Selling to those who don’t yet know they need it
When trying to sell something that someone doesn’t know they need, explain to them specifically some functionality that they will gain. It has to be a functionality that is useful, different, and that most of the audience will get excited about. Don’t only explain what the product is or does – example a use-case or scenario where it would be useful, in addition to explaining in detail what the doodad is.
I thought this up when seeing a Growl pop-up notifying me to upgrade. It said:
Yes its free, yes its available, but why do I need it? The current version suites me quite well and works quite well. Maybe it added a cool new feature that allows you to variably set how long popups stay showing, dependent on the content in the popup. You could use this to tell popups containing your “name” to stay up for forever, and all other popups to disappear after 5 seconds. I would then rush to download the new version.
