How many time have you looked at the front page of a company web site and read something almost exactly like this:
The market leader in providing innovative solutions that transform businesses. Serving more than 67% of the fortune 500.
Drives me nuts.
Too often the starting point for customer communications start with the question, “What do we want to say?”
When you start there you suddenly find yourself with all kinds of due diligence facts, historical anecdotes, feature, functions and benefits…and so do all of your competitors. As a result everyone starts sounding very much the same.
The game changes though when you start from the position of asking, “What do we want the customer to do?”
Yes, it seems quite simple, particularly if you think the answer is, we want the customer to buy. But do you really just want them to buy? Aren’t you really MORE interested in them “succeeding”?
Typically we don’t just want customers, we want satisfied customers. So the answer to the question” what do we want them to do” is, “we want them to use our product or service to solve their problem.”
Of course in order to be able to start communicating from the perspective of solving the customers problem we have to now what the problem is and how your product or service solves it. THEN you have to let the customer know that you understand the problem.
So instead of:
- We have
- We are
- We provide
You start with
- You want
- You need
- You can
Try this experiment:
Take any of the communications you currently use to describe what you do and set them aside. Start the piece over with a description of the problem you solve. Next throw in a few lines about how your solution is unique in terms of what it does for the customer. You only get to talk about the problem and the unique solution, NOT your organization.
Now go look at your competitors communications and see if you don’t recognize how this approach starts to make you stand out.
When was the last time you saw a company talk more about you as a customer than they do about themselves?