After attending The Brain Audit Sessions, you can post your questions below and I will answer.
Warm regards
Sean D'Souza
P.S. Here is the link for more details on: The Brain Audit seven-part webinar series that shows you why clients buy and why they don't.
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I’m wondering if what we’re for/against is supposed to match what the customer is for/against. Do we have to align on both? Is the problem, the what we’re for, and the what we’re against, three separate things?
You don’t know what the customer is thinking. Hence, for you to align anything would range from “difficult to pure fluke”. All you can do is simply put what you’re thinking, forward and wait for their response.
Hence, let’s take an example of a cafe. Auckland is currently in a lockdown (and tsunami warning, but I digress :)) Anyway, there are about five cafes open in an area of 100 metres, because takeaway coffee is still permitted. If you’re a cafe owner, the lines are likely to be like this:
What is your product?
– Coffee
What do you stand for?
– Excellent coffee.
What are you against?
– Terrible coffee.
Even if we stay within these very vague “excellent” and “terrible” description, let’s just assume that the client already knows where the coffee is good or not good. And for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume all the cafes already have excellent coffee (at least that’s the perception of the client). If you were to try and align with the client, you’d struggle because in your mind, there is no higher standard than “excellent” coffee.
But what is the customer thinking?
I’ll tell you what. We asked one of them why they bought from one place vs the other. And they said, “the one at the beach attracts a lot of snobs”. Well, that’s not something you as a owner would anticipate. You’re so focused on the coffee that you don’t realise that your store is attracting people who:
1- Already think the coffee is more or less the same within the 100 metre range. They like ALL the coffee.
2- However, you are being chosen because your store is “not snobbish”. The client feels uncomfortable at the other store and chooses your cafe for the unpretentious manner.
It’s clearly impossible for you to figure this point out in advance. Just like we saw with the Febreze ad, it’s very hard to know what the client is thinking. One thing we know for sure is that given that all products appearing to be the same or similar, the client chooses one over the other, because it’s solving a specific problem.
Having the three questions allows you to interrogate your position and puts the client in a place where they can come back and tell you why you’re right—or where you’re off the mark.
Makes sense?
What I learned was to tell the client ‘What my service is for’ and ‘What what my service is against’ — then see how the client responds. Do they correct me (“No, what your service is for isn’t X, it’s Y”) or do they accept it and talk about something else (the payment method or somesuch).
What I ***like*** about this is that it’s a brief opening that opens a door that it feels like it will be easy to come back to later for a continued conversation.
Better said, it feels like it will be the start of a more succinct version of the Target Profile interview.
Thanks. Yes, it does feel less intimidating to just do the small part first and then move to the bigger chunks later.
The founder of the Feldenkrais method (movement exercises to enhance body awareness) coined the term “the elusive obvious”. In communication workshops, you learn not to assume what the other person is thinking. Why then do we sit at our desks, relying on our pseudo telepathic powers to come up what our clients want?
My main learning is so straightforward, it hurts: Don’t guess what the clients wants/needs, ask them. Duh!
I know, you’ve asked for just one learning but I’add one more “elusive ovious”:
If you try to reach EVERYone, you won’t reach ANYone. When a prospect is looking to have their problem solved, they’re looking for SOMEone with SOME solution they hope will get the job one. The clearer we define the SOMEthing or SOMEone our business represents, the easier it is for clients for see if that’s a match for them or not.
The funny thing is that I removed all of those slides. I had slides that said “Everyone is not your audience”. And they will never be. A good example of this are the testimonials of the podcast on iTunes. One client says: I love the music. If you scroll down just a tiny bit, there’s a client that says, “I hate the music.”
At one point, I was considering making two podcast versions. One with music and one without. I gave up on that idea and I am so glad I did.
What I learned is that what I thought was a specific “for” and specific “against” was not specific at all. That I need to get way more granular — to the specific *emotion* involved, eg anger sadness etc — rather than just “stuck in a bad feeling.”
If we can’t explain what “bad feeling” is, then it’s vague. For someone, a “bad feeling” might be that they end up eating all the cookies in the jar. For another, it might be “waking up on Friday and wondering where the week has gone.” The Anthony Hopkins, “destroying the furniture” is a vivid way of explaining the abstract.
Going deep instead of wide can make us think we need more details and examples. But it can always start with a tiny version of it.
Target profiles can start with a tiny target profile. That was my learning in the webinar.
The tiny steps strategy is really good and it’s always useful when we found ourselves before a big task to step back and remember that there is a tiny version of it we can certainly handle.
Exactly 🙂 No matter how small and doable something can seem, it can still be made easier and smaller. And that’s what I learned too with this target profile interview. I’m just annoyed I didn’t think of it, earlier.