It Was Good for Me, Was It Good for You?

“Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. That's the hardest thing for sellers to realize."  - Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies.

We couldn’t agree more. Because, as marketing consultants, we at Comunicado tell our clients, “Marketing is not about you and it never will be.”

Why would Jill Konrath and I say such things? Especially to people in marketing and sales? Because it’s true. All your prospects care about is the difference you can make for their organization.

A fascinating phenomenon that reinforces this idea that customers don’t care about you – occurs when we find renegade customers using our products in ways we never intended. When I was with Hewlett Packard, I sold a materials management software package to an oil company.

The package was built to manage discrete manufacturing processes, but after a bit of tweaking, this customer adapted it to an indiscrete refining process. I just happened to find this out during some chitchat with my customer at a football game.

When I informed the product manager, she quickly told me, “Well, I will have to pull their contract. I can’t support an installation that isn’t doing what we intended the product to do.” My parents had the same reaction when I tried to adapt my bicycle as a ceiling fan for our living room on a warm summer day.

Okay, there are reasons to push back when things like this occur. But there’s a way to do it. I have a client that recently got caught in the “customers bending the rules” game. His clients are using one of his services in ways that help them, but in ways that he considers "off brand". He's not entirely wrong. The customer is using his service in a way that doesn't produce the usual research residual their business model calls for, so his solution is to either stop taking orders, or bury the story as much as possible so others don't pick up on it. But in these cases:

• Spin the customer-developed adaptation into a new offering (and charge more money for it if it doesn't deliver the margins you normally produce).

• Bundle it into another offering  (to preserve margin if the customer’s implementation doesn’t support your cost structure very well). This is also a way to make products that are "off brand" less visible.

• Start a joint venture. This of course, is a big undertaking, but when I was with a web development firm, we partnered with our client, Lincoln Center, to re-market the site we’d built for them to other performing arts centers.

You can also use the opportunity to:

• Give the customer an innovation award (as a recognition opportunity that could go a long way in fostering loyalty).

• Pitch the story to one of the trades (if the story is a bit crazy, editors love it and your client with love the publicity).

Resist the product manager’s knee-jerk reaction to blame the “naughty customer” and find a win-win solution. It’s definitely out there.