The Promise of the You Economy: It’s Not About You
There’s a bit of a misunderstanding about the promise of the You Economy.
It’s not all about you: your self-worth, your passion, your personal brand.
It’s about your power to create and offer something of lasting value. It’s about your ability to contribute to things that are bigger than yourself. It’s about your access to the machinations of commerce.
My friend Amanda Steinberg, who is also the founder & CEO of the financial education company you simply must subscribe to, wrote recently of the proliferation of personal brands in the wake of the solo entrepreneurship craze.
She describes it–and I squealed when I read this–as a “torrent of social media one-upmanship.” It’s a race for the funkiest website, the hippest photos, the most profound tweets, the cleverest pins, the most raw Facebook updates.
Stand out, or stand down.
And she’s right. It’s a mess.
The You Economy doesn’t promise that you can get paid to be you. It doesn’t guarantee that you can make money & follow your passion.
The You Economy promises that you have the chance to create something that makes others lives meaningfully better.
You can harness your passion, your personality, your pizzazz to realize that imperative but those things are no substitute for stick-to-your-ribs value.
If you’ve found yourself in the one-upmanship game of personal branding or the race to social media stardom, it doesn’t mean your business is doomed. But it does mean you need to stop–today–and evaluate the value your business is creating.
Escape “digiphoria; the cold, joyless comfort of softly glowing screens.”
Venture into the pursuit of something real.
What are you pursuing? What keeps you up at night? How does that drive you to serve? To create? To question?
The You Economy has asked you to show up. Not just as you are, but in pursuit of the solution to a problem, the answer to a question, the fulfillment of a desire.
Will you rise to the occasion?
The You Economy is Self-Determined — are you?
Despite the lasting effects of the recession, despite crippling college loan debt, despite the stubborn unemployment rate, there has never–ever–been a period of history where you have more control over your work and the way you get paid for it.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a part of the ever-growing movement of entrepreneurs and freelancers that are making up the global economy in larger & larger shares. But there are plenty of others joining small teams of motivated doers, organizing to create something new & meaningful and then disbanding to look for the next opportunity. Still more people are writing their own job descriptions and determining their own expectations at growing companies.
This rapidly evolving economic environment, this strange new world of work & creative energy, requires unprecedented agency to get ahead, to make an impact.
The You Economy is self-determined.
Are you? Click to tweet!
Success in business today is not predetermined by a particular set of preconditions. It’s not contrived from a particular set of tactics or forged from a website with graphics and layout just so.
Only you can determine the course by which your business succeeds. Only you can determine the best way to merge your ideas with your customers’ perspective to find the winning combination of service and profit.
This is your chance to shine, to decide. Don’t lend your light to others you believe know better than you. Learn, grow, collaborate–but don’t lose track of your own ability to create a path that allows your business to make its greatest impact.
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Ready to realize your own dreams? Ready to forge a self-determined future that includes a business with a big impact & a life of meaning?
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The Danger of Affordable: How to Reframe This Negative Script
While some businesses focus on catering to the luxury market, most businesses are looking to serve a broader market of incomes & lifestyles. Even when you’ve gotten crystal clear on who you’d most like to serve, that group can be diverse.
So it’s natural to want to offer a way to engage your work that’s “affordable.”
The thing about “affordable” is that it’s not actually related to price; it’s related to value.
Here’s what it takes for something to be affordable:
An affordable product must deliver considerably more value to the customer than the value she exchanges for it.
Of course, all of your products should fit that description. Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid Illustrated, uses a baseline of 20x–he prices his products in a way that he can guarantee a 2000% return on investment if implemented properly.
So the real danger in using the word “affordable”–even just in your own head–is that, I believe, it undermines your perception of the value you are already offering. Everything you create is affordable. Everything you offer delivers a significant return on investment in terms of money, convenience, fulfilled desires, time, etc…
That’s the very essence of affordability.
