What Is Your Product

Selling The Value Of Your Platform

Don't sell yourself short by creating a handful of features and solutions to share with prospects thinking it's enough to persuade them. That position will be a race to the bottom with price, once they start talking to your competitors.

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The Customer Can't See The Full Picture

Steve Jobs said it best, the prospect doesn't know what they want until you tell them. Taking that one step further, the prospect doesn't understand the value they are getting using your platform unless you show them.

When a prospect is shopping for a product, service, or platform, they assumably have an idea of the exact outcome in their minds they are searching for as well as the amount of money, time, and effort they are willing to use in order to obtain it, especially in a B2B market.

So when they come to your SaaS platform unless you share all the value you are creating and expand their minds, they aren't going to see the full picture of what you have to offer.

Pyschologists call this motivated perception.

Showing Them The Full Picture

The best example I can think of for this idea is info commercials.

Most people when they first see a product, already have an idea in their heads of what they would use it for and how much they'd be willing to pay for that use.

Because we have motivated perception and are hyper-focused on a specific problem we are trying to solve, we won't see any other use for a product except what's already in our minds.

It's for this same reason Ferrari can sell a means of transportation for 100x more than your typical car. The buyer's motivated perception is focused on status, not function.

When an info commercial says, but, wait, there's more, it breaks that image in your mind and allows you to think outside the box and realize there is more value than you originally thought and you can use this same concept to position your product in the market as well.

Communicating Better Features & Solutions

When it comes to product marketing, in its simplest form, it's really just communicating the value you have to offer the world in a way that it understands.

Most companies get hung up on feature and solutions sets but then when you look at their website analytics, very few people view those pages. It's because the setup is all wrong.

When thinking through the solutions your software is providing, it's much more than functionality. Because of the exploration we made in the last step, a problem's problem makes everything a lot more complex.

The Power Of A Good How To

The way you break through the complexity is by reordering the problem into an action statement and then adding how to because that is typically how someone thinks when they use Google.

Using the list of problems before, as well as the subproblems, think of headlines you could use to alleviate that concern.

Personal Example

As a personal example with Contineofy, with the problem understanding what marketing strategies actually work is confusing and it's subproblems:

• I don't have enough time to go out to learn marketing while at the same time, I am trying to build a competitive platform
• There are so many programs out there to learn marketing, most of them there expensive, and I personally don't really have an interest in paying to learn this

A good solution title that positions our product perfectly in the minds of our ideal customer profile, you, is How To Outsource Your Marketing, Gain Customers, And Get Back To Developing Your Platform.

When you read this, does it not make you want to click to learn more?

It's because this headline is specific to the outcome you really want, draws you in using curiosity, and focuses indirectly on the ideas that you're going to save time and money as well as having to use less effort to achieve your outcome.

Bringing It Altogether

Once you've gone through your entire list of problems, you should have a list that nearly covers every angle that a prospect could come towards you when searching for a solution to their problems.

Where most software companies get this wrong is they focus exclusively on the functional aspects of their platforms and are usually oblivious to the emotional and status outcomes people are looking to solve as well as the additional problems of expectations, time, and effort.

Now that you have this list of solutions that are focused on all three outcomes and not just functionality, you're ready to make some bold claims and launch your minimum-value product.

Another bonus, you now have an entire list of content marketing you could get your team or freelancers to write for you that will drive organic traffic to your website.

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Crafting Your Best Offer

Crafting a software offer that stands out from the competition and makes the prospect say to themselves, "I need this" is no easy feat. In a market, where the average American is exposed to 4,000-10,000 ads per day, how do you really get noticed?

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