Specify to Sell!

Regardless of your product or service, chances are your market is becoming more competitive per the hour. Of course, adding value and selling on such perceived benefit is more important than ever and an effective way to add this value is by specifying your product or service within an industry or with strategic customers.

A specification is an explicit set of requirements or characteristics to be satisfied by your product or service and it will depend on the end user's needs. The main reason for the creation of the specification is to ensure that the product solves a certain necessity with a predefine level of quality. This creates a natural filter preventing products with the wrong set of characteristics to compete in the application, so the specification effectively becomes a tool to sell.

Specifying is highly relevant when creating your market and sales strategies. To do it properly you will have to understand your customer needs and their target audience. This will determine if your product will have to comply with basic norms and regulations. Those normally include legal requirements and other simple characteristics common in the market. However, the main reason for this evaluation is to identify gaps between current offering and the market's needs.

You will need to analyze your own product or service to recognize your value proposition, which is any key feature in your offering that makes it special or different. If possible, make those exclusive features match the gaps found in your market analysis. Even if that is not achievable, you will now be able to sell the value proposition of your product explaining how this will create unique benefits and enhance the user's experience.

The ultimate goal is that the customer creates a standard that your product or service can match perfectly, or even better, exclusively. Therefore, offer your help in the creation of the standard. Remember that nobody knows your product as well as you do (at least that's the way it should be) and that you can propose very precise information that your customer might not be able to gather otherwise.

The specification is often a series of documents and it may be created on the base of exact characteristics of the product. Be sure that those include your value proposition. In some cases, the most effective specifications will include particular brand name(s), models and even distinctive characteristics such as the country of origin. Don't miss to evaluate each one of those parameters in your own offering.

Lastly, express your interest in adding your product to existing applications, be open to discuss details of your product and offer samples or trials as necessary. This investment will payback greatly with business in the long term, so remain open to assist in the process.

Due to the complexity of some markets and products it is best if the person devoted to the specification activity has experience in consultative and long-cycle sales. Specifying is not about immediately closing sales but rather preparing the road for business relationships and on-going sales in the long term.