Under My Skin

This month I want to help you take a good, deep look at your prospective clients, so that you can start to really understand what motivates them to purchase.  I want you to go beyond your own product or service, and really develop an empathy with your prospect.

Obviously the starting point is to understand their basic demographic.  This covers who your client actually is, for instance:

• Age

• Gender

• Geographic location

• Business or personal

But in order to really understand what motivates your prospect to become a client, you must look much deeper and learn to connect with them on a more personal, more emotional level.

And remember here - even if your clients are executives making high level business purchases, there is still always an emotional reason behind those decisions:  it may be avoidance of the stress associated with wasted money or inefficient use of resources; or perhaps they are looking for the increased respect that accompanies a sound business decision.  You get the point.

So, once we have established who your prospect is and where they can be located, we need to look at how they think, and what is really likely to motivate them.

Ask as many questions about your client as you can.  Within the context of your product or service, ask:

• What kind of people are they - what do they do/enjoy/dislike, etc?

• How do they think and speak - what kinds of words do they use?

• At what location will they be most open to learning about your product?

• Via what medium will they be most open to learning about your product?

But even more importantly, you need to get right under their skin:

• What are their problems or frustrations?

• What really bugs or annoys them?

• What really worries or disturbs them?

• What would they like to change, and in what way?

• What are their goals or dreams?

• What is most likely to motivate them, or get them excited?

It is this kind of thinking which will enable you to identify the aspects of your product or service which will appeal emotionally to your prospect.

We are not looking for 'excellent service' or 'top quality', here.  We are looking for the single feature that will speak to the niggling feeling in the pit of your prospect's stomach and cause a light bulb to go on: "Hey, I need that!". 

It doesn't matter how life-changing or trivial your product or service might seem; whether you are selling safety equipment to oil companies, or peanuts to office workers, there still has to be a light bulb moment when your prospect says "Yes, that would make me feel good".

Define that moment, and you are half-way there.