One of the best ways to move your business from surviving to thriving is to position yourself as the ‘painkiller’ in your industry.
Imagine you wake up with the world’s worst back ache. It is so bad you can barely walk .
Gritting your teeth, you shuffle to your medicine cabinet only to find it completely empty. Luckily, your local chemist offers a home delivery service. So you ring up and order a box of their strongest painkillers. The Chemist helpfully mentioned that the physiotherapist next door is a magician at fixing backs, so you ring them straight after and book an emergency appointment.
Did you worry about the price? Did you bother ringing around to see if you could get it cheaper? Did you think about buying another day? No chance! You were in pain. You bought it on the spot and probably would have paid 2-3 times more as long as it made the pain stop.
‘Vitamin’ businesses are the exact opposite to this. They work on much longer term benefits. They promise they will make your life (marginally) better and represent an investment in a potentially brighter future. But its hard to know if they really work or if you are flushing good money down the toilet.
So how can you position your business as a painkiller that people need to buy NOW?
Products
For products, its about packaging up the extras.
To sell a computer, traditional retailers focus on the features such as how much RAM it has, screen quality and type of CPU. This leads to people shopping around based on price as the product from one store is the exact same as the other.
What if instead you offered a package where a computer technician delivered it to your home, helped you set it up, connected it to your network, transferred over all your old data and showed you how to save time in your business and personal life using the new features it included.
Now you are offering relief to the pain that comes with buying a new computer, and price becomes a much lower consideration.
Services
For services, its about picking the right stage of the customer journey..
If you are a lawyer, it can be hard to convince people to pay for services such as writing terms and conditions in the early days of their business. They just don’t see the value.
However as soon as a client doesn’t pay them and they miss out on thousands of dollars worth of revenue, that changes.
You could target that pain point by offering a package around how to handle and avoid non-paying clients. This could include writing the terms and conditions for them so it never happened again, but also include legal help to try and recover the missed payment.
By picking the right time on their customer journey, you have gone from offering a vitamin that they weren’t sure they needed, to a pain killer they are willing and eager to pay for right now!
Targeting the pain points your clients have results in higher conversion rates and far less price sensitivity. Look for the problems your client is looking to solve right NOW, and develop packages and products that will deliver the result they desire.
What are the pain points in your industry? How can you package and position yourself as the expert who can solve it?