As a product owner, you’re unlikely going to get extraordinary results if you continue to center your marketing on your product features alone. By the end of this post, you’ll see why it’s more effective to devote your energy to explaining why your product is useful and is highly valued, rather than selling the features that make up your product. Unless you provide tangible solutions that are in-demand, your target audience may never pay attention to what you have to sell.
For this reason, recognizing the problems that your customers are experiencing and providing the right solutions, and at the right price, is crucial to building a successful business that attracts new customers. This is one of the key business mindset shifts that will make you more profitable.
In this post, you’ll learn five (5) tried and tested strategies to start providing solutions, which will help you sell more products and grow your business..
What Does It Mean To Provide A Solution?
Selling a solution first starts with establishing an ideal connection between your customers’ needs and the product you’re selling. But oftentimes, products are created in a one-size-fits-all approach, rather than as easily customizable items to accommodate individual custom needs.
A solution could be a product, service, or combination of the two that is carefully designed to help a customer solve a particular problem.
In today’s world, business is changing at a rapid rate and customers’ expectations and needs are evolving along with it. As business owners, we can’t continue to repeat old practices and expect different results.
Selling a solution will require that you fundamentally change how you do business. For example, instead of merely pushing products to the market, you’ll need to start investing your time and resources in creating genuine connections with your customers in order to understand their problems and create solutions that addresses their concerns
Making a transition away from the traditional feature-focused mindset to a problem-solving one may be challenging at first, but there is clear evidence that the outcome of this shift is worth its weight in gold.
Now, let’s dive into the five (5) effective strategies to facilitate this transition.
1. Identify Your Customer’s Pain Points
Most customers don’t care about your product itself. What customers care about is what’s in it for them. What solution can they get from what you’re selling?
But how can you possibly help solve their problem if you don’t know what’s bothering them in the first place?
The right step forward is to provide a solution that people want to pay for to satisfy a problem they want to solve. To achieve this, you need to develop genuine relationships with each of your customers with a view to learning about their problems and how to find new ways to help address them.
The ability to fully comprehend your customers’ needs and create tailor-made solutions is your best chance to convert customers into lifelong clients of your business.
2. Engage And Delight Your Customers
There’s a belief commonly held by salespeople that the more knowledgeable and informed customers are, the more likely they’re to shop around and find an alternative solution. This idea is only partly correct.
Indeed, improving customers’ knowledge doesn’t necessarily lure them away from your business. Instead, it helps you to gain their trust and further solidify the relationship that exists between them and what you’re trying to sell.
Some of the tools you can leverage to help educate your prospective customers include how-to blog posts, educational videos, infographics, white papers, and other resources that can help them make informed buying decisions.
A customer who benefits from your insightful blog post or YouTube video will more likely purchase from you, when comparing your products against your competitors.
3. Clearly Articulate Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Unless you’re operating in a monopolized market, there are chances that you have competition, probably stronger ones. So, how do you distinguish yourself from the crowd and sway prospective customers to your side? The answer is simply by highlighting your unique selling proposition.
A unique selling proposition is the essence of what makes your solution better and more effective than your competitors. A strong USP articulates the value you provide and the problems it helps solve. It projects a specific advantage that you have over other product companies in your space.
It’s not enough to say something like, “we provide excellent customer service.” That’s too broad and generic. Instead, say “we have a dedicated team of customer representatives who operate 24-hours a day, 7 days a week and are standing by waiting to attend to your questions and ensure that all of your challenges are addressed in the shortest time possible.”
While providing a 24/7 customer support team may not always qualify as a strong USP, the idea is to show you how you can sell the benefits you provide to gain a competitive advantage.
4. Show Them Proof
Today’s customers are not only hesitant, they’re often cynical. And since there are plenty of salespeople looking to deploy dishonest tactics to sell a few products, it is important that you demonstrate how your business is credible and trustworthy.
Have evidence of your end-solution and a catalog of what you have helped your customers achieve from purchasing your products. Instead of merely stating how you’ve helped hundreds or thousands of people solve their problems, you can include a link to customer reviews on search engines or social media. You can also feature customer testimonials on your website and in other marketing materials.
5. Sell Value
Customers are always keen on knowing what they stand to benefit when they buy from you. This is why you need to focus your messaging on value, instead of on product features. The most important metric in a new product is the changes and capabilities that the product introduces to the user’s life or environment.
For example, instead of describing a camera’s battery by saying it has a whopping 2130mAh capacity. I would choose an option that describes how this camera battery makes life and work easy. While not many people care about camera battery specifications, everyone wants something handy that makes their life and work easier.
Thus the more effective way to sell a camera battery is by telling customers that they can shoot the entire day without worrying about it dying. That sounds more promising and directly beneficial than harping on some grand product feature. It is all about the experience and value that your product delivers.
In closing, keep in mind that people buy with emotions but will always try to justify their decisions with logic. If you want to get the most from your marketing and grow your business, you must develop strong connections between you and your customers, and work to address their problems with what you’re selling. Applying these five strategies will help you become more effective at selling your products, while providing desirable solutions at the same time.
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