We recently polled a group of salespeople at a client sales meeting.
First question: How knowledgeable are your customers?
Their answer: They are very intelligent, hard-headed engineers who are interested in the specifications and performance of the equipment we have to sell. Their purchasing decisions are made logically and without emotion. So, we have to have the best product and the right price, or we're not going to get the business.
Second question: Which competitor takes the most business away from you and why?
Practically everyone in the room named the same competitor. What was interesting to us were their reasons. They talked about the attractive color of the competitor's product and the advertising claims (which most of them agreed were extravagant, if not deceitful). They mentioned product features which, in their opinion, were worthless gimmicks that added nothing to the performance or the life of the product. Listening to all of this, we could have concluded that the customers they had described earlier as hard-headed engineers who made unemotional purchasing decisions were really a bunch of frivolous airheads who could easily be taken in by devious claims and useless, gimmicky features. But the contradiction between the answers to the two questions really doesn't surprise us.
We believe that most companies grossly overrate the level of knowledge that exists in the market about their products and their competitors' products. This belief is confirmed by reviewing the results of brand awareness studies. Leading suppliers of a given product quite often place substantially lower in their product categories than well-known companies that don't even offer the products.
Specifiers and buyers in your market need continual reinforcement and justification for their purchasing decisions. If you don't provide it, they may jump in the direction of a competitor who makes a lot of false claims or adds a lot of useless gimmicks to his product. You should give prospects good and valid reasons why they should buy from you. Recognize that prospects are never as knowledgeable as you are, never as appreciative of your quality and features as you are, never as capable of making competitive comparisons as you are, and never as thoughtful about long-term cost justification and return on investment as you are. In fact, they are almost always ready to accept any information that fills a communications vacuum you may have left in the marketplace.
Just to prove the extent to which most companies (perhaps even yours) tend to overestimate their customer's level of knowledge, ask yourself this question: If all of your prospects were truly knowledgeable, would you really have any competitors?
At Norris & Company, we specialize in delivering the facts about your products simply, clearly, and concisely.
If you would like more information on this subject, or a reprint of this and other ads in this series, please contact us: (508) 510-5626 • info@norrisco.com
