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Get at the emotional heart of the issue.
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Avoid strings of pat phrases intended to shorthand a series of
benefits (world-class enterprise-wide solutions bundle). Fight off the
committee that came up with these jargon-jammed slogans. These phrases
make sense to your team, but not to customers.
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Build marketing text out of nouns and verbs, keeping
adverbs and adjectives to a minimum. In this way, you will avoid the
worst hype.
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Ban the mission statement from the home page, demoting it to some
minor sub-section, or deleting it completely. Why bore customers?
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Write like a human being, not a corporation. Compared to big
buildings made out of glass and steel, people are more convincing sales
folks.
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Do not get too polished. It is OK to ramble at times, to repeat
your main point.
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Mention details from your own life. Customers find you
interesting, and gauge your reliability by what you reveal about your
own experience, background, outlook.
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Show your face. Include your photo, when speaking directly to the
customers.
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Be informative, realistic, and enthusiastic, so that customers feel as
if you are honestly excited by your product.
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Admit problems or drawbacks matter-of-factly, offering
workarounds as kludges, not fantastic benefits.
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Make promises that you know your companies can really keep.
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State a unique selling proposition for the company, or for each
individual product and service. Show why I should buy your product, not
one of the competition's products. Differentiate.
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In product information, include photos, screenshots, or
diagrams of the product. I can see what I will get.
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In product information, connect concrete benefits to each feature
mentioned. Do not just list a bunch of features. Show me how each
feature would do me good.
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When the product is new, unfamiliar, or complicated, show how it
works, with animation, a tutorial, or a series of diagrams.
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Offer a complete set of specifications in a data sheet for each
product.
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Offer direct links to original reviews (rather than just snagging
some quotes out of context).
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Offer quotes from happy customers-ideally, with their names and
addresses.
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Offer stories of your successes, or case studies.
Include a direct comparison with the competition, pointing out
advantages.
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To answer common objections, address questions, or suspicions
explicitly, rather than trying to get past the objections by
exaggeration or implication.
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To give managers more context, and make the extended argument for
the product, offer white papers, web conferences, or
slide presentations.
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Mention and link to customer assistance, documentation, bug databases,
and other support materials, without embarrassment. Go for complete
disclosure.
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Make clear what action the customer should take next.
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Make it easy to buy, from every page.
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Give me an incentive to buy right away.
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For potential customers who are hesitating to commit, offer something
for free: a demo copy, a white paper, a tool, to keep them
engaged.
References:
See: Hansell (2001),
Henning (2000a, 2000b,
2001a), Knowledge
Capital Group (2001), Locke
(2001), Price and Price
(1999), Sawhney (2001),
Sawhney and Parikh
(2000), Sawhney and Zabin
(2001), Usborne (2001a, 2001b,
2001c) |