The curious case of demand generation

Creating demand is trickier than you think. You could be thrown off in spite of having a better product with better pricing.

Growing up, my dad always said, “If you want to be good at business, you should be able to sell ice to an Eskimo!” We always had a good laugh on this and I always tried to expand this statement “… you should be able to sell comb to a bald person”, or “… you should be able to sell video game to a blind person” (younger me wasn’t necessarily funny but always found these extremities exciting).

When I joined my family business, I realized that generating demand is not an easy job. You could offer the same product with better features for a cheaper price and your prospective customers will turn a deaf ear. It was surprising, frustrating and demotivating, all at the same time for me when people turned down an OBVIOUSLY BETTER product without having real reasons for doing so.

With time I realized that softer points matter more while selling your product than the product itself. In case of my prospective customers, especially the ones who were not satisfied with the product they were already using, they still found it acceptable because they got used to the expectation of product malfunction and had already built their related processes around this expectation while their existing supplier had made sure that they never ran out of delivering timely to avoid disruptions.

Choosing my product that supposedly promised better performance, will need changing of related processes / habits (or even complete revamp) that suit this new product. There was yet another roadblock I faced with some purchasing authorities in that they did not want to be responsible for bringing in unwarranted change and take their company through hurdles (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it).

Just having a better product isn’t enough

I realized that from the customer’s perspective, unless my product was SUBSTANTIALLY BETTER (DISRUPTOR as we like to call it), they will consider it to be just another product. Why should anyone go through the pains just to get a marginal advantage? Just advising on smaller benefits they might enjoy was not enough.

You need to be a brand for easier acceptance

Besides, if the new product works, it will be business as usual. However, if this new product turned out to be worse than the one they are already using, the onus will be on the purchaser to prove his innocence. This situation of proving his innocence could be avoided if the new product is already a well known BRAND. He can always explain that he did not experiment with an unknown product and took the company through unforeseen conditions.

My eureka moment

What worked for me was yet something else. I focused all my energy into making the customer trust me. There’s nothing great about trusting someone having thorough domain knowledge of the product and logistics (most people possess it, there’s no value addition here). However, the thing that made him cross the bridge and make a purchase was the fact that we were trying to REDUCE THE HASSLES, not only around replacing a product but also from his routine.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that it indirectly makes your customer dependent on you and although there’s hardly any switching costs for him, this dependency acts as a psychological barrier for him to switch.