Product and service plans mistakes in describing the offer

A product and service section reads as a set of promises: what the product does, what the price covers and why a reader should believe either. The reader holds you to each one. The faults below are places where the wording says more than the evidence behind it, and each repair attaches what is missing.

What to take away

Features are not evidence. A demonstration, an order or a quote is.
A claim with nothing behind it becomes an assumption with a test named.
Proof is owed for what a reader infers, not only for what you state.
Say what is excluded and what the customer supplies, in a short list per line.

Features stand where proof belongs

Pages of what the product does, with nothing behind them, hand the reader a brochure. Features describe; they do not prove. Replace the pages with one table and keep the prose to what a non-specialist needs in order to understand what is bought.

Brochure vs Margin Table

What the plan has

Content: Pages of features
Unit: Not stated
Price: Absent
Direct cost: Absent
Contribution: Uncomputable
Frequency: Absent

What the reader needs

Content: One row per line
Unit: Named unit
Price: Stated price
Direct cost: Stated cost
Contribution: Computed
Frequency: Purchase frequency

The table has a row per line: unit, price, direct cost, contribution, purchase frequency. It is where the claims below get their numbers, so the prose can say what is bought without repeating them.

Mark the evidence beside each claim

"Customers want this." "It is faster." "It works." Each is a claim of a different type and each needs a different kind of support. A section that states them all in the same voice invites a reader to discount all of them.

Claim	Evidence that backs it	Without it
Customers want this	An order or deposit	An assumption, with a test named
It is faster	A measured throughput	An assumption, to be measured
It is protected	A registration number	A claim, labeled as one
Our supplier can deliver	A supplier quote with a date	An assumption, with a date to confirm
It works	A demonstration	A claim, labeled as one

The evidence for "customers want this" comes from the work in the market analysis. A measured throughput comes from counting a real week, as operations plans mistakes explains.

Prove what the reader infers

Readers draw conclusions you did not write, and an implied result needs the same support as a stated one. The FTC's advertising guide says that advertisers must have proof to back up express and implied claims that consumers take from an ad.

Where the same words appear in your advertising, the federal rules on substantiating a claim apply to them there as well. The FTC's policy statement requires advertisers and ad agencies to have a reasonable basis for advertising claims before they are disseminated. Sales and marketing plans mistakes covers the same ground from the selling side.

Rewrite one claim in three parts

Take the claim you most want believed and write it in three parts: the claim, the kind of evidence, and where a reader can find it. A claim that cannot complete all three is an assumption, and the section should say so.

Write the evidence into the sentence itself, with its date, so a reader does not have to hunt for it. A registration number, a quote date or a deposit date can be checked, and a checkable claim is worth more than a confident one.

Describe the offer for a non-specialist

Write for a competent reader who does not know your trade. The description should make clear what is sold and why it is hard to copy, and nothing more. A lender is assumed to have no technical background at all.

Specifications go in the appendix, where the reader who wants them can find them. Keep the section itself to plain statements of what the customer gets. If a sentence needs a glossary, rewrite it. The people who deliver the offer get the same plain treatment in the team section.

Say what is excluded

Nothing says what is not included, what the customer has to provide, or what falls outside the price. This produces arguments with customers and questions from readers who have had those arguments themselves.

Includedwhat the price covers.
Excludedwhat falls outside the price.
Supplied by the customerwhat they must bring before work starts.

Write that short list per line. It is the cheapest paragraph in the section and the one operators respect most. Where an exclusion depends on delivery capacity, check it against the operations plan.

Label what is still untested

Some parts of an offer are not settled, and the section is stronger for saying which. Give the range being tested and the floor below which the model fails, with the date you will decide. A single confident figure with nothing behind it is a guess.

The same applies to anything described as coming. Write it as an assumption and name the test, so the reader sees which statements are tested and which are hoped for. The wider faults that stall a plan are in plan fundamentals mistakes.

The stranger test

Hand the section to somebody who has not seen the business and ask them to list what you are promising and to tell you what one sale earns you. If they cannot, the fault is in this section, whatever the prose is like.

Common questions

Is it a mistake to leave the price out until we have tested it?

No, provided you give the range being tested and the floor below which the model fails, with the date you will decide.

How technical should the description be?

Enough for a competent non-specialist to understand what is sold and why it is hard to copy. Specifications go in the appendix, and a lender is assumed to have no technical background at all.

Should I include what customers complain about?

For an established line, yes, briefly, with what you did. It reads as an operator who watches their own business, and it costs a sentence.

We sell dozens of items. How much of this applies?

All of it, at the level of product families that share a cost structure. Then treat the two or three items carrying most of the revenue individually.