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Added for You - Your Business is a Cereal Box: Attract, then Inform
We have all been involved with horrible service and seen things we nearly could not believe while out purchasing products or services. I can tell you this that so many of the most unbelievable things I have seen resulted in Calamities in customer service for the company.About four years ago I watch a Hispanic man who worked as a gardener for a landscape company. They had been working on the neighbors property all day and then he walked over a low brick wall and entered the other neighbors side area, where they put their trash cans. He then proceeded to take a leak. The lady in the house happened to come out at tha
Ask yourself: Would I buy from myself? What would keep me interested? What am I looking for? What do I really want?
Learn from how you search the web: If you were looking for administrative help, would you be searching Google for “15 years of experience”? Probably not. You would be more likely to search for terms like “database entry” or “transcription services”. If that’s what you look for, chances are most of your clients will do the same. Give them what they want and organize your information accordingly.
As you create any communication material, answer these questions:
Well, we are into the New Year and everyone is making resolutions on how to improve in 07. It’s time to think about your product and it's packaging too. Just like we do with our mental, emotional and physical aspects of our lives, think about improving and updating your packaging. You want it to mesh with consumer wants and needs. Consumers are a moving target and what worked last year may not work in the years to come.Here are 10 simple things you can do to ensure your product packaging is on target and delivers the right message to the right audience.1) Take an honest look at your product packaging. I
The lesson: Ingredient lists don’t sell cereal. Look at your business features as you would the nutritional information on a cereal box: people only look at it when they are already considering buying the box. It displays important information that needs to be communicated, but it does not answer the first questions in the client’s mind.
For service providers, marketing is a challenge: you know your service is useful and has value, but because you don’t have a physical product, the benefits may be harder to define. After all, your client will only experience what you do once they actually hire you, which they won’t do if the benefits of using your services are not convincing.
How will you, as a service professional, deal with this fact? You must communicate with your clients by being focused on their needs first.
Attract, then Inform
I notice that many of my clients put too much emphasis on what they do instead of emphasizing why their audience should choose them over the competition — or choose them at all.
Note these claims:
What’s wrong with these claims? Absolutely nothing, if they are true. In fact, these are features your clients should be aware of. They are part of what you are offering (the “what” of your business), but they are independent of your clients and their personal concerns.
Benefits are effective in attracting people because they speak to what they can gain personally. Once you have their attention, then you can enhance your selling proposition with features. Features can close a sale, but they will usually not be your client’s first point of entry.
Your benefits should:
I vs. You
In the features list above, notice how many times “I”, “we”, “our”, “my”, and “me” are used. People are naturally concerned with their own needs first. By presenting them with a list of reasons why you are so great, you are sending them the wrong message: that their needs are secondary to what you think they should know. Don’t make the mistake of turning your marketing into a giant r?sum? of your accomplishments. Use words like “you” and “your” more often.
Be your own client
What do your clients look for? Try a little role playing: Pretend you are your own prospective client and objectively evaluate your communication material.
Ask yourself: Would I buy from myself? What would keep me interested? What am I looking for? What do I really want?
Learn from how you search the web: If you were looking for administrative help, would you be searching Google for “15 years of experience”? Probably not. You would be more likely to search for terms like “database entry” or “transcription services”. If that’s what you look for, chances are most of your clients will do the same. Give them what they want and organize your information accordingly.
As you create any communication material, answer these questions:
Fear is probably one of the greatest obstacles in entrepreneurship. However, there is another great obstacle that can hold you back almost just as much. That obstacle is outcome dependency. If every time you get rejected or a client doesn’t like your ideas and you take it out on yourself, it means that you are still outcome dependent. The only way to succeed is to completely kill your outcome dependency. The way to do this is to go all out. Pitch that VC you’re sure is going to shut you down.Ask that girl out with the most ridiculous line and keep going until you’re almost certain you’re going to get slapped. Scre
How will you, as a service professional, deal with this fact? You must communicate with your clients by being focused on their needs first.
Attract, then Inform
I notice that many of my clients put too much emphasis on what they do instead of emphasizing why their audience should choose them over the competition — or choose them at all.
Note these claims:
What’s wrong with these claims? Absolutely nothing, if they are true. In fact, these are features your clients should be aware of. They are part of what you are offering (the “what” of your business), but they are independent of your clients and their personal concerns.
Benefits are effective in attracting people because they speak to what they can gain personally. Once you have their attention, then you can enhance your selling proposition with features. Features can close a sale, but they will usually not be your client’s first point of entry.
Your benefits should:
I vs. You
In the features list above, notice how many times “I”, “we”, “our”, “my”, and “me” are used. People are naturally concerned with their own needs first. By presenting them with a list of reasons why you are so great, you are sending them the wrong message: that their needs are secondary to what you think they should know. Don’t make the mistake of turning your marketing into a giant r?sum? of your accomplishments. Use words like “you” and “your” more often.
Be your own client
What do your clients look for? Try a little role playing: Pretend you are your own prospective client and objectively evaluate your communication material.
