Reilly Newman | There is a sales fallacy that many businesses fall prey to. This fallacy is the need to justify your business or service/product. As businesses, we are “selling” our services or products, yet overtime this act of sales has slowly become seen as a lowly act of begging. Naturally, sales has driven the business to over-explain (and ramble) in the hopes to swoon their customers into making a purchase by possibly impressing them with interesting features and knowledge.
This over-explaining is one of the downfalls of selling from a business owner/insider’s perspective. We lack an outward perspective and most likely suffer from the curse of knowledge. This curse is simply how, over time, our minds become wired to our specific industry. Like how a brain surgeon may explain things in her jargon and not realize that the average human doesn’t understand. But since she has been doing it for years, she has forgotten that fact.
This insider’s perspective causes us to lose sight of our own (product) “labels” in favor of the (product) contents. By focusing on the contents, we unfortunately have a knack of stripping away all value from what we do simply because we are just too darn close to the service/product and industry.
Example: A business could focus on selling how their peanut butter is made – what region their peanuts are grown in, how they are sorted, rinsed and roasted, how natural the ingredients are, and that they use the latest energy-efficient machinery to process it. But that may not be what their consumer wants to know or hear. They would rather focus on how that lightly salted creaminess is going to taste or spread on their bread or crackers. The first focuses on the contents (business perspective). The second focuses on their label (consumer perspective). Just like most people enjoy eating sausages, but no one wants to know how that sausage was made.
Selling from an insider’s perspective is an easy pitfall. There may be a part of us (our ego) that enjoys talking in industry jargon…that enjoys talking above the heads of our audience. Unfortunately, this doesn’t bode too well for your audience as they are humans and wish to be treated as such.
So, how do we beat this? Don’t just talk…speak to be heard. Strip out the jargon and heady industry lingo. It may be helpful for internal use, but for your audience it will only push them away.
By allowing yourself to remove this excess waste, you will be left with a more open canvas (and mind) that will put you in a new state to view yourself (ideally, in collaboration with a third party) to develop a more impactful perspective that can help you relate to your audience.
This is how you get those better words to describe the peanut butter. How you take formerly dirty, washed and roasted crushed-up peanuts and make them into something someone wants to buy.
Whether you have intense industry lingo or not, the fact of the matter is that there is a lacking of perspective when a business is only working in the business’s perspective. There’s a missed moment to relate to your audience, to share the true value of your business, or discover new opportunities. These moments are what create sales.
Cut to the chase and tear down the walls you have constructed of your own perspective. You are too close. Step back, get a third party perspective to help, and be open minded to how your audience views you.
Most likely, how you view your business is not how your audience views it.
(For more on being more effective in what you say, see our article Cut to The Chase.)
