If they don’t care, it doesn’t matter

A pair of engineers left their corporate jobs and started up their own consulting company.  One of them had lots of experience in electrical engineering, the other in plumbing, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.  They counted among their clients architects and water parks.

These engineers took great pride in their standards.  While most other consulting engineering companies, including the ones they had left, handed off the work of converting hand-drawn plans into precision CAD drawings to draftsmen, assistants, or interns, these guys did all the CAD work themselves.  To them, this commitment to quality is what set them apart from their competition, and they trumpeted this difference on their web site and in all their marketing materials.

Interviews with some of the firm’s clients told a different story.  While they all agreed that these engineers did great CAD drawings, none of the clients felt that the CAD drawings coming out of this firm were any better than the drawings coming out of the firms that gave the drawings to underlings to do.  The unanimous philosophy was I don’t care who does the drawings as long as they get done and they’re accurate. In other words, the firm’s clients had confidence that any engineering firm’s CAD drawings will be perfectly fine, regardless of the process to create them, as long as the person who reviews the drawings knows what he/she is doing.

This engineering firm cared about who does CAD drawings, but its clients didn’t.  The first right thing the firm did was try to discover the truth, even though they already thought they knew what it was.  The second right thing the firm did was ask questions in a way that would give them useful information.

Questions that would not have helped these engineers discover the truth about the importance of who does the CAD drawings:

• Are you satisfied with the CAD drawings produced by XYZ Engineers?
• How satisfied are you with the CAD drawings produced by XYZ Engineers?
• What do you like about the CAD drawings produced by XYZ Engineers?
• How do you compare XYZ’s CAD drawings with those of its competition?

The reason these are not helpful is that they all assume that CAD drawings hold the same importance in their clients’ organizations that they do in their own.  Better questions:

• Talk about the process you used in finding an engineer for your last project.  What were you looking for?
• Which engineering firms were you considering for such-and-so project?  How were these firms similar to or different from one another?
• How did you end up including XYZ Engineers on the short list of engineering firms you work with?  When you choose one to work with, how do you choose?

Notice that none of these asks about CAD drawings.  (We did ask them about CAD drawings eventually, out of curiosity.  It turns out that who does the CAD drawings is so not important to the firm’s clients that they were actually surprised the topic came up.)

If you want to find out what’s important, you need to ask what’s important.  Sometimes people don’t know what’s important — actually, most of the time people don’t know what’s really important to them because we make most of our decisions unconsciously — but by steering respondents down a narrow path, we close ourselves off from finding out something potentially really cool and interesting.

As it turned out, there was something that differentiated this engineering firm in the minds of its clients: the size of the firm.  Clients didn’t care who the CAD drawings got handed off to, but they cared who they got handed off to.  This small firm had big credentials, but it wasn’t so big that clients would get lost in a queue or delegated to junior engineers.  On top of that, because it was a two-man firm, instead of a sole enterprise, clients knew that if one guy couldn’t come to the phone, the other one would — the entire company wouldn’t shut down if someone caught the flu.

A much better place to live in the heads of one’s clients — that the firm takes care of clients in a way that neither smaller nor larger firms can — and much more difficult for a competitor to replicate.

Moral: Whatever it is that matters to you about your business, if it doesn’t matter to your customers, it’s not the bait you should be using to try to lure new customers in.  This is not to say that you shouldn’t pay attention to these important things — good CAD drawings are important — but whatever you are saying about your business to differentiate it from your competitors needs to be a difference that matters to your customers.

Lesson: When you’re trying to get to the heart of where your business lives in people’s heads — this is called positioning — the smartest place to begin is with people in whose heads your product already lives, that is, your customers.  If your product or service already lives where you want it to live with your happy customers, then you can figure out how to go out and look for more people like them to make happy.

Don’t assume you know what matters — watch what customers do, ask them why they do what they do, and listen to the questions they ask you.  That will get you started on understanding matters to them.  Beware of your own blinders, those biases that prevent you from inviting people to tell you the whole truth.

Selling mousetraps to people who aren’t shopping for mousetraps

“If a man can … make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yes, if…

• The world thinks it has a mouse problem
• The world is unhappy with the way it is currently trying to manage its mouse problem
• The world has heard of this “better mousetrap”
• The world thinks this mousetrap might be better than what it’s currently doing to manage its mouse problem
• The world believes that the relief this mousetrap will bring is what the inventor is charging for it.
• The world is unhappy enough with its mouse problem and thinks that this mousetrap is a better-enough and reasonably-priced-enough solution that it is motivated to get its tired butt off the sofa, pull on its boots, and take the time to slog through the woods looking for the house where this inventory of mousetraps is waiting to be distributed.

There are plenty of articles out there about the mousetrap fallacy, and most of them talk about how making a great mousetrap isn’t enough — you need to advertise, you need to launch a major PR campaign, you need to spread the word, you need to print brochures, you need to put up a web site, etc.  In other words, mousetraps don’t sell themselves.

