Over past years, I found many innovative startup founders fall into trap when introducing new-to-market products — We talk a lot about the awesome product features when potential customers ask us what we do, while seldom we realize what customers care is only about “What do you do to solve my problem?”

This article is not about sales tips to let you get more deals, it is also not about how to refine a better product features to attract your customers, they contribute very little to your success of business if you are not having a clear value proposition — What value or solution you are providing to customers that solve their problem.

Here, we have 5 tips to allow easy understanding by customers about your new-to-market product’s value proposition, provided with the case study of my currently found startup MovingPass:

1. Step Into Customers Shoes

According to Sales Guru Jeffrey Gitomer’s book, The Little Red Book of Selling, “Why do people buy?” is a thousand times more important than “How do I sell?”, customers buy because they feel there is a fit of their needs and your product or service.

For business owners, solution needs come from a problem or inefficiency of current process that they would like to improve. MovingPass sees the problem in couponing — Everyone love discount of products, and coupons serve as a medium to convey the messages. However conventional paper-form coupons are not very likely delivering the value — Coupons kept in customers’ wallet are usually being forgotten. Also the inconvenience of cutting coupons out from an advertisement page arouse hesitation to keep them. These lead to low effectiveness of coupon marketing campaign (low coupon redemption rate).

2. Solution and Result

People want to know what result they would expect from your product or service addressing their pain. It is best if your product has successful problem-solving case studies, but more important is how best you understand your customers, and the way you convince the result to be truly promising to your customer.

MovingPass want to solve coupon problem so that it is more likely for customers to keep and use coupons. The result our customers would expect is having a more effective coupon marketing campaign and lead to —

More Traffic, Better Sales!

3. “Sounds magical, so how you achieve this?”

When people ask you such a question, we congratulate you that they are interested to know more about what you provide. But waittt! Do not misunderstand that they want to know about your product features (unless it is their second hand experience and seeking for better/ additional features), what they are curious to know is the customer experience — People perceive value based on their own experience and feeling.

For MovingPass, we help brands/ retailers to drive more in-store traffic by providing coupons in mobile devices version. It is convenient to be kept in our smartphones (paper free!), stimulate location/gps -based offers when we are nearby stores and remind us to use coupons before expiry.

4. Be a Tailor — Easy to Get Customers Involved

At the moment people feedback that they would like to use your product, never hesitate them to get involved hardly. There is a true hard fact that people are not very much interested to learn using your product before it is famous — Master the tactic to be a caring tailor will advance your product adoptions in early stage.

The more instant you can get customers involved, the faster people will see result, and the earlier you will get feedback from the experience. Never attempt to leave customers without first time assistant unless you are not hurry to see success of your services/ products.

MovingPass assists every customers from coupons designing, distribution to campaign analytics. We never ask them to use our pass design web platform although it is super simple to make their own mobile coupon in 3 steps. Customers expect to see result right away after a period that they paid for our product and services, hassle free!

5. Value Greater than Cost

Convince your customers value over pricing. I saw many innovative startups fail to enchant customers not because of their products but they try too hard to convince customers with a low pricing/ low entrance barrier, instead they seldom express a higher value customers would get from products over spending.

Always knowing that spending dollar is like investment, and investment is a matter of valuation.