Ask yourself: Would I buy from myself? What would keep me interested? What am I looking for? What do I really want?
Learn from how you search the web: If you were looking for administrative help, would you be searching Google for “15 years of experience”? Probably not. You would be more likely to search for terms like “database entry” or “transcription services”. If that’s what you look for, chances are most of your clients will do the same. Give them what they want and organize your information accordingly.
As you create any communication material, answer these questions:
For people considering market research, a point that often trips them up is the difference between qualitative and quantitative market research. Unfortunately, there are such important distinctions between those two types of research methodologies that it’s difficult to consider the pros and cons of conducting market research until those differences are made clear. That’s the goal of this article.I know that it’s stating the obvious, but the terms really are made much easier by remembering their root words – quantitative market research measures the quantity of respondents who feel or act in a certain way.
What’s wrong with these claims? Absolutely nothing, if they are true. In fact, these are features your clients should be aware of. They are part of what you are offering (the “what” of your business), but they are independent of your clients and their personal concerns.
Benefits are effective in attracting people because they speak to what they can gain personally. Once you have their attention, then you can enhance your selling proposition with features. Features can close a sale, but they will usually not be your client’s first point of entry.
Your benefits should:
I vs. You
In the features list above, notice how many times “I”, “we”, “our”, “my”, and “me” are used. People are naturally concerned with their own needs first. By presenting them with a list of reasons why you are so great, you are sending them the wrong message: that their needs are secondary to what you think they should know. Don’t make the mistake of turning your marketing into a giant r?sum? of your accomplishments. Use words like “you” and “your” more often.
Be your own client
What do your clients look for? Try a little role playing: Pretend you are your own prospective client and objectively evaluate your communication material.
Ask yourself: Would I buy from myself? What would keep me interested? What am I looking for? What do I really want?
Learn from how you search the web: If you were looking for administrative help, would you be searching Google for “15 years of experience”? Probably not. You would be more likely to search for terms like “database entry” or “transcription services”. If that’s what you look for, chances are most of your clients will do the same. Give them what they want and organize your information accordingly.
As you create any communication material, answer these questions:
Planning tells you what is going to happen, post-mortem tells you what has happened Both planning and post-mortem are essential management tools needed to achieve corporate objectives, as well as to prevent the recurrence of the same mistakes. Planning for change must be the ever-present concern of every executive. At the same time, if events do not happen as planned, a post mortem is to be conducted so as not to repeat the same planning errors.General Dwight D Eisenhower’s famous quote, “Planning is nothing and planning is everything” was a response to his cynical colleagues, who believed that, becaus
I vs. You
In the features list above, notice how many times “I”, “we”, “our”, “my”, and “me” are used. People are naturally concerned with their own needs first. By presenting them with a list of reasons why you are so great, you are sending them the wrong message: that their needs are secondary to what you think they should know. Don’t make the mistake of turning your marketing into a giant r?sum? of your accomplishments. Use words like “you” and “your” more often.
Be your own client
What do your clients look for? Try a little role playing: Pretend you are your own prospective client and objectively evaluate your communication material.
Ask yourself: Would I buy from myself? What would keep me interested? What am I looking for? What do I really want?
Learn from how you search the web: If you were looking for administrative help, would you be searching Google for “15 years of experience”? Probably not. You would be more likely to search for terms like “database entry” or “transcription services”. If that’s what you look for, chances are most of your clients will do the same. Give them what they want and organize your information accordingly.
As you create any communication material, answer these questions:
Internet is rapidly growing as a popular career source. Job seekers are finding that well-planned and systematically laid out career sites prevail over the traditional newspaper classifieds. The days are gone when job seekers had to browse through cluttered newsprint to find out a suitable job options them. Not only finding a suitable job, posting CVs through traditional mails and getting interview calls used to be too cumbersome till the internet came to the rescue. Searching jobs on Internet has dual benefits for you – it saves your valuable time and it cut shorts your expenses on searching and sending CVs to your pote
Ask yourself: Would I buy from myself? What would keep me interested? What am I looking for? What do I really want?
Learn from how you search the web: If you were looking for administrative help, would you be searching Google for “15 years of experience”? Probably not. You would be more likely to search for terms like “database entry” or “transcription services”. If that’s what you look for, chances are most of your clients will do the same. Give them what they want and organize your information accordingly.
As you create any communication material, answer these questions:
The answer may be different for each target market, so it is important to know who your prospective clients are before asking yourself these questions.
Being completely objective about your own business is not easy; you’ve worked hard to build it and you know it inside out. Defining your benefits from an outside perspective can enable you to better understand how other people view your business. Getting a view of your own “big picture” is something a professional business coach can help you achieve.
Whether you do it alone or get outside help, it never hurts to think about what you have to offer to potential clients. So, next time you’re at the grocery store, stop by the cereal aisle and ask yourself: “What are MY 5 essential nutrients?”
Copyright. Cristina Favreau. All rights reserved.
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