Your enterprise customers don’t really care that much about the things you say about yourself. They don’t even care that much about the stories you tell about them. But there is one group of people that they’re always interested in: their own customers.
Do you know how to tell your story in terms of your customers’ customers?
In every form of communication with your customers, you want them to notice you, to return your call, to open your email, to take your meeting. To make this happen, we always try to talk about the only people that your customers really care about. It’s not you. It’s not even them. It’s their customers. This is what worries and excites and motivates your customers: their customers.
If you can figure out how to communicate your value, your abilities, your distinctiveness, your genius, your service, and all the other things that make people want to do business with you, you can accelerate your sales. But if you can learn how to do all of this while telling the customer about their own customers, that’s when you’ll deserve their undivided attention.
One of the B2B technology companies I work with serves a global market of only a few hundred companies, all of whom know my client. My client’s a well known brand in their industry so after a while, their customers have become a little complacent that they know all there is to know about my client and its products. When they needed to make a big splash for the launch of a new version of one of their top-selling software solutions, I helped them tell the story of their software in terms of how it would benefit their customer’s customers. We told the story of a day in the life of one of their customer’s customers. We showed how with my client’s new software, their customers could turn what would have been a lousy day into a great one.
Not surprisingly, this really caught their customers’ attention. This was so successful I’ve been back to do the same thing for subsequent releases. It’s just the way they prefer to describe their software now. Their customers love it.
Is this a technique that could work for you? Do you know enough about your customers’ business and their needs to be able to describe your benefits to their customers?
Try putting that last question at the top of your agenda at your next executive off-site and let me know what you find.
