In today’s blog, we are going to talk about your business… and why anyone should buy anything from you!!
This is a tricky question. A lot of business owners can’t answer that off the top of their heads. I remember, somebody told me once, I need to be able to wake you up from a dead sleep and ask you why people should buy from you. And you should be able to rattle it off without even thinking.
So with that in mind, I have a few questions for you.
What is it that you do?
What product do you sell or what service do you offer?
Why is your product or service better than everybody else’s?
In other words, and this is the key…
Why should I buy this from you, instead of somebody else?
You might have to go think about that for a while. Because you need to be able to answer that question instantaneously. It is the single most critical question you need to answer before you can effectively market to the public. If you can’t answer the question to yourself, the public isn’t gonna buy from you.
I’m going to give you two examples of what I’m talking about. Recently, I got a call from a guy. I used to work with. He is in Portland, Oregon. I was an interim CEO for an insurance company. He had left the company and started his own business selling insurance. Open enrollment was coming up and he called me one day and he said, “Hey, Brian, I need to ask you a favor.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “I need an opening line or a pitch to get in the door or past the gatekeeper in these companies.” He was looking for a magic bullet. And I said, “Well, let me ask you something. Why should I, as a customer, buy from you? And he said, “Well, because I offer great customer service.” And my response was, “So what! Everybody tells me they offer great customer service, but most of them don’t.” And he said, “Well, you know, I care about your employees.” And I said again, “So what, telling me that you care about my employees means nothing to me. And by the way, everybody says the same thing. Why do you care more than they do? You’re gonna have to do much better than that. Because right now, you sound like a salesperson.”
At this point, he didn’t have an answer. And we sat there in silence for about a minute. And I said, “Listen, here’s what you need to do. You need to take some time. And you need to figure out the answer to that question, and it needs to roll off your tongue, and it needs to make sense. And when you have that answer to the question, “why should I buy from you” call me back, and we’ll talk through it.” He said, “Thanks”, and hung up.
Now, truthfully, if he figures out the answer to that question, he doesn’t need to call me back. And here’s why, when you figure out why… that’s your pitch. When you figure out why… that is your magic bullet. When you have something that nobody else has, or that you do better than they do, or there’s a reason why they should buy from you… THEY WILL BUY. So that was example number one.
Now, this is kind of an opposite example. When I wrote my first book, I was looking for an editor. I looked at a few large companies. And then I got a referral from another friend. So I called the referral, her name was Hillary. I shared with her what I was doing, and the companies I was looking at. I told her, I really liked this one company in particular, and I thought I was gonna go with them. We talked for a few minutes…She was very knowledgeable about the industry, and the job I wanted to be done. She also knew the company I was talking about. She then said to me, “You know, I actually talked to them about working for them in the past as a subcontractor, because, you know, they don’t really have all these editors in-house, they subcontract this work out, and ultimately, I decided against it and chose to keep growing my own business as opposed to working with them.”
So she told me what her fee structure was and that she felt like the company was overcharging their clients. She thought she could finish the job and be much more cost-effective. I would get exactly the same thing the company was selling me for less money. BOOM…that is what hit home. I realized this company was basically going to take my money, and subcontract out the work to someone like Hillary. I would be paying a middleman, I would not get any more value for my money. But if I went with Hillary, I’d get the exact same service…for less money.
This is what she was offering To me that I couldn’t get from the other company. It made sense. By the way, she did an amazing job and I’m super glad that I went with her. She answered THE question. And it’s funny, I look back, and I don’t even know if she realized what she was doing when she did that. But she had the single most critical piece, which is why and so I chose Hillary. That is how you get people to buy from you.