Customer perception of your product or service is all relative. You need to identify the customer’s point of reference to be effective in your marketing and selling efforts.
Many customers will shop based on price or feature comparing your product to your competitor’s offering.
Other times your customer is only comparing what they currently have with what you are selling.
Let’s look at an example.
A while ago, I mentioned that we had an old TV that needed a converter box to receive the new digital TV signals. Ironically, that same TV started sparking and smoking about a week after we bought the converter box.
With the television dead, it was time to search for a replacement. Because our current TV was so old (over 9 years), any current television on the market looked really good.
Since my point of reference was based on a out-of-date experience, any new television would probably work as long as it fit in our cabinet.
When customers come to your store with this mindset, you need to work overtime to convince them to buy that fancy, huge, feature-rich, and pricey system you want to sell.
Not all people care about the top-of-the-line version of your product. If you want any chance of upselling the customer, take a step back and explain the basics and benefits of what you are selling and why they’d need it.
Customers will compare the products you sell side by side. If you can’t differentiate between them in words and benefits the customer cares about, they will either walk away with nothing or buy based on price.