But there’s another issue:  Sometimes your best prospects are shopping for solutions to their mouse problems, but aren’t shopping for mousetraps.

I know whereof I speak because I myself have a mouse problem. His name is Billy, a 5-year-old jet-black cat whose life’s mission seems to be to rid my back yard of every one of its mouse inhabitants, carry said mice into my house, and set them free, where they can spend the rest of their days happily stealing kibble from the cats’ dishes and throwing fat little bacchanals for themselves among the rolls of gift wrap in my downstairs closet.

If you are selling better mousetraps and expect me to find you and recognize in you the answer to my mouse problems, you will likely be disappointed. Not that I have an objection to better mousetraps or that there is anything wrong with your better mousetrap. You might be selling the most exquisitely-designed mousetrap that ever snapped. You might have twelve patents pending, a fistful of five-star reviews from Mouse Traps Today, and Billy Mays screeching your better mousetrap’s merits all over late night television. But if  I am using the internet to help me shop, I will not find you, and not because you haven’t loaded up your website with all the pertinent keywords about mousetraps.

I will not find you, because you are expecting me to type better mousetrap into the Google search bar. I am not. I am typing better cat.

Back in the olden days, when the advertiser was the hunter and the customer was the prey, all we had to do was shout our messages somewhere where someone was likely to hear them, resting assured that she would put two-and-two together and buy what we wanted her to.

Now, with the internet, the customer is more and more often the hunter. We, the marketers who hold the answers to her problems, must do what we can to be found. And we need to understand that although we can solve the problem, and she is looking for a solution to the problem, the customer might not be looking for us. Even if the solution is a better mousetrap, the customer might be looking for something completely different. She might be looking for a better cat or a feisty rat-terrier or an exterminator or poison or an animal trainer or a hypnotherapist (so she can “become one with the mice”).

Moral: If we want to be found, we must be wherever our prospective customer is looking. If we want the customer to buy what we are selling, we must go beyond positioning our mousetrap as the best mousetrap available. We must even go beyond positioning our mousetrap as a solution to our prospect’s burgeoning mouse problem.

Lesson: We must persuade the customer that, of all of the options she is considering, the mousetrap we have invented for her is the solution that she’s been looking for. Even if it’s not the one she has been shopping for.

If your customer calls it a basement, call it a basement

Basements or Plumbers

At a workshop I was running on how to make smart decisions about Yellow Pages advertising, I gave the group an assignment:  Imagine you are a single mom with two school-aged kids.  It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday night, you just got the children into bed, and a pipe has burst in your basement, releasing a flood of smelly gross stuff into your rec room.  Open your Yellow Pages and find help.

The participants opened their directories and, within a few minutes, most had spotted a plumber whose ad might persuade them that he could solve their problem.  One young woman, however, was having difficulty and complained she couldn’t find anything.  I looked over her shoulder.  No wonder she was baffled.  Rather than opening her book to “P” for plumbers, she was looking under “B” for basements.

Basements or Levels

On a separate occasion, a remodeler saw an opportunity: He had decided to focus on basements, establish himself as the expert in this niche, and build a franchise.  But the word “basement” just didn’t sound right to him.  Too downscale, too declasse.  He preferred the term “lower level.”

So he put the words “lower level” into his company’s name.  He put them in his printed materials and all over this web site — the word “basement” was banned.   He instructed his employees and the colleagues in his BNI group to never permit the word “basement” to cross their lips again.

And nobody ever found his website, unless they typed his URL right into the navigation bar.  The reason: when a homeowner goes to Google looking for a contractor to finish or remodel his house’s lower level, what does he type into the search bar?  “Basement.”

Moral: If you want to be found in a print directory like the Yellow Pages or an online directory like the Google database, you need to describe your services using the same words your customer is going to use to look for you, not the words you think your customer should use.

Lesson: Begin with an understanding of where prospective customers will be looking for you.  The young woman in my Yellow Pages seminar will probably never look in the Yellow Pages to solve a flooding basement problem — she’ll look on the internet.  (Good thing she came to my seminar so she’ll know how to make good choices with the YP for her business, considering she doesn’t use the YP herself.)  When she tunes in, though, will she find what she’s looking for?  She will, if a savvy plumber knows she’s going to plug “flooded basement” into the search bar.

Once you know where people are going to look for you, make it your mission to understand the process they will go through to look for you.  Then make it insanely easy for them to find you.  If you’re going after the Yellow Pages user, have a listing in the section of the directory they’ll be looking in.  If you’re going after the web user, load up your page content with keywords that your prospect will use to hunt for a company that does what yours does.  Don’t require your customers to learn your language in order to do business with you.  Speak theirs.

Omission detection

Listen to what customers say. But give credence to what they do.

Let’s say you were a mom.  A market researcher calls you and asks:

What criteria do you use in selecting breakfast cereal for your kids?

