What does your Packaged Promise have to do? How far does it go to help your client get from where they are now to where they want to be?
Some questions to ask:
Can I do the whole job in one go?
Is that really doable, by me and by the client?
If not, how do I break it up so that the client can see progress, without being overwhelmed by the size of the task in front of them?
And an insight from that last question:
If there is progress, there must be a process. So what is it? How do I get my client from where they are now, to where they want to be?
Can I describe that as a process in a way that makes sense to the client?
Where are the ‘natural’ breaks in that process? Can I match Packages to those?
How can I keep the client motivated to continue the journey?
Sharing the process with the client before they start their journey, helping them to locate themselves while they are on it and celebrating milestones as you go can all help.
And a final question prompted by a conversation with Adam Forbes:
How small could you make those Packages?
How could you turn each step on the journey into a tiny or atomic habit?
After all, as any pub landlord or fountain owner could tell you – those single, small denomination coins soon add up.
Before you can Package your Promise of Value effectively, you need to know these things about the people you serve:
the situation(s) in which they find themselves
the transformation they seek – their Job to be Done, and how motivated they are by their situation to achieve it.
how your Promise of Value is likely to appeal to them
how you can help them to get their Job to be Done done better than the alternatives – even, possibly, that you are the only way they can get this Job to be Done, done
how able they are likely to be to take up your Promise
Once you know these things, you can begin to design one or more Packages to suit the needs, motivation and ability of the people you serve.
There are 4 things you need to consider when designing a Package:
Function – how far does the Package go to help your client get from where they are now to where they want to be? To get their Job to be Done, done?
Format – how will you physically get that benefit into their hands?
Timing – is the Package a one-off intervention or is it delivered over a longer time-frame? Is there an end to it?
Price – how much does the Package need to cost to profit both parties?
I’m thinking out loud here, re-inventing the wheel for myself as usual.
If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” (and I recommend it), you’ll be familiar with this diagram:
But what does it practically mean for you?
If you are a business offering something new and different from what has gone before, something that could potentially disrupt the status quo, you need to understand this curve.
As an example, here’s what it means for me.
In the UK, there are around 1,018,220 businesses that employ between 3 and 10 people, including the owner. These are my overall ‘market’, the people I want to serve.
I offer a service that’s new and potentially disruptive to the status quo, so however I niche down into that market, by industry say, or geography, or business life stage, this curve comes into play. It adds another dimension to the psychographic of the people I can help most, that I have to consider when designing, marketing and delivering my service.
Here’s how it splits:
25,455 of them are Innovators. They love trying new things, what matters to them is that things are new and better than the current best option. They’ll want to know how it works (and they’ll take it apart to find out). They’re not worried about support, or infrastructure, they’re just happy to have the latest cool thing to play with. These are great people to test really new ideas on. Until they get bored and move on to the next cool new thing.
137,460 of them are Visionaries. They are interested in getting ahead, and if they can see how a thing will get them ahead of their competitors faster, they’ll go for it. They don’t mind if it’s not all there, or if there is no support. They will happily support themselves. They will ask for your thing to be redesigned to suit them though, so be prepared to maintain several versions of your thing.
346,195 of them are Pragmatists, and much more demanding. They want to know whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less than the cost of the problem. They want to know that you are a safe company to work with; that there is support, and maintenance and spare parts. As long as these things are in place they don’t care who does it, which means you can still be a small business, collaborating with other small businesses to provide a complete service. Pragmatists will only use a new thing if they believe that there are enough people like them already using it. They don’t trust Visionaries (‘flying by the seat of their pants’) and they trust Innovators even less. That gap between Pragmatists and Visionaries is The Chasm.
The same number of businesses (346,195 of them) are Conservatives. I think of these people as the ones who say ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM‘. For them what matter is whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less money. They want everyone else to be using your thing before they do. They want you to be not just safe, but respected in the marketplace. They also expect you to provide everything yourself – support, maintenance, spare parts. In other words, you have to be a big company like them. Or at least look like it.
Finally, there the 152,733 who are Skeptics. As you might imagine from their position on the distribution curve, they are the last to adopt new things, sticking stubbornly to whatever has served them well up to now, even if the new thing would serve them better.
I’m an Innovator looking to serve Visionaries.
What side of the Chasm are you on? More importantly, where are the people you seek to serve?
The great thing about your Promise of Value is that defining it can start with you. Your values, abilities and personality act as a kind of mirror, reflecting the kind of people you can best serve.
At some point though, you have to map what you can offer onto what those people actually want and need. You have to make it concrete, and describe it in terms that mean something to them, that make it easy for them to buy, rather than for you to sell.
