3 Tips to Make Sure Your Offers Have Congestion Free Travel

Offers get caught in the go-to-market traffic congestion because they are not intentional.

Products aren’t offers, services aren’t offers and the combination of the two do not make an offer.  No one can buy or sell a product or service until it’s converted into an offer, and the better the conversion, the better for both the buyer and the seller.

If offers are so important, why do we do such a bad job creating them or more accurately, why do we seldom create one intentionally that compels the buyer and rewards the seller with more profits?

For much of the last 100 years it was enough to create a product to fulfill a buyer frenzied bubble.  Bubbles are those times where the market says, “I have to have that.”  Whether it was a Cabbage Patch Kid, the first iPhone, that home to flip or hot concert tickets.  A buyer will go through a lot to buy, over pay and celebrate how hard it was make the purchase.

Today buyers are more product knowledgeable, there is lots of supporting technology and buyers are smarter about how to make a great and safe buy.  Google, 5 stars, Amazon, review blogs and the ability to see recalls and law suits make the buyer wise before they consider making the buy.

For those who build offers in the B2B world, not only are the buyers smarter, they have reviewed as much as possible about you and your products before you even know they exist.  Often the B2B buyer buys as a team that is spread out by discipline, geography, and language.

In the old days, it was enough to have a product.  Today the buyer does their research and your product passes the vetting (along with 3 other companies). They start by asking all kinds of questions about implementation, your role, warranty, customization, exactly how your product solves specific buyer problems, and why one customer gave you one star and reported you to the BBB?

Below are three tips you need for a new RoadMap plan to assist you in avoiding go-to-market traffic backups:

Tip One:  The product or the service is seldom 50% of the offer the buyer wants to know about.  Much of what the buyer wants to know about is not hard engineering information.  The buyer first wants to know if they can trust you.  The buyer wants to know if working with you increases or decreases their risk.  They want to know about the end-to-end engagement experience you will provide, and if what you deliver will even be close to what the buyer understands based on the selling process.

Tip Two:  You control your offer.  Adding value is about solving the buyer’s problems.  If the buyer could solve their problem without you they would not be talking with you.  Start with a specific statement about the problem you will solve for the buyer, that no one else solves.  Follow that statement with a very specific and engaging Joint SOW process, to be sure you fully understand their problem and they have a preview of life with your solution. Note that Amazon does this process in 2 minutes, Best Buy does it in the store in 20 minutes and IBM may take a year – you must decide what your process is.  This Joint SOW assures the offer will give the buyer compelling value and that the seller will receive corresponding value.  If you previewed the value to the buyer, then only you can lead the buyer to exactly that value previewed.

Tip Three:  The offer starts before the buyer knows you or your offer exists and before you know this is a possible buyer.  The offer is what is floated into space where there may be potential buyers lurking (like fly fishing).  The buyer sees something and starts to investigate additional detail and then makes assumptions about how this might work in the buyer world.

The seller depending on how they floated the offer is watching website or blog interaction or the conversation at a show.  As both do more investigation, there is a point where one or the other starts a conversation (online chat, phone call, email, etc.) and each qualifies the ability of the other to add and receive value.

Now the offer goes to the Joint SOW and if the preview is compelling to both, the offer morphs into a contract to be signed and then fully executed.

The offer is where the complete relationship between buyer and seller is initially envisioned by both parties.  If there is no vision, everything is random (making buyer / seller alignment almost impossible).  If each has a vision and the Joint SOW merges the two visions into something compelling for both parties’, life is good.

Not having an intentional well designed offer that compels buyer opt-in, manages the engagement process and assures the value of the deliver will be fatal.  The only question is how long it takes to pass on.

So intentionally create an offer that solves a high value buyer problem and map a congestion free go-to-market trip that is good for both the buyer and the seller.