What’s the distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service?

I get this query so much.

Right here’s the reply and I’ll make it as easy and as clear as attainable. I feel it’s necessary, crucial, that salespeople perceive the distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service. Realizing the distinction can have an effect on the way you promote AND how one hires, evaluates and assesses salespeople.

The distinction between the way you promote a product versus the way you promote a product is . . .

There isn’t any distinction!  Interval.

Let me be completely frinkin’ clear right here.

There isn’t any distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service — completely NONE!

These of you who assume there’s a distinction want to judge the way you promote, since you’re promoting improper. The salespeople who concentrate on their service or product as their promoting method are lacking the purpose.  Good promoting doesn’t promote a product or a service. Good promoting focuses on figuring out issues, then presents an answer to unravel the issue. If it’s a kickass answer, nobody cares if it’s a product or a service.

Once we begin with the shopper and their issues, there isn’t a distinction whether or not the answer is a services or products. It’s what the services or products delivers that issues. The affect of an answer, product, or service remains to be a imaginative and prescient, an intangible. It’s not one thing you possibly can contact or really feel, and it’s distinctive to EVERY buyer.

The argument I hear most frequently is: you possibly can see and really feel a product, the place a service is tougher to promote as a result of it’s an intangible. Are fucking kidding me?  When somebody tells me this, I simply need to soar out of my pores and skin. When somebody argues a tangible product is less complicated to promote than an intangible service, it tells me they’re a horrible gross sales individual or worse but, a horrible gross sales supervisor. It tells me their gross sales method is to steer with their provide (the product or the service) and that they don’t look to grasp their prospects points and issues. It tells me they promote function/perform. That is horrible promoting.

If we’re promoting appropriately, we’re in the end anchored within the prospects “hole.”  The hole between the place they’re right now and the place they need to be tomorrow. We’re promoting primarily based on fixing measurable, tangible, pressing enterprise issues. We’re not promoting our service or our product, however what our services or products can ship for our prospects by way of their enterprise worth. Once we’re promoting like this, it’s all intangible. It’s at all times totally different for every shopper or buyer. Once we’re promoting like this, there isn’t a cookie-cutter method. It doesn’t matter if in case you have a tangible, tactile, visible product or an intangible, nontactile service. It’s all intangible in case you’re promoting incorrectly.

There isn’t any distinction between promoting a product or a service.

In the event you consider there’s a distinction between promoting a tangible product or an intangible service, you might have an even bigger downside than you notice. It’s essential re-evaluate your gross sales expertise. Begin right here with these books.

In the event you’re promoting appropriately, there isn’t a distinction between promoting a product and promoting a service. Within the case that there’s, it means you’re not promoting, you’re pitching a product and it’s time to begin over; learn this.

Anybody disagree?

In that case, how do you promote a product otherwise than a service?

I’m all ears.