We all have our own ways of connecting with our business clients, our leadership team, and our personal relationships. From a business point of view, everything we say tells our potential clients something. The language on our websites and the content we use for marketing say a lot about who we are and how we work. Business owners may not realize how important it is to use the right words in all of their marketing. One mistake that companies make is sending out marketing messages that contradict each other. This can cause confusion and make people less likely to buy. Another mistake is when a business doesn’t use the language that its clients are used to.
This problem happens when marketing uses jargon and technical terms that are specific to a certain field. This kind of jargon is hard for clients to understand. This kind of “business-speak” makes it hard for clients to understand what you’re saying. Then, some people feel too shy to ask you to speak more simply so they can understand you. This lack of connection makes the client feel further away. If this confusion keeps going on, it might cost a sale. So how do you make up for this?
Rule of business marketing: You must speak the language of your clients.
If you want your message to be heard, you have to speak the client’s language. Not a spoken language, but the way the client expresses how they feel and what they want.
When a client comes to your business, they will have a request, a need, or a want. This is how they express their emotions. How they talk about it will tell you about their language and how important it is to them emotionally. If you sell widgets and a customer tells you, “The last company I bought widgets from ripped me off by selling me this cheap crap,” you know that they feel taken advantage of. This client cares about quality. So use your sales leadership skills to show them how good your products are. Getting their attention is easy. Just talk to them about how they feel!
Marketing messages should be the same.
Once you know what you want to say and how to say it, write it in a way that your potential client will understand. Then it’s time to look over all of your marketing messages. This includes what people see in your ads, what they read on your website, and what you say when they call. Every marketing and sales process has more than one step, so it’s important to make sure that the messages from each step are the same.
From what we know about sales conversion, it’s easy to see where one step doesn’t fit with the next. You’ll know because you’ll see that you’re losing a lot of potential customers. When the message is wrong from one step to the next, this happens. So be on the lookout for a big drop in conversion from one step to the next. For example, if your website sends you leads for a more expensive service that you follow up on, you might expect that only 25% of those leads will turn into clients. That makes sense. If you’re getting less than that, it’s likely that your conversion rate is very low, like 5%. Why? Because sales and marketing conversion is like an ON/OFF switch; it either works well or doesn’t work at all.
Change the way you talk to people to get new business clients.
Don’t give up on your own ideas just because a process or script works. It might work most of the time, but most clients won’t connect well with it. Change it to fit the way you build relationships and ask open-ended questions to find out what you need to know. Remember to listen to the feelings behind the words so you can talk to the client about how they feel. When you understand how the client feels, it will be easy and quick to meet their needs, and they will be happy to recommend your business to their friends and family.