Why we FLOP: Part I – De Boer Consultancy SARL

Why do promising sales opportunities fizzle out before you have a chance to really get into the detail with the customer, to find out what makes them tick and agree the pain points which are solved by your product or service?

Because we FLOP. This short series of articles discusses four traps into which salespeople and commercial teams often fall, especially when under pressure to deliver quickly or when they are unsure of either their own product or how their product can meet the specific needs of the customer.

F is for Feature Dumping

It isn’t just salespeople who fall into this trap, usually with a show-and-tell presentation to open their engagement with a customer. Marketing teams often make this mistake as well, for instance when crafting product collateral or web content. How many times have you seen a comparison grid in which the company’s product ticks every feature box whilst the competing offerings are apparently missing some or all these features?

Feature dumping is reeling off a list of key features by way of introducing, positioning or explaining your product. The idea that more is more. Throw enough stuff and something is bound to hit the target. More often than not, it doesn’t!

The problem here is that you get into an arms race of features with your competitors, making you and your company a hostage to fortune if your competitors can show a longer list of features, or if you are missing one or two specific features which catch the eye of your customer, or you are missing features which have been the hook used by the incumbent vendor.

Your customer wants to compare apples with apples, especially if the stakeholder involved is taking a very functional, operational view of competing products. If you take this feature-led approach as a startup or as a new entrant to a particular market, you are on a hiding to nothing against more established competitors.

Sometimes, a customer might encourage this approach. For instance, they provide you with a tender document or RFP – the ultimate apples with apples comparison – which is structured as a long list of requirements (features). You are duty-bound to respond in kind and comply with their response structure, or else you risk not being considered as a vendor. The chances are, of course, that one of your competitors has helped the customer to write their list of requirements, aligned with that competitor’s own specific set of features.

One of the key tricks to winning tenders is to play a (discreet) role in writing the requirements (and ideally also the evaluation criteria), which requires early engagement and building trust with the customer, at a strategic and operational level. Incumbent vendors are usually at an advantage when it comes to this early-stage engagement, which is why winning new customers is harder than keeping them. If you receive an RFP unannounced, by all means provide your proposal… but don’t put too high a percentage on your chances of winning it!

A recurring theme in this series of FLOP articles will be value. Try to keep your value proposition – and how it delivers specific value to your customer – front and centre of your approach, from start to finish of the process. A laundry list of features isn’t a value proposition. You are asking the customer to figure out the value of your offering to them, which 9 times out of 10 they will fail to do.

To this end, one structure which is often helpful, once you have established the goals and pain points of your customer, is to provide an overview of your product in terms of FBA: Features, Benefits, Advantages. Try framing each feature of your product in terms of the benefit it delivers and the advantage (or value) this gives to your customer.

For instance: our product utilises an AI model [the feature], with the benefit of being able to handle larger amounts of data at a faster speed than a manual process [the benefit], which means that your company can potentially deliver its service to your customers quicker and more efficiently than your competitors [the advantage].

It can feel a little clunky at first but using the phrase which means that in your sales conversations will force you to describe the advantage and value of your feature to your customer, and not just its benefit. When it comes to marketing copy, you obviously need to use some variations on this stock phrase to avoid looking robotic or formulaic!

Each of these FBAs needs to feed into your overall value proposition, both at a general level and, wherever possible, specifically for each customer. Be consistent and coherent. If a feature isn’t relevant, don’t lead with it. F is also for Focus!