the content of your pitch;
but take note of the question. It is not “What
do you want to say?” No point in answering
that, because no one is interested (I did say
that I would pull no punches).
You are the most passionate, committed, knowledgeable,
enthused, downright delirious advocate for your
product on the planet. You know more than anyone
else about what it can do, how it’s designed,
why it’s better, faster, more powerful,
more flexible. You are the evangelist, and you
want to spread the word.
Well, hold up a moment. The key here is to pace
the delivery of your information. Don’t
tell them everything at the first encounter. At
this stage, you’re vying for the prospect’s
attention, and if you start telling them everything
you want to, they’ll switch off in the first
few sentences. If they don’t, they’ll
drown. Switching off is a self-preservation exercise.
Speak to the listening of your audience. Focus
your proposition on the customer’s problem
or opportunity. Focus on how your solution delivers
value, rather than how the product works. Speeds
and feeds go on the Tech Spec sheet, not on a
sales collateral. To break through the noise filter
that prospects carry around, you have to pitch
your product in the customer’s context,
not in yours. The reader doesn’t care about
your features – s/he only cares about their
own. So address them.
Q6. What are the three reasons to buy?
The human brain works in threes. Nobody knows
why, but tests show that we remember threes better
than any other grouping. So after you’ve
listed your product’s 127 features and benefits,
the really hard work starts. Reduce them to three.
What are the three smack-down, best-of-the-best
reasons for preferring your solution to any other?
They may be technical, financial, organizational
– even personal. Pick the three that set
the benchmark for the prospect to judge all the
others. Then cram as much supporting evidence
as you can into the collateral. Every page, every
paragraph, every diagram should be supporting
the three claims.
These six questions are about one thing: Selection.
You have to be selective to communicate, and you
have to communicate to market your product. The
world will never be as fluent about it as you
are, but if your target group finds value in your
proposition, and they remember your three reasons
to buy, you’ll be a long way ahead of the
competition. |
