Sales Tip 666: Product Limits and Workarounds – Anthony Coundouris

“Limits improve a customer’s expectation of what a product or service does and doesn’t do.” – Anthony Coundouris in today’s Tip 666

Do you naming limits?

Join the conversation below and check out the links!

4Qs Framework
run_frictionless Website
run_frictionless: How to free a founder from a sales
Anthony Coundouris on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Anthony Coundouris. Anthony has a decade of experience consulting with technology and SAAS startups. He specializes in designing automated sales and marketing systems and is the author of the book run_frictionless. Here he is:

Anthony Coundouris: Thanks, Scott, for having me on the show. In today’s Daily Sales Tip, I’d like to teach why it is beneficial to name limits.

If you guessed I’m an Australian, you guessed right. Fun fact about Australians. 80% of us live on the east coast with the remaining 10% on the west coast. I’m an east coast fella.

Here’s the definition of naming limits

When you are creating a sales process, a customer learns as much from the list of functions as they do from the list of limits. Limits improve a customer’s expectation of what a product or service does and doesn’t do. The boundaries of expectations are defined by both.

Here’s why you want to start naming limits

Have you ever visited a restaurant, been seated, had your order taken, dined on some tasty food, and then been told your credit card is not accepted when trying to pay the bill? If you had this experience, it is likely the restaurant didn’t make limits known in the early game.

When salespeople disguise a limit in the early game and reveal the limit in the endgame, they destroy any trust built with the customer. Think of the early, middle, and endgame as three stages of your sales process.

I consult to many SaaS companies serving business customers. A common problem they have is when a customer buys their software, the customer experiences a long on-boarding process.

Let’s address this friction-point by telling the customer automated onboarding is not available today. However, you have three work-arounds.

Work-around one. Use Excel to perform a few tasks manually. While your application can shoulder the majority of the workload, a this-party desktop application handles 5% of operations.

Work-around two. Sign up to a partner application via an API. Rather than your organization shouldering the burden of every feature request, you draw on third party applications with a cloud-ecosystem. <

Work-around three. You offer to handle onboarding manually for your customer, free. You free the customer of the friction by setting up an offshore team who handle repetitive, manually-intensive tasks.

In all three examples we name limits and work-arounds. Every organization has product limits. Even Google with a market cap of US$1BN name product limits. The difference is whether you choose to name limits in the early game or bury them.

Let’s sum up

If you followed my advice and named limits in the early game, you made a good call. Here’s why.