Is Your Product “Bought” or is it “Sold”?

The art of sales is rapidly changing.

Short week for most of us, so I'll make this is a quick observation that gets you thinking about your business....

Over the past few months I have spent a lot of time talking and thinking about the difference between the concept that some things are “bought” and some things are “sold.”

Believe it or not, there is a difference.

Most consumer items are bought?– you go online or to a store, pick out what you want, put it into your cart, and pay what you owe. You generally do not need (nor want) someone to talk to you about features and benefits in order to buy.

There are other items or services, however, that need to be sold in order for you to buy. Historically, these are bigger ticket, more expensive or nuanced things that need explaining, configuring or have a process in order for you to get the most value from the sale.?Most (but not all) B2B business solutions, particularly the ones that innovate an existing workflow, are sold.?They have been built on a sales model (one that requires discussion with a salesperson).

With the advent of smartphones has come an on-demand type of culture, people want to be able to buy things whenever they want, where ever they want, without having to be sold by someone. Hell, people will choose to go to “self checkout” at the grocery store (at no discount, by the way) to increase the speed of our transaction an avoid interaction with a checkout person altogether.

We want to do the research. We want to do the configuring. We want less human involvement. We expect that things should be easy enough to “just work” the way that we want from the beginning, and that when we buy, we get the value we expect immediately, without someone having to show us or sell us on the features and benefits.

Three immediate examples of items that I see are transitioning from being sold to being bought: cars, houses and investing advice.

Not long ago, these all required people to sell them to us in order for a transaction to occur. Now, with our increased ability to do our own research and streamlined paperwork processes, engaging with these products and services require little to no selling.

Today, cars, houses and investing advice can all be bought anywhere and anytime without salespeople.

Our buying behaviors in business are largely being influenced by how we buy as consumers. This is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on organizations to make their products and their marketing simple and frictionless (thus the rise in popularity in the concept of "product led growth"). And as the B2B buying personas skew more towards Millennials and Gen-Z, this evolution is naturally to going to quicken in pace.

Think about your own business?– whether you are providing widgets or your time. Is your product or service currently?bought?or is it?sold? Can people simply “order up” whatever it is they need at the press of a button or do they need to talk to someone?

If your solution is currently sold, what do you need to do to reduce the friction in the purchasing process so it can be bought? Are you making it easier for your customer to do their research and come to their conclusions independently? Are you still having your salesforce push product or are you pivoting them to help customers make sense of all the information they are getting and find the value in your offering?

Obviously, not everything will be able to be bought without human interaction. But if you are not investing the time and resources now to figure out how you can get closer to a frictionless transaction, you will be left in the cold.

Hope it was good food for thought for you – perhaps I will revisit this idea down the road. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

XOXO

Dave

This was adopted from the February 5, 2022 intro to my weekly "Friends of Dave" newsletter, which is accompanied by interesting links I curate each week. If you would like to see past full issues, please click here?>>>?https://www.getrevue.co/profile/davidafrankel