Stewart Butterfield, founder and CEO of Slack, recently said, "No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so."
When we started Dockwa two years ago, the collective voice of the boating industry screamed, "This will never work!" And they were right.
What we'd been selling was Dockwa the software product, all of its features in their specific implementation. As Stewart had intimated, people buy software to address a need they already know they have or perform some specific task. If a customer is unaware they have a problem, your pitch will fall on deaf ears. Simply put, by selling the product – a "small" innovation – we were selling ourselves short.
As our understanding of our impact evolved, we realized what we are selling is much more than software. We do not sell reservation-management tools: We provide a reduction in the cost of communication, stress relief for staff and customers, and the ability to extract enormous value from previously useless binders of paper.
We sell better organizations and better experiences for their respective guests. The software just happens to be the tool our customers use to deliver these promises.
Viewing our product and efforts through this lens has had a positive and lasting effect on both our team, as well as our customers. It has enabled us to refine our product roadmap and redefine our market. For a truly transformative shift in human behavior: sell the innovation, not the product. •