How to get your non-techie customers to buy your tech product

Photo credit: Karen Baijens.

What would you do if someone handed you the keys to a Ferrari and told you that the car is yours? Well, I would probably drive it off it as quickly as possible before that person changed their mind, and I bet you would too.

Now, replace your tech-savvy self with someone who lives in a cave and has never even seen a bicycle before, let alone a sports car. I bet that the cave dweller would not even touch the Ferrari or give it a test drive to see if he or she likes it because it just looks so alien to him or her.

The example above may be extreme but my point is this: Even if your product is valuable and offers huge benefits to your target market, it may still be difficult to get your potential customers to try or buy it if they cannot perceive the value of your product.

It feels like pulling a thirsty horse to the water

For the past year, I have been running a property management platform called Pegaxis, which connects old-school property managers to old-school service providers like building contractors, security companies, and electrical workers.

After spending months of grueling product development and market research, the marketplace platform we had envisioned came to fruition. We were confident that it would make the current procurement processes in the property management industry more efficient and transparent. However, it was only the start of a long journey to convey this proposition to our targeted market.

Let’s call our typical user Mr. Tan, a 58-year-old employee of a general contractor company who is eager to get more business. The problem is that Mr. Tan does not know the difference between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer and when he should use left click and right click. I am sure you can imagine how challenging it is for us to teach him to use our platform over the phone.

A lot of my startup’s customers are not tech-savvy. They have been using the same business processes for possibly decades. They range from contractors who take new jobs via telephone, condominium managers who help people book tennis courts by writing their names on a clipboard, to managing directors of multinational companies.

Although it was not surprising that most of them chose to continue on with their conventional practices even though we offered a more efficient solution, my team and I did not realize how difficult it actually was to get them to overcome inertia.

After much reflection, it dawned on us that many people in the older generation do not understand and use technology in the same way that the younger generation does. They grew up in a much simpler electro-mechanical era and have embedded this model of the world in their minds. Basically, they would prefer to be on foot to reach their destination instead of driving a Ferrari, simply because they cannot see the value of a modern method.

Our two-pronged strategy: Bring the water to the horse and collaborate with the farmer

As the one initiating the change, I realized that we must not fault the non-tech-savvy generation for being resistant to change. Instead, we must come up with creative initiatives to help bridge this gap. Just like how the simplicity of the iPhone endears both the young and old, the techie and the non-techie, I believe technology should be enabling and inclusive. And such is the test of a good technological solution.

After months of trial-and-error, we came up with two strategies to help our target market. One was the bottom-up strategy, which focused on simplicity, and the other is the top-down strategy, which focused on collaborating with established companies.

Things to learn

1. Be super user-friendly

Instead of building a whole bunch of functionalities, we disciplined ourselves to develop only one module, i.e. procurement, and made sure it worked well. Because we only had to do a few things, we were able to keep the platform very user-friendly without compromising its functionality.

Bridging the gap