How Product Options Affect Your Selling Efforts

Options are product accessories. They are the features offered to customers in the format of: "Would you be interested in ... ?" If you need to ask your customers about options, it might indicate that many purchasing requirements remain unknown to you. If you fully understood their goals, you would not have to ask customers if this option or that one interests them. You would already know. You especially do not want to guess whether your unique strength makes sense for customers.

Of course, options benefit you when they are merely a matter of a customer's personal preferences, such as whether to order the telephone's leather case in brown or black.

Note

If you are not careful, a major pitfall with options lurks ahead. You might end up with the syndrome of "one from Column A, two from Column B." You spend all your time explaining to customers why one feature or product from "Column A" costs this much while two from "Column B" cost this much. Your product's value becomes how individual features stack up against each other or those of competitors. How your features achieve customers' goals gets lost in the shuffle. You can even end up competing with yourself, never a good situation.