The more you know about your customers, the more effective your sales and marketing efforts will be. It’s well worth making the effort to find out:
• WHO they are
• WHY they buy
• WHEN they buy it
• WHAT they buy
• WHOM they buy from (currently)
If you’re selling to other businesses, you’ll need to know which individuals are responsible for the decision to buy your product or service.

I’m using the word ‘product’ in this context as a broad term. This means if you’re a jewelry company then your product is obviously jewelry, but if you’re a marketing company then your product is the services you provide. All businesses have a product of some kind.

The problem I’ve noticed, though, is often people don’t understand their product, haven’t defined their product or, in some cases when a person is just starting a company, they don’t even know what their product is or is going to be.

Today we are going to delve into your brand, product or service. I challenge you to give a revisit to your own product and the problem you thought would be solved if your customer used your product. If you’re just starting a business, but don’t know what your product is yet you need to find out before you do anything else. Not only is marketing impossible without a defined product, but a business itself is almost non-existent when you don’t know what it is you’re selling. So, how do you figure out what your product is? Luckily, there’s a set of questions to get you started on this as well.

No matter what you are selling, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

– Why are you promoting what you are?
– Do you understand the solution you are providing a potential customer?
– What are their pain points you will help solve for them (Create a list)
– People trust people. Do you (or your brand ambassador) have relatable and likeable qualities

If you have 100 customers, there are probably only 10 who are actually amazing – your ideal customers. The goal is to figure out what those 10 ideal customers have in common. Who are they? What are the characteristics that make them up?

Then you can actually do marketing that finds those specific people and attracts 100 out of 100 customers – not 10 out of 100.

The Art Of Persuading Your Customers

As we learn and grow our business, it is important to have Pathos (emotional appeal). That’s why figuring your “why” for your business is important. We want to be able to connect with our audience deeply and emotionally.

Pathos: These are emotional appeal. It’s the deep connection between you and the audience.
Logos: These include logic, data and statistics.
Ethos: This signifies credibility. It’s who you are and why people should listen to you.

Emotions and Customers (Pathos)

B2B and B2C buyer are emotionally connected to any company’s brand. In fact, 50% of buyers are more likely to purchase your products if they perceive personal value for themselves, the numbers are even better – plus, they’ll pay a higher price. If you are able to make a strong emotional  connection with your audience, it shows goodwill. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and understand where they are coming from. If you can make an emotional connection you’re on the path to persuasion.

1. Be authentic

Don’t put on an act for your audience. If your audience suspects you are not genuine or that you are toying with their emotions you lose ethos.

2. Be human

Remove the metaphorical barriers between you and your audience. If you’re famous, do something to show you’re like anybody else. If you’re disliked, show the audience your likeable side. If people think you’re aloof, do something to warm them up.

3. Use the right frame

Consider the difference between titles on “how many product benefits are too good to be true” and “creating products for people in a simple, eco-friendly way”. They could be two different frames on exactly the same topic: moving away from non-useful products. I know which title I would prefer to
read. 

If your audience doesn’t trust you, then anything you say is suspect, and subsequent appeals in ethos and logos may be worthless. Thanks to the Internet, consumers now don’t have to take a company at its word – they can research before buying, and 81% of shoppers do just that.

Logical Reasoning and Marketing (Logos) 

It relies on making a logical argument, backed with reason or evidence to persuade the audience. If  you are confused about your product, then you have probably demonstrated poor logos to your audience. Logos is particularly important when trying to persuade people who know a lot about the topic you’re addressing. It is important to demonstrate strong evidence base using facts, figures, and testimony to support your conclusion.

Marketing with Credibility (Ethos)

If you’re going to make a claim, you’d better be able to back it up and keep your credibility intact. Remember that people like to buy from people, particularly people they trust. One good way to connect with customers is to make your company feel human to them. That shouldn’t be difficult; after all, your company is made up of people.

Sell Product Benefits Not Its Features

The most important element of product knowledge is to sell the benefit and not the feature. Too often as salespeople, we get all excited about features and overwhelm the customer. A customer wants to know WHY that feature is important to them. Never make the mistake of talking about more benefits than you need too. In other words, six benefits do not make the product seem twice as good as three. Only relate benefits to the customer that you uncovered during your researching phase of the sale. 

Knowledge vs.Understanding

Product knowledge vs. product understanding is quite similar to the contrast between features and benefits. And just as “features tell, benefits sell,” a salesperson who focuses on product knowledge without product understanding misses the mark. For example, someone who sells cars probably knows all about the latest model’s acceleration features, the available paint colors, and whether it comes with a V6 or V8 engine. All of the above come under the category of product knowledge. But the salesperson who understands his product knows what each of those factors will mean to different prospects. He knows that high acceleration will be attractive not only to the teenager who yearns for speed but also for the suburban mom who wants to be able to safely merge onto a busy freeway.

