Tag Archives: differentiation

Amazon Kindle vs iPad

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Finding Your Value Wedge

In Power Messaging we teach companies to differentiate by finding their “Value Wedge.”  Here’s how it works:

Identify your uniqueness in the context of a specific prospect need.  Then amplify that need so it becomes the dominating buying criteria, and then clearly contrast your uniqueness with the competitor’s weakness so your prospect sees the unmistakable value of your solution.  Also, make sure it is defensible by proving the claim and demonstrating your clear advantage.

I recently saw this commercial and thought… now there’s a perfect example of a company that knows how to find and promote their Value Wedge.  Watch as Amazon Kindle responds to the emerging threat to their e-book reader leadership posed by the iPad.

Amazon is saying…  Hey, if you are in the market for a reader, because you love books, and you love reading them everywhere, especially relaxing outdoors, then there’s only one solution for you.  They aren’t trying to be everything iPad is… they are identifying their prospect as voracious readers and elevating the need to be able to read everywhere and showing how only the Kindle meets this need.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPad is an amazing little gadget with so much to offer.  But, if you are a reader, and that’s your emphasis, why not buy the product that will work when and where you want it to, at a much lower price point?

Love to see two strong Marketing powerhouses go at it, using Power Messaging techniques.

- Tim Riesterer
CMO and SVP Strategic Consulting and Products
Corporate Visions Inc.

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Analogy Shrinks Sales Cycle

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Kurt Shaver sells electronic catalog software. While his sales cycle is typically three months, here’s a story of how he won a $100,000 deal in just one week’s time applying Power Messaging.

“I was up against a competitor whose product was ten times less expensive than mine. What a challenge! How could I convince my prospect that he should pay so much more for my product?”

After learning Power Messaging techniques, I knew going into my sales presentation that I wasn’t going to win if I simply showed all of my product’s technical features. If I did, my prospect wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between me and my competitor, and then I would simply get hammered on the price issue.

I knew I had to make my appeal on an emotional level. I had to build a powerful presentation around value in order to get cost out of the prospect’s mind. I had to help the customer experience how much better their life would be with my product.

Instead of telling them, I knew I’d have to sell them!

So I devoted the entire presentation to differentiating my company’s offering from my competitor’s. I made it all come alive for my prospect with stories and metaphors.

Here’s the analogy that really got him: I told him that having my competitor’s product was like using a screwdriver, while my product was like using a power drill. I asked him which he’d rather use to get his work done – a screwdriver or a power drill?

I knew I had the sale when the prospect smiled and said, “That was the best sales presentation I’ve seen.” That week, he backed it up with a $100,000 purchase.”

Great Products Deserve Great Stories

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What makes up a great story?  In field sales it is having the prospect in the center of the story. You make your prospect the center of your story by doing a great job of dramatizing what is unique to you and important to your prospect.

Dramatizing what is unique to you and important to your prospect is the heart of the story.

Let’s break this apart and look at the pieces.

What is Unique to You?
To know the answer to this means that you know your competition as well as yourself.  This is actually a very old concept Sun Tzu made famous in his book The Art of War.  What you uniquely bring to the game can be major strokes, like your service levels, brand identity, broad customer base, or smaller unique capabilities based on functionality in your product offering.  What ever it is, isolate it, and know what it is.

What is Important to your Prospect?
Your prospect has a life they are living. That life has its own challenges. In their business arena they are trying to solve problems, improve revenues, increase customer satisfaction, stay ahead of their competition, etc.  Whatever they see as their top challenges you want to investigate and see if you can help them.  You not only look to see how your offerings can help them solve their problems, you will want to look to your unique capabilities as well.  Why? Because if you create value around these unique capabilities, then you can get the prospect so excited they decide they MUST HAVE this capability, and guess what… your solution is the only one that has it (otherwise it would not be unique).

  • You use the value your total offering creates to justify that they make a DECISION.
  • You use the value you create around your Unique Capabilities to ensure they make the decision FOR YOU.

Dramatizing
This is the secret sauce for making the above work. If you do not do a good job of dramatizing what is unique to you, it will fall flat and go nowhere. But, you don’t want to dramatize something that is not going to have value for the customer… i.e., something is not important to your prospect.  Use your messaging skills to dramatize their financial, business and personal value in a way that really excites them.  If you create emotional energy here, you give them a hormone cocktail running through their veins, and research shows this helps people make decisions faster.

Put it all together
To make the story great craft the story around what is unique to you and important to your prospect.

Think of this as a new kind of UI (user interface.) When you are face to face with a prospect; you are in a UI process with this prospect.  For sales, think of this as a new kind of UI (Unique to you and Important to the Prospect.)

Before you go to the prospect’s office you need to already know what is unique to you.  When you get in front of the prospect go through your discovery process to start exploring what issues, problems are important to your prospect. When you uncover areas important to your prospect that also align with your unique capabilities, dramatize these for the prospect. Make sure the prospect gets it!  Use examples of their pains (the ones you just found out in your discovery process) to customize your presentation to them.

Now THAT makes for a GREAT STORY—using the prospects own examples to make your stories come alive.

Technicians – The Trusted Advisors

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In a typical sales process (especially when selling highly-complex or technological solutions), the salesperson addresses the prospect’s needs, pains and desires, explaining how his solution will solve their problem. He then introduces a sales engineer or sales technician who gives the prospect a quick demo of how the product works.

Finding balance
What the technician says and how he says it can either strengthen or undermine the relationship with the prospect. Technicians, who focus only on the features and functions, make it difficult for prospects to connect their needs to the product.

Technicians who focus on the prospect’s needs first, supported by a quick experience of how these features / functions can improve lives — move the buying decision faster. Too much focus on emotion comes across as “fluff” and short on substance. Too much proof confuses the customer and extends the sales cycle.

Present only the features that address your prospect’s immediate needs. Show them why your product is the best and only choice. This combination will move the buying decision in your favor — fast.

Trusted advisor
Technicians are in the best position to be the trusted “buying” advisor to the client. A good technician is a lot like your doctor.  He asks questions before prescribing any treatment, asks what you think, and how to move forward. It’s never a monologue from the doctor, but a trusted dialogue with you, his patient. When the technician and salesperson realize this, they can work together to present and reinforce the values to be discussed, making winning the deal.

Kevan Kjar, Senior Consultant Corporate Visions