people don't change (and it's not our job to change them)
Why should a product or service force people to change how they work? Or to become an expert at something they don't want to be expert in?
Think about the last time you bought a new app that promised to change completely how you manage projects or sales or even the business as whole.
Either A) you've never done that, or B) the complete change didn't stick.
For most of us, the things we sell should not try to change people.
There are diets and journaling tools and habit planners that promise all that. Sometimes they work if the testimonials are to be believed.
But for those of us in B2B, we're not here to revolutionize the way people work. It's not our job to change how people work.
Two observations:
Selling a product in the context of a customer's workflow is the best framing. Build use cases that echo real work. Include the tools and activities that come before and after your app or service. It should all flow with how they already work.
Complicated tools don't get used by most people. There will always be a few fans, but most people will scratch the surface of a complex tool's capabilities. Learning a new tool requires a lot of change (and time). Often that means adopting a new tool into a daily routine.
Examples:
Real workflows. Sales for Dear Video, a video editing service I ran for a bit, jumped when we showed in a diagram when to involve us. In-house videographers told us that they handle editing. After seeing the diagram, they started sending us raw footage when they had post-production backlogs. We fit into the workflow they already had.
Un-complicated. We build a product analytics tool. I speak with sales leaders, marketing leaders, and product leaders. None of them want to be analysts. That is, though, what they feel they need to be to get value from the big analytics tools. We're building to fit into their current tech stack and ways of working.
Why not trying to change people works:
Change is hard. And customers don't want hard. They don't want change all the time.
People want to feel confident in their work and comfort in the way they do it.
Some companies do build changemaker products. But change can be a hard sell.
If you and I want an easier, simpler path towards profits we have to learn how our customers already work.
We do that by deeply understanding our customers. We get to know their tools and how they work and flow. Then we put ourselves in the middle of it and amplify the results.
Peter
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