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How Much More Product Could You Sell If You Included Some Time With It?

Selling Time With Your Product

As product managers we are always looking for ways to give our products a unique selling proposition. We add unique features, we drop the price, we try bundling the product with other products, etc. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking the single most important way that we can get our potential customers to turn into actual customers: start selling time with our product.

Now clearly we’re not going to be able to box up a bunch of time and offer it to our customers. However, AT&T is currently running a series of ads for their wireless service where they make their “rollover minutes” appear to be tangible things that people can keep track of. Instead of something that our customers can touch, maybe what we can start to sell is experiences.

If you are a product manager for a resort that is located on a Caribbean island, you are probably already doing this. However, for the rest of us, this comes back to that pesky “user experience” thing. Just how do your customers feel while they are using your product?

I must confess to having been a product manager who was in charge of a number of products that had fantastic functional value. However, I was so enamored by what my products did, that I spent very little time thinking about how my customers must have felt while they were using my product.

If you need a very simple example, then consider the ubiquitous progress bar found on most software these days. I for one can tell you that seeing a progress bar progress from 0% to 100% while a software tool is doing its job makes me very happy – I don’t like having to sit there looking at a blank screen wondering just what is going on. The progress bar makes my user experience much better and makes me feel like I have more control over my time.

Allowing Your Customers To Control Their Time Better

Taking the idea of “selling time” to your customers one step further, the next thing that a product manager can do is to put the control of how long something takes into the hands of your customers.

Internally we are always looking for ways to speed up the buying process. What can we do to move a potential customer from lead to prospect to paying customer as quickly as possible so that we can book the revenue and move on to the next customer?

The problem with this approach is that it can cause the customer to feel pressured to buy. If instead we put control of the buying timeline in the hands of the customer, then they get to control just how fast the process goes.

The clearest example of this can be seen on web sites where you can allow the customer to “build” their own product. Putting them in charge of creating their own pizza or computer means that once it’s been built, the customer already feels a sense of “ownership” and is much more likely to buy what they’ve specified.

Product managers can take this time control process one step further and equip sales teams with the tools that they need in order to guide customers down several different paths. How long each path is and what is covered can be controlled by the customer so that a contract is not placed in front of them until they are truly ready to buy.

It’s All About Attitude

How your customers feel about time will be something that is constantly changing. Just because you’ve found something that works now, doesn’t mean that it will keep working tomorrow.

You can expect your customers to become bored with the steps that they have to go through to use your product today and want to be able to do things quicker and better. It’s going to be your responsibility to be constantly coming up with new approaches that work for them.

What All Of This Means For You

The next time (sorry about the pun) that you are faced with a competitor that appears to have a better or cheaper product than you can offer, take a step back. Think about how you can start to offer your potential customers what they really want – more time and better control over their time.

There are a number of different ways that you can do this. The key is to understand how your customers are using your product and to then make the time that they spend with your product even more enjoyable.

Selling time is the one product that will never go out of style. Sure you can’t box it up and no, you can’t store it in a warehouse, but all of your customers will keep coming back and asking you for more of it…!

Do you think that you could boost your product’s sales if you started to advertise the user experience more?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the global economy snaps back, product managers are going to start traveling once again. One place that we should plan on spending some time will be at industry trade shows. No, these are not the most enjoyable things to go to just to hand out your business card; however, maybe you feel this way because nobody ever told you how to get the most out a trade show…

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Don’t Mickey Mouse Around With Your Customer’s Time

Quick: what’s the most valuable item in the world? Gold? Diamonds? Nope, it turns out that the thing that most of us would gladly give our left arm for more of is: time. Now since I can see that you are nodding your head in agreement with this, I’ve got a question for you. Why aren’t you selling time along with your product?

Don’t Worry, Nobody’s Doing It

Study after study of both consumers and businesses have shown that both share our view that time is the most valuable of resources. Nobody has enough of the stuff. Customers have stated over and over again that they would probably buy any product that could save them time. Hmm, sure seems like a great way for a product manager to make their product (more) successful…

The real tragedy here is that so few of us seem to be listening to our customers on this subject. You don’t have to be able to read your customer’s mind to see that there is a real need here. A study performed by Paul Nunes and company has revealed that only 5% of customers believe that the companies that they do business with and the products that they buy respect their limited time.

How NOT To Try To Sell More Time

All too often when Product Managers discover that their customers are looking for ways to gain more time, they try for the quick & dirty solution. These are the types of solutions that allow the product manager to make statements like “now takes only half the time that it used to”. This no longer cuts it with your customers.

One of a product manager’s biggest problems is that your customer’s world keeps on moving faster and faster. This means that just because you find a way to reduce the amount of time that it takes to use your product, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s really going to have any value to your customers. I mean really, doesn’t the concept of having your photos printed and ready for you in 24 hours seem like it still takes too long?

