Do You Know What You Are Building?

The single most important piece of successful product uptake is being able to clearly communicate the value proposition to the prospective buyer.

Hi, Nate. So what do you have here?

I will be asked this question dozens of times next week at a major industry conference. I used to go into these conferences and just wing it. I'll just say whatever comes to mind. No big deal, right? Right?!

What I learned very quickly is that people don't really have a lot of patience and will easily get distracted based on your word choice. This is absolutely the case in person. Now imagine being online where you are competing with cat videos and Facebook notifications. You will be ignored.

One thing that I have focused a tremendous amount of time on over the past few years is dialing in succinct descriptions of our products and intentionally selecting vocabulary that matches the intended audience. You should be able to describe your products and their value proposition in no more than a few sentences. This is hard but incredibly powerful. Mark Twain wrote ' I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one instead.' You need to perform this exercise with your team. A few sentences; that is it.

In addition, using industry specific terminology like members instead of customers or patients instead of visitors goes along way in creating connection. The more aligned you are with the prospects universe the more immediately they will start to form an emotional bond to the story you are telling them.

Ahhh, they get me. They understand my problems.

This is precisely the type of connection that you want to elicit during a conversation. One quick trick in doing this in a very organic way is to ask introductory questions to provide context.

• Ask them about their field?
• What is their role?
• Where do they work?

The more information you have about your audience the better you can tailor your messaging to resonate with them. This practice alone, will fundamentally change the conversation. Attention is very scarce in the market today and you want to to capitalize on it when you get it. This is why having succinct product descriptions, value propositions and building contextual messaging are vital to successful product uptake.

Try these out and let me know how they work out for you.

- Nate

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This article originally appeared on dataSmarts.