How Would Google Sell Your Product?

Newspapers still have a place in physical space.  Grabbing a lunchtime fill on London’s South Bank, the deli had its own daily copy of a broadsheet’s Technology Supplement strewn all over a highly perched table top.  Not normally my cup o’tea, it helped ably pass a few minutes of munching, but later that evening online, I wondered back to one useful article about how Google do things.  Here’s one key point:

“Google’s habit of releasing new products as betas is instructive. By producing unfinished, incomplete, imperfect products – unthinkable under old rules and expectations – Google is opening up its process of design.”

Much of my time with clients at present is about how they sell new products.  One of my recent tasks was to call up a select band of my client’s customers and ask them about the glistening new pride and joy provided by my client, sales of which were not as stratospheric as had been hoped.  Before you ponder as to why this wasn’t done by the marketing resource, well, their approach had been to email every salesrep and ask them to provide the info, as they had the “relationship” with each end-user.  To my recollection only one salesperson provided any info, and that was duly deemed “wrong”.

Yes, maybe only Google can afford to offer freebie products these days.   Yet whereas they involve customers in the design process, in this case, I involved them in the design of the sales process.  At the heart of my questioning was identifying what the customer would feel best about in the new wares and likely to consequently buy.

The results I gained were astonishing.  So much so, that the action has become part of my regular programme in this arena.