Helping Prospects Recognize Value Proposition
After building a relationship of trust, the next step of the commitment pattern is to help others recognize goodness (or value proposition) when they see it. For the purpose of this post, I’ll talk about persuading prospects to recognize the value proposition of your product. But these principles of commitment apply more broadly to any persuasive engagement.
For some products, helping prospects to recognize your product’s value proposition is straightforward. For others, it is more difficult.
For example, our ArrayFire product has a number of value propositions. I’ll choose two to demonstrate: speed and ease-of-use.
For speed, it is easy to help our prospects understand when code runs fast because there is a straightforward quantitative way to measure speed. For ease-of-use, it is more difficult to define for the prospect, and we spend extra time sharing horror stories of other approaches that are overly complex as well as success stories of others that have used our product and saved months of development headache.
Attention paid to assisting prospects in recognizing value proposition is valuable later on when they actually start using the product. With the upfront help in recognizing value proposition, prospects are more likely to give proper credit to those values as they surface in the course of your product’s use.
Further, if they decide against your product and choose a competing approach, they will have been trained in recognizing the important value propositions. When they face headaches and end up down rabbit holes without your product, they will remember that you promised to save them from those problems, and they will come back for a second look at your product with more serious intent.
What are your thoughts on the importance of helping others to recognize value proposition in your products?