A couple of weeks ago I talked about how you can use psychology to make a good first impression, and how to create a tagline for your business that will capture attention. So now let’s assume that your target audience is listening, at least digitally. What do you say next?
Well, clearly that depends on who you’re speaking to. Let’s say you own a business that sells services to the healthcare industry and it’s a service that helps physicians. Let’s take a look at one of the medical specialties, a pediatrician. Our first pediatrician who runs his own practice is concerned about high-quality patient care, as well as how efficiently he can see patients in order to bill more codes. He may be working late hours to take calls from parents at 2 a.m worried about their child’s fever, and depending upon how he took that call he may not be able to bill for it. He’s concerned that if he doesn’t take those calls, his patients may start to use urgent care as their primary care and his active patient base will decline. He’s worried about how to backfill his medical assistant when she calls out sick. He needs to make sure that his CMEs are up to date and that he remembers to renew his hospital privileges. He is thinking about offering telemedicine consults to earn more revenue but isn’t sure of the legal implications if he should do it on his own, or work on getting licensed in other states so he can moonlight with a telehealth company. He needs to find time for training when there is an upgrade to his EHR system. And since on top of being a doctor, he is also a small business owner, he needs to be concerned about managing payroll, submitting his business taxes, and dealing with the landlord who wants to raise his rent. Despite all of these challenges, when you bring your child to see this pediatrician he is one of those doctors who makes you feel like he has all the time in the world for you.
Now let’s look at another physician who is the Medical Director of Pediatrics in a hospital Emergency Department. He is also concerned about high-quality patient care but has a team of physicians to manage so needs to oversee their care as well. He is a high energy personality who thrives on adrenaline. He seems like one of those people who is mentally sharp and always “on”. He has no patience for inefficiencies and fights the hospital system at every turn to provide the best possible environment for his physicians to practice. His BS tolerance is very low and while able to provide very focused care to individual patients, he expects his staff and everyone around him to get straight to the point. He is under tremendous pressure from the hospital to meet ever-increasing KPIs, including reducing the door to Doc metrics, RVUs which are Relative Value Units used in medical reimbursements, as well as what are termed Evaluation and Management levels, which essentially translates to being able to bill the highest level of complexity codes to increase revenues. In such a high-pressure environment where his physicians must move quickly from one patient to the next yet produce accurate and effective charts, this pediatrician is concerned about burnout, turnover, and standards of care.
Both doctors, both men, in this case, same education, same specialty, but do they sound like they have the same wants and needs? So when in your business you say that you want to sell to doctors, or even that you want to sell to pediatricians, would the way you approach each of these physicians to be the same? Hopefully, you have heard enough differences to say, “of course not”. And that is the right answer.
Clearly each personality you approach, even within professions, will be unique. But as you examine your best clients and your best target clients, you’ll find that you can group them into common categories that maybe some combination of the profession, life stage, age, sex, income, etc. And if you look closely at these groupings, you’ll probably find similar motivations and pain points. In marketing speak, we call these groupings buyer personas, and there is an entire methodology built around defining personas, creating targeted messages to each persona, etc. This is part of the work my team and I do when we’re conducting our marketing strategy virtual workshops. But it’s something you can DIY, and I highly recommend it for your business. If you approach each potential client with the same questions and if you deliver the same value statements, then you won’t be anywhere near as successful in sales as if you approach each prospect with an understanding of what will motivate them to take action.
So what goes into creating a buyer persona? There are several ways to approach it but one way I have found successful is to start by thinking about your best clients you would like to clone. What are their background and experience? What are their personality and lifestyle? What challenges do they face in their business and personal life and what goals are they aspiring to achieve. If you were sitting across the desk from them, what objections might you hear from them about your products or services? And putting your standard pitch aside for a moment, in what areas could you be most helpful to them? How far could you get them toward overcoming their challenges and achieving their goals? If this sounds like a lot of thinking, then you’re right. But if you can answer these questions about your target audience, then you can develop a message that will have them dancing around your office screaming “Yes! You really get me!!!” OK perhaps that’s a bit more dramatic of an outcome than is realistic, but they will certainly appreciate you expressing how you can help the areas they’re most passionate about and you’ll probably close more sales.
Remember that in neuromarketing, our goal is to get inside the heads of our target audience and think the way they think. We want to do three things. First, use the right emotional triggers to get their attention, second, understand them as individuals in order to adjust the way we sell, and third, develop a message that leads them through the story of how our company can help them to achieve their goals. We didn’t get to number 3 today so I’ll save that one for next week.
In the meantime, your homework is to think about your top 3 favorite clients. They should be the clients who happily pay you the most money because they love what you do. You should feel happy to pick up the phone when they call. If you could, you would clone them and grow your business around many more clients just like them. Carve out a good chunk of thinking time and write down your answers to the questions I asked earlier about what makes them tick. It’s not enough to only think about their demographics. Challenge yourself to identify common pain points, motivations, and goals. If you have this ready for next week then I’ll walk you through a methodology for developing a killer message that will help you to close more business.
One caveat to buyer personas is that the more we’re able to intelligently dissect real data, the closer we’ll come to identify some of the core characteristics of our ideal clients. That’s the science part of the equation. The art, at least until AI is able to rapidly predict future responses based on past data, is to go with building detailed personas and combine them with data-backed buyer insights.
Meanwhile, I’d like to leave you with a quote from all around business guru Peter Drucker. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits them and sells itself.” Happy marketing!