Graham McGregor: How to make complicated products and services easier to sell

When you eliminate jargon it can often make products or services easier to sell. Photo / 123RF

In this week's column I'd like to share two simple strategies on how to make complicated products and services a little bit easier to sell.

Strategy One: The first way to do this is eliminate as much as possible any technical jargon in your marketing material. And then replace this jargon with a simple example or explanation that is easy to understand.

Here's a good example:

I was chatting recently with Ash Sharma the director of a company called Atmopure.

In our chat Ash was explaining how his company helped his clients to increase the shelf life of popular products like fruit, vegetables and flowers.

Ash told me that it's Ethylene that makes your fruit, veg and flowers ripen and eventually over ripen and rot.

Ash suggested we call Ethylene E-gas for short.

E-gas is completely natural and is produced by fruit & vegetables and flowers themselves. By controlling E-gas we can slow down the ripening process and extend the shelf life of fresh produce and flowers too.

There are multiple ways of going about this and the most common one is refrigeration. By lowering the temperature, we can reduce the respiration rate of the fresh produce and thus slow down the ripening process.

Secondly we can use sprays to coat the produce to keep it fresher for longer.

Thirdly, edible waxy materials can also be used to coat the fresh produce for extended freshness.

Both the second and third methods are ways to block the E-gas.

Then there is the method by Ash's company.

They utilize machines to remove the E-gas from the storage environment and keep the E-Gas at minimal levels through continuous air filtration cycles.

This method is non-invasive and they do not introduce anything into the storage environment. And his equipment has proven popular with a number of cool stores and supermarkets now using it in their storage facilities.

I liked Ash's easy to understand explanation of what could be a complicated topic.

He eliminated technical jargon with his E-gas idea and made the various alternative options to reducing E-gas simple to understand.

Strategy Two: The second thing you can do to make complicated products or services easier to sell is to explain in more detail some of the common features you list about your product and service.

Here's a good example:

EBOSS are a marketing agency in New Zealand that work with a number of product suppliers to help them introduce their products to 14,000 builders and 7,000 architects and architectural designers.

I was chatting with the marketing manager of one of EBOSS's product supplier clients a few days ago.

He told me that one of the reasons he liked using EBOSS was because they helped him make his product information far more effective at selling a product into a particular target market.

He explained that they had a new building panel that they had introduced and in the original product material and specifications it said that this panel was 'lightweight' and 'cost effective'.

EBOSS looked at this product info and told him that he had to be a lot more specific about what 'light weight' and 'cost effective' actually means.

What common industry jargon could you eliminate in some of your marketing material?

They then asked him further questions like these...

'How much does the panel cost for each square metre and how does this compare with alternative options like GIB or Plasterboard?'

'How much does the panel weigh and what does that mean with regards to installing it on a building project?'

The marketing manager found that by having EBOSS challenge him like this that his building panel product info is now more relevant to potential clients who might want to use it on a building project.

So instead of having a lightweight panel that is cost effective they now have a wall panel that is so light that one person can hang a whole sheet by themselves. And because it costs only $X a square metre and doesn't need painting or stopping this panel is now a great alternative to using Gibb and Plaster Board.

What EBOSS did was get their client to be more specific about some general product features and they got them to do this in a way that made a product more appealing to someone who was thinking about using it.

Summary

When you eliminate jargon and be a little bit more specific about general features of a complicated product or service it can often make this product or service a little bit easier to sell.

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated" - Confucius

Action Steps

1: What common industry jargon could you eliminate in some of your marketing material?

2: What general features of your product or service could you explain in more detail in a way that makes this product or service more appealing to a potential client?

Graham McGregor is a Marketing Strategist and helps business coaches attract perfect coaching clients from around the world. You can download his marketing guide ‘You Deserve Perfect Coaching Clients’ at no charge from www.perfectcoachingclients.com