When it comes to buying and selling products, supply and demand are two completely different perspectives.
Selling is supply-side. It’s where you have a product and you want to get rid of it.
Buying, on the other hand, sits on the demand-side. Someone has a problem, they need something to make progress in their lives.
Consider the supply-side through the lens of your product.
Think about your product. How do you sell it? It’s likely that your sales and marketing spend time looking at the features and benefits, figuring out to who you’re going to sell it. It’s likely you treat your customers as a demographic – they form an ideal group in which to buy your product.
You design around this group, hoping to stumble across and find them, and to THEN get them excited about your offering. When it doesn’t quite sit with them you may change it, add a certain feature hoping they respond better to it.
With this approach you never look at how the product will fit in people’s lives and how they will make their lives better. You only see your product and how to make as much money as possible.
The pressure then turns onto sales who’ll push the product.
Customers are fish in the water waiting to take the bait.
But it’s not just the product this extends to.
Sales funnels, marketing processes, customer service requests are all developed rigidly. We as customers have to adhere to these pre-set designed ideas.
Demand-sales sales is on the other side of the coin.
Demand-side tries to help you to understand how people buy things. It’s when your product and sales are designed around the buyer’s needs, through looking at things through their perspective.
We fill a demand issue because there’s a gap in what people want and what people are selling.
If you have seen me talk or read the books my partner, Greg Engle, and I write – you will know the mantra of ‘build it and they will come!’ doesn’t work. That’s because people don’t sit there thinking about your product if it doesn’t address the problem they have.
It’s only when people have a problem that needs solving, they search for a solution which – you guessed it – creates demand.
Case Study: Casper Fills a Need
Take, for instance, the mattress company Casper. Instead of thinking about their product’s features and benefits and asking, “What’s the demand for mattresses?”
Casper asked, “How many people struggle to sleep at night?” They looked at how people experienced insomnia at night, tossing and turning and feeling uncomfortable on their traditional mattresses.
Their ads featured soft bunnies and kittens crawling across their mattresses, tugging at the sheets. “We asked these creatures of comfort what it’s like to sleep on a Casper,” the narrator says. “Some things just don’t need words.” The ad closes with the animals sleeping like angels. What’s not in the ad? Anything about the features and benefits of a Casper.
Casper looked at the relationship between businesses and customers from the customers’ viewpoint (demand-side selling). It understood why people buy mattresses and recognized the anxieties that got in the way. Their product features — better design, simple options, and buying from and delivering to the home — was the icing on the cake.
And it’s working. Casper now has 3.2 percent of the U.S. market share for mattresses — ranking seventh. They’ve sold to over one million customers, with $400 million in sales. The company is valued at $1 billion.
Learn more about understanding the true demand of mattress products with this case study, The Mattress Interview.
At the end of the day it’s not all economics and theory
Supply and demand-side selling is really a simple concept.
It’s all a matter of how you listen to a customer and then try to fit a product or service to to meet their needs.
It’s not about inventory or about price fluctuations or learning graphs. There’s no need to overcomplicate it.
Demand-side selling puts salespeople on a personal, more detailed level and gives them a better chance of making the sell.
Professor Theodore Levitt. said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” That’s listening to a real problem, not selling a product. And that’s the way it should be.