Learn to Speak Their Language and Attract Better Fit Leads

Sales is like a tripod: and when you think about it, a tripod is only as strong as its weakest side. If just one side is even slightly off, even though it might not immediately topple over, the whole thing starts to wobble precariously. The three parts of sales must all be in alignment to keep your business sturdy and stable. If something’s even a little off about your offer, your audience or your messaging, you might be making sales, you might be just getting by, but your business is not operating at its best and that’s costing you in the long run.  

Real talk for a minute? It’s been a time, friends. 

All around the world 2023 was hard, in life, in business. I feel like I’ve been saying it a lot since 2020 happened, and well, it 2020’d all over everything. But every year since has presented such different challenges… and 2023 was certainly no exception. Everyone I’ve talked to has felt it. If we’ve all felt it, that includes your customers and prospects. People today are more careful than ever about taking a chance on anything that doesn’t communicate a clear and resounding hell-yes and checks all their boxes, no matter if you’re in b2b or b2c space and no matter your offer.

Never before has it been more important to make sure you’re communicating your offer(s) clearly, concisely and effectively. The most critical part to communicate is the transformation your prospects can look forward to once they’ve implemented the solution you offer. On the other side of the same coin, you run a business, and a clear and concise budget matters. When it comes to ROI, it makes sense that you only want to allocate resources to activities that actually get you those perfect fit leads. But what does that look like?

How do you attract the right leads?

Lead attraction isn’t just about showing up where your audience shows up or when they need you. 

That’s what people say a lot, right? Just show up where they are! The implication being that the rest will take care of itself. 

What no one seems to be talking about is that just being where your audience is, is only part of the equation.

Think about it like this, what happens when you’re in a room, and all someone does is talk about themselves?  Me Me Me. (Marcia. Marcia. Marcia. If you know, you know)

You find a reason to get out of there!

The best conversations are two-sided, and that never starts with a Me, Me, Me.

Sure it’s important they understand the value that YOU bring, but they need to know the WIIFM factor–what’s in it for me. That means you need to have the right message so that they can feel like you’re talking directly to them. 

Starting the Conversation

How do we navigate a two-sided conversation before you ever get them on the phone? It’s natural, organic to have a two-sided conversation on a call. It’s something else entirely when you’re trying to get them on the phone in the first place.

Why is it so hard to get them on the call? The idea of “the sales call” is pretty much universal. And unfortunately, it doesn’t stir good feelings. That bad rep sales got stuck with is rooted in the fact that we tend to imagine the call as convincing people to buy things they don’t necessarily need. We assume the point of sales is to generate the highest numbers in revenue – and that’s where it begins and ends. (Think used car salesman vibes.)

But selling is really just effective communication. It’s a way to let the people for whom you created your product/service know who you are, how your solution can transform them, and why you’re the best bet against your competition. And remember, your audience WANTS you to sell to them! They have a problem they’re willing to pay to have solved. They just need you to effectively communicate that to them.

It doesn’t matter what your product or service is, how much it costs, or who it’s made for. The tripod of sales applies every single time: 

1. Offer
2. Audience
3. Messaging

Fun fact about the human brain: our emotional response is deeper than our logical response. Long before we process the meaning of words and phrases, we are already reacting to them based on how those words make us feel. Your offer can’t just tell them the info, the what and the how, it needs to hit them right in the feels. 

Crafting Your Offer

What goes into a good offer? How do you know you have the right offer? How do you test your offers/know you’re on the right track? How do you craft an offer that makes them feel something? 

This is both art and science. 

Meaning there are some fundamentals and strategies that go into it, but it’s not a formulaic, set and forget approach. 

Your offers need to be tested, tweaked and optimized based on the real-time needs, whims and growth of your audience. 

This is where launching your minimum viable product (MVP) using an AGILE framework comes into play. Before you invest in a fancy new sales page and funnel with all the bells and whistles, try launching your new offer in Google doc to test it! Google docs are for more than just drafting and collaborating with your team. Sales pages presented as a Google doc are fully customizable – you can make the sales page as designed or plain as you want. With over 121 billion emails sent through Gmail each and every day, you can pretty much guarantee all of your prospects are already using, or at least familiar with, the Google doc.  It is a truly versatile and often underestimated tool in client facing business.

One of the best ways to come up with new offers is to ask your audience what they want. You can do this through customer interviews, surveys and social media. You can also spend some time digging through the testimonials on sites like TrustPilot, and make notes of any comments about how they wish the product was better and the things they felt were lacking or missing altogether. Make sure you’re including the reviews for your competition in this exercise.

Identifying Your Perfect-Fit Audience

Your audience, also referred to as your target market, often goes through stages that dictate how they’re likely to see/react to your product, based on the overall market that you’re in. 

