Find the "struggling moment" and convey relevant value.

Useful Idea #1:

Innovate and market better by identifying your customer’s “struggling moments.”

“People don’t buy products. They hire solutions to make progress in their lives.”

“If your customer is not struggling, they can’t see you.”— Bob Moesta, Jobs-to-be-done visionary and author of Learning to Build

How to apply this to your business:

Identify your customer’s “value trigger” so you can help them in their struggle.

A trigger event is that magical moment when your buyer moves from being oblivious that they even have a problem, to being in the market for a new solution. Think of these moments as the “value trigger”, where what you do suddenly becomes salient and urgent to resolve.

Make it your business to figure out the life events and line of thinking that your customers are in, which results in them saying “Today is the day I fix this/do something.” It’s usually a feeling state brought upon by a trigger event that either because of frequency and/or pain/cost.

These can be

• Social (eg. prepping for a presentation, partner conflict)

• Biological (eg. feeling tired, gaining weight)

• Situational (eg. a milestone birthday, less resources to work with)

• Emotional (eg. feeling overwhelmed, feeling left behind)

Look for where they are struggling. Ask your customers directly about what exactly tipped the scales for them to do something and call you. You might be surprised by the answers you here.

Once you find those answers out, use that language in your marketing to clearly show them how you make progress on that “hot” problem.

Then, use that knowledge to innovate and create high-value complements that delight your customers and give you an edge.

“Nothing is more important to us in our lives than the thing we are thinking about when we are thinking about it.”— Daniel Kahneman 

Useful Idea #2:

Think about what your customers are thinking about. Go to where they think aloud and ask for advice.

When someone is first beginning to struggle with a problem, they usually make a search using this kind of language:

1. “What do I do when _______ happens…”

2. “How to handle ______”

3. “What does it __________ mean…”

These searches often end up on a Reddit/Quora/discussion thread related to that topic. Often it’s one of the first links people click after they make a Google search.

It’s understandable why. There is a ton of great advice to be found on these threads. You can learn from hundreds, even thousands, of people about the exact thing you need to know more about.

A massive amount of information is consolidated into a single scroll. These threads are deep wells of crowd-sourced insights that only get more comprehensive over years as new comments and updated information is contributed by the community. This gives these threads a certain level of objectivity that posts on other social platforms like Linkedin, Facebook, or Twitter can’t quite capture.

Use this common behavior and go be where your customers are in the moment they realize they need you.

How to apply this to your business:

1. Think about the problems and situations that often spark your new business engagements. These are common scenarios that are serious enough that people need to pick up the phone and call you. 

2. Go to the threads and communities on Quora/Reddit/Discord/etc that are 1) actively discussing to the common struggles you help your customers with or 2) one the early stage “trigger event” research that precedes them realizing they’re going to need professional help.

3. Have your team (not your social media manager) post replies on those threads with practical “non-salesy” advice that you would give a friend. Create “work” profiles for these platforms and note the professional experience that is behind the answer, along with relevant personal stories and non-attributable anecdotes. Bonus points if you sign up for alerts on these topic threads and consistently engage.

Why this works:

• This means you are where your prospects are in their struggling moment and are able to give them the advice they need to take the next right step.

• It also allows you to be the first thing they “see” when they first realize they need someone like you.

• It gives you insight on what your audience might be thinking and the information (and misinformation) they are seeing when they are trying to solve their problems. 

Be where the conversations are, and contribute generously in service to your customers. They’ll thank you for it, you’ll learn from it, and you’ll get qualified leads from it.

Communication concept:

Clear descriptions provide the kind of clarity people need to make decisions in complexity and uncertainty.

“One of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s great discoveries was that we do not make clear, clean decisions between things, but make decisions between descriptions of things.”— Author Michael Lewis

This is significant. More than quantity of data or information alone, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated how clear descriptions enable both our intuitive and rational mind to come online and feel as if we have enough information to make a confident decision.

Often decisions are only made once our personal, internal thresholds of instinct and logic have been satisfied to a point of feeling confidence. These thresholds are different for each person or situation, but the mechanism remains the same. Clear descriptions creates actionable salience.

No matter how complex the decision, there is always a way to describe the matter in simple, clear terms. In a world where we are simultaneously overloaded with data and forever working with incomplete information, clear descriptions are often the only clarity we really have. When we communicate using simple, easy-to-understand descriptions, we help others make decisions with confidence.

How to apply this to your business:

For the most common decisions that your clients/customers/people need to make, brainstorm and document a “grab bag” of analogies, metaphors and short stories that illustrate important ideas or simply describe a complex situation.

Experiment, notice, and document which descriptions work well. Integrate these descriptions in your processes and systems, and help accelerate people achieve the confidence thresholds they need to take decision action.

That’s all for now.

May your endeavors this week bring you to greater truths and more meaningful experiences.