This is Barry mold still getting small businesses out of stock. Welcome back. Another big reason why you're stuck in your business in the sales and marketing area is that you sell features rather than benefits. And you're selling a product that today because the internet is a commodity and it can be purchased cheaper somewhere else. What you're doing is you're selling like it's 1981. And I remember that year very well.

There was a time where I graduated from college, and IBM came out with that first IBM PC. That was such a huge hit. I remember when I was at IBM, the way that we did selling was definitely to sell features, the advantages, and then the benefits of each of the products. People couldn't go and look up with the features of a product. I as the IBM representative had to tell them what the product was all about. They had to trust me.

In fact, we use a technique quite often called Fudd, fud fear, uncertainty and doubt, because as IBM we always said to them, no one got fired from their job for buying IBM. We tried to tell them that if you bought another product, perhaps something that was cheaper, there'd be a lot more uncertainty than if you bought from IBM, we could really depend on our brand. Another mistake that you make that is keeping you stuck, is that you try to sell based on the wonderful features that you have in your business, all the different things that you think will sell your product, as we said in the last video, just because you build this Doesn't mean people will come. The biggest problem about focusing on the features of your product is that 80% of the folks will only use 20% of the product. Think about Microsoft Excel a wonderful product, but what percent of the features of that product Do you really actually use?

The other problem with focusing on features is that most decisions are not made based on what a product does. 75% of all products, and all the decisions made on those products are based on some kind of emotion. And we'll be talking about that more in the brand section of this video series. Now remember, a lot of brands have gone to great lengths to create an emotional connection to their company. Think about Harley Davidson. There aren't just Harley Davidson bicycles, but there's all sorts of Harley Davidson paraphernalia.

Check this out. Here's a baby wearing a Harley Davidson diaper. One of the biggest changes that's happened with the internet was written about by Dan pink. When he published the book not too long ago, it was called the cell is human. What he emphasized in this publication was that customers no longer want to be sold. That should be a relief.

They really want to be educated. They want to get value from interacting with you and your website. Think back we talked about in video one about the double helix trap and what we need to really go out and break that about keeping in touch with customers on an ongoing basis to form relationships with them. So you're not always only doing sales and marketing. When you have no business. You have to go out there and build a trust relationship and I think that Amazon has done an amazing job.

Building trust relationships, think about what they sell. They started a long time ago, just selling books. But then when you got comfortable buying books from them, you knew that the books would be in stock. You knew that when they said the books were going to be there two days later to your home or office, it actually was, you developed a very trust relation with them. So now you can buy almost anything from them. And they sell all sorts of things from home electronics to various games and everything that you can imagine even competing with Zappos on shoes.

Remember, as we talked about in video, one, you can't rush this trust, you've got to go around the circle. You have to know like, trust, try by repeat and then refer. This takes a long time. It was a great study done several years ago by Nielsen which talked about the importance of Reputation Marketing in an internet age. This graphic to me was really amazing. Not really surprised, but people trust 92% of time from people they know they trust their recommendations.

But check this out consumer opinions posted online from people that the consumer doesn't know they trust them 70% of time. This fact is really quite amazing, because it beats out more than two to one any online as the company may do, or your own branded website. So what does this mean? what this really means is that people are going to buy based on other people's recommendations that are posted online and what people say. Now, there's a great story that I always tell about great American bagel and I went many years ago to buy a dozen bagels at this local bakery here in Chicago. It's a franchise and I ordered a dozen bagels as I was in I asked them to slice the bagels, the person behind the counter told me that the bagels would be five cents extra to slice each one of them.

At 60 cents, I was outraged by this, I didn't complain. But then I must have told the story over 100 times, because I was not excited about what they had done, and never back went back to that bagel place. We have to understand that customers really will complain more than they'll say nice things about your company. Harvard Business Review has some great statistics that say that 25% of people are likely to speak positively about your business, but unfortunately, 65% are likely to speak negatively about your business. More importantly, 23% of people that had a positive experience with your company are going to tell 10 people unfortunately 48% of the people that had negative experience with our company are going to tell 10 or plus people so people are more likely to plain. That is why we the form their relationship and really give them value.

And it can't be just based on low price. low price is a losing game for small business owners because in fact, low price doesn't mean low trust or low service. Think of the leading brands of low price these days. Think about Costco and southwest and Walmart. They offer low prices and great service. We have to remember as small business owners, having a low price is a loser's game, because our margin is going to get cut down to almost nothing that we have to make sure that we give high value which perhaps comes along with a higher price so we can really win.

One of the biggest problems we face today trying to sell our products is something called showrooming. And while you may not know what showrooming is, I'm sure that most of you have done it. You go into a store and you see a product and it sells for In $99, you then go on your phone, your smartphone, and you look up to see, perhaps, is that product available cheaper somewhere else. In fact, Amazon actually has an application where you can scan the barcode, and they'll tell you what they sell the product for people then leave the showroom and order that product online. This is a losing game for a lot of retailers. And when I talk about how do you beat this, so you're selling value, and not just features, we actually can beat showrooming and make sure that we're selling on value and not just features so our products don't become commodities.

The first thing we need to do is learn from Scott Starbuck, over at Citi sold shoes in Chicago. He has a very long standing boutique shoe store. And when he does as people make their way around his retail establishment, he actually has iPads that He shows various stories about the shoes. He has something called city soles TV. So it gives more information about where the shoes come from who makes them what you might want to wear with them. This will break the habit of showrooming because he's actually building value.

Another way to build value is to make special bundles for your products. We see this all the time where people bundle together video games and controllers or different kinds of consumer products. This really does work because the customer combining two things together really does see more value. The next thing is we must continually train our staff over and over again. This is one of the biggest advantages that you have of someone coming to your store or talking on the phone that an online retailer just doesn't have. Your staff can be educated and can help the consumer make the right decision.

Being there to help them really does count. The other lesson we can learn is really from Apple retail stores. If you go into their locations, each of their salespeople has a mobile POS or point of sale device. You don't have to leave the salesperson to go up to a long line a counter to buy, which you can do is get that product ripeness salesperson that does a couple things. First of all, I don't have to leave and stand in a long line to wait to buy something. Secondly, it doesn't put a skewer a Shazam in that relationship between you, between the customer and the salesperson.

So it's a natural relationship to say I found this product for you. Now you can buy it from me in our store right now is been incredibly effective for them. Another place where you need to focus is your mobile website. There's an astounding fact that 90% of small businesses out there don't have optimized mobile websites. What does that mean? When a customer goes to your site, they have to do a lot of pinching and a lot of scrolling.

And that's a problem, because 50% of all searches today are done on mobile devices. And when someone actually makes an inquiry about your product or service, they're much more likely to buy if they're doing it from a mobile device. The next thing you need to have is what I call a no hassle return policy. I know that none of us like to get returns back because it usually is a loser from the tendency of profit. But you have to make it easy for people to return their products or get a refund for service. Because that's really where the trust happens.

You can't continue a relationship with a customer if they're forced to keep a product or service that they were never happy with in the first place. And they're going to tell 10 other people that they're really dissatisfied with your product or service. Remember, as I said in the previous video, you've got to keep Your influence going by staying in touch with customers and building value on a month by month basis. I know you'll agree now that you have to focus on the value that you're selling for the price that you're selling it instead of focusing on features, if you focus on value, you will get your business unstuck and eventually you'll have a much more profitable business. This is Barry moulds, getting small business on stuff. Have a great day.