10,000 Songs in Your Pocket: Apple’s Billion-Dollar Sales Hack

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Max Clark. This is the problem with tech sales. This is not a new problem. I've been in tech. I've been an IT practitioner for over 25 years. It was a problem when I started. It's still a problem today. It was probably a problem in the '50s. Probably gonna be a problem in 2050. There was a bunch of problems. But the main problem is ultimately tech gets positioned and sold based on features. Speeds and feeds. This box has a 2.9 gigahertz thing. This thing has 27 megabytes of storage thing. This has a network interface thingy. Now, if your job is to evaluate the difference between technical thingies, you care about those specs. You care about that stuff, right? If you wanna take pictures of your children, are you looking at the difference between a 21 megapixel and a 33 megapixel camera? Like what are the difference between those for you? How do you figure that out? Oh, the 33 is bigger, so I must want it. Except that 33 megapixel might have a rolling shutter issue. It might have an issue with capture rates. It could have, when I say issue, maybe the 21 megapixel has a deeper frame buffer can take more photos because it becomes a trade-offs. Bigger is not always better in tech, so that's just a little side hit we're going to. Now, and this gets even more murky because as soon as somebody like Gartner defines a category, everyone that's adjacent to that category tries to shove their product or service into that category to say that we can do this thing because now they know it's gonna be an evaluation line. And you get up into these horrible things like, yeah, we do SD-WAN, yeah, we do SASE, yeah, we do clustering, yeah, we do this, yeah, we do that. And it's like, yeah, yeah, kind of do it. Sure, like technically, you're not lying, but no, you don't really actually do this. And this becomes a big circular problem because we get so focused on the speeds and feeds that we forget the actual reason why people buy this stuff. What are they actually trying to do? These are the day people have to get a job done. What is a job they're trying to do? What is the problem they're trying to solve? What is the objective they're trying to get, like achieve? What is the job that they're trying to do? And can you help them with that job? And based on that need, how do you actually map technology to it? So this is that whole joke to somebody with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, same thing with IT and tech. Everything has a technical solution to it. The question is whether or not that actually should be the case or not, right? Like does tech actually solve the problem or make the problem worse? Like do we need to address this issue differently? And I feel like we need to create some sort of like Hippocratic oath for IT people, being like, you know, I'll do no harm. Like I will not create complications and unnecessary layers of systems and infrastructure for the business unless it's actually required a necessary based on what we're actually trying to achieve and do because by the way, you implement a system, then you make the system redone it, then you have to back the system up and the system has to talk to another system and you end up with this like spiraling weave of rats nest of stuff. So anyways, back to the point here. Point of this is that if you're an IT or tech person and you're talking about the speeds and feeds, figure out how to talk about value and jobs to be done. If you're in tech marketing, again, what does the person on the other side, what are they able to do that they weren't able to do before? What are they trying to do? What do they get? Not they get 21 megapixel or 33 megapixel or 1.21 gigawatt, you know, like they don't care about that, right? Like the best example of this was Apple's campaign 10,000 songs in your pocket, right? Like nobody cared that the device had, they didn't even publish how much storage was in these devices, Apple didn't publish how much storage was in these devices for years, like they 10,000 songs in your pocket. Like that's what you could do with it. You had 10,000 songs in your pocket. Figure out what your version of 10,000 songs in your pocket, and I promise you, you'll be way more successful at positioning your product, your service, identifying, you know, to your customer and your customer understand what you do a lot better, right? 10,000 songs in your pocket, not 512 megabyte. That's actually, it wouldn't have been megabyte. Well, you know, what was the original iPod? It's like 64 gigabyte? No, it wasn't that big. Like they were small, right? So yeah, I don't even know. I don't even remember because that's not how it was positioned. You know, I can figure this out. It was an MP3 back in the day. Probably, you know, 128 kilobytes. So, you know, they were small. But 10,000 songs in your pocket, you remember that. I'm an IT nerd. Just think about that one for a second, right? I'm an IT nerd, but I'm a person. And that's the difference. That's how this stuff works. And that's how you should be thinking about this. And if you can figure out that transition, by the way, if you're talking to feeds and feeds, just figure out how to stop. Like just slap yourself in the face every time that you start talking about a speed and a feed. Unless you're talking to another IT nerd. You wanna call me up? We can have a nerd session. Happy to talk about it. So that way you can like vent and get it off your chest. And you can go talk to other people and it doesn't have to be nerdery, right? You can go talk about the value that they're getting and what they're getting out of it and what your product or service does for them and how it helps them in their life that's not like this other thing. I'd love to hear your example of it. What's a good example of 10,000 songs in your pocket that you've seen for a piece of tech? I'd love to see examples. I'd love to collect more of these things. I think this is going to be a massive unlock for a lot of people trying to figure out how to communicate with non-technical people and actually help their businesses and get what they want. Like everybody wants like improvement and leverage and value, let's help them. Hope this helps. (upbeat music)