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Greatness

My first boss and mentor in sales and marketing communications had a wonderfully simple, yet very motivating, approach to every communication challenge.

Whether it was an article, ad copy, or a presentation, he would remind us to start with the same presupposition:

“Imagine the world is screaming at you ‘WHO CARES?!’”

It’s a jarring, but true, reality. (Thank you, PT, for that wise advice long ago.)

If you don’t give people a good reason to care about what you’re saying or writing, they won’t. Especially today in our overloaded, over-stimulated world of emails, texts, and ads.

“Who Cares?!” will definitely wake you up and get you thinking, and here’s another quick method from Geoffrey James to take you to the next level of message creation.

Whenever you make a statement about your product, service, or company, ask this simple question:

“What’s so great about that?”

For example, you may have a platform that analyzes shipping costs and a CFO may take one look at it and say: “We already get reports from our shipping partners and accounting firm on how much we’re spending. Why do we need your platform?”

Here’s where the question comes in:

  • Our platform analyzes shipping costs.
  • What’s so great about that?
  • Shipping invoices are notoriously complex and difficult to read, so we highlight the most important parts and make them easy to understand.
  • What’s so great about that?
  • Excessive, inaccurate surcharges are often hidden in your invoices which causes you to overpay for your shipping.
  • What’s so great about that?
  • You can identify and recover past shipping overcharges and prevent excessive overcharges in the future – reducing overall shipping expenses.

Now you’ve got a core message on your platform’s greatness that makes sense to any decision-maker:

  • “Our platform reduces your overall shipping expenses by making it easier to identify and recover inaccurate and excessive shipping surcharges.”

Instead of focusing on bits, bytes, and bullets, you now have a succinct marketing message that captures the positive effects of your solution.

Try it with anything you need to promote – your cause, your company, or even yourself.

It’s the fool-proof way to build the perfect answer to the burning question “Who cares?!”

Have a great week.

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