However, most people confuse “understand” with “resonate”. It not that your clients don’t understand what you are telling them is it that the words don’t resonate with them. This is because in this particular scenario it is not what they have been told to care about. Again, don’t mistake this for no caring.
Never was this more obvious to me than the recent conversation I had with my son about his future. Like all parents I want my son to have a “better” life than I have had. He and I were discussing his future plans and I was trying to explain to him how much it costs to live the life he has become accustom.
I explained to him how much a house costs, a car payment, raising a family … and his own ever growing food budget! None of this seemed to hit home with him. In fact, if anything it served to confuse the situation even more.
That was when it hit me … I wasn’t speaking his language. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand mortgage rates and car payments it was that in his world of skateboards and drums he did care.
So, I changed my approach to something he could relate to. I took the big annual numbers and broke them down into more easily digestible smaller numbers and broke those down even further to and hourly wage. This was a number he was familiar with as he has recently been job hunting and the dollars per hour was a metric he understood.
This conversation took place while driving to I took the liberty of drawing the correlation between the dollars per hour he now understood he needed and the businesses we passed along the way… explaining to him that he would not meet those lofty goals working at these various stores.
My son came to the conclusions (the same one I was trying to bring him to when the conversation started) all by himself. I thought to myself how easy this was once I talked to him in terms that were important to him.
Good Selling!
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