What do all sellers in Billingsgate Market do? They shout a simple message to get your attention:
“Salmon, £12 a kilo! Last few!”
What if one tried to sell you on:
“Try this incredibly healthy Omega-6 and Omega-3 fat rich Atlantic fish, it’s ideal for your keto diet!
I bet by the time they ended their sentence, you’d be already gone to another stand (unless you’re a fitness freak that gets excited about the word keto).
And while selling fish vs. selling software is a completely different level of complexity, the rule remains the same – your message should include essentials that your potential buyers can relate to and are familiar with. Don’t make them think. If understanding what you do takes too much effort, they will quickly move on.
Especially when what you do is innovative and you’re creating a new market segment, you need to disguise it as something they know and will be comfortable trying.
That also means, you should tailor your language to one that your customers can understand.
Speak my language
One of our mistakes at Untrite was assuming that we can’t talk about our product or share industry insights as if we were explaining them to a 5 year old. Without all those grandiose keywords or technical jargon. We felt we’ll be taken as amateurs who don’t know what they are talking about. Often we were doing these mistakes unconsciously, because we thought that those whom we’re addressing our solutions will have some basic foundations on how AI tech works and see an immense potential of it.
Who else if not Directors of Digital Transformation or Directors of Data Analytics, who live and breathe innovation… don’t they?
And it’s also a bit embarrassing to admit, but we scoffed texts we read in articles or websites of other companies in our space. Most was filled with multitude of meaningless, generic keywords as if their copywriter got a task to tick all the keyword boxes for whatever it’s trending. “Digital transformation” – tick. “Real time data collection and sharing” tick. “Knowledge creation and sharing platform” – tick. “Predictive maintenance”, tick. “Strategic investment into your legacy systems. Built in shared language for collaboration.” Tick. Tick. There was little about what the actual tool really is. How does its tech work and what can it do.
We instead wanted to convey “meat”, not the marketing fluff. Our message should explain exactly what it is what we’re selling, giving more spec details. We wrongly believed that other people will be equally excited about the technology as we are and they will come up with many potential problems we could solve for them.
What fools we were.
It’s your job to figure out their problem
This is where most new startuppers get wrong. They think they need to put the big guns out to convince other party to buy. Nobody wants to be flooded by full of jargon and buzzwords sales pitch. But everyone wants to be heard and wants their problems solved.
It’s your job to discover those. Just like a good psychologist, your job is to listen and ask questions. The patient feels what’s wrong, even if they can’t pinpoint the exact problem. You need to connect the dots, ask many questions to find a common language and and discover an angle, a use case you could explore together.
There is this great short book about finding customer problems called Mom’s Test by Rob Fitzpatrickz. People say you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business idea is a good one. Your mom will lie to you the most (because she loves you), but it’s a bad question and invites everyone to lie to you (mostly, to get rid of you after the first prospect call 🙂 ). It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s your responsibility to find it by asking good questions.
Ok, but I deviated here a little. Back to the familiarity bit.
They want boring
If something innovative sounds simple and you get it immediately, then most likely it took ages for creators to figure it out. The hardest thing is explaining complex things in a simple way. The truth is, people want boring, or at least familiar. They don’t want revolutions, infrastructure ploughed up side down, needing to learn new systems, because a) people resist change by nature b) that feels like a headache. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM, remember?
Benn put it nicely when explaining how his company’s new software evaluation process went:
When I looked it up, my first reaction was that it was built for people smarter than me. Instead of a demo or product screenshots, I found technical papers explaining something I didn’t understand. The case studies talked about real-time enterprise workloads, streaming Spark applications, and distributed, highly-scalable data science model development.
Throughout our entire evaluation, we never considered Databricks. In hindsight, we should’ve. Databricks is, just like Snowflake, a fast, hosted, almost infinitely scalable database. And, unlike Snowflake, it supports a wider range of languages that could’ve opened up entire classes of new applications that, once accessible, we would’ve been excited to try. But we never connected these dots during our evaluation because the story Databricks told was buzzwords. Snowflake’s was boring, and all we wanted—at least at first—was boring.
Use a top-down approach. Tailor your message starting from describing a generic problem you’re working around using words and concepts familiar to the other person. Then guide them with questions to discovering specific, narrowed areas where you could help.
Never assume that other people will know what you do. Even if things seem obvious to you, they may not do so to others. Also, they may not care, so you should let the other party feel that whatever you offer will provide some personal gains. Draw a success story and let them feel that they came up with it.
You and all the marketing material you share, decks, website etc. should be focused on highlighting what it enables, not what your product does or how it works. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Most decision makers don’t care so much about technology (it’s also very important but that comes later in evaluation process) as what problem it solves, where it can be applied.
photo: mine, Fish market, Kuwait.
