Marketing Complex Products

A complex sale takes more time and thought to position

© Brenda Keener

Nov 7, 2006

A complex product requires you, the marketer, to condense the issues into clear and concise statements that make its benefits immediately obvious to the customer.


Many products are simple to create positioning, messaging, and advertising for that illustrate their benefits.

Some products are not so easy, and engineering teams tend to innundate you with reams of data as to how these products are better than the competition. Your job as a marketer is to take all this mumbo-jumbo and condense it down to the few salient points that will make your potential customers listen.

Sounds easy? It is definitely NOT easy - and is why they pay us "the big bucks".

Some tips for doing this are as follows:

1) Meet with your engineering teams and make sure that you understand the product in depth.

2) TALK to your potential customers, and understand their "pain" points intimately.

3) Draft an "elevator pitch" in your mind that allows you to present the key benefits of your product in 2 minutes or less - as if you were in an elevator with a key potential customer and only had until he reached the next floor to convince him to buy.

4) Take this pitch - and use it as the basis for your messaging, so that complex information is condensed into something easily understandable.

Complex products often lead to complex messaging - but what this does is confuse the customer base and lead to no revenue.

No matter how complex the product, there is a way to make it easily understandable to the average "Joe" who may come across your ads. This is very important as the decision makers in most organizations consist of both technical and nontechnical people. If the nontechnical people don't clearly understand your benefits, they are not going to approve the sale.

Another way of doing this is to pretend that you are presenting this information to your 85 year old grandmother. Will she understand terms like "market traction", "network optimization", etc?

Do your best to pull industry "buzzwords" out of your pitch. Yes, I know, most other marketers throw them around like candy, but they tend to categorize you with the rest of the pack.

Your goal is to differentiate your product and company FROM the rest of the pack.

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