This past class we went over 30 second commercials and how they should be structured. In case you missed the notes, the structure is this:
- My name is _______ and I am a _______ with __________.
- We provide ________ to _____ customers who ______.
- A question I hear a lot is _____________ (where am I going with that psychologically/pain).
- Typically, customers who do business with us do so because:
- __________
- __________
- __________
- Probably the biggest thing we do for customers is _____________.
I had a key takeaway from our class on Friday and I want to focus particularly on the blue text. The part that I put in blue was interesting to me because I was reminded of a very important aspect of selling: Pain. When I gave my 30 second commercial, I did not focus on any pain that I was solving. The blue text is where you want to pinpoint the customers’ pain in a 30 second commercial. Why does a customer really need to do business with you? What is something that you can provide for them to help them in some way?
It is critical to sufficiently and succinctly address the pain your product is solving when doing a 30 second commercial. After all, “No pain, no sale.”
Sadly, I wasn’t in class on Friday, but this looks like it was a good lecture. It is so important to address what kind of pain you are addressing. This better helps you to be direct with your customers and potential customers. I hate when companies pretend like they can address whatever pain I am having simply because they want my money. A company should be up front with you so they can better address you if they really cant fix your pain and someone else could better address it.
This exercise was a lot harder than I thought. Especially because I was trying to write one up for Penny Discovery – which isn’t exactly a conventional business model. My main problem was that I devoted way too many sentences to explaining how we do what we do. Since no other educational app gives kids real toys as rewards, I wasted a lot of breath trying to give my listeners an exact picture of us as a company. If I would have instead focused on the pain points, I probably would be able to open up much more of a dialog with my customer since they would be more curious as to how we meet their needs – which leads to trust and empathy (yay!).
So Peter, I totally agree with you – I should have focused on the pain first – not just trying to accurately frame my business and get my point across – because therein lies the sale.
As strange as it may sound, I believe Newton’s first law of motion tells us exactly what our mindset needs to be when making the sale. An object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. People need to be moved- they need to be reminded of those things that irk them, cause them discomfort, or inconvenience. When a salesman can successfully find these customer pressure points, all he needs to do is apply some force and watch them move. We all hate pain, and when you can convince someone you can alleviate that pain and make their life better, you’ve made the sale.
It was difficult to pinpoint the pain in these three bullet points. I think part of this stems from our inner desire to share all the good things and potential benefits with our customers. We don’t want to talk about the bad because we are afraid it will turn the customer off from what we are trying to sell them. We have to see past this fear to realize that talking about the pain of the concept is what really gets the customer searching for a solution: something we are just now ready to share with them.