Your customers are smart people.
But sometimes, they are too embarrassed to tell you what they don’t know.
Especially if you sell high-tech, complex, or large-ticket items; this can be more of a problem than you realize.
ABCI buys and uses a ridiculous amount of software and data subscription services.
These sophisticated tools change frequently, and are become worthless if we don’t also spend a ridiculous amount of time learning to use them well and staying current on changes in technology and markets.
We attend several seminars per year and do a LOT of reading and talking to experts each month to make sure we’re using them fully and really getting our money’s worth.
Our prospects and clients don’t have the benefit of those hours of training, so if we’re not careful, we’re in danger of making assumptions that they understand our sales presentations and our product delivery trainings.
And they won’t correct that assumption.
They’ll just nod and smile, and pretend they understand, but then, for no explicable reason, they’ll avoid making the purchase; or put the unused (and in their opinion, unusable) product on the shelf, together with the daunting owner’s manual and training materials for that imaginary time in the future when they “have time to figure out how to use it.”
And then when someone asks them about it, they’ll say “Oh yes, we purchased that product months (or years) ago, but we were never able to make it work.”
As frustrating as this is, and as damaging as it can be to the reputations of perfectly good products, I understand why this happens.
When I was in grade school, I somehow missed some important math concepts. I nodded and smiled my way through class, turned in horrible homework assignments, and barely passed a couple of math classes, before moving into other subjects where my lack of knowledge would not be obvious.
I went way out of my way to hide my ignorance from parents, teachers, and especially from the real or imagined derision of my “straight-A-student” brother, who was in the running for some of the top math scholarships in the country at the time.
My ignorance eventually caught up with me about twenty years later, when I realized that algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were required for the GMAT exam to qualify for a Master’s Degree program.
So, under the guise of being a concerned parent, I bought an educational software program that taught everything from Pre-Algebra to Calculus for kids. After everyone was in bed, I would spend time learning math concepts from a flock of dancing penguins.
I passed the GMAT (with a better score than John! Thank you penguins!) and later used those new math skills to acquire my Private Pilot Rating.
So, why would I learn math skills in the middle of the night from dancing penguins rather than from parents, teachers and tutors who were all available to help me?
For the same reason we just spent hours with a new client who was continuing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for software they had previously purchased, but had yet to implement. They were still using spreadsheets and sticky notes “doing it the hard way” even when they had powerful tools and training at their disposal.
They were too embarrassed to admit to the software company’s representative that they understood very little of the provided setup and demonstration.
They were also too busy with day to day business operations to take the time to figure out where to start making it work for them.
Our recommendations for preventing (and solving) this problem if you sell a complex product or service does not involve dancing penguins, but it does involve a few of the things I learned from that experience.
- Assume a lower level of background knowledge than you think is reasonable. Remember, you work with this stuff every day!
- Incorporate user feedback into design changes that will make your product easier to use. Any time you can eliminate a step for your customers, it’s well worth it!
- Provide good, visual, self-service training materials.
- Also provide long-form traditional instructions for customers who prefer them.
- Also offer in-person assistance from a technician (teacher, actually) who has the time and patience to ensure a customer “really gets it” before leaving the scene.
- Provide training over a reasonable period of time. It takes time to adapt to a new way of doing business, flying the airplane, managing the workflow of the hangar, or whatever job your product or service is involved with.
- Produce the same training materials in different formats. A series of short videos is often best. (We created our “First Fridays” series for new clients for this reason.) Put the same material into an emailed “tip of the week” (or “tip of the month”) and include it in your monthly printed newsletter or deliver it with your invoices.
- Repetition is usually not a problem, especially if you use different formats.
Most sales and customer service people are overly concerned with being condescending and not concerned enough with being considerate of busy customers.
To boil all this down into one word – simplify, simplify, simplify!
Even if your clients are rocket-scientists (some of ours actually are) you shouldn’t make them use any more time and brain-power than necessary to understand, select, buy and use your product!
As Steven Covey said in is book The Speed of Trust, sometimes when you’re working with people, slow is fast. }.
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