That’s what I call Packaging your Promise, and I’m having to find new words for how to do it, because most common terms are seller-centric – ‘identifying a market’, ‘positioning your product’, ‘channels’ and ‘routes to market’ etc. That’s a problem, because you’re not selling – in fact you can’t ‘sell’, because as my good friend Barnaby Wynter puts it “Put simply, the buyer has taken control of the buying process”.
What you’re actually trying to do is help the people you serve to buy what’s best for them right now to deliver what’s good for them in the long-term.
Your Promise of Value is a big thing. And unless you’re promising basics, like ‘enough to eat’ or ‘being able to stay warm in the cold’ or ‘staying alive’, it’s likely to be somewhat abstract – ‘be more confident’, ‘be more beautiful’, ‘be more healthy’, ‘be more happy’.
I may want to ‘be more confident’, but I can’t just buy ‘confidence’. There has to be something concrete I can buy or do that delivers confidence as a result – like a nose job, or a diet, or a new suit, or a private education.
Turning your Promise into something the people you serve can actually buy is Packaging, and the golden rule of Packaging is that it’s about them, not you.
That means you have to know the people you seek to serve really well. What are their motivations? What are the constraints on that motivation? How can you configure what you offer to overcome those constraints and unleash their motivation?
If the constraint is money, the answer might be small packets – that’s how Poundland works – goods are packaged to a price point, so quantities change, but not the price. Or it might be something that makes it cheaper for you to produce or transport, like a bag-in-box for wine or olive oil.
If the constraint is time, the answer might also be small packets, but it could be on-demand delivery, or a draw-down, or a subscription.
If the constraint is attention, the answer might be creating space for focus.
If the constraint is impetus, the answer might be a time limit.
The actual constraints your people are working under will vary, which might mean creating different packages for different groups of people. But be careful not to turn choice into a barrier.
Remember it’s about making it easy for them to buy, not for you to sell. And however you package it, it mustn’t fall short on your Promise.
The answer to the question “Who is your ideal client?” is often “The one who pays well, on time.”
It’s flippant, and usually followed by a sheepish laugh, but also revealing. No matter how much depth you go into on the psychographics and demographics of your ‘ideal client’, the chances are you’re thinking more about your needs and abilities than you are of theirs.
A bigger and better question to ask is “Who am I the ideal solution for right now?”
When we are trying to package our Promise of Value into products and services, it’s easy to think in terms of adding things. Making the list of features and benefits so long that a prospect will have to scroll through pages of copy to get to the ‘and all this for just ££££!‘ line.
What if, when you reached this point, you went away, had a cup of tea, and on your return started taking things away again.
All those bells and whistles and extras are there to justify to yourself the fees you want to charge. Or a response to your perceived competition. Just because everyone else does, doesn’t have to mean that you should.
They don’t really add value to the client. In fact they obscure the real value you can offer.
Be brave, pare away the unnecessary embellishments. Reveal the truth of your Promise. As simple as possible, but no simpler.
So that the right people – your people – will recognise it. And welcome it.
Have you ever stood in front of sweet counter full of chocolate bars? Or a wall-full of 500 pizza choices. And walked away empty-handed after a few minutes, because you couldn’t decide which to choose?
As Sheena Iyengar and her co-researchers discovered, too many choices actually makes it harder to choose something over nothing.
In a well-known experiment in a store that was famous for the extensiveness of its range, they set up a tasting station for jam. Every half an hour the choices available to taste switched from 6 jars, to 24 and back again.
More people looked and tasted when there were 24 jams to choose from. But 6 times as many people bought when there were only 4.
The lesson for packaging your Promise?
If you want people to notice you, have lots of choice. If you want them to buy, don’t make them work so hard. They’ll probably give up.
We think often about the motivation of the people we wish to serve: ‘They must be ambitious to grow‘, ‘They must be seeking change‘, ‘They must be hungry’.
But according to B J Fogg, behaviour designer and author of ‘Tiny Habits‘ there are at least two more factors we need to consider.
The first is ability. Motivation means nothing without the ability to act on it, so when packaging up your Promise of Value for sale, it helps to think about what formats will work best for different clients’ abilities to act on their motivation.
These kinds of question might help:
Where is each potential client in their journey?
When is it a good time for them, to discover me?
What can I offer that is the best thing for them, where they are right now?
What could make it not work?
How can I make sure it works?
How can I make it easier for them to enrol with me?
The Promise is the same, but the format may make all the difference to whether someone buys.
