☑️ Sell ease
One of the best parts of reading business history books is realizing the omnipresence of competition, especially the Chronos-eating-his-children aspect. Each industry has an organization that’s infallible one day and felled the next.
Challenging organizations succeed when they sell something slightly different. As the expression goes, if you want to beat Bobby Fisher, don’t play him in chess. One way to do this is to offer to make things easier. Three examples:
“We learned that employers want everything (with their 401k plan) to be seamless and easy. When I talk about accessibility, a lot of the small businesses we work with want something that is low-cost, but time is money so it has to be the easiest thing in the world. That's where we shine, it's low-cost and it's easy." John Stein, Betterment
And
"In overall (podcast) usage Apple still dominates, and what Spotify wants to do is bring more of that listening time over. Personally I'm using Spotify a lot more in the house because, though it took me forever, I could easily move a Spotify podcast to my Sonos speakers and just like that, my time on Spotify as a podcast platform has gone way up." Peter Kafka, Recode
And
“We have the Sonos app. My kids and wife will say, ‘Alexa, play the new Drake,’ and they don’t care that the quality is crappy, it’s good enough and it’s easier.” Rich Barton, Zillow
As an insider you know all the features. You know the output and the torque. You know the pixels and density. You know the coverage and water resistance. Here’s the issue, your customers don’t know and your customers don’t care.
Customers want the job ‘done’, a sprightly subjective measure. This nebulous nature is good because size and ease tend to be inversely related. Want more customers? Make it easy.