Are you unwillingly driving customers away from you by having a complex, ‘inside out’ business model? You should definitely check.
If you do, you should do your utmost to align your business model with how your customers are running their business and make an effort to just slide right in as the perfect solution to whatever pain, they’re experiencing.
The above dawned on me recently when I had a conversation with some great startup people about their business, their business model and their pricing strategy. While everything they said made perfect sense from their point-of-view, I realized something:
Every time their product was presented to a potential customer, the customer essentially had to first understand the startups preferred way of doing business before making an assessment as to whether their way of doing business and the product would make sense to get into their own business.
This seemed strange for a couple of reasons:
First, we know that the market is hugely competitive, and that complexity has the potential to kill any deal, if there is a simple alternative just there for the taking.
Second, we know that closing a sale means reducing the steps and reasons to say ‘No’ to a bare minimum. Whenever you introduce any kind of friction, you’re essentially adding potential opportunities for your future customer to just say ‘No’ to whatever it is, you’re offering.
So what to do instead?
Make an effort to understand your potential customers, how they do business, and what the challenges and pains are that your product could easily help them overcome. And then package your product in such a way that you’re the obvious solution for them to say ‘Yes’ to – every single time it’s presented to them.
There is really no excuse for making buying your product too complicated for customers.
(Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash)
