Dec
14
Written by:
John Clark
12/14/2008 2:25 PM
Harry Beckwith relates insightful keys to business relationships in his book, "The Invisible Touch". One of them is the need to constantly remind ourselves about what the customer really thinks is important. To illustrate it he recalls to mind the movie The Fugitive when Harrison Ford shouted his insistence the he did not kill his wife. Standing in that water drain ready to leap out into the dam he got Tommy Lee Jones' true feelings on the subject, "I don't care!"
When it comes to your business, here is a brief list of eight things your new prospects probably don't care about:
- How special you think you are. This is earned by their experience with you and only they are allowed to think it. Your self claims are always discounted.
- They don't care that you have a self inflated judgment of yourself, enough to claim to be #1 at whatever it is you do. Idle, unverified claims are discounted out of hand.
- They don't care about your number of years in business or the anniversary of when you started in business. When you claim "125 Years of Tradition" they are probably appending that with, "yea, and Unmarred by Progress". People don't care to work with companies that appear to be meeting customers' needs during the Grant administration. Remember the Chicago Cubs - an unblemished tradition of nearly 100 years without a World Series appearance and probably worse because of the failure.
- They don't care about your "Mission Statement" or your various statements about your commitment to your mission. Think about it, do you care about mine? Statements are good. Just keep them to yourself and don't bother to create a special page stating it. If truth in advertising was practiced, the menu item for this would be labeled "YAWN".
- They don't care about your "Commitment to Excellence". This is "blah, blah, blah."
- They don't care about your president's message to shareholders, at least not without nausea pills.
- Don't communicate for the sake of communication. Customers can easily hit the unsubscribe button and they find it easier when you bore them with "yada yada".
- Don't tell them something about your company because some other clueless company made similar proclamations. Heck, they probably copied it from some other clueless company who had extra in their advertising budget to spend but nothing really to say.
In simple words, tell them something they really care about. Tell them about "them". Once they know you care about them first then, ever so slowly, they will start to care more than 2 cents about you.
Here is a simple test for you to conduct on your website, brochures or other communications. Search and count how many times you say I, we, us, our, ours. Then count the times you say you, yours. If you and yours doesn't outnumber all the others by 3 to 1 then you have missed a key point of the true interest each visitor to your site or business has. That is lost sales. Each lost sale is a lost opportunity for the life cycle of that customer.
Stop being unmarred by progress for 20 years or whatever. Give them what they want and you will end up getting what you want on the way.
John Clark