The Customer Shouldn't Have To Do The Work

Photo by John Legrand on Unsplash

Those who’ve worked with me for any length of time will inevitably have heard me say some variant of the following words: “If the customer has to work to understand what we’re offering, we’ve already lost.” I try to live by those words. 

There’s enough going on with any client or customer that any of us are dealing with. Just like us, they’re constantly bombarded by emails, news, requests for, and demands of, their time - and, oh yes, their actual work. 

The result? They simply don’t have the time nor the patience to process more than they need to. And that puts the onus on us to make it as simple as possible for them to understand who we are and what we are offering. 

We can’t spend time explaining the intricacies of our offer before they get it. We don’t have the luxury of the ‘build-up’ i.e. building our story layer by layer before they understand. And we certainly can’t simply explain our capabilities and expect them to be able to knit together a coherent interpretation of our strengths. 

(Well, I suppose we can do all of those things. There’s just no guarantee of our desired end result.) 

The point is, as I like to say, they shouldn’t have to work to understand what we’re bringing to the table. 

Intuitively this makes sense but you’d be surprised how often we forget this. We’re too enamored by all of the intelligence that’s gone into our product and feel the need to have to explain it. Or we’re so immersed in the detail that we’ve lost sight of the forest for the trees, so to speak. 

The thing is, no one cares. Not at first blush, anyway. 

They just want to know how we can help, how we can solve their specific problem, the one’s that’s been keeping them up at night, the one we’ve created our product or service to solve. 

And, they want to know this quickly. Because they’ve still got that To Do list and phone calls and requests from their boss to get back to. 

So our focus needs to be to, well, focus. 

What’s their core problem? Why does it exist? How does what we offer alleviate that core issue? How do we do it quickly and expediently? 

Now explain that in 1-2 sentences. If they like what they hear - that is, if it resonates with them - you’ve bought yourself the luxury of a conversation.