Buyer Insight: Buyer-First: The Antidote to Product Myopia

0:00Mark Stiving: Buyer first, the antidote to product myopia.

0:12Mark Stiving: Hello, welcome to the Impact Pricing Buyer Insight Series, where we give you quick but powerful tips on how to understand, package, and communicate your value to maximize your profitability. Today, we're going to dive into a blog mark originally published on August 10th. Let's get started. Over the last several weeks, Mark wrote about product myopia, the belief that value lives in the product rather than the future it creates. If you missed that series, the short version is this. Most companies are organized around their product, and that orientation suppresses the willingness to pay they have already earned.

0:50Mark Stiving: This week, we want to introduce the antidote, a way of thinking called buyer first. Ask most companies what they do, and they will describe their product. Features, capabilities, how it works, what it does. That is product-first thinking. The product is the center of the conversation and the buyer is expected to translate what they hear into something that matters to them. Buyer first flips the question. Instead of asking what does our product do, it asks how does our buyer see our product? What problems are they living? What results do they need? What does their world look like after the problem is gone.

1:27Mark Stiving: Same product, completely different conversation. The difference sounds simple, but it is harder to execute than it appears. Most companies have spent years, sometimes decades, building language, marketing, pricing, and sales processes around the product. Shifting to buyer first requires seeing your own product through a completely different lens, the buyer's lens. So what does this look like in practice? Well, Pasha Hawaii is a shipping company. They move containers between the mainland and Hawaii. A product-first description of what they do sounds like this. Container shipping services, refrigerated container shipping, fixed sailing schedules, intermodal services, EDI capabilities.

2:12All accurate. All completely beside the point. Let's look at Pasha Hawaii from a large retailer's point of view. Notice the buyer first starts somewhere else entirely. Large retailers don't buy mainland to Hawaii container shipping. They buy dependable product availability across Hawaii stores. Every service Pasha offers maps to a problem that retailer is living. Unpredictable replenishment rhythms, inventory availability

2:39Mark Stiving: gaps, perishable freight exposure, high manual coordination costs, excess planning buffers, concentrated supply chain risk. The conversation changes, and that conversation is the one that builds a business case, earns a price premium, and closes the gap between the value Pasha delivers and the value their buyers can see and believe. That is buyer-first thinking. It starts with the buyer's world and works back to the product. The product features still matter, but only in support of the desired business outcomes. So why is this so hard? Well, Buyer First requires knowing your buyer's world at a level most companies rarely reach.

3:20Specific problems a specific buyer is living in their own language connected to real consequences that they can quantify. That knowledge comes from conversations with buyers, careful documentation of what they said, and disciplined translation of their problems into the language of results. It is real work, and it requires someone willing to stay with the buyer's problems long enough to understand it at that level of specificity. Mark has been building a custom tool that does exactly this. We give it a product and a buyer and it produces a buyer first view of the relationship, the problem the buyer is living, the results they need and the language that connects your product to their world.

4:01He's operating it on behalf of a small number of companies who wanna see their own product the way their buyers do. Reach out if you're interested. If you have been following the Product Myopia series and recognizing your own company in it, buyer first is where the work begins. Stop describing what your product does. Start describing what your buyers get. Mark's new book, Buyer Disconnect, now available on Amazon, goes deep on exactly this. Need help understanding, communicating, and capturing the value you deliver? Reach out. This is what we love to do. Now, go make an impact.