Kundennutzen Archive - Page 6 of 22 - The Art of Communicating

The truth about cars

There was a time when cars didn’t have seat belts.

There was even a time when car makers hesitated to equip their cars with seat belts although they could. They feared bad publicity. After all, it would mean admitting that the cars were unsafe. Which could scare customers and keep them from buying.

So, they decided to not tell the whole story but rather hide the fact that cars do, as a matter of fact, crash sometimes … and hope that no-one notices it.

Today, we have way safer cars because people who cared surfaced the whole story. Obviously, the best way to deal with the truth was not to hide the problem but to face it, deal with it, and improve the product.

A good question to ask is this: If your customers knew what you know, would they buy?

Many companies don’t trust that their customers really would. And so, they bend the truth and maybe hide parts of it.

But some companies use this question as a motivation to improve the product. Not only will these companies end up with superior products, marketing will also be way easier.

All they need to do is tell a true story. Ultimately, it leads to customers who can – and do – trust you.

How is clarity to be achieved?

“And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.” — F. L. Lucas

Wow effects are easy to achieve. When in doubt, throw money at the problem. Samsung, for example, has put entire orchestras on stage during their keynotes.

Wow effects rarely increase clarity, though. Also, you don’t even need clarity to achieve a wow effect.

Aha moments are different. You can’t buy an aha effect.

The aha effect requires effort. It requires you to do the work and think things through. You’ll have to see your audience to understand where they’re coming from and what matters to them. You’ll have to understand their language so that you can find the words that lead everyone in your audience to see what you see.

Aha effects require clarity. Clarity requires effort.

But it’s worth the effort. Because while wow effects usually fade quickly, aha effects often last.

The best way to think about wow effects is as a door opener to your audience’s connection. But once you’re in, lead them all the way to an aha moment.

Making people fall in love with what you make

Marketing is widely considered to be the art of making people fall in love with what you make.

But what if you turned this around to make the things people will love. Let’s say: not build a course and make people love it but build a course that people love?

Or in a way that people love. Let’s say not build an app and educate people to love it but build it from the start in a way that people love to use?

This shift in perspective has a profound impact on the decisions you make during development. It has an even bigger impact on how you market your product. Because you can stop to decorate your product with fancy sounding slogans. You can just speak plain English and tell a true story.

What are you building?

“Buy now”

When you ask your customer to “buy now”, what are you actually asking for?

Money?
Commitment?
The beginning of a relationship?
A favor?
Gratitude?
Excitement?
“I don’t ask! Either they buy or not!”?
Trust?
…

It’s a good exercise to get clarity about it and clearly state it. Then listen to your gut. Then look at your offer again.

What do you feel? What do you see?

Shining eyes

Shining eyes are among the most reliable compasses for doing work that matters.

Benjamin Zander pointed it out in his brilliant TED talk:

“I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. How do you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it.”

What does consistently make your customers’ eyes shine?
What makes your team’s eyes shine?

Persuading people

The moment you try to persuade your customer you essentially admit that …

i) either you don’t fully understand what really matters to them or
ii) you don’t trust your product to deliver on what matters to your customer.

(Or both, obviously.)

If you fully understand your customers’ needs and desires and if you also trust in your product to deliver on that, then you won’t need to persuade. You only need to make them see by telling a true story about your product.

Because once they see it, it becomes totally obvious: This is the product that serves my needs. They’d be fools not to buy it, right?

That’s why it’s so much easier to start with that story in mind and build your product so it delivers on that story – rather than the other way around.

When you first build the product and then go looking for a story, you might end up discovering that it’s, well, not that great a fit after all. Hence, the need for persuasion techniques.

But when you do it the other way around, then all it takes is to speak with clarity.

What customers want

Are you giving your customers what they want or what they need?

Many of the people who care for making an impact and who have turned their passion into their job, maybe even built a company out of it, would say it’s the latter. Their customers might not see it at first but it’s definitely what the customers should be doing.

For example, a client might call a marketing agency because they want more customers but what they really need are better customers.

Now, any marketing agency that fails to address what the customer wants, will never be called by the client in the first place.

There are basically two things you can do about it:

Teach the market what it needs, in other words: that they want something different so that they might consider you.
Figure out what the customer actually wants and put it in their words.

For example, the client from above says they want new customers but what they actually want is more business. Address that and they might call you – which gives you the opportunity to sell them what they need.

So, what do your customers actually want? And how does that relate to (what you think) they need?

Gentle nudges

My daughter wanted to take a workshop. I called the organizer to register her. I was told that my daughter’s on the list although … well, the workshop might be cancelled because there were not enough registrations. End of story.

Crucially, what’s missing from the story is one simple suggestion the organizer could have made but didn’t: “The workshop is actually even more fun with friends. Does your daughter have a friend who would fancy joining her?” (She could even have made that more attractive by offering a discount if she registers with a friend.)

Of course, it’s obvious. Why would you need to state the obvious? Because what’s obvious to you isn’t obvious to others. Because what’s obvious isn’t necessarily easy. Because sometimes we need that little nudge to actually do the obvious.

Not that this kind of nudging always works. But it’s almost always better to ask than not to ask. After all, my daughter wanted to take the workshop. So, it’s in her best interest to bring a friend.

Which obvious actions could you suggest to your customers to nudge them in their best interest?

Rule no. 1

Rule no. 1 in communication is brutal:
If they didn’t get, they didn’t get it. End of story.

There really is no point in arguing that you meant it slightly differently and if only they had listened more carefully, they would have easily seen that.

They didn’t.

It’s not their fault.

Clarity is our responsibility. Not their’s.

Which means that clarity is an invaluable ingredient for almost all aspects of business and life. It’s essential if you want to make an impact.

Brilliance booster

When you hire a coach, it’s most likely because you want to improve your situation in some way. But there’s a huge gap between how bad coaches and good coaches try to achieve that.

Bad coaches try to make you feel less miserable.
Great coaches try to make you feel more brilliant.

Which means that both sit on opposite sides of a spectrum … it’s not that bad coaches are like great ones, just not as good. They are different.

Great coaches work from the assumption that you are brilliant and that you have both, the skill and the will, to achieve even more brilliant things.

Bad coaches work from the assumption that you are miserable and don’t really know what you’re doing. Thank goodness you called them so they can save you from that misery. This kind of coach often has way more answers than questions and they tell you what to do and what not to do. Because they know while you don’t. It’s an off-balance relationship where the coach thinks they are more brilliant than you.

Great coaches have a different approach. They establish a balanced relationship in which they are brilliant at what they do while you are brilliant at what you do. They usually have more questions than answers and help you find a way that allows you to grow from where you’re at. They don’t tell you what to do. They’ll figure it out with you. They use their brilliance to boost your brilliance.

(PS: If you want to learn more about how I approach coaching, just schedule a free discovery call.)

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