Marketing
Steve Jobs Convinced Mark Zuckerberg To Focus On Community By Understanding This 1 Thing.Html
By Heather Wilde, CTO, ROCeteer@heathriel
Covid Resource Center
Best-Selling Author | Speaker | Coach | CTO
One of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur is getting sales. Often, we focus so hard on creating the best products that we don’t have any effort left to find andconvert customers.
This leads to more money spent to acquire customers and more frustration in the long run. Often, companies end up failing for just the simple reason: they can’t convert sales.
There are multiple factors that come together to determine what type of information someone needs to understand something. Additionally, there are other, completely different factors that determine how a person can be convinced to purchase your product.
A person can either be convinced by seeing, hearing, readingor doing.In addition to these four patterns, people are either convinced in one of the following ways:
- Automatically (right away)
- After a Period of Time (different for every person, can be measured in minutes, years, or in between.)
- After a Number of Times (a finite number, such as the classic seventouchpoints to close a customer.)
- Constantly -(in other words, these people always need new proof to be convinced.)
While people may have dominant learning styles, their convincing patterns are not necessarily connected. An experiential learner might need to read about someone else’s experience before going out on their own.
If you’re working as a traditional sales person with one-on-one interactions, it’s easy enough to identify your customer’s convincing pattern- you can simply ask them questions and then change the conversation appropriately.
However, when doing online marketing, you’re going to have to have a multi-pronged approach that can check all the boxes.
The first step to understanding what type of materials to create for your product is to understand the behaviors of people with these patterns.
1. Convinced by Seeing
Have you ever heard the phrase: “I’ll believe it when I see it?” Someone who is convinced by seeing will use “visual” language when they speak. They will say things like “We need to see this through” or “Can you picture this?” This type of person will want instructional videos, infographics, and visual representation of your product that they can physically see in order to be convinced to buy it.
The Dollar Shave Clubadis a goodexample of showingproduct in an engaging way.
2. Convinced by Hearing
People who are convinced in this way are looking for the quality of someone’s voice and the authority provided by it. They say things like “Sounds good!” and “You hear what I’m saying?” and they look for support in the words that people say out loud.
Using testimonial videos and other social proof is a great way to convince people by “hearing.”
3. Convinced by Doing
For some people, the only way to convince them is to let them try things for themselves. By accomplishing a task, they’ll be able to come to their own conclusion. The only thing you will be able to do is give them the task and let them go.
Steve Jobs famously asked Mark Zuckerberg to go to India to learn about community – which then helped shape the future of Facebook.
4. Convinced by Reading
This type of person wants to scan information in written form. They will be convinced by having documentation, either summarized or long-form, but they want to consume it themselves.
Reportedly, Director Rian Johnson was only convinced to take on directing Star Wars: The Last Jedi after reading the script.
As an entrepreneur, you should aim to sell to people who are relatively easy to convince. Avoid those who require you to consistently try to advertise to them, as the cost is too high to convert them.
For online sales, people who are convinced automatically and after a number of times are the easiest to tackle, and depending on the phase of your product the easiest way to go is via “Hearing”, through social/viral content. The second easiest is a combination of”Seeing” and “Reading”, with content in video and written channels.
For scaling purposes, avoid anything that requires you to target “Doing” types, as well as people convinced “after a period of time” or “constantly”, as thoseboth represent high effort and low return.
That said, in today’s internet, be cautious. While there can be some funny side effects of these convincing patterns, such as the “conspiracy” surrounding a non-existent movie in the ’90s (that often affect people who are Automatically Convinced by Reading) these can also have dangerous consequences. Ensure that you are clear on your purpose and intent when publishing any content.
By understanding these simple patterns, you should be able to convert the maximum number of people to your product.
Dec 19, 2017
When Julia Cheek founded Everlywell in June 2015, she was, by her own estimation, “perhaps the least qualified person to start a health care startup.” And yet, as her Austin-basedat-home lab testing companyapproaches its fifth anniversary, she finds herself overseeing a staff of about 100 people, providing home tests for allergies, food sensitivities, thyroid conditions, and, as of May 2020, Covid-19. The company raised $50 million in its last round of funding and was listed at No. 3 on the Inc. 5000 regional ranking for Texas this year.
In anInc. Real Talk: Business Rebootlivestream, Cheek, 36, spoke withInc. editor-at-large Tom Foster and took questions from viewers.Their conversation ranged fromhelping her team cope with quarantine to making big decisions. Here are some highlights.
Think Big and Think Fast
In May, Cheek and her board decided to give away $1 million to labs across the U.S.to help them develop a working test for Covid-19. For a startup still counting every dime, it wasn’t an easy check to write.However, Cheek saysthey made the decision quickly. “It took about an hour,” she says. “It was one of the fastest and easiest decisions made in the history of the company.”
She knew that funding those labs would speed up development of an at-hometest. She also had to make decisions internally to offset that cost while doing everything possible to maintain head count. That meant scaling back every discretionary dollar her team could find–Goodbye, office coffee!–in order to do the right thing and keepher team. “I wanted to protect as many jobs as possible,” she says.
“It was the right decisionmade at the right time,” she says now. A month later, she’s hiring.
Look Out for Your People
When asked how she deals with the challenges of running a companyfrom home (with a new baby) as well as whilewitnessing the protests in the streets, Cheek was quick to stress the importance ofmakingsure her colleagues are able to cope. “I worry like a mom about every one of our team members,” she says. That means asking herself how her team is doing all the time and asking herselfhow she can make their days better. Sometimes that means encouraging them to disconnect from Zoom or other digital platforms and take care of themselves. “Our primary focus is: What does every employee need for their mental health?” she says.
As for her own self care, she’sbeen developingwellness routines, including taking many meetings while walking and doing her best to separate her home workspace from the rest of her house.
The Funding Challenge
Cheek spoke at length about the difficulties she encountered while seeking funding as a female founder, despite the fact that she went to Harvard Business School and had a strong network.
“It was hard for me,” she says. “So you can imagine how hard it is for people of color, especiallywomen of color. I heard a lot of noes. What I learned is that it only takes one yes.” Among those yeseswas one on-air boost from Shark Tank‘s Lori Greiner, which doubled Everlywell’s sales overnight.
Ultimately, Cheek says, people needto talk about funding obstaclesopenly and honestly and encourage entrepreneursand investors to confront theirbiases. “It’s important that founders hear stories and become part of the solution,” she says.
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Jun 4, 2020