Insight #4: Your Introduction - It's An Issue Of Confidence

There are two factors at work in a prospect’s subconscious mind when he’s considering doing business with you: confidence and risk. Your job in advertising is to raise confidence and lower risk. If you successfully do that, you’ll sew up all the business you want. So let’s talk first about confidence.

The problem in today’s marketplace is this: People are more jaded, skeptical, and wary. They’re wary of getting ripped off, jaded from receiving bad service, and skeptical of offers sounding too good to be true. In short, people are generally in a defensive buying position. As a result, their tendency is to either do nothing (the dreaded competitor called “inertia”) or to stick with their current provider, even if the relationship isn’t all that great.

Many people figure it’s safer to stay in a so-so relationship than to risk testing the waters to find a new company to do business with. (The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know!)

You can probably mentally validate this through your own personal buying habits. Have you ever become fed up with a company that you’ve been doing business with, gone to the yellow pages, and called around looking for someone better? Then after becoming frustrated and exhausted, you meekly return to the original culprit, because you’ve perceived that there are no better options available? Of course you have. We all have. You know by now the reason for this is that major problem called the “Confidence Gap”. The customer has no ability to make any distinction about whether any of the options are any better or worse or different than any of the others. There are a lot of different reasons for this confusion in the marketplace. But, the biggest one is most likely due to the dramatic increase in the number of choices people now have.

Back in the old days when you wanted to buy a Ford, where did you go? To the Ford dealership, of course. Which Ford dealership? THE Ford dealership. Why? Because it was most likely the only one anywhere near your home. And after you got to the dealership, where specifically in the dealership did you go to find out information on the vehicle? That’s right - to the salesperson. And why to him? Was it because you loved being “hammered” and “controlled”? Did you enjoy pain more then than you do now? Of course not. The reason you went to the dealership and the obnoxious salesperson then was because it was the ONLY way you could find out any information about the vehicle. It was your only choice.

So, what about now? Where do you go now? You go to one of the 17 Ford dealerships within a 50 mile radius of your home. Or, if you’re like most car buyers, you go to the newsstand first and pick up a magazine detailing retail and dealer invoice prices of all models and styles and options. Then you may actually visit one or two, then get quotes from 4 or 5 up to a dozen dealers.

Let’s take this a step further to show you how confidence gets eroded. If you’ve ever bought a new car, you’ve experienced the hassle of trying to find the best deal. You look in the paper and see the model you want advertised for a really low price. When you get to the dealership, you find out that the vehicle is a totally stripped-down version, there’s only one of them anyway, and it’s painted avocado green. But “coincidentally”, they do happen to have the one you really wanted for only $8,000 more than the one in the ad. So, the next time you scan the newspaper and notice the fine print in the ad, “only one available at this price”, you’ll know not to fall for that trick again.

Well, now you’re tired. So, you flip on the TV, and wouldn’t you know it. There’s a commercial by a Ford dealership and they say that they’ve got the largest inventory of Fords in the state. So you make a mental note to go check out that place. You flip the channel and there’s another commercial by a different Ford dealership, and guess what? They’re the largest volume Ford dealership in the city. Wow! Can that be true? As you’re driving over to settle the issue of who’s actually the largest, you hear an ad on the radio by a leasing company that says you’d be a fool to buy a car when leasing is so much cheaper...and they can handle all the details right over the phone.

Then you see a billboard for Vehix.com. Okay, let’s stop here. This is a fairly realistic scenario, right? Who do you have confidence in after trying to sort this mess out? The problem? All the sellers are trying to trick buyers into coming into their showroom so they can pressure them into paying too much for something they didn’t really want in the first place. The buyer-seller relationship is, at its worse, totally adversarial or at its best, uncomfortable, confusing, and unsatisfying.

Not to beat a dead horse, but this is what’s called the “Confidence Gap”. The customer has no ability to determine if any of his or her purchase options are any different, better or worse than any of the others. Obviously, the big question is “how to overcome this?” How do you build confidence? There are three key concepts to building confidence. You must do these if you want people to trust your business. Here they are, stated in simple terms:

In our Monopolize Your Marketplace On-Demand Program, we go into a lot of detail about how to conduct surveys and find out exactly what your customers want. There’s not enough space and time to go into that much detail here. So, here are some basics. Ask your current customers, past customers, and prospects who haven’t become customers yet what they want in your kind of business.

3 Steps To Gain Your Customer's Confidence And Find Out What They Really Want From You

First step, find out what they want. Simple enough, right? Here’s how you find out: ASK. That’s it. Ask. Now the tricky part is this: How you ask and what you ask?

But don’t just go ask them, “What do you look for in a printing company...or in a temporary personnel service...or in a hair salon? (Or whatever your business is.) Put some thought into it beforehand. Identify some of the typical problems and frustrations prospects experience when trying to do business in your industry. Know what exactly are the problems and frustrations your product and service solve for the customer. Figure out some things that you could do that customers might really like and appreciate.

Then when you survey your customers, in addition to just asking them what they’re looking for when doing business in your industry, you can bounce your ideas off them and validate whether or not the things you’ve identified as important or innovative are actually important or innovative. But, most importantly, don’t neglect the opportunity to ask. Don’t assume you already know. Because, if you did know, you’d already have all the business tied up, right? So just ASK!

The second step to gaining confidence is to give the customer what they want. If you take the time to ask, and you figure out what they want, GIVE IT TO THEM. Does this sound familiar at all? This is your InsideRreality (what you do best that differentiates your business from your competitors). You’re crafting your Inside Reality so it reflects what your customers want.

Here’s a tip: In today’s competitive marketplace, you’ve got to innovate and make your business better by a big margin. You can’t just make your business 5% better or 10% better than the competition. That’s not enough to generate the confidence people need to give you a try. You have to make your business 50% better or 100% better or 300% better than the others. If you don’t, someone else will. You need to have a good inside reality if you want to engender confidence with your prospects and customers. It’s a critical step.

The third step to gaining confidence is the really tricky one. You need to explain what you do in a believable and embraceable way. What are you explaining? It’s your Outside Perception. You need to learn how to take your Inside Reality and communicate it in a way that breaks through the clutter of noise (the confusion of mixed messages) in the marketplace. The message needs to bridge the Confidence Gap in order to gain the confidence of your prospects.

Find out what prospects want. Give it to them. Say it in a way that’s believable. Take the Inside Reality of your business and convey it in a way that makes your business able to be perceived as unique and the obvious choice.

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