Your clients don't care about you!

It's shocking, I know, but your clients don't care about you, or your company, or your products. They are not interested in when your company was founded, the number of employees you have, the production techniques you use or the fact that you have just moved to a new site. All they really care about is themselves, all they want to know is what you or your products are going to do for THEM. So why do so many of the sales letters, presentations and pitches that I see on a daily basis fail to grasp this simple fact?

While I sit here writing this article I am looking at "The Grocer" which is the trade magazine for the food industry. Now I know that this is a business to business communication and so probably not the most exciting magazine in the world and yet companies are spending good money to sell their products through this publication. Time and time again all they talk about is themselves, and to prove it here are some examples of the headlines of the adverts contained within it:

"We're proud of our roots..."

"We've bitten into the nibbles sector..."

"Brand new from the brand leader"

and I could go on and on!

All the people reading these adverts want to know is what are these products going to do for them? What will they do for their business? How much more money will they make for them? In fact every customer you talk to is tuned into one radio station:

WIIFM

What
Is
In
It
For
Me

Every time your client reads an advert, or sales letter, sees a presentation or a sales pitch, all they want to know is what is in it for them! In fact there is a saying:

“Clients don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care"

So the question here is how can we show we care about our clients? Well not by talking about ourselves and telling them how fantastic we are! If we are going to show how much we care, we must first understand them, their business and the challenges that they face. In the words of the great Stephen Covey we must:

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Now as salespeople we can do this by asking questions, lots of questions to find out what exactly it is that they want, and having asked these questions really listen to what they are saying and then incorporate this information into our approach.

Bill Robinson