It’s Not About You

It doesn’t matter whether you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, writing on a blog, making a sales call or trying to get a date.

It’s NOT ABOUT YOU.

Even though we understand this intellectually, it somehow seems that we grapple with this in real life.

Your visitor doesn’t care about you. They only care about how what you do affects them.

After all, when you’re putting up a tradeshow booth, your inclination is to show what’s NEW, what’s COOL and what’s RELEVANT about your company.

Often that doesn’t matter to the visitor as they just want to know what’s relevant to them.

But the good news is that as often as not the two competing tasks – telling your story vs. making your story relevant to your visitor – are in congruency.

If you’re trying to sell a new food product, you may be interested in pushing that product to your customers because if they buy a lot of it, or a lot of people buy a lot, it’ll be good news to your bottom line.

Your visitor doesn’t care. Instead, she is interested in its taste, calorie count, cost and how her family might like it. Those things are important to her, not your company’s bottom line.

Now of course you say – YES! That’s elemental. Of course you create a tradeshow booth and tradeshow marketing campaign based on what the customer wants.

But do you? Really?

If your company is unknown in the marketplace, yet the first thing a visitor sees is your company’s name in light at the top of the booth, you’re thinking of you – not your customer.

Your name isn’t relevant to them. Yes, you’d like to MAKE it relevant, but you do that by inviting them in with something compelling to THEM. The top graphical imagery in your booth should be what’s most important to THEM. In some cases that may be a compelling question or bold statement. Your company name’s impact and meaning with them will grow over time.

If you’re Apple, Microsoft or Wii, the name is sufficient and relevant, because the visitor has an impression of your brand and are interested in your new products. They have history with customers.

A new company doesn’t, so your task is to think about what’s most important to THEM: draw them in with a statement, graphic or question that addresses that specifically in regards to your product or service.

Sales calls are often the same. If I had a quarter for every sales person that called me weekly and did an ‘information dump’ on me before even asking any questions, I’d be able to buy both of us a nice cuppa joe. Weekly. In those cases, it’s about them. Not me.

In your relationships with friends, partners, clients and prospects, make it about THEM.

You’ll do better than most of your competition.

photo credit: il_Morta