Customers Don’t Care About Your Fancy Features

Customers don't care about our fancy features. This was never more clear to me than early in my sales career when I made a big mistake.

At the time, I was selling patient monitors, and everyone wanted to connect directly to the electronic charting system. It was a gaping hole in our offering that we didn’t connect to the EMR system.

One day, they announced that we had FDA clearance and could now connect. I was thrilled! I ran around the tri-state area, telling anyone who would listen about our amazing new feature. I had no idea it was about to come back and bite me. I was visiting a customer I had always wanted to land. He asked me the inevitable question: “Can you connect to our charting system?”

I excitedly responded that we absolutely could! I went on to tell him all the detailed specs, just to impress him, but he interrupted me. “Katie, wait. We actually tried that with your competitor, and it didn’t work out at all. We hated it. Sorry, I don’t think this is the product for us.”

Wait, what? He said he didn’t want our amazing new technology that we’d worked so hard for? This can’t be happening! I did my best to back-track. I explained that it was only an option, and wasn’t a requirement, but the damage was done. “Sorry, Katie,” he said. “I think your product is just too complicated for us. We need something simpler.”

I learned an important lesson that day. When he asked if we could connect to the charting system, I shouldn’t have assumed that he wanted to. I should have responded with, “Is that something that’s important to you?”

I would have learned exactly what I needed to know to win that deal. I would have learned that I needed to focus on the simplicity of the technology and how easy it was to operate.

Not every customer needs fancy. Some need simple. What customers DO care about are their needs. Period.

Agree? Let me know on LinkedIn!