Selling to Customers

B2C, B2B, C2C

Products, Services, Intangibles,
& Projects

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 B2C
Business to Consumer
e.g. Amazon, Flipkart selling to retail consumers
Star Bazaar, Big Bazaar, Dmart selling to retail
consumers

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 B2B
Business to Business
e.g. Essar Steel online market platform selling
steel, cement, industrial paints and industrial
Tools, metaljunction.com

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 C2C
Consumer to Consumer
ebay.com online marketplace where consumers
can auction or sell goods directly to other
consumers

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Distinguishing between companies according to
whether they market services or goods has only
limited utility.
A more useful way to make the same distinction
is to change the words we use.
Instead of speaking of services and goods, we
should speak of intangibles and tangibles.

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Everybody sells intangibles in the marketplace,
no matter what is produced in the factory.
Intangible products—travel, freight forwarding,
insurance, repair, consulting, computer
software, investment banking, brokerage,
education, health care, accounting—can seldom
be tried out, inspected, or tested in advance.
Prospective buyers are generally forced to
depend on surrogates to assess what they’re
likely to get.
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Prospective buyers can look at gloriously glossy
pictures of elegant rooms in distant resort hotels
set exotically by the shimmering sea.

They can consult current users to see how well a

software program performs and how well the
investment banker or the oil well drilling
contractor performs.

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Or they can ask experienced customers
regarding engineering firms, lobbyists,
professors, surgeons, hair stylists, consultants,
repair shops, industrial maintenance firms,
shippers, franchisers, general contractors,
funeral directors, caterers, environmental
management firms, construction companies,
and on and on.

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Tangible products differ in that they can usually,
or to some degree, be directly experienced—
seen, touched, smelled, or tasted, as well as
tested.
Often this can be done in advance of buying. You
can test-drive a car, smell the perfume, work the
numerical controls of a milling machine, inspect
the seller’s steam-generating installation,
pretest an extruding machine.

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Though a customer may buy a product whose
generic tangibility (like the computer or the
steam plant) is as palpable as primeval rock—
and though that customer may have agreed
after great study and extensive negotiation to a
cost that runs into millions of dollars—the
process of getting it built on time, installed, and
then running smoothly involves an awful lot
more than the generic tangible product itself.

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To make buyers more comfortable and confident
about tangibles that can’t be pretested,
companies go beyond the literal promises of
specifications, advertisements, and labels to
provide reassurance.
Packaging is one common tool. Pickles get put
into reassuring see-through glass jars, cookies
into cellophane-windowed boxes, canned goods
get strong appetite-appealing pictures on the
labels
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Hence, it’s sensible to say that all products are in
some important respects intangible

No matter how diligently designed in advance

and carefully constructed, they’ll fail or
disappoint if installed or used incorrectly. The
significance of all this for marketing can be
profound.

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 Importance of Impressions
People use appearances to make judgments about
realities. Whether the products are high priced or low
priced, whether they are technically complex or simple,
whether the buyers are supremely sophisticated in the
technology of what’s being considered or just plain
ignorant, or whether they buy for themselves or for their
employers.
Everybody always depends to some extent on both
appearances and external impressions.

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 Making Tangible the Intangible
It bears repeating that all products have
elements of tangibility and intangibility.
Companies that sell tangible products invariably
promise more than the tangible products
themselves.
Enormous efforts often focus on the enhancement
of the intangibles—promises of bountiful benefits
conferred rather than on features offered.
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To the buyer of photographic film, The product
is thus remembrance, not film or pictures.

The promoted products of the automobile, as

everyone knows, are largely status, comfort, and
power—intangible things of the mind, rather
than tangible things from the factory

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If tangible products must be intangibilized to
add customer-getting appeal, then intangible
products must be tangibilized
Everybody requires the risk-reducing
reassurances of tangibilized intangibles.

Hotels put on the toilet seat a “sanitized” paper

band, and neatly shape the end piece of the
toilet tissue into a fresh-looking arrowhead.

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All these actions say with silent affirmative
clarity that “the room has been specially
cleaned for your use and comfort”—yet no
words are spoken to say it.
Ideally, this should be done as a matter of
routine on a systematic basis—that is,
industrialized.

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A customer is an asset usually more precious
than the tangible assets on the balance sheet.

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 Projects
The concept of selling the project and having
people “buy” it are most obvious when you do a
project for a client.
But it is also necessary when the “buyer” is your
boss or a user department.

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In selling projects, you need to present your
projects so the boss, user or client “buys” the
value of the project’s business result. 
The business result has value when it relieves a
performance pressure that your decision-maker
feels.
What are performance pressures?
- Deliverables

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The problem is that most of the time decision
makers tell us what to do; not what
performance pressure they want to resolve.

And, whether or not they have told us about

their performance pressures, they will judge the
project’s success based on whether it relieves
those performance pressures.

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Why many clients / users / bosses don’t share
this performance pressure information? 

First, sometimes it reflects badly on them and

there are many who won’t talk about their
problems or pressures. 

Second, they may not know what upper-level

performance pressures rolled down-hill to
them. 
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Identify the decision-makers who have a stake in
the project. 
You need to quantify the performance pressures
they want the project to relieve.
As projects get larger, your “map” of decision
makers and performance pressures can become
complex. 
But keeping this mapping updated is a great tool
for account management and positioning.

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e.g. you get a project assignment to change a
billing system report by adding several data
elements and altering others. 
The CFO wanting to identify the biggest
Customers, 
The marketing director complained about how
hard it was to track the sales that resulted from
special promotions to these big customers

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When you convert these performance pressures
into measured achievements you have value to
sell these decision makers.
That leads to higher odds of project success.

Rather than work in the Order Taker mode a

Project Manager who understands the business
purpose can do a better job.

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Thank You!

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