A deal-breaker is something a customer just can’t get past to make the purchase. If your products and services have too many built-in deal breakers, it could hurt your business.
A Deal-Breaker Example
I’ve been looking at buying a new laptop recently. I really like the Lenovo T61p. I like as much power as you can cram into a laptop and in benchmark tests this bad box absolutely dominates any laptop in its class you can throw up against it.
Then there are the deal breakers … The T61p has a matt finish screen. I really like a bright glossy screen. Lenovo also doesn’t have any real retail distribution. I can order it off the internet easily enough but I’m touchy-feely. I gotta try it before I buy it.
I simply can’t get past these two points. They’re deal-breakers. And so the search goes on and I’ll wait a few months and see what other manufacturers come out with.
Finding and Fixing the Deal-Breakers in your Business
Sometimes it takes a creative solution to fix a deal-breaker. But most of the time, once you find it you know exactly how to fix it. So the real key here is finding it and there are 3 easy ways to do that:
- Look at past sales failures. Experience tells you everything you need to know about what sells and what doesn’t. Every sales failure is an opportunity to tweak or develop your offering.
- Look at what the competition is offering. It’s always good to keep your eye on the competiton. What’s working for them? What’s not? You can benefit from their experience too.
- Get customer feedback. Successful sales can tell you a lot as well. Talk to your customers. Survey them. If you get a lot of similar feedback on something they’d like to see or wish was different that’s a strong signal. Even though “the thing they didn’t like” wasn’t a deal-breaker for them, it might be for a lot of other potential customers.
Not every deal-breaker is worth fixing. If I’m the only person who wants a glossy laptop screen, and the only one who needs to get my greasy fingerprints all over it before I buy it, then it’s not worth the cost for Lenovo to add that option. Sometimes you just have to say no.
But routinely looking at your goods and services and finding deal-breakers you can fix will bring in more sales. It’s also a good way to keep your products in the evolutionary loop so they don’t get stale.
It’s your deal. If you can break it, you can fix it.
That reminds me the company I used to work for a couple of years ago, they had cable TV, and everyday you had this customer who wanted “that” channel, which, of course, we didn’t have. And now I realize I’m like that too lol
I spend a lot on the net, but always for digital downloadable file. If it’s a computer, a guitar, well I have to touch it, try it, see if it looks the same as it looks in the ads. Yeah 🙂
Thanx for the linkage Shane, always appreciated!
Jon,
That’s a great example of a deal-breaker. I think a lot of people try to weigh the cost of different cable packages vs the channels they want.
I don’t watch much TV so I just have basic cable, but whenever I get “the pitch” and I look at what channels I think I’d like, they’re all in different packages … which is a sneaky way to get customers to upgrade to a bigger more expensive package.
I’m with you … couldn’t even imagine buying a guitar without playing it and hearing it first!
I couldn’t agree more about keeping an eye on the competition – they are the people you need to always be one step ahead of. How can you be ahead if you don’t have a clue what they are doing?!?
– Martin Reed