Click on video above to see and hear Rhondalynn in action.
You may be surprised to hear that 95% of your prospects don’t really understand you message. You have to understand that your potential customer is simply in pain (in some aspect of his life) and he is looking for the solution. So he has come to you… and what do you do?
Let’s take a look at your last ad, press release, email or even the home page of your website. If you are being honest, I would bet that more than 60% of the prime real estate here is focused on YOU – your brand, your product/service, what you are doing and why you are doing it. And if you are using visuals they are probably of your products, your machinery, your location or even YOU.
And if you are like most business owners, the last 40% of your time and space is spent trying to cram as many words as you can into this bottom section to let your prospects know just how much you can do. In my experience, most of you are spending way too much time trying to impress your audience with fancy words and descriptions.
Here’s the bad news – you’ve already lost your potential customer. In fact, you put him to sleep about 2 minutes ago.
Your brain accounts for 2-3% of your body’s mass but uses 25% of your body’s energy. This is a very important fact to know if you are trying to influence or persuade others. Your brain is the 2nd most energy consumptive organ in your body – if you don’t give it what it needs, it will control your thinking. For those of you who are hungry right now, you know exactly what I am talking about.
From a survival perspective, the brain doesn’t like to use more energy than it has to. If you can make it easier for your customer’s brain to grasp your message, process it quickly and decide, you are more likely to get a YES.
Just for fun, I would like to introduce you to one of your customers… well, at least the decision making brain of one of your customers.
The part of your customer’s brain that decides is the same brain that you and I share with this crocodile. This part of the brain is solely focused on what? Survival, that’s right. Does Mr. Crocodile care about your brand, your products, your photo or your features and benefits? No. Does it care about win/win? No. It is solely focused on itself and physical survival. This part of your customer’s brain gets triggered within 30 seconds and is permanently tuned into the WIFM (what’s in it for me) radio station – constantly scanning to protect itself from pain or death.
So what does this mean for you? To the extent you understand the pain of your customer and are here to help him solve it, he will listen to you or read what you have to say.
Let’s come back to your marketing message for a moment. How can you use this insight for your next ad, press release, email or your website?
First, you are going to stop wasting your most valuable real estate talking about your products, your background, your brand, your philosophy or who you have been certified by. Your clients do not care. If this box represents 100% of the time and space that you have to get your message across right now, you need to spend 80% of it:
– Showing your customer you understand his pain
– Recreating his pain
– And offering THE solution with proof you can deliver
This means that you should never waste it with a lame opening statement like “Introducing our new spring line”, “welcome to our newsletter” or “here are our latest clearance items”. While important to you, they mean nothing to the part of your customer’s brain that decides. They are like a bedtime story for your customer.
If you are using photos or video, and I highly suggest you do for reasons that we will cover in a session together very soon, you want to select visuals that support what? That’s right – recreating or demonstrating you understand your customers pain. This is not the time or place (if you are an electrician for example) to show a picture of you and your van. That photo is about you and not your customer’s pain. Remember your customer is tuned into WIFM radio station.
Also, if you are going to feature your brand or logo, it does not belong up here in this important 80% area.
That leaves only 20% for your call to action and contact details, which is plenty of space if you have captured your prospects attention up top in the 80% zone.
Do you remember when I made the bold claim that 95% of your prospects don’t really understand your message? As you can see, the reason for that is really very simple – your customer has come to you in pain (in some aspect of his life) and his crocodile brain is solely fixated on finding THE solution. This part of his brain, which is responsible for decision making does not have the time or patience to sit around reading or listening to information that is all about you. If you don’t capture his attention in the first 30 seconds with something that is relevant to his pain, you’ve lost him. He can’t possibly understand your message no matter how clever or funny it is because he’s not even paying attention – his reptilian brain has already moved on to look for the solution that will keep him alive or cure the pain .
