Are You Speaking Your Customers' Language?

Give customers the information they need using their words, not yours.

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming customers will understand you because your co-workers do. Customers aren't interested in how things are done your company or your industry. Customers just want know know "what's in it for me". Ignore this and you WILL lose sales to competitors.

I just gave a development company an RFP to redesign a client's website. I'd spoken with them at length about what we wanted, and I included further detail with my RFP.

Yesterday I got their proposal and was surprised to see that none of the key features I'd specified were mentioned in it. Instead of moving me closer to buying, the proposal left me doubting if they could in fact deliver what I'd asked for.

I'd just started the search for another developer when they called. 30 minutes later I was comfortable that they could in fact do the job. The rep admitted that he'd simply plugged their standard descriptions of features into their proposal document, descriptions which were useless to me.

That's a second chance you don't often get. Are you telling your customers what they need to hear in the words they'd use themselves?