I won’t overwhelm you now with any marketing strategy so let’s start with the basics:

What Problems Do You Solve for Your Customers?

Selling is about solving customer problems, whether those are problems customers are currently facing, or problems they will face as their marketplace evolves and their needs change. If you can’t put your finger on your customer’s problem, you won’t solve it. When I asked a top sales professional about what he did that allowed him to stand out in his field, he responded very simply, “I solve problems.” Simple, but not easy! You must describe the problem clearly, and do it from the customer’s point of view. The problem should be one the customer sees value in solving. To find out what the really difficult problems are, ask the right questions and listen before acting.

How To Really Understand Your Customers

Everyone has a different pain threshold – a graze for one person might feel like a gash to another. Identifying your customers’ pain points is to understand their deep, underlying fears. Understanding the things that cause them worry, confusion, fear or regret should be as much your problem as it is theirs.

Why is this important? Because it informs your marketing strategy, turning a vague, mediocre plan into an excellent, solutions-driven and personalised one. Here I’ll explore how to discover your buyer personas’ pain points and offer ways you can help them to resolve them.

Remember…All customers are not equal

If I had to give 1 mantra for understanding your customer, it will be this- People and their needs are not the same. Therefore all customers are not the same either. It’s important to keep in mind the 80/20 rule when it comes to customers. It may not be exactly in that proportion, but a large majority of your sales will come from a small minority of your customers.

1. Profile Your Customers

Customer profiling involves building a description of your customers, or a set of customers, that includes their characteristics, location and behaviour. By segmenting (grouping) them based on their gender, age, where they live, where they work, their family size and how, why and what they spend money on, you can get an idea of how your products and services may best meet their needs.

My Top Tip 1: Focusing on one buyer persona at a time, can you use these categories to identify what type of pain points each of your personas has? Perhaps it’s more than one of these – if so, can you prioritise their
pain points into an order from most painful to least?

2. Use Tools To Find Common Questions

New brands should look to online tools to help them uncover common questions. Those questions, as we know, are what reveal the root of a customer’s pain point. Luckily, there are plenty out there that can help.For starters, try out Answer the Public. This free tool will generate hundreds of questions on a given topic, separated by question type: who, what, when, where, why, can, etc.

3. Conduct Market Research

You can use market research or the data collected on your existing customers to identify trends and patterns. These trends and patterns can help you understand what motivates customers to buy, and the best approach to take in your marketing activities. It can also be used to help build customer awareness of your products and services.

4. Get Your Sales Data Talking

When it comes to garnering pain points, you should focus not only on existing customers but also on the lost prospects. Expanding your customer base is imperative and behind every lost deal is an important pain point that your product fails to solve. This could be a pricing-related issue or a missing feature — find out what it is and how you can turn it around in your favor.

5. Attitude of Innovations

Break down barriers to innovation and improve ongoing customer-led product development by repositioning your offerings as an integrated suite that delights your customers and meets an expanding array of their needs. Align your marketing and brand strategy with overarching business objectives.

What Value Does Your Product Or Service Provide?

If you are going to deliver high value to your customers, the first thing you need to do is to solve their problems and provide excellent customer service whilst your customer uses your product as a solution to their problem. We all know that successful product management depends on identifying a customer’s needs or wants and then delivering a product or service that satisfies these. However, in an increasingly competitive environment, product managers must be able to satisfy these needs in a way that is ‘better’ than competitive offerings.

How does this help you stand out from the crowd? Because you can put the focus of your company on your competitors’ pain points by having the best customer service possible. Do what the rest aren’t and attack the problems of your customers quickly and calmly. 

I’m not only talking here about the way your product or service actually looks, I’m also talking about being able to put together desirable packages, purchasing levels and a series of added benefits that are significant in value and are, themselves, a whole lot more valuable than simply the product is by itself.

To create real value, you must recognize what a Customer perceives as value. You must understand how the Customer views your competition’s product. What is important to the Customer in his buying decision? Is price more important or are benefits? Are you good at delivering what the Customer believes is important? Are you able to deliver more than your competition on these
factors? 

I understand these are general terms, but they will help you to create value as you understand your Customer’s need and perceptions.

The Value Pyramid framework helps companies address that broader challenge of intangibles. The more emotional elements at the middle and upper levels have traditionally been difficult to isolate and quantify and, therefore, harder to implement. But the battle for differentiation is shifting toward these less transactional aspects.

There are different types of value:
1. There’s the obvious practical or functional value that a service offers
2. Emotional value
3. Life-changing value, and
4. Social impact value.

How To Apply These Elements Of Value In Your Business

Most companies want to see huge strides of progress happen overnight, however that is less likely to occur. Smart steps for a company using the elements of value is to work towards incremental innovation. Incremental innovation is taking new forms of customer value, to the company’s present product and service.