I want you to assume for a moment that you are dying of thirst. Would you be willing to sit for an hour while I substantiate my credentials, talk to you about why I started my company and educate you on the value and qualities of my pure spring water? Or would you simply get up, walk across the street and find the water that you need to survive?
What if you were dirty and itchy? Would you be any more willing to listen to me focus on my brand or my product for an hour? How long would it take before you just got up and found something to wash yourself with?
And what if your house were on fire? Would you kick back and read 3 pages of stuff on my website about how great my water is or would you rather find someone right now who can help you put out the flames?
The bottom line is this – the quickest way to connect with your customer and get the attention of the decision making part of his brain is to let him know immediately that you understand his pain and can cure it. If you do this well upfront, he will listen to whatever it is that you have to say.
This insight will help you go from boring your prospects to convincing them and that’s good for your business.
Today, I’ve got a major challenge for you. I want you to take a look at what you are currently spending on marketing – whether it’s on brochures, your website, pay per clicks, PR, newspaper, direct mail, social media etc. – and I want you to slash the total budget by 20%. No matter what you are selling and where you are selling it, I guarantee that you won’t miss that 20%. And there is a very good reason for that. 96% of the people who see your message right now, don’t get it anyway. You are spending thousands of dollars each year on sales and marketing materials to increase your sales and the vast majority of your prospects don’t understand your message – so they can’t possibly recall it and buy from you.
So with the money you just saved in your pocket, we are going to take a few minutes right now to re-engineer your message and give you a much better chance of getting through and being understood. The good news is this – it is not going to cost you much to take the time right now to create a message that helps more of your prospects to say “yes”. And if more leads say “yes”, the money you do spend on sales and marketing is going to increase your sales.
To prove my point, I’d like to make you an interesting offer – I can either give you $50 cash right now or a piece of paper where I will write the net present value of a five year annuity at a compound annual interest rate of 10%, adjusted for CPI. Which of these sounds more appealing to you? Which would you rather take right now? Which of these can you take now, put in your wallet or spend it at the shopping centre?
Unless you are one of those very rare individuals who can calculate in your head the value of my second offer, I’m willing to bet you’d rather just take the $50. And that makes a whole lot of sense, because everyone knows what $50 is and what it is worth. There’s nothing confusing about it, is there?
The part of your brain that makes decisions is not interested in working hard to figure out what my message means and what it’s worth. That part of your brain is looking for something that is tangible. And if you’re unsure about whether a message is tangible or not – ask yourself “would a 6 year old understand it?”
Think about it – if I offer you a $50 note or an orange, you don’t have to think very hard about it to figure out what I am offering you, do you? Both of them are equally easy to understand. As soon as you see it, you know what it is and you know exactly what you can do with it. $50 will buy you enough food to cook a meal and the orange is good for you – it’s tasty and you can eat it. There are no directions and no heavy thinking required to make sense of what I am offering you. Your new brain doesn’t have to do any thinking (and wasting time) to get my message.
So what does this mean for you, your message and your customers? If you are making it hard for your customers to understand what you do and whether they are getting a good deal, you need to spend some time right now making your offer more tangible. Ask yourself “does my message include a bunch of big words, fluff and jargon?” Could it be boiled down to something that a 6 year old could understand? What do you need to do to communicate it more clearly to increase your sales – t0 help your prospects to be able to say “yes”? Can you simplify the words that you use or introduce photos or props to get your message across faster?
Now, I think you can guess that coming up with a simple, succinct message is a lot harder than being lazy and throwing together an ad full of useless, complicated information. A good rule of thumb here is to remember that you should be working harder to craft and simplify your message than your prospect has to in order to decipher it. Someone has to do the hard work – either you are committed to doing it before hand or your customer will need to think about it.
Now if you are serious about saving money and you want to increase your sales, you won’t spend another cent until you stop, take a good hard look at your materials and do whatever it takes to make your message tangible. You don’t have to spend more money to chase find customers. What you really need to do is take the complication and confusion out of your message so that more of your prospects can say “yes” now.