But that’s not what you mean when you make offering something “affordable,” is it?
So let’s stop using this word that doesn’t really mean what we think it means. Let’s remind ourselves that businesses are have a duty to create products that are affordable based on value and return on investment.
So what does your business need?
What your business needs is something accessible, something with a low barrier to entry, something that requires less trust on the part of your new customer. Those are the kind of products that help your potential customers turn into loyal customers, while creating a stream of revenue for your business at the same time.
Look more closely:
Accessibility
Often brands have their own language, their own energy. Does your business offer an initiation to this language? Do you offer a product that imbues that energy to new customers?
Doing business with a new brand can be intimidating to customers, especially when their hopes, dreams, or goals are on the line. When you offer an accessible product, you’re giving your prospects a way to ease into your business’s bigger offerings.
Low Barrier to Entry
Does your business offer a product that is easy to get? Something that’s on sale all the time? Something requires very little of your potential customer?
Products with a low barrier to entry allow new prospects to turn into new customers very quickly. They can often open the door to a more in depth sales conversation.
Lower Trust
You want to deliver big results for your customers. However, those big results often require a big leap of faith on behalf of your potential customers. Do you have a product that requires a little less trust? Promises an equally important but smaller outcome?
Products that produce concrete results and accomplish tasks that your customer are already seeking solutions for require much less trust than those that promise transformative change. Building trust in small steps prepares your customers to bigger steps with your business in the future.
Stop selling yourself short on the value of your products or services. Look for an opportunity to create a product that creates a path into your business that’s accessible, low barrier, and low trust.
You know what your customers need. But is it what they want to buy?
Perhaps you’ve heard it said before, “Sell them what they want. Give them what they need.” And maybe you didn’t quite know what that meant. Or, worse, maybe you thought that sounded a little slimy.
Here’s what I know about you:
You’re extremely good at what you do. Like woah. You work from a place of mastery, mastery that is constantly evolving, growing, and chasing your curiosity. The clients you work with are blown away by the results you achieve for them. The customers who purchase your work are floored by its quality.
And you’re ready for more.
It’s a been a select few who have actually bought. Where are the teeming masses clamoring for your genius?
I’ll tell you: it requires a bit of a bait & switch. It’s a bait & switch, though, that’s in everyone’s best interests. When you know exactly who your customer is, what she’s thinking, and why she’s looking to buy, you can present an offer that resonates with her–and 1000s like her–for the purpose of giving her the value she really needs.
The goal is to frame your offer in a way that helps her to realize that her goals are possible. Your next goal is to help her reach those goals in the best way you know how.
That’s why you need to operate from both your expert’s perspective and from your customer’s perspective. It’s a dance. Combining the two allows your client to experience the most value–transformation, knowledge, success, fun–possible.
So what are your clients really looking for?
What are your customers truly trying to accomplish?
How do they feel? What are they thinking? How do they talk about their frustrations with their friends?
These are they keys to massive market impact. These are the keys to scale.
If exercising your genius is what you want to be doing, if that’s the key to massive success for your clients, unlocking this information is the key to doing just that for as many people as possible.
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The Customer Perspective Process guides you through unlocking this information. After completing the process, you will know how to:
- Identify opportunities based on your customers’ needs & desires in a way that leads to massive impact
- Evaluate your marketing, sales copy, and offers from your customers’ point of view to ensure success
- Communicate in a way that allows your message to spread rapidly and easily
- Apply your learning to content strategy, strategic partnerships, and your business model to create sustainable business growth
Learn more about The Customer Perspective Process boot camp: click here.
Why Steve Jobs & Henry Ford Would Love The Customer Perspective Process
Steve Jobs famously created Apple’s most revolutionary products without customer involvement. He was happy to ignore what people asked for in favor of offering them something they couldn’t dream of.
Henry Ford had a similar view of innovation. He said, “If I would have asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Though, whether he actually said this is a subject of debate.
