Selling a platform - lessons from Lego
In 2012 I was sat in the office of a national utility company.
I worked for a boutique Salesforce consultancy and the client had just bought a pile of Salesforce platform licences and was looking for something to build on them.
I was amazed. They’d invested a lot of money in the tools, but didn’t actually have anything to build.
Back in the office I was being asked whether we were going to get a deal, and I used Lego as a way of describing the challenge.
The customer had bought a pile of lego bricks, but didn’t know what to do with them.
They needed someone to show them what was possible so they could use what they’d purchased.
Lego is the master of this.
They produce plastic bricks.
As a child I used to have boxes of these bricks and no matter how many times I played with them I ended up with the same rectangular ‘house’ as the last time.
I was limited by my own imagination.
But Lego knows that helping customers to see what was possible, and guiding them towards that goal not only helps the customer, but also drives the value of the purchase up.
In our local toy shop you can spend many hundreds of pounds on a raw material that costs probably pence.
In 2022 Lego released the Eiffel Tower - with over 10,000 pieces and costing over £550!
By helping the customer visualise what is possible, they encourage purchases on a scale that couldn’t be imagined if you were just selling the bricks.
Guide your customer
When you sell a platform it can be easy to say “the beauty of our platform is you can build whatever you want.”
But the customer might not know what they want, or what is possible.
You need to guide them:
Cookbooks and recipes - show your customer a step by step guide to building a specific outcome on the platform
Video demos - show the customer what you or other customers have built on the platform
Pre-built - can your customer buy ready-built modules that you have created on the platform?
Hire the team - Lego hire ‘designers’ specifically to imagine and develop ways of using their bricks. Do you have someone who’s job this is?
Lego Designer careers page
Keep Lego in your mind and inspire your customer’s imagination.
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Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue growth.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your RevOps strategy.
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