Yesterday my wife and I were going to a restaurant for our anniversary and walked by a cafe that looked shut down and had a notice on the door. So naturally, I googled the cafe to see what happened and found a crazy, unrelated news story from a few years back about someone robbing the cafe with a hatchet!
What?! “Who carries a hatchet??” Was the natural response my wife blurted out. Directly followed by, “besides Gary Paulsen, hahahahaha!”
Like you probably are right now, I just looked at her blankly with no clue who Gary Paulsen is.
Apparently he wrote a book called The Hatchet that my wife teaches to her fifth grade students.
Great joke…to someone who knew that book and author off the top of their head. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people, and so my wife’s joke fell flat.
Telling an inside joke to someone on the outside is a lot like what most companies are doing with their sales and marketing messages. They are talking to their audience about something that the audience doesn’t yet have the context or information yet to fully grasp. This happens because you are an expert in your field, you live it every day, you know the nuances and the “101” lessons about your product and industry.
The way you can avoid this is by clearly defining your target audience, understanding their current perspective and mindset, and then mapping the conversations and information that can bring them from where they are to where they need to be to see how amazing your product is.
This is something that every entrepreneur, sales person, and marketer should have in their toolbox. So if you don’t yet have this anywhere other than in your brain, you should check out our program here – https://thegrowthsuite.com/growthprogram/