Selling the Solution And Not the Technology

‍It’s all a matter of balance.‍

For tech businesses, it’s often hard to separate the technology from the problem being solved.

Most common to our clients, this results in the sales narrative becoming too narrow to be scalable or too broad to be relatable. It’s all a matter of balance.

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The problem being solved.‍

At one end of the scale you’re solving a specific task for your end customer. At the other end - at the extreme - you’re probably keeping someone’s shareholders happy (unless you’re a charity or ngo, but that’s for another post).
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So getting this balance right and articulating the problem being solved is essential

What happens if your sales narrative gets this wrong?

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• You’ll either fail to connect to your customers’ needs, or fail to scale
• Everything from brand design to tone and language could be too broad or not specific enough
• It could be the difference between product development and feature creep

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Where does your ‘problem being solved’ sit along this continuum?

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Chatt‍

This was the exact dilemma faced by Chatt.

Chatt’s product development focus was ‘building smart chatbots that could be built without technical knowhow’. Their chatbots would allow simple integration into existing customer service tools.

Following our workshops (you can read about our approach here), it was clear they were framing the problem being solved too closely to the technology. It meant they weren’t able to differentiate and land their sales message. We needed to go broader without diluting the sales message.

It soon became clear the problem being solved - the objective - was not to ‘simplify chatbots for scaling businesses’. It became ‘free up the time spent on customer service for scaling businesses’.

And the strategy became this:

“Give businesses more time to focus on the customer service enquiries that need hands-on support”.

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A narrative reset

‍Well how did this change things?

Product Development:

At a fundamental product level, it became clear the product could work on any customer service channel with limited additional dev/resources. The tech now works with customer service channels including email, text and Alexa, as well as messenger channels such Facebook, whatsapp and Twitter DMs.

Identity:

Chattbot was then rebranded Chatt to account for the broader objective & strategy. It gave Chatt both increased freedom and increased focus when designing the new brand. We love the new brand our team came up with.

Narrative:

It allowed us to build a much more scalable story. It still allowed us to solve the chatbot problem with pinpoint accuracy, however it also widened Chatt’s target audience.

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If you'd like to see how Gardn can support you and your business, please get in touch!

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