What’s the distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service?
I get this query loads.
Right here’s the reply and I’ll make it as easy and as clear as doable. I believe it’s vital, essential, that salespeople perceive the distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service. Understanding the distinction can have an effect on the way you promote AND how one hires, evaluates and assesses salespeople.
The distinction between the way you promote a product versus the way you promote a product is . . .
There isn’t a distinction! Interval.
Let me be completely frinkin’ clear right here.
There isn’t a distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service — completely NONE!
These of you who suppose there’s a distinction want to judge the way you promote, since you’re promoting mistaken. The salespeople who give attention to their service or product as their promoting method are lacking the purpose. Good promoting doesn’t promote a product or a service. Good promoting focuses on figuring out issues, then presents an answer to unravel the issue. If it’s a kickass answer, nobody cares if it’s a product or a service.
After we begin with the shopper and their issues, there isn’t any distinction whether or not the answer is a services or products. It’s what the services or products delivers that issues. The impression of an answer, product, or service continues to be a imaginative and prescient, an intangible. It’s not one thing you possibly can contact or really feel, and it’s distinctive to EVERY buyer.
The argument I hear most frequently is: you possibly can see and really feel a product, the place a service is more durable to promote as a result of it’s an intangible. Are fucking kidding me? When somebody tells me this, I simply wish to bounce out of my pores and skin. When somebody argues a tangible product is less complicated to promote than an intangible service, it tells me they’re a horrible gross sales individual or worse but, a horrible gross sales supervisor. It tells me their gross sales method is to steer with their supply (the product or the service) and that they don’t look to know their clients points and issues. It tells me they promote function/operate. That is horrible promoting.
If we’re promoting accurately, we’re in the end anchored within the clients “hole.” The hole between the place they’re right now and the place they wish to be tomorrow. We’re promoting primarily based on fixing measurable, tangible, pressing enterprise issues. We’re not promoting our service or our product, however what our services or products can ship for our clients by way of their enterprise worth. After we’re promoting like this, it’s all intangible. It’s all the time totally different for every consumer or buyer. After we’re promoting like this, there isn’t any cookie-cutter method. It doesn’t matter you probably have a tangible, tactile, visible product or an intangible, nontactile service. It’s all intangible when you’re promoting incorrectly.
There isn’t a distinction between promoting a product or a service.
Should you consider there’s a distinction between promoting a tangible product or an intangible service, you may have an even bigger downside than you understand. You might want to re-evaluate your gross sales abilities. Begin right here with these books.
Should you’re promoting accurately, there isn’t any distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service. Within the case that there’s, it means you’re not promoting, you’re pitching a product and it’s time to start out over; learn this.
Anybody disagree?
If that’s the case, how do you promote a product otherwise than a service?
I’m all ears.