Which of these is true for your company? How are you going to fix it?

1. Your customers are focused on their own issues — and don’t see you as relevant to those concerns. Are you talking to the wrong people or companies? Are you trying to sell too broadly? Do you simply need to better explain the relevance of your work to customers’ problems?
2. Your company talks about itself, forcing customers to navigate your bureaucracy, jargon, products. How can you put aside your internal bureaucracy and help customers solve their own problems? Can you organize around customers and their problems?
3. Your company talks about solutions without correctly defining your customers’ problems. Ask existing customers, target customers, and your sales and marketing people what the customers’ problems are. Where are the common threads? Where are the disconnects?
4. When your company talks, it sounds like a bunch of other companies. What’s the difference?
5. Your company talks in language they don’t trust. Too tidy. Too pat. Too good to be true. Find out how your customers talk about their problems. And don’t overpromise what you can do about the problem. Respect your audience’s intelligence.
6. Your company doesn’t admit what it doesn’t do. Draw a line: Here’s what we do well — that is, where a customer gets the most economic value from us. Here’s everything we don’t do so well — can we send customers elsewhere for those things?

Getting customer attention is already hard. Why make it harder?

Related posts:

1. 6 Reasons People Can’t Tell What You Do Even After Reading Your Website
2. Buying is irrational…even B2B buying
3. B2B complex sale = influencing a community.
4. 4 things that marketing can change in a down economy
5. For the swipe file: impressive B2B tech ad in social media

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