Customers Know How to Buy
Are product sellers needed any longer, if the buyers already know everything about their products? Recent findings indicate that purchasing organizations tie the vendors to their buying process considerably later than in the past. Indeed, the Internet is bursting with information, available both for buyers to research and for competitors to copy – and most anything can be copied in almost no time at all. Most companies publish free product information on their website, and sellers aren’tt even needed to tell customers about new products any more.
Buyers know what they want and they equally well know the market price at which the product should be available to them. The seller gets a call from the buyer only when the buyer wants to bargain the price. And not all buyers bother to do even that – they just send their price inquiry to the customer service instead. In this situation, the price the cuistomer gets is usually eithertoo high – or too low – because the customer service organization doesn’t have the time or the skill to find about the customer needs – and it was the price the customer specifically asked for, wasn’t it?
The end result is clear: if the buyer cannot see the value of the product, he sees it as too expensive and he might not even buy it it at all. And who only really needs just products?
What Are Sellers Actually Needed for Any More?
Customers still need to understand what the supplier’s product actually does for them or how this functionality actually benefits them. Customers do not really care about the product itself – they care about how they can use it to improve their results and reach their goals.
Now that most sellers have learned that the customer needs to be told about benefits, and not about features, of the product, they face yet another challenge. Generic product benefits need to be interpreted as functionality which makes the customer’s life easier and helps him do better business. The customer must be made to understand the true value of the seller’s offering.
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