So, from the elements of value pyramid, choose which element to add to boost the value of the company’s offering. Once you have chosen which elements best boost the company’s offering, prioritize your chosen elements. Then, build experiments using lean methodology to validate your values. Elements can offer a lot of insight into how to navigate the industry, but if they aren’t solving your business problems (AKA growing revenue) they aren’t really helping you. When using the value pyramid to grow revenue, the first step is assessing what elements are most important in your industry and with your existing products and services.

I encourage leaders to ask three questions:

• How does our value proposition compare with competitors?
• How do we bridge the gaps and seize opportunities to differentiate in the market?
• Can we launch a minimum viable product without breaking the bank?

To be on the winning side…

1. Compete on Value not on Price

Cost is certainly a factor for customers, but many people are willing to pay more when they can see the value and feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Satisfied customers that perceive a lot of value in your offering are not only willing to pay more, they’re willing to talk you up. Conversely, an unsatisfied customer who hasn’t seen the value is going to go somewhere else, even if you offer the lowest price.

If you try to compete on price alone with your competitors, you’ll often lose. Set a price that makes it clear that customers are receiving value, but it also maximizes your take. Somewhere in the middle, but not the lowest, communicates value at a fair price to customers who are comparison-shopping.

Create Value Proposition

You need to communicate what makes you different, and continually work to increase that value proposition to set yourself apart. You can do that through:

• Identifying what you’re good at and owning it
• Make your value proposition clear in all your communications
• Ask customers why they buy from you, use feedback to boost your value proposition
• Quantify your value with real data
• Communicate the benefits of your service so customers can see the value

My top list for customer value:

• Product function
• Points of differentiation
• Quality
• Service
• Marketing
• Branding
• Price
• Existing relationships or experience
• Personal bias from experience and upbringing

2. Transition and Education

As new customers come on stream with your organization you may want to provide action or transition teams to help them to be better able to utilize the products or services that you sell them. By the same token, the more education they have related to those products or services the more capable they’ll be at utilizing them.

3. Make an Investment on most Valuable Customers

Allocate sales force, R&D and marketing investments disproportionately within customers and segments where the product best serves and offers the greatest value. Additionally, allocating growth capital in new products will attract more customers.

4. Unexpected Service

Whether you offer products or services, excellent customer service in every stage of the sales process not only retains customers but gives customers a reason to tell their friends.

Customers will react positively to surprises like free shipping, thank you notes, retweets, birthday coupons, and postcards. From the first, “Welcome to our store,” to addressing unforeseen problems, making the customer’s priorities as your focus goes a long way in creating value. Sure, no business owner wants to have to deal with an unhappy customer, but when you can deal with their problems in a quick and decisive fashion, you are showing the customer where you think the value is–in the relationship you have with him.

As you can see, there is a lot of time involved in determining customer value. But measuring customer value is not an end in itself. Do you have a smaller organisation? Then take a good look in advance to see which variables you want to use for the costs. Not all costs have the same impact on customer value. The most substantial cost items have the greatest impact and are the easiest to identify.

So in summary:

– Jot down every pain point that is troubling your customer
– Establish what kind of solution you or your brand will be provide
– Write down every feature and benefit and how they help solve your customers’ problem
– Persuade your customer with logical reasons to believe they should buy from you Keep journaling as you discover new ideas.

My Keynotes

Customer expectations are often very high. You have to overcome the challenge of stitching your target customers’ expected product with your value proposition. And then your value proposition with the actual product you’ll deliver to your customers.

It is not about making the customer believe that your product is the best out there, further it is about delivering exactly what the people are asking for and to develop a product, which covers all their needs. Customer feedback must be choice one when looking for innovations and new strategies.

I have been working in client relations for a long time. When a customer is unsatisfied I start to ask some questions and in most cases it comes out that they were missing features, which they found in other products. So to satisfy your customers, you will need to be as close as it gets to their needs and they will be satisfied and loyal. Identifying the pain points has never been an easy task. But if you can nail down and identify them, you can reach out to and attract the core group of people who crave what you’re selling — the people who need your products and services in their lives, because your products solve a problem that’s been nagging them for so long. While making assumptions is an easier way out, you need to know what your customers are thinking to gain their attention. This is because most businesses worry over not getting enough sales by targeting the wrong prospects.

Delve deeper into what your customers are really looking for. When you position your product or service based on their pain points, there will be more reasons for them to do business with you.

To simplify further:

1. Determine what your audience is going through, what they’re struggling with.
2. Prove to them that you understand it.
3. Genuinely care about their problems and show that you want to help them.
4. You start with a surface-level issue they need solving, and begin by asking them “Why?”