Are They Hearing You?

No matter how brilliant or worthwhile your message is, if your customers don’t want to hear what you have to say, that message is lost.

Years ago, my team was promoting an antidepressant whose cost was not covered by public formularies. An excellent product but being a late arrival suffered the politics of governmental cost restrictions on innovative medicines and so was only covered by private insurance plans.

Not surprisingly, the first line of our product messaging at the time was “For your depression patients who have private insurance plans…”. 

Reality was that busy physicians did not know, nor did they want to take the time to figure which of their patients had a private insurance plan and which did not. As soon as we suggested that they identify patients who had private insurance, the physicians did not want to hear the rest of what we had to say because using our product meant taking more of their precious time.  

Our team made a simple change to our messaging that had a huge impact. What physicians do know about their patients is whether or not they are working. The vast majority of people who are employed have private insurance plans and so instead of asking physicians to identify patients who had private insurance, we asked them to consider our product for those who were employed.

This simple change in messaging made all of the difference. In the physician's mind it was now easy to identify the patients who could use our product and within a few months our team was the top performer in the country for this product.

The lesson from all of this was that when speaking to customers, the words that you use and how you use them make a critical difference in how your customers receive what you have to say. A simple change can have a dramatic impact on a customer’s response.

So, the next time that you are speaking with a customer, it is worth asking yourself, are they hearing you?