These great innovators may not have asked their customers what they wanted–you shouldn’t either–but they were masters of understanding needs, desires, and the potential meaning new products could have for the customers that made them wealthy beyond imagining.
Steve Jobs real innovation wasn’t the product–mp3 players were around before the iPod hit the scene–and it wasn’t the design either. He might have made great design mainstream but aesthetes were already purchasing products that looked as good as they functioned. Steve Jobs real innovation was that of meaning, as powerful a marketing device as any ever crafted. What new meaning would the iPod have in the lives of its owners?
Simple: Jobs suggested to customers that they could carry 1,000 songs in their pockets. He knew that, beyond better ways to buy music, better ways to store CDs, or better ways to listen to tunes, listeners would love the idea of having their music, on demand, wherever they went.
Jobs could easily have been a genius who died in obscurity instead of the founder and figurehead of the richest company in the world. The answer to this question–and the others he asked like it–was the foundation of his ability to create raving hoards of fans (and money-spending customers).
He took a clear understanding of the current conversation (because markets are really conversations), assessed it from his expert point of view, and shifted a small idea in a market-dominating product.
Ford, similarly, didn’t invent the automobile. Rather, he created the processes by which it could become a product that the vast majority of people in the 1st world must own by understanding, from his customer’s perspective, what was important. He made the automobile easier to drive and easier to produce. He streamlined the array of vehicles being offered.
Those small changes have changed the way we live, work, and play. That’s massive market impact.
Now, you’ve got a lot in common with Steve Jobs and Henry Ford. First off, you’re smart. And you’re incredibly skilled at what you do. You may lack confidence in marketing, pricing, or sales, but you know when you’re creating value for your customers you are masterful.
Second, you’re good at asking questions. You’re curious.
Third, you’ve got an exciting vision for your customers and the world.
All in all, this is a recipe for success. But something is getting in the way, isn’t it?
You might even find yourself asking, “My clients are some of the happiest, most satisfied clients in my industry because I deliver. So why can’t I find more of them?”
Here’s what gets in the way: you think with your expert’s brain 100% of the time. Why? Because it’s fun! It’s fun to feel masterful, it’s exciting to feel on top of your game, it’s energizing to challenge yourself and to be challenged. It’s not that you don’t care about your customers, you really, really do–and I believe Steve Jobs and Henry Ford did too.
What happens if you tune your curiosity to your customer’s perspective?
What happens if you see the world through their eyes?
What could you create if you understood why they express the needs they do?
Or if you knew what thoughts motivated their actions?
You could use your expert’s brain–just like Jobs & Ford–to create something truly impactful. It would take the best of your expert understanding and fuse it with the deep desires of your most valued customers.
Your product would suddenly speak the language your customer needs to hear to “get it” and at the same time be better than they could have imagined.
That’s what Henry Ford and Steve Jobs did. That’s the Customer Perspective Process.
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The Customer Perspective Process is my signature framework for turning small ideas into massive market impact. It’s the key to creating business models that are both profitable and social.
Join me for The Customer Perspective Process boot camp. Upon completion, you will know how to:
- Identify opportunities based on your customers’ needs & desires in a way that leads to massive impact
- Evaluate your marketing, sales copy, and offers from your customers’ point of view to ensure success
- Communicate in a way that allows your message to spread rapidly and easily
- Apply your learning to content strategy, strategic partnerships, and your business model to create sustainable business growth
Learn more about this process: click here.
Oh, the Things You Can Do With Your Customer’s Point of View
I’m in the middle of a series of posts on leveraging your customer’s perspective (and your business’ unique strengths) to discover how to take your ideas to scale. We’ve talked about to-do lists, evolving your business model, leveraging love, and using small ideas to create the most impact in your market.
But what else can you do with an intimate knowledge of your customer’s perspective?
