Monthly Archives: August 2012

Selling is as much fun as it is a challenge. After meeting so many prospective clients and people I would want to work with over the last 15 months since we started marketing of MavenMagnet, I took some time to retrospect on this short journey (and hopefully the start of a long trip) as to where we got success and where people didn’t go with us. We got success when people believed in us and believed why using MavenMagnet is a better way to meet their needs.

Everyone knows what we are doing. The hard part is to convince why this the best thing for them. In case of MavenMagnet, our core challenge is to convince people why market research with a different source of information and  with a different way of analysis will help them in their decision-making process. Why our methodology, our technique and our technology is the best thing for them to use. Why they should trust our results and make decisions taking our recommendation into consideration.

How is critical. You will find companies dime a dozen to claim they can do what any other company is doing. The real meat of the discussion is when we explain how we can do it and how we have got the team, the technology and the vision to do it better than anyone else. How we have developed innovative products that use cutting-edge technology and techniques to come up with real and actionable insights in a fraction of time as compared to anything out there.

It is a mute exercise trying to sell to someone who just doesn’t believe in the reason behind why using this particular product is going to help them. It’s a moment of great satisfaction and pride when someone buys into your vision of doing something, no matter how small or big it is. This is what keeps us going and I believe no matter how things turn out, this is something worth cherishing.

Cheap and economical are two words with very distinct meanings which are sometimes used (incorrectly) interchangeably. The meaning of the two words are evidently more different when it comes to selling a product. Take automobiles for example. Not many people will want to drive the cheapest car in the world but many of them will opt for a car which is the most economical in its class.

When you say that the product you are trying to sell is cheap, it loses its value. An economical product on the other hand is something that is the best value in its category. The key thing to define here is value. Value is a very intangible thing. Some products are sold at a premium because the perceived value of the products is higher than normal. Others are discounted to map to their perceived value. Any product that best justifies its value to the consumers in a category is theoretically economical.

Something that is sold cheaper than its perceived value eventually starts getting perceived as a product of lower value.  Develop a great product, create campaigns and build service infrastructure to in-turn increase the value of your product for your consumers. At the end of the day, price is always mapped to the value of the product. So the right strategy is to make your product economically appealing. Don’t sell it cheap.