Do you speak your customer's 'Lingo'?

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you just can’t connect with your customer because they perhaps don’t speak the same ‘lingo’ as you do?  It happens all the time and can make a customer feel uneducated and emotionally disconnected.  Don’t fret, you still have time to make a change and fix it. A plethora of business professionals I've had the pleasure speaking to about this subject matter at hand have trouble talking a customer’s lingo as well, all in part because they're conditioned to think in very "balanced" terms when they talk to customers...and especially when it comes to making an offer.

Proposals happen to be a common malpractice where this commonly takes place. However, it's certainly evident in other business practices as well, like on your website.

Not only do most websites, proposals and other marketing material start out by talking about the individuals who created or designed them, rather than the audience they are intended to be written for, the CUSTOMER. The subject matter also tends to utilize a lot of irrational language. Have you ever seen or been a part of this where the subject matter attempts to convince people to buy using facts and logic.  Not that this is wrong, however, is it really the best place to use this material when trying to speak to your customer audience?

What could possibly be wrong with using facts and logic?

Well, more than you might think. It happens to do with how decisions are made in our brains.

Time to turn into ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ for a moment. Did you know that the driving force behind decision-making comes from a part of our brain called the limbic system (see Wikipedia for more information about this)? This is the part of the brain where emotions are processed.

In fact, when your limbic system is damaged, you can become paralyzed with indecision, consequently over miniscule choices like what to wear, what to eat or even what to do. You can weigh all the reasons rationally, yet never be able to actually turn that knowledge into a decision. Scary isn’t it?

Now, what if this happens when you're trying to convince a customer to conduct business with you?

They can have all the facts at their disposal...but if you haven't connected with the ‘emotional’ state for buying, well, let's just assume you have a much better chance at closing the deal if you actually connect with their emotional state of mind and connect with them with ‘points of pain’.

Obviously do want to give your customers good reasons to buy. But you also need to engage them emotionally.

One of the very simple ways you can do this is by taking rational, objective sorts of words, and just replacing them with more emotive ones that connect better with their emotions. Like this:

trademark --> brand

campaign --> promote

construct --> build

implementation --> differentiation

And of course you can also add extra emotional words, while removing some of the rational ones. Words like "powerful" and "successful" and "intense" are quite emotionally laden, whereas words like "purchase" and "propose" are not.

Just doing this can have a huge effect on the emotional impact of your text. It's subtle, and may not seem like it'll do much -- but what you're doing is invoking emotion through careful placement of powerful words.

And again, nowhere is this more vital than in your proposal or your website. That's a key hinge that your entire sales platform rotates around -- so small changes there can produce huge changes overall in the future.

If you need help with this, ConnecTheDot can help just shoot us an email.