As more and more options become available, and they see more and more sales messaging about the thing that you do, from your competition as well as you, they become more and more jaded. 

And let’s be frank: after 2023 we, as a global community of consumers, jaded or not, are much more savvy – no matter who we are or what we’re buying. An audience of savvy consumers means you need to work that much harder to not just reach them, but to connect with them – before they shut you out with the rest of the noise. 

Once you’ve identified your audience, it can be helpful to create buyer personas or ideal client avatars (ICAs). You do this by creating a small number of fictional characters to represent individuals in your audience. You give them a name, a picture, and list their demographics, psychographics and behaviorgraphics. Psychographics and behaviorgraphics is just marketing speak for the way they think and act. What are their desires, fears, needs? How do they behave as a consumer? As a human in the world interacting with other humans? 

This may seem juvenile or like a waste of time, but it helps give you and your team a concrete idea of exactly who you’re speaking to when choosing the language to communicate your offers and fine tuning your messaging. When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. And a savvy consumer needs to be addressed directly. 

Finding the Right Messaging

How do you lower the defenses of a savvy consumer enough to reach them? You get the wording of your messaging just right. If you nail your messaging, you have to do less work to find and convince them, because they’re drawn to you – something they can’t quite put their finger on, but they just know you’re speaking to them. 

The kind of brand messaging that attracts the highest quality leads is a perfect blend of you, them, and the solution you offer – like any recipe, if one is too strong and others not enough, the whole flavor is off. 

Crafting brand messaging that resonates requires you to know when and where to lean into emotion vs appeal to logic. In terms of your messaging hierarchy, the emotional stuff is the high level stuff. Any language that conveys logic should be placed deeper in the messaging hierarchy, ensuring they’ve already made that emotional connection before you get them thinking. Some parts of your messaging is audience driven, some is timing, some is where the information will go. The unifying piece is that it should all be communicated in voice of customer (VOC) language. 

So what is VOC and where do you find/learn it?  

Use VOC in Your Brand Messaging for High Quality Leads

Voice of customer means using the language and phrases your audiences already use to describe themselves, their problems, and the solutions they’re looking for, and applying that language to your offers. If you describe your products/services using the language they already speak, they perk up. 

Ever been somewhere crowded, where there are a lot of conversations happening and you’re aware of all the noise, but you’re not hearing any one conversation in particular? 

Then suddenly you tune into one of those conversations because you overhear a few key words that resonate with you, that speak to you, about something you’re going through or care deeply about? 

This is what your marketplace is like. 

All the advertising, all the messaging, it’s just a lot of noise, and sometimes it gets really loud. You cut through the noise and reach your perfect fit leads by using Voice of Customer (VOC) in your messaging.

There are mainly three ways you uncover it. 

1. You do market research. 
2. Talk to people who are just like your target audience …

(…and ask open-ended questions—the 5ws and an h) 

1. Pay attention to what people say in forums or reviews.

How do you know your messaging is working?

Here are 5 things your message needs to do:

1. Show your audience WIIFM (the what’s in it for me factor)
2. Be tailored to their motivations and pain points.
3. Use language that mirrors their own.
4. Paint a picture of what they can achieve after working with you.
5. Make the decision to buy a no brainer, and make it easy to take action.

Your business is like an expensive and precious piece of equipment mounted on the tripod of your sales: your offer, your audience and your messaging. 

You don’t want to leave one of those legs wobbly and risk damaging your business. It could be a matter of fine-tuning one aspect. The way to do this? Regular check-ups. The world and market are always changing… so it makes sense to check in periodically to make sure that all the pieces of your tripod, offer, audience and messaging, fit together and are still working. 

If you build regular check-ups into your process you know exactly when to perform the regular checks and maintenance required to keep any piece of equipment in good working order. 

Like a camera on a tripod, when the legs are all sturdy, you’re capturing a clear picture that dazzles your audience. If one leg of the tripod is too short, too long, or in need of repair, you can’t take a clear picture and your audience is left with something blurry that they have to work too hard to figure out – they’ll just keep looking for a more impressive picture. 

Want More Perfect Fit Leads? 

It can be overwhelming to tackle all of this on your own: voice of customer research, positioning your offers, brand messaging. The art and science of perfectly positioning an offer is sometimes best done with outside help, especially because a neutral 3rd party can provide something you can’t: distance to see objectively.

If you have an offer, an audience, and you’re making some sales but not enough – or you know that something just isn’t working – I offer group and private coaching where we workshop it. Then again, if you want to take on a full brand messaging project because you know there’s a disconnect in your business, we can talk about that, too. 

Book a consultation today to find out how you can make more effortless sales by learning their language to forge deeper connections with your audience and lower the defenses of today’s savviest consumers.