Product Behavior

I met with a small company this week. They sell a complex product, and are trying to scale. The founders of the company do a great job of describing the benefits of the product, but they can’t be at every sales meeting as the company grows. Their sales people do a much less effective job at describing the benefits, and resort to talking about features and solving the specific problems of a customer.

All of our clients have some version of this problem. We have it ourselves. It usually comes down to muddling the messages to different members of the audience. The general lingo is “stakeholders”–people or groups that all have some power over the purchase decision.

Often when clients come to us with a “consumer segmentation,” they’re looking horizontally. This type of consumer has these issues to address; that type of consumer has these other issues. The product is designed to speak to both groups, or mainly to one and only opportunistically to the other.

But they forget the vertical segmentation. Consumers are stakeholders, but they’re like the leaves of a tree. If you’re at the ground, to get to those leaves, you have to climb the trunk, go out on a branch, traverse a twig, and only then can you reach a leaf. You must design your product to be appreciated by the leaves, but even if you’ve taken every sort of leaf into account, you can’t forget the rest of the tree.

Think about selling a piece of enterprise software that does some financial analysis. An accounting department is all excited by the new process your tool enables. But the CEO wants to understand the big idea: how will this improve his business? The IT department wants to understand the features: among other things, will it integrate with the software they already have? None of these stakeholders can make a purchase decision alone–but any could veto it. Even if the process will enable great things for the accountants, you’re also selling to CEO and IT.

Or, a variation of the same issue: say you’re a manufacturer selling toasters through Target. The consumer is a big stakeholder, of course, because if they don’t want the product, there’s no point. But Target’s buyer is a big stakeholder, too–maybe bigger than the consumer, because if the product never gets on the shelf, the consumer will never get to make the choice. And within your company there are many other stakeholders: the heads of marketing and engineering who have to think it’s good enough to commit resources to development, the manufacturing partner who has to make all the designer’s details real, etc.

In the case of the company I spoke to this week, the founders are used to talking to CEOs and explaining the big picture. The sales people seem more comfortable talking at a lower level in the hierarchy of the customer’s organization. The solution, ultimately, is to give the salespeople better tools to talk at a higher level, or better support to sell in at the lower level.

But the more general idea is to notice that honing a message is important, but there is always more than one message in play. Everything I’ve written about product archetypes is about telling the right message to a stakeholder, but there is always more than one class of stakeholder, and each, in some fashion, needs its own message.

[Photo of Beethoven's Ear Trumpets by we-make-money-not-art]

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