What’s the distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service?
I get this query so much.
Right here’s the reply and I’ll make it as easy and as clear as potential. I feel it’s essential, crucial, that salespeople perceive the distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service. Realizing 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 any distinction! Interval.
Let me be completely frinkin’ clear right here.
There isn’t any distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service — completely NONE!
These of you who assume there’s a distinction want to guage the way you promote, since you’re promoting fallacious. The salespeople who deal with 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 provides an answer to resolve the issue. If it’s a kickass resolution, nobody cares if it’s a product or a service.
After we begin with the shopper and their issues, there isn’t a distinction whether or not the answer is a services or products. It’s what the services or products delivers that issues. The influence of an answer, product, or service remains to be a imaginative and prescient, an intangible. It’s not one thing you’ll be able to contact or really feel, and it’s distinctive to EVERY buyer.
The argument I hear most frequently is: you’ll be able to 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 need 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 guide with their provide (the product or the service) and that they don’t look to grasp their clients points and issues. It tells me they promote characteristic/operate. That is horrible promoting.
If we’re promoting appropriately, we’re in the end anchored within the clients “hole.” The hole between the place they’re right now and the place they need to be tomorrow. We’re promoting based mostly 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 when it comes to their enterprise worth. After we’re promoting like this, it’s all intangible. It’s all the time completely different for every consumer or buyer. After we’re promoting like this, there isn’t a cookie-cutter method. It doesn’t matter when you’ve got a tangible, tactile, visible product or an intangible, nontactile service. It’s all intangible for those who’re promoting incorrectly.
There isn’t any distinction between promoting a product or a service.
In case you consider there’s a distinction between promoting a tangible product or an intangible service, you’ve a much bigger downside than you understand. It’s essential re-evaluate your gross sales expertise. Begin right here with these books.
In case you’re promoting appropriately, there isn’t a 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?
In that case, how do you promote a product in a different way than a service?
I’m all ears.
