| Being able to crystallise the things your business does into clearly defined products is a huge step towards increasing your prosperity.
It puts you miles ahead of all those other industrial companies which focus on telling their customers about all the processes they perform instead of about how the end product will satisfy customers’ needs.
But how do you turn your version of what everyone else does into a product you can market?
First let’s look at the classic obstacles to doing this:
- Your technical focus is high, your business focus is low
- You don’t know enough about your target market’s business
- Your products lack definition.
Correct these problems and you can almost immediately create your own distinctive products.
Having products to offer beats any mere list of the things you do. A product will appeal to your customer because it helps him meet his needs.
Creating a well-packaged product in the industrial area is much more difficult than for, say, the consumer food market. But the philosophy is the same: The end purchaser wants a solution to his craving for breakfast cereal or for smoothly running electric motors without knowing or caring how it is achieved. The customer is interested in the end product, not the process!
We are currently working with two industrial companies whose services are maintenance-related. If you can create a positive product out of maintenance, you can do it for almost anything because by its very nature maintenance represents something of a grudge purchase.
Many customers’ concept of an ideal world is one which requires no maintenance whatsoever! The successful service supplier’s response to this attitude is to make his target’s perception of his product focus on how it preserves the capital asset and also reduces the maintenance budget.
If he merely reacts to a customer attitude that says “I must do this maintenance but I don’t really want to,” then the supplier will forever be in a price-driven market.
To avoid that trap you need to present a strong perception of added value. In both our clients’ cases the first step was to recognise that their testing programmes do two jobs: They flag machines which need immediate maintenance AND they also detect machines that do NOT need attention right now.
We need to keep reminding ourselves that the test results themselves are not of high interest. It’s the verdict they deliver and how the marketing team uses it that matters.
The real added value product is to combine the testing with a software product which can analyse trends and so predict the timing of maintenance requirements.
This means the product offers two strong buying arguments: |
