What Are You Really Selling

How To Increase Your Platform Value

Most people think they'll compete by telling the market they can do something better than their competitors. Unless you have an unlimited budget, that's probably not going to be how you win. Instead, focus on delivering massive value and results.

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Why You Can't Win Head On

The reason you can't compete head-on is because of the perception people have about certain industries and the categories in each, they already have a winner chosen.

In order to compete, you can

• Throw millions of dollars to displace that idea in their minds
• Choose an entirely different category to compete in, sometimes even inventing a new category
• 100x your competition and offer massive value

For this article, we're going to focus on the last one.

How To Displace The Competition

We've seen this more and more over the years with advances in technology.

• Uber displaced traditional taxi cabs by making it faster and more convenient to get a ride
• Airbnb offers better experiences at a cheaper price than the traditional hotel
• Amazon allows you to shop without even leaving your home

Now, you don't need to reinvent the wheel, spending millions developing software, the idea here is to think through the list of problems you're solving and think of all the additional services you can offer and use as a value-add in order to make the prospect say to themselves, "I get all this? The other software only solves this."

People Buy For Two Reasons

When people decide on making a software purchase, it's because of these two things: 1) they understand the value you are offering, and 2) trust you to deliver on that value.

Anytime you hear an argument or resistance in the sales process, it's because these two items aren't being validated.

Personal Example

When focusing on our prospect's problem of understanding what marketing strategies actually work is confusing, some of the services we added when you work with us are:

• Battle Cards: Build out battle cards for your top 10 competitors and share them with your sales team so they know exactly how to compete when a prospect brings up the competition
• Lead Consultations Most agencies just pass over leads. When we pass a lead, we help you to understand the journey the prospect has taken as well as how sales should position the next steps

These are only a couple of the value adds, when you book a strategy session and discover our service agreement, we hope it leaves you scratching your head wondering how you're getting all this value considering what you're paying each month on retainer.

Solving Your Problems

Now it's your turn.

Breaking these solutions into subgroups focusing on where the problems come across in the buyer's journey can help you to know when to introduce each problem/solution when you're doing your marketing and sales.

These main stages usually include: prospect/opportunity/customer.

There Are No Wrong Ideas

When working through this, don't limit your ideas. Just because you write down an idea doesn't mean you need to do it. Right now just focus on generating a large list of solutions to every problem on your list.

Going through this process could also help you with future developments of the platform and they could be added to your product roadmap to be built out and offered later down the road as an upsell.

Focusing Your Solutions

When you are writing out all these solutions be sure to focus on the three problems, expectations, time, and effort. Being clear about how each is used, will allow your sales team to handle objections easier.

Solution Focus Examples

Some of the ways this could play out are:

• How do you offer support? 1-1, group, knowledgebase
• How much effort will they exert? Will there be an onboarding process to show them exactly how to use your software, will they have to figure it out, will they have a person helping them live
• How will they connect with you? Telephone, chat, email
• How often is your support available? 24/7, 9-5, weekdays, weekends
• If you offer discounts, do they get the same value as someone who paid full price, or are there tiers

These are only a handful of questions to ask but it's important to handle every possible objection. Again, making all these responses viewable to your marketing and sales team will help sales on combating prospect objections and closing more deals as well as marketing to understand what marketing campaigns they need to create to educate future prospects.

Your team can only work as effectively as the information they are given. Doing this work at the beginning and revisiting it frequently, will ensure that you can be offensive and defensive in the market.

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