Intangible: “Unable to be touched; not having a physical presence”.
Good luck with selling something that can’t be touched and without a physical presence! We should have opted to work in Procurement because it’s far easier than selling! Intangibles? How can we deliver value from them?
A few years ago I was running a trial to replace a phenolic resin at a moulded fibreboard manufacturer.
I’d already sold them on the cleaner aspects of our product. Their effluent wouldn’t require so much treatment before disposal.
At any production trial I would always make sure to talk with the operators on the plant. I would engage with them and get their names. This made them feel comfortable and (hopefully) make them talk more.
The trial was rolling along quite nicely when one of the operators came up to me and said:
“Your product smells so much better than the stuff we use now.”
Now I know I’ll never win business on the smell of a product (unless I move into perfumes) but I do know a valuable sales intangible when I hear it.
A happy workforce is a productive workforce. If our product smelled better it was a small way of improving the lives of the operators. This would make life easier for their management and thus make them more disposed to our product.
Other intangibles could include the reduction of supervision of the process and inspection of the finished products. You won’t know about them until the process has been running a while.
What intangibles have you managed to extract value from?