Why Don’t People Value You?
Read This if People Are “Confused” After You’ve Explained Your Business or Product
Has this ever happened to you?
You’re at a networking event and it’s your turn you deliver your elevator pitch.
Maybe you stumble a little, but you feel pretty good about it… Until you look out at a sea of furrowed brows and puzzled faces at the end.
Or maybe people are virtually “furrowing their brows” at you when they look at your webstore, or landing page and decide to click away because they couldn’t make heads or tails of the thing.
If you can’t seem to figure out how to communicate with people in a way that gets them excited, whether it’s about your business itself or while selling your products and services.
Why do people say “Yes”?
If you’ve ever tried to explain your business or products to someone to no effect, then that’s the question you should be interested in.
When you’re asking someone to become a customer, or to join your email list, you’re asking them to say yes.
When you’re asking someone to become a new customer, or you’re asking someone to join your email list, you’re asking them to agree to a BIG Yes.
How do you get someone to agree to a BIG Yes?
Simple.
You have to convince them that the COST is worth it.
Something that many business owners don’t understand is that price is not cost.
“Cost” is something that can be negative OR positive!
Cost is actually a mental process that happens inside the brain of your readers while they’re on your page about whether or not they get more value from spending their money than the value of keeping that money in the bank.
Every single word, sentence, graphic, how your website is organized, what information you do or don’t give is a factor in whether the cost is a + or a -to the reader.
Both paid and free offers have a cost!
Again, the cost is not the price. It’s ultimate result of the decision making process inside your customer’s brain.
Is signing up for your email list better than leaving their computer to stroll over and talk to their coworker? Is buying your product better than squirreling that money away from a rainy day?
Those are the hard questions you have to answer to get visitors to say yes.
Today you’re going to learn about the 3 keys to unlocking value in your customer’s mind. You’ll be able to use these 3 keys as a guide to evaluate how well your existing pages ACTUALLY communicate the value of working with you.
You’ll also be able to use these 3 keys as a guide for creating new pages that sell.
When you take them time to understand them, these 3 keys to value are going to help you understand what to say, and when to say it to get people excited about your business and working with you.
Key #1 — Understanding
You’d be surprised how many business owners are failing at just this first step.
Consider this classic copywriting formula for a second:
Problem-Agitate-Solution
If even if you’ve never heard of this model before, just think about it with me.
I want you to open your “problem page” and look at the copy, that page that you know is under performing.
What’s the first paragraph about?
Is it about the product? Maybe a description, or maybe it’s a “satisfaction guarantee” seal, or maybe it’s even your logo…
Do you see the problem yet?
If your page starts with your business or company, then you’re skipping straight to the solution.
That’s a huge problem!
Before anyone wants to hear about the diet plan and specific fitness regimen of your online course, they need to be clear and feel like you’re even relevant to them.
You have the specific products and services that you do to solve a problem for them or to help them reach a personal goal.
You’re the vehicle for helping them get what they want. That’s the whole point of business!
So think of leading your elevator pitch, or your product description with the “why” people need your help with in the first place.
Jumping straight into your solution, without prefacing it with anything more relevant to your reader is making a lot of assumptions.
Do you really just want to leave it up to chance that the consumer understands what their problem is, that they’re more aware of their problem than just a nagging itch and they know the absolute specifics of what their problem is costing you, that they know the exact perfect path to their goal, that they even know how to choose the best goal for them?
Before you ever approach your specific solution, there’s a lot of groundwork you should do building a foundation of what problem you’re even solving and for whom.
Look, if you’re selling a fitness program and your reader doesn’t even know that yes, even “just belly fat” can be dangerous, then you’re not going to have a whole lot of luck selling to them.
They’re not going to be interested in hearing about your product because they don’t see how it’s relevant to their life.
I wanted to show you a specific example of how you can move away from “company logic”, leading with a focus on you, and towards “customer logic” by leading with the benefits to them:
Take the time to get clear on what end goal your clients want from you, and lead with THAT in your communicating!
Key #2 — Believing
Here’s a cool science story to help us understand Key #2:
Have you ever seen those stickers on the back of trucks (or commercial vehicles) that say “HOW AM I DRIVING? Call ###-…”?
Have you ever wondered how people would rate you?
How would you rate other drivers?
Well, psychological scientists were curious about exactly that!
In experiments scientists asked participants to rate how good of a driver they thought they were.
Interestingly enough, when asked to rate themselves almost everyone seemed to be a better than average driver… Hmmm…
But when asked to rate how skilled other drivers were, shockingly they were all below average!
I’m sure you realize that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Across the aggregate mass of “drivers on the road”, there are obviously some better drivers — but there’s still jerks on the road too!
This relates to Key #2 because it’s possible that someone can understand the downsides of their problem while still thinking of themselves as “outside” of the negative consequences.
This concept of “believing you’re for them” is the driver behind “niching down in your market” and the reason for “branding”.
