The Missing Piece in Selling your Work.

A  Con­ver­sa­tion Not Heard

How do you describe your work? When you are talk­ing to some­one about your work, be it some­one in your booth, gallery or just the per­son behind you in the cof­fee line. How do you describe the nature of your work? Many will describe their work in terms of func­tion and fea­tures and describe them­selves as the maker of the work, the one who knows how to incor­po­rate stan­dard fea­tures. The pot­ter describ­ing her pots to a poten­tial buyer will often talk in terms of the mate­r­ial used and the fea­tures she included, like a drip less spout, or a nicely sculpted handle.

This is how we have been taught…describe the fea­ture, sell the fea­tures and com­pete on the basis of fea­tures. You will stand out among com­peti­tors if your fea­tures are better.

Does this really help you? Does it do any­thing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate you in the eyes of poten­tial buy­ers? Where does it place you on the deci­sion tree of the buyer?

The answer is.…this type of approach really turns you and your work into a com­mod­ity and we all know ( from expe­ri­ence) that on the whole buy­ers make their deci­sions among com­modi­ties not on fea­tures but on price. When hav­ing to decide between almost imper­cep­ti­ble fea­tures buy­ers revert to what they know...price.

This type of think­ing, or some vari­a­tion, has been the basis of most mar­ket­ing edu­ca­tion (for­mal and infor­mal) until another ele­ment was added…The Siz­zle, how many have heard the term sell the siz­zle not the steak? That approach was based on acknowl­edg­ing the emo­tional con­nec­tion that buy­ers have to buy­ing, the prob­lem was doing so, boiled down to  lip­stick on the hog. The Siz­zle was based on what the seller saw as the emo­tional factor…the def­i­n­i­tion of Siz­zle came from the seller who imag­ined that the buyer would be focus­ing on the smell of the Siz­zle. And it stopped there at the smell, hence the lip­stick. No mat­ter how we framed the siz­zle, ulti­mately we were still talk­ing about features.

The Miss­ing Piece

Now, for the part we have all known, but didn’t quite under­stand and even if we had a hint of under­stand­ing it, we didn’t know how to put it into prac­tice. That intu­itional sense we had has been the focus of research at the Har­vard Busi­ness School over the past sev­eral years by Ger­ald Zalt­man Pro­fes­sor of Mar­ket­ing and Fel­low at Harvard’s inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Mind,Brain, Behav­ior initiative.

Turns out we were right to think some­thing just wasn’t work­ing… the fea­ture and siz­zle approach really didn’t help us and  the siz­zle just felt very super­fi­cial. Accord­ing to Zaltman’s, research the dis­con­nect occurred when we based our com­mu­ni­ca­tions on what WE thought the buyer was look­ing for, we were speak­ing fea­tures and siz­zle and buy­ers wanted to hear some­thing else. They wanted to hear how what we made con­nected to their story, not ours. They wanted us to pay atten­tion to what they were ask­ing for. Zaltman’s research uncov­ered and built on the role of deep metaphors in our lives, he learned that, world­wide, humans func­tion with the same basic metaphors.

So to go back to the Siz­zle the rea­son (among oth­ers) it didn’t work was that the smell of the siz­zle went deeper, for some it meant con­nec­tion as in fam­ily cook-out, or could evoke a story of fam­ily con­flict that always sur­faced at such get-togethers. In both cases  it wasn’t the siz­zle that the buyer used to make a deci­sion it was how and what the com­bi­na­tion of fea­tures and siz­zle evoked in the deep metaphors of their unconscious.

Pay­ing Attention

The les­son here is that we need to be hon­est (tell the truth) about the sto­ries our work evokes and use that infor­ma­tion to make our work vis­i­ble to those who rec­og­nize the story. In our brand­ing process we must iden­tify the deep metaphors and sto­ries that drive the type of peo­ple who would buy our work.

We need to also be hon­est and pay atten­tion to the ways w present and describe our work. The pot­ter could describe and dis­play her work as evok­ing warmth, and com­fort, or the doll maker could feel that her dolls evoke a sense of peace, or transformation.

Think seri­ously and deep about your work, you know you have a story, a metaphor you are work­ing from use it to find those who can be touched by your work and you will not only stand out you also become a leader.

What deep metaphors does your work evoke? What sto­ries lurk in your uncon­scious that emerge from your work?

Note: This is the first of a peri­odic series on learn­ing how your cus­tomers think and how to imple­ment what you learn.