June 27, 2011

It’s the rally cry of marketers: understand your market. Create personas or avatars, describe their lives, their fears, desires, concerns...their deepest darkest pains and needs. Where is the hole in your customers’ lives or businesses that you’re product or service is capable of filling?

It’s a powerful exercise—actually a necessary one if you’re looking to create and bring to market something with enough relevance and value to generate interest. But that still may not be enough to get people to raise their hands and say, “Yes, I’ll take 10!”

To get to that place, you need to go deeper. You need to get a bit psychic...

Step 1: Find out what your customers are telling themselves

Your potential customers talk to themselves. All day long. They may not realize it, but from the moment they open their eyes to the moment they close them at night, there’s a running conversation going on in their heads. And at some point, they are going to be telling themselves a story about a problem they have that we can solve. Challenge is, they don’t yet know we exist.

The first step, then, is to understand the storyline and the conversations already running in their heads. What are they telling themselves? What are they asking themselves? Who are the main players? What is the language they’re be using? How do they FEEL about it?

The outer needs, desires and “topical” buy triggers are a starting point, but that’s just the beginning. It’s not the real story, nor does it give you access to the conversation at a level that will allow you to craft a marketing or sales message that glides past the filters and makes a beeline to the elusive automatic buy buttons.

So, start with the topical things, but then go deeper. You need to hit their emotion veins. That’s where the “real” internal dialogue lies—the one that, entered artfully, yields near-effortless sales results.

To uncover the inner dialogue:

• Start with your own knowledge of the market, needs and customer; identify their needs, desires and most common asks and challenges.

• Sit down with a potential customer and, before you ever say a thing about you, your product or service, ask what their biggest challenges are. Then ask the most important questions: What’s important to them about [the need, product, service or solution]? and Why? Keep circling deeper until you get to the level of emotion.

Yes, even in a big corporate setting, there is a metric ton of emotion and self-interest that drives the decision to buy.

A purchasing manager, for example, will be as concerned about how your solution will make them look as they are about how well your solution actually does the job it’s supposed to do. You need to understand that conversation and that part of the inner dialogue.

• Keep asking questions, at least five layers deep on the "what’s important" and "why" questions. And really listen. Do NOT open your mouth to solve or sell or craft any marketing or sales content until you’ve reached this place.

Once you get to the level of emotion, you can then start to understand the real conversation and the truer drivers of the sale. But not before.

Step 2: Enter the conversation already going on in their heads

Many marketers, entrepreneurs and salespeople spend the vast majority of their efforts working to change the stories prospects are telling themselves to conform to the one the marketer wants to sell them. This is not an impossible job, especially if you’re a stunning good salesperson, marketer or influencer.

But it’s a far more difficult one than simply knowing the conversation that’s already running in a prospect’s head, then simply joining in that conversation at the point of maximum impact and gently guiding a person to the belief that what you’re selling is the sole resolution to their story.

Once you have strong understanding of the conversation that is already going on in your prospect’s head, now you’re in a position to enter that conversation. Doing so transforms the experience of your message from one of “interrupt and sell” to “join and guide.”

It allows you to let a prospect create their own alternative storyline that flows logically from their running internal conversation—the story they’re already telling themself. And, crafted really well, it allows you to create a message that positions your product or service as the only logical solution to the question they’re already asking.

It makes it feel like the shift in storyline is coming from them, not you.

So, rather than spending 20 percent of your time getting a basic feel for market need and 80 percent of your time trying to create a new conversation that serves only the surface need, reverse your approach. Spend 80 percent of your time going much deeper with your potential customers.

Understand their individual needs, their drivers beyond “will this do the job you say it will” and the deeper conversations and stories that are already running in their heads around the pain you can solve or the delight you can deliver.

Then craft your message to join in that ongoing conversation, touch on all the major concerns and lead them to a resolution...that just happens to involve you benefiting, as well as them.

Jonathan Fields is a lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, business strategist, speaker and author. His forthcoming book is Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel For Brilliance. He blogs at JonathanFields.com

Related Topics

• Marketing

Related keywords

Jonathan Fields, Article, marketing tips, marketing strategies, Duct Tape Marketing, Jonathan Fields