Negative side-effects happen where there is a cost, constraint or difficulty associated with your offer. The thing to remember is negative side-effects are unavoidable but they can be turned to your advantage.
The key to managing negative side-effects is to expect them and so prepare your clients for them. The question on the Circuit Questionnaire at 3.18 suggests you could use a statement like this:
Now you can get {benefit} without {traditionally associated cost}!
The first thing to note is this is a cost associated with a benefit. What you’re saying is your offer addresses this traditional associated cost.
So, let’s say you are a website designer. You could claim a variety of costs would be eliminated:
- A Done-With-You (DWY) offer might cut some of the high costs of a website developed from scratch.
- A Done-For-You (DFY) offer might cut some of the time associated with developing a website yourself.
Use the Value Triangle!
One point to note: you can save time by paying more money or you can save money by spending more time. You are unlikely to come up with an offer that saves both time and money. Indeed, I discussed this very issue in my post about the Value Triangle.
Consider Your Prices
If you’re offering to save your customer time, this means you are using your time. So, you charge more because you have limited time too! However, you are:
- likely to take less time than your customer would because you do this all the time, know the short-cuts, etc.
- less likely to make mistakes
- able to add features to the site your customers are likely to miss if they do it themselves
You should charge for the time you save for your customer and not the time it takes you to complete the job. After all you can do the job quicker because of the time you’ve spent over years learning your trade!
Similarly, the DWY approach has its own advantages. The customer will understand their site, how it works, etc. They will establish a routine that helps them keep their site up-to-date.
Help Your Customer Decide
The point is the customer must decide which of the available options to choose. The important thing is they make an informed decision and understand its implications.
If you have several offers, you should be able to suggest a couple of viable options. Alternatively, you can sometimes make referrals to providers who can make a better offer.
So, you can say your offer is time-saving and reasonably priced but make the price comparison with other time-saving offers. A DWY offer is not time-saving per se and so don’t compare it with the price of a DFY offer.
Use the Value Triangle to find out what is important to your customer. A conversation around how the three factors interact will equip them with a model they can use with any provider. If they are going to pay more, they can reasonably expect higher quality and faster delivery. Pay less and expect to sacrifice either quality or speed.
Be aware of other advantages. A DWY approach sacrifices speed but not quality and it has other advantages, as a learning opportunity for the customer. A high-speed, low quality fix may be what you need under some circumstances, eg where you are testing a market and a rough and ready site is all you need for the present.
OK, that brings us to the end of “Proposition”, the third element in the Circuit Questionnaire. I will pick up with the fourth element, “Problem” in a few weeks’ time.