You can signal to people through who you use as examples, how your page looks, which specific problems you call out (for weight loss, does she not fit in her dress or does he not fit into his slacks? Even something that small has an impact on the overall belief of how well you address their issue), and even how your company presents itself.
If somebody understands how many people die in car accidents, but doesn’t believe they could be the problem then you may be dealing with a lack of belief in their personal risk or losses — rather than a lack of information.
Going back to the classic Problem-Agitate-Solution copywriting formula from earlier, after you make sure the person understands why they’re not getting the traffic they expected (Problem) then you could quantify how many leads they’re missing and how much it would cost to buy that traffic through PPC (Agitate).
Most pages that business operators have DIYed fall down on just these first 2 keys.
You can’t expect people to value you service if they don’t understand how it relates to them, and don’t believe that they have any problem (or that they would benefit from the results).
Key #3 — Wanting
The best way to get someone to want your products is not really to try to trick them, or “manufacture desire”, it’s to actually be good at matching what they need to your products and services.
Copywriter Gary Halbert used to do a little thought experiment when he presented to groups or college classes.
He’d ask the students:
“If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to see who could sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side to help you win?”
The students would reply back they they wanted their one advantage to be the highest quality beef, or the best customer service, or the coolest logo…
After his students finished up, he’d say
“O.K., I’ll give you every single advantage you have asked for. I, myself, only want one advantage and, if you will give it to me, I will (when it comes to selling burgers) whip the pants off all of you!”
“What advantage do you want?” they’d ask.
“The only advantage I want,” he’d reply…
“Is… A Starving Crowd!”
Matching your products to the needs of the right people is the true secret of great marketers.
Sometimes part of that is being honest with yourself that there are a lot of people you’re not right for, or they’re not ready to make that type of investment and they need something else.
Here’s an example from my own copy of how you could apply this:
They say the word that a salesperson hears the most often is “no”.
That’s definitely true, and sometimes it can be hard to deal with — but what that really means to me is “Not this” or “Not yet”.
That’s the difference between looking at value with company logic vs looking at value with customer logic.
Sometimes as business owners we’re so worried about this transaction, that we shift the focus away from what’s best for the other person.
Can you “Manufacture Desire?”
In a way…
Clarity is persuasion. Keep in mind that confusion and unclear words add a negative cost to your client’s perception of your mind.
The best way for you to persuade visitors to become customers is to be extremely clear on who the customer is (know your customer avatar), and how they’ll use your product.
Going back to what we talked about earlier, it’s okay to be honest with yourself that you’re not the right solution for everyone. So persuade people to become customers by not being afraid to talk to just that 1 person.
Inside Out Marketing vs Outside In Marketing
When you have an “inside out” mindset about your marketing, that means you’re approaching explaining value to the customer from that transactional mindset. The telltale sign of this is that you lead off your homepage, your product descriptions, or your landing pages with something about you or your product.
Instead, you want to look at it from an “outside in” perspective. Everything you write, heck every product or service you have, is for your customer.
So instead of thinking about “Oh I have this revenue goal, I have to sell that many products, I need to generate that much traffic…”, you want to begin with your customer.
“What are they struggling with? What are they afraid of happening if things don’t work out? What are they missing that’s keeping them from success?”
Sometimes your product can help more than one kind of person. What should you do if your product has multiple use cases?
Start your copy focused on completely answering “What problem am I best able to address? (And for whom)?” and then when you’ve made that complete point can you move onto talking about your other use cases.
Here’s an example from a real landing page:
I know that this is a product that could be used by a son, by a father. But let’s just take a second to look at this branding here, there are some hearts on the logo. There’s a smiling girl in the banner image.
So I really imagine that this is used by a mother for her daughter. So you can make this more compelling by moving away from using generic terms like “College student”.
For this brand it makes the most sense to focus on making the point for their main use case, mothers and daughters, 1st and only after making making that point completely they could move onto the other use cases of their product for fathers, sons, other family members and their young adult relatives.
Putting It Into Action
Here’s what you should take away from all of this.
Whenever you’re trying to communicate about what you do, remember Problem-Agitate-Solution.
Whether you’re writing a landing page or pitching a client, remember to begin with customer logic by focusing on them before you start talking about your own good qualities.
I’m sure you have tons of great things about you, but people want to know if you’re relevant to them first!
The order you should bring information up in conversations is sequential — that goes for both the 3 Keys to Value and the Problem-Agitate-Solution formula.
Finally, you should be the last thing that you talk about with prospects.
Before you start giving product details, testimonials, company history, or in any way detailing the specifics of YOUR offer be sure that you have identified their problem, explained their problem, and quantified the cost of not fixing their problem (or agitated to them how bad it will feel not to meet their goal).
Think of asking somebody to do business with your company (or whatever your goal is to sell something, to get them to optin to something) as asking them to change their behavior.
Humans are lazy, we like to be set in our ways. You have to understand that because of some combination of their pre-existing habits, your prospects aren’t actively working on their problem.
If you want them to work on a problem, you have to “get leverage” over their preexisting habits by making them more afraid of NOT changing than the discomfort that trying to change causes them.