I was reading "The Road Less Traveled" by Scott Peck last week. In a portion of this wonderful book, he explores the importance of active listening.
He wrote: “An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference, and desires so as to experience, as far as possible, the speaker’s world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this.”
Scott refers mostly to the relationships with our spouses or kids, yet I couldn’t help but think of marketing dynamics. While it feels a bit profane to extrapolate this concept to marketing, it’s so essential. The best salespeople are those who can attune to their prospect. The more attuned you are, the more precise your response to their problems and desires.
This is one of the core differences between a successful sales campaign and one that is not: the orientation of the offer. Very commonly, I have to help my clients step out of their own way and put their solutions to the side. The truth is that people don’t really care about your offer; they care about their problems. Understand their problems and help them solve them. Or as we say in marketing: The pain is the pitch.
Wants vs. Needs
One of the most common misconceptions about this idea is that we tend to create offers around what we think people need. For most of us in the coaching and consulting world, we are not really in the business of needs; we are in the business of wants. People don’t need to become better leaders, they want to. People don’t need to become better with their money, they want to.
While obvious, this distinction is critical - we can’t try to sell a want as a need. Satisfying a want requires us to really understand our audience by listening to them, attuning to their pain points, and crafting a solution to help them get what they want. If we fail to do this, chances are that we are pitching a self-centered product: an offer that is based on what we think people need, confined to our current knowledge, and delivered in a medium that is most comfortable to us.
The best-selling offers are manifestations of a real understanding of your audience. By real, I mean that we have successfully bracketed our biases and what we want to hear (we want to hear a validation of our hypothesis of business). Instead, we have listened and attuned to their pain points. The more we attune to our audience, the more we can craft messages to create an emotional connection with them, the more we can give them a promise of transformation that they actually want, the better we can address their objections, and the better we can serve them.
Listen to Serve
Attaining this knowledge and successfully packaging it in an offer usually takes time. That is why creating a winning offer is not usually something people do on the first try. We have many opportunities to attune to our audience:
- Interviews
- Conversations with clients/prospects
- Focus groups
- Research
- Surveys and polls
- Products that didn’t sell
- Comments on social media
- Responses to your newsletter
In conclusion, if you really want to have a successful and sustainable business, you need to learn how to serve your clients. In order to serve them, we must learn to listen to their problems. Your expertise and knowledge are hugely valuable, but they won’t find a receiver unless we give them a reason to listen to us.