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When you’re pitching your product or service to a customer, are you making the mistake of only talking about yourself? What customers want to hear is how you can help them. Let’s talk about this mistake of not speaking from the customer's viewpoint.
What do customers want to hear?
Imagine that you have met a founder of a company and you've asked her what she does. She said, "I'm a computer engineer and I've graduated from a premier institute and I have created a software using X technology."
Does this tell you anything about her product? Does this even interest you to take this conversation further? Highly unlikely, unless she was a very good friend of yours. This is because the founder is only telling you about herself, about the product and its features. She's not actually telling you what it means for you.
Instead, if she had said, "I create an app that helps improve mental health of individuals." Isn't this a more interesting description of what she does? You as a customer don't really care where she came from and what technology she used and what technology she used to solve the problem. All you care about is that she's solving a problem that is important to you.
In the same way, if all that your business is doing is telling people about the product that you have, its features, the kind of technology it has been built on, the operational aspect behind it and the profile of the people who made it or who are working with the business, then you’re making the same mistake. If this is all that you're telling the customer, then they are not able to understand and make the decision whether your product is beneficial to them or not. If they are not able to understand that, how will they want to do business with you? They won't be able to decide whether you can actually help them solve a particular problem.
Remember this, that when a customer looks at a business, all they want to know is how the business can help them. If that is not obvious to them in the first few minutes of the interaction with the business, then they're not going to be interested any further and they're going to move on to the next business who explains this more clearly to them.
Having said that, of course, the credentials and the quality of the product or the service that you offer is important to the customer, but that can come later. That can be the next thing that they look at. Once they've decided that, then you are the business who can solve their problem.
Changing your narrative
With this knowledge, now look at your marketing collateral. This could be your website, your social media profile, your brochures etc. that you normally use to tell people about the business. Is it only talking about you or is it talking about the customer? Are you using words like 'we' and 'I' or are you using words like 'you' and 'your'. Once you flip the narrative to include 'you' and 'your', your marketing will be much more effective and you will be able to understand the right kind of customer.
It's also a good idea to have a single line problem statement that tells people what you can do. As an example, my single line problem statement is - I help entrepreneurs ace their marketing in a logical and result oriented manner. Now, this tells you a few things. One is that I help entrepreneurs with their marketing and the second thing that it tells you is that I have a logical approach towards marketing. The third thing is I'm always tracking the marketing so that I achieve the results that you want to achieve for your business.
In the same way, you can also write down a single line statement that helps to define what you can do for a customer. That way they don't have to read a lot of information to really understand how it benefits them to do business with you.
Think about your single line problem statement today and write out your marketing pitches with your customer in mind. Tell the customers what they want to hear and see the difference in how quickly they make the decision to do business with you. I'll come back with the last mistake in the next week. See you then!
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