Internet Tech Boston

One of the biggest obstacles to successful  sales and marketing efforts is the constant fear of owning up to real or perceived product shortcomings. When faced with the inevitable question from a prospective client regarding functionality, the knee jerk reaction is almost always – “Yeah, we can do that.” This leads to the age-old struggle between sales and delivery. Delivery teams feel that sales has over-promised with no regard to how their empty promises affect the rest of the team. Sales feels that Delivery teams are sandbagging and whining about having to do their jobs. This continues until all engineering and developer resources are tied up in custom jobs, and all hope of actually improving the product to add new features for future customers goes out the window. If this vicious cycle repeats indefinitely, it will surely prohibit the company from being truly successful.

Moshe Engelberg, PhD, MPH proposes an alternative approach in a white paper titled, Marketing 101: If You Can’t Fix It, Feature It.

The underlying principle is simple and powerful: What you may treat as a “negative” — a liability — may in fact be your greatest asset. Instead of hiding it or trying to change it, lead with it. Don’t hide from the truth, which is usually what your target audiences think about. Disarm the negative perceptions by putting them on the table, front and center. In other words, if you can’t fix these differences, feature them.

Why this Works

Take a step back and look at competing wants. Sales wants a product that demo’s well (i.e. easy to sell), has lots of features (i.e. can be sold into a wide range of customers), and is easy to implement (i.e. they get their commission faster). Delivery and Engineering want reasonable expectations (i.e. something they’re familiar with) so that they can deliver a good product (i.e. bug-free and bullet-proof) and make clients happy (i.e. reduce complaints as much as possible).

When sales does not expose product limitations appropriately, the product does not demo well, it is harder to implement, and it results in unhappy clients. Everyone loses. If we replace the “Do you want fries with that?” sales approach with the “Feature It” approach, then everyone WINS. The customer’s expectations are met appropriately and the project completes quickly with minimal amount of customization. The client is happy that they got exactly what they bought. Sales is happy that the client is happy and paid in full. Delivery is happy that they’ve launched another successful project.

This is a flavor of High Probability Selling, in which marketing generates interest in only the prospective clients that truly WANT what it is your company is selling. By featuring your product’s limitations, you attract a prospective client list that does not value what your product does not do. Conversely, they are more interested in what your product DOES do.

In summary, don’t hide from giving customers the truth. Tell them what to expect up front, tell them why it’s a GOOD thing, and then focus on delivering high quality, repeatable results.