The Correct Way To Sell More Time With Your Product

If you want to add “more time” to the list of items that you are offering to sell to your customers, then there are four things that you need to start doing. None of these approaches to making your product more valuable are all that earth shattering, but if they buy your customer more time, then you should see sales of your product shoot up:

1. Multitasking: how much attention to your product is required by your customer when they are using it? Although we all know that trying to multitask in our daily lives is a bad thing, it turns out that customers will flock to any product that allows them to do more than one thing simultaneously. This is one reason why desktop search tools that run in the background silently indexing your hard drive are so popular – buy, install, run, and then forget. Customers love that.
2. Get It Faster: how long do your customers have to wait from when they buy your product before it is in their hands and ready to use? If you are selling a software product that requires a significant installation project to get it up and running, would it be possible to allow your customer to start to use some functionality before the entire system was up and running? This would go a long way in reducing the perceived time between purchase and use.
3. Fear Of Commitment: are customers avoiding your product because they believe that it’s just going to require too much of their time to use? If so, you’ve got a challenge on your hands. What can you do to convince them that either they’re wrong – the time commitment is not that large, or that they really do have the time? You see this type of product positioning with exercise equipment ads all the time – you can get flat abs in just 10 minutes a day!
4. No More Waiting: how hard is it to purchase your product? Do you make your customers go through a lengthy RFP process and then have to sit through multiple product configuration meetings once you’ve been selected? Why not take a look at what you’ve actually been selling and pick the three most popular configurations and offer those as a pre-packaged product with the option to further customize?

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we are always under pressure to make our products more popular. The levers that we have to pull in order to make this happen include things like lowering the price and increasing the features. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking the one thing that our customers are most desperately looking for: more time in their lives.

If we can find a way to allow our products to help our customers get more control over the time in their lives, then we’ll have created a unique selling proposition for our product. We can do this by allowing our customers to better multitask by using our product, do things faster, reduce the commitment that the product requires, or even by getting rid of waiting for the product.

Time is a universal desire – everybody wants it and they are always going to want more of it. As a product manager, if you can figure out how your product can provide your customers with more time, then you will have found your secret to product success.

Do you think that your customers would be more willing to buy your product if it provided them with more time?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Welcome to the world of the 21st Century – there seems to be a new competitor who is trying to win the attention of your customers every day. What’s a product manager to do?  Maybe the answer lies in what your existing customers are saying about your product…

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Slimming Down A Product Can Attract New Customers

If product managers ran the world, we’d be able to sell our products to everyone at a very high price. However, since we don’t run the world (yet), we need to adjust and adapt in order to sell our products to as many people as possible for as high a price as is possible. However, when the global economy tanks, we’ve got a whole new set of challenges that we’ve got to deal with…

Slimming Down Your Product

When your customer have less money to spend, you’ve got to adjust how your product “looks” to them in order to get and hold their attention. Taking a large, expensive product or service and “slimming it down” can make it more attractive to your customers who are price-conscious.

This approach works best for product managers who are managing services such as marketing firms, design firms, etc. A good example would be a firm that does landscape design. Instead of selling a complete redesign of a yard, perhaps they could slim this product down and offer a consulting package that includes a site visit, a discussion about wants and needs, and a preliminary design. As always, this can be a great lead-in to a larger sale later.

Unbundling Your Product

For those of us product managers who have products, not services to mange, a different tact can be taken. Take a hard look at your product as it stands today. Is there any way that you can that product and “unbundle” it – basically break it into separate components? If you can find a way to do this, then you can turn around and start to sell the components separately.

The good folks who sell us cell phones learned this trick a long time ago. Batteries, carrying cases, earphones, etc. are all sold separately (and at higher prices!)

Product Manager Beware!

One side benefit of unbundling a product is that a slimmed down product has the ability to attract new customers. However, all too often product managers start to dream about upselling new customers on additional products and thereby boosting their sales. This generally doesn’t work because those new customers are simply looking for the slimmed down product and will go away if they don’t find it.

Final Thoughts

Slimming down / unbundling existing products are a great way for product managers to help their companies make it though tough times. However, you need to remember that times won’t always be this tough. That means that you’ve got to very clear about what your customers are going to be able to get at what price.

Customers associate price with value and that means that that they’ll understand that they will be getting less at a lower price. Make sure to leave the door open to offering more at a higher price later on. Follow these suggestions and you will have found out how great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

Questions For You

Have you taken any steps to make your existing product / service more attractive to more customers at a different price point? Have you considered changing your service offerings to include a lower price up-front consulting offering? Can your existing product be broken into multiple components? Would this bring in more revenue? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s time for some creative product manager thinking. Times are tough, our customers are strapped for cash and yet we’d like to keep sales of our products at least at where they are if not boost them a bit. No matter if your product is a service or a “real” product, there’s something that you can do to sweeten the pot for your potential customers – offer more services…

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