What would your answer be?

My first stint out of business school was at a large breakfast cereal company, and this question was asked of thousands of moms by a very reputable and well-meaning market research organization.  The overwhelming answer to the question was, of course, nutrition.

How, then, was the brand group to account for the fact that the number one selling brand at the time was Cap’n Crunch?  Could it be that the major purchasers of breakfast cereals at the time were not moms, but college freshmen?  (No.)  Then what?  Could it be that the moms lied to the researchers?

Well, yes and no.  There are two things going on when researchers research.  The first is that they are asking questions.  The second is that the questions pass through the filters of the people being asked, which changes the answers.  That’s right: The very fact of being asked changes the answer.

Nutrition was important to these moms.  However, there was something more pressing than nutrition, which was what will my kids eat? Nutrition doesn’t do kids any good if it’s just sitting there in the bowl getting soggy.

Then why didn’t they just say that?  Why didn’t they just say that the number one criterion is what my kids will eat, followed by nutrition?  Or that nutrition is most important, but given a choice between nutrition that tastes like sugar and nutrition that tastes like bark, they’ll choose the one their kids will eat?  Or that nutrition and sugar are equally important?

It’s because the market research company was asking a question it didn’t even know it was asking.

Let’s say you were a husband.  Your wife pulls on a new pair of jeans and asks:

Do these jeans make my butt look big?

Any man on the planet knows what the real question is, and it has nothing to do with big butts.  The real question is:  Do you love me?

So, you’re a mom.  A total stranger calls you on the phone and asks:

What criteria do you use in selecting breakfast cereal for your kids?

You know what the real question is, don’t you?  The real question is: Are you a good mom?

The moms in this study gave the answer they thought a good mom would give because they wanted, not only for the researcher to think of them as good moms, but to think of themselves as good moms.

Moral: People don’t necessarily answer questions that tell you who they are, but, rather, who they want to be and who they want you to think they are.  Likewise, their expressed opinions, such as about the importance of nutrition, won’t always augur their choices.  There may be a trump card right under the surface that they haven’t given voice to — or even consciously considered.

Lesson: If you want to get to the heart of why people do what they do, start with the what, and follow with the why. A better set of questions would have been:

• What cereals are in your cabinet right now?  Why those?
• What cereals did your kids eat for breakfast today?  Why those?
• When you go grocery shopping next, which cereals are you likely to buy?  Why those?

Listen to the feedback people give you about your products and services.  But, more important, pay attention to what they do.  That will give you as much insight into their values as anything they will reveal to you through their words.

(c) 2009 Victoria Lynn Jones

Don’t assume

Your customer is doing enough assuming for the both of you

I stood in the Lion House beside a mother and her little boy, watching a Siberian tiger pace back and forth in its ancient cage.  Above the cage was a framed picture:

The child pointed to the picture and asked, “Mom, what does that mean?”

His mother replied, “It means that animal eats deer, honey.”

In other words, “I don’t know, but you don’t need to know that I don’t know.”  She could have said, “I don’t know, but let’s ask this zookeeper over here.”  Or, “I don’t know, but let’s copy it and look it up when we get home.”  Or, “I don’t know, but let’s remember what it looks like and see if we can find it anywhere else at the zoo today.” (Did you know that the Galapagos tortoise eats deer?)  Instead, the route this mom took was to make an assumption and state it as fact.

Now, maybe her son’s question was coming at the end of an annoying stream of questions that he had been rattling off all day, and his mom had just had enough.  Or maybe she felt that a mom’s job was to be all-knowing and thought that it is better to give a child a wrong answer than to demonstrate fallibility. I suspect, however, that, even though they were at the zoo to learn things, it was just too much trouble to think about having to look for the answer to this question when there are penguins and gibbons and cows yet to visit.  It requires a lot less exertion to just make an assumption and move on — her son is probably going to forget all about it in five minutes anyway.

We tend to roll our eyes at people who are so lazy or stupid that they can’t understand what we’re trying to sell them when it’s right in front of their faces.  And then we wring our hands at how quickly they forget our messages.

The zoo assumed that zoo visitors would understand what this picture means.  (After all, the people who work at the zoo understand this picture, so it stands to reason that everyone else does too, right?)  And it assumed that the meaning behind the picture would be important enough to remember.  So it didn’t offer any further explanation — just the pictorial shortcut to an underlying message which it believed would be self-evident.

Moral: If this is how hard someone is going to work to figure something out when he/she is on an expedition whose whole purpose is to figure things out, imagine how hard he/she is not going to work to figure out what your organization’s communications mean — whether the communications are conveyed via picture or word or deed.

Lesson: Make it insanely easy for everyone to figure out what your organization and its products/services are about — and why they should matter to anyone besides you.  If you use logos and graphics, make sure that their meaning is as clear to your customer as they are to you.  If they’re not clear, give them a hint.

By the way:

(c) 2009 Victoria Lynn Jones