Do your customer buy what you sell, but think it’s something else?
My job used to take me and my team to Atlanta and Denver. A lot.
And we used to shake our head at this company which had expedited airport security lines in both of those airports. I was a customer.
It’s like TSA PreCheck, but quicker and 10x more expensive.
It’s a premium service, and only made sense when I was a road warrior.
Sell what they buy, please
What CLEAR says it’s selling, and what we knew we were buying, were wildly different. And in the many years that CLEAR has been around, they’ve never seemed to twig onto this.
Not one person has ever enjoyed spending more time in an airport security line than they absolutely had to. But if travel is part of your job, it’s not even the time you spend in line that aggravates you, so much as the unpredictability. You can’t plan your arrival at the airport with precision because you don’t know if you’ll end up behind 20 super-organized people or a tour group who forgot that belt buckles and big shampoo bottles aren’t a human right.
So you buy predictability from CLEAR. You know, from experience, that 4PM at ATL with CLEAR means you’ll typically get to your gate in fifteen minutes or less.
Now you can squeeze in one more meeting, let the client order dessert, jump on that call, or relax for a minute before you face Atlanta traffic again.
CLEAR thinks it’s selling faster airport lines. But its customer are buying predictability.
You’re probably selling one thing, but when your customers buy they’re actually buying something else.
This is fine, when you know it’s happening. But when you don’t, your communications miss the mark.
If you’re in professional services (like me), you probably don’t sell what your customer buys. You sell your focused attention on the client’s problem. It comes out as reports, project plans, legal documents, whatever. That’s what the customer buys.
But you understand you sell focused attention (and manage it like the precious resource it is).
And because you sell focused attention, you won’t offer services that use up too much of it relative to the price you can charge. You avoid customers who pay the same as everyone else but need too much from you. You might even avoid customers who are distracting, upsetting or just incompatible with how you work, because they’d reduce the attention you’d have for other customers.
It’s okay to sell something different than what customers buy… if that’s the nature of your business and you stay aware of it.
But when you’re selling or marketing to them, it’s smarter to talk about what they’re buying, not what you’re selling. They’re not buying a less-terrible airport experience. They’re buying more time outside the airport.
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I’m Dean. I figure out what to say to your prospects, and how to say it in the best possible way.