Building a Reason to Care

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

You told me the what, but not the so-what. 

You have probably heard this before. It’s often delivered as an admonishment to a salesperson or marketer by a customer or prospect. Maybe someone has said it to you. If we’ve all heard it, why are we not delivering a reason to care more often?

Because it’s hard. As marketers, we all know better than just stating the what, but getting to the so-what takes a lot of work. Sometimes it just takes time for a market to emerge or for customers to fall in love with a product. Only then can you go back and ask customers why they love a product so much or what it does to make their life or job easier.

For obvious reasons, this problem is most acute in nascent markets. No one has sold such a product before. You may have very few customers to ask questions of, and probably – if you know the technology adoption curve – they are all innovators (tech enthusiasts) and early adopters (visionaries). Innovators buy things because they are curious. Visionaries have a concept for how a product can improve their lives or jobs; they are just not the best at succinctly expressing the so-what.

All hope is not lost. It just takes courage, some hard work, and being okay with revising your work. Here’s my process.

1) Form a hypothesis – You must have some idea of the so-what but probably lack the proof you need. I think my new widget will save people an hour a day because it’s so much faster than doing things the (soon-to-be old) way.

2) Make some assumptions – These are allowed if you are upfront about them and clear on what they are. My widget is voice controlled and doesn’t require typing. It also saves old requests and suggests them to you as solutions to future tasks. With ten daily tasks, saving around five minutes per task is about an hour. We’re getting there, but this is not yet the so-what.

3) Do some research – Get on Google and find out how much time people spend filling out forms or setting up tasks. Maybe you are targeting a specific document- or process-heavy industry, like healthcare. Surely you can find some stats on average typing speed, number of documents per doctor’s visit, and that kind of thing. Some stats on employee productivity and retention might also help. This is the data, the research, the stats to back up or bolster your assumptions. You may find yourself mixing stats from many different sources. That’s okay.

4) State your case – My widget will make your team more productive. It will save them more than half a day a week of manual tasks (1 hour x 5 days). That will both make them happier and more likely to stay, and save you money by needing fewer people. Compared to the cost of recruiting replacement employees and paying more salaries, my widget is a no-brainer. Now you have your so-what. Notice we’re not talking about the widget, what it looks like, or what kind of microchip it has inside. Instead, we’re talking about the impact it will have.

5) Iterate – If you have customers, run your so-what by them. See if they buy it. Don’t be crushed if they give you another angle to pursue instead. Sometimes customers need to have something to react to, and their feedback can often put you on the right track. Try it with prospects, too. Here you are looking to see if they bite on your so-what.

There you have it. Not rocket science, just the willingness to stick your neck out and take critical feedback. Once you have a reason to care that works and are selling to many customers, you can go back to them and start building your own proprietary research to support your so-what story.

If you want to go deeper on this idea, I strongly recommend reading The Challenger Sale and understanding the commercial teaching concept. Put simply, a commercial teaching not only presents a new idea but undermines an existing one. Using this technique, marketers can make their so-what powerful enough to change how prospects see a product entirely.