1. Devise an engaging content strategy.
When you know what’s on your customer’s mind, you can create content–blog posts, email updates, social media posts, videos, classes, etc…–that meet her exactly where she’s at. Instead of hoping that the latest social media trick will tip the scales in your favor, you offer fresh ideas, instant inspiration, or genuine entertainment that lets your customer know just how in tune your business is with her needs.
When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.” Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody?
— Jason Fried, Why is Business Writing So Awful?
And perhaps more importantly, do you want to give your customers the impression you think they’re just like everyone else? No. You want to make them feel special. One in a million.
For example, Lisa Claudia Briggs, from Intuitive Body, knows her Most Valued Customer tends to bear the weight of the world on their shoulders. They internalize outside stress (at work, in their families, with friends) and turn that into unhealthy habits like overeating. She calls them empaths. Using the Customer Perspective Process, she can use that information to create instant connections and establish trust with potential clients. She recently wrote about the advantages of being an empath, turning a perceived negative into a positive. That’s great (long-lasting) content!
2. Use the media to spread your story.
Your customers are the media’s customers. The same people that buy your products and services also buy newspapers, magazines, and cable. Reaching your customers through the media (as opposed to advertising) means your coming through a trusted source. You earn the title expert or insider from people who get paid to mete out experts and insiders.
My friend and colleague Brigitte Lyons, a media strategist for microbusinesses and creator of the Your Media Map program, uses the Customer Perspective Process to both better understand her own clients and to train them in preparation for dealing with the media.
As I was preparing to launch my publicity planning program, Your Media Map, I brainstormed the work participants needed to do before they went after the media. The first thing that came to mind was Tara’s Customer Perspective Process.
One of the most successful mindset shifts you can make to dramatically increase your hit rate is to keep in mind that you and the media share a common customer. Your right-fit media is just as invested in serving your MVC as your business is. When you keep this commonality in mind, your approach to a journalist (or blogger) changes from being a self-interested pitch to a customer-focused collaboration.
This mindset shift is the key to launching a successful media campaign — and it also helps you calm the jitters you’ll feel when you approach a journalist with a huge audience. You know their reader inside-and-out, because she also happens to be your MVC.
3. Construct a sales process tailor made to duplicate your best customers.
Too many businesses use fancy language to sound like they have a solution. Any kind of jargon–business, self improvement, design, craft, advocacy, etc…–is a barrier between your customers and your work. Your sales process isn’t an opportunity to display your smarts.
It’s an opportunity to match how the value your business creates matches the needs and desires your customer is already expressing (or not expressing) the way they’re expressing them. For example, Jen Louden knows the frustrations, questions, and desires that teachers face when they enter the virtual classroom. She’s crafted the sales process for TeachNow, her signature program for creating confidence & clarity around teaching-as-business, to reflect those frustrations, questions, and desires in her students’ language.
4. Build a business model that exponentially increases your revenue.
When you construct your business model using your customer’s worldview, you can anticipate what products or services he’ll want and when. That means that each satisfying experience with a product turns into a marketing device for the next.
Your business retains highly satisfied customers who continue to invest the products & services they depend on.
According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, a loyal customer can be worth 10x as much as a single purchase. If your customers could purchase 10x more from you, you’d be quite happy, right? Crafting a smart business model around your customers’ evolving needs–based on your knowledge of their worldview–means they’ll have that opportunity.
5. Turn your business into a referral engine.
You’re not the only one who needs to talk about your business. You need your customers to be consistently referring clients to your products & services, too.
They’re unlikely to feel comfortable using your description for your business. If the only way you know how to talk about your business is through careful brand language, you’re missing out on a big opportunity for scale. When you give your customers ways to talk about your business from their perspective, it’s easier for them to spread the word for you.
I’ve seen this happen beautifully with my book, The Art of Earning. My customers (that’s you!) are all familiar with the starving artist archetype. By turning that on its head and challenging their perspective, they have a fun way to recommend the book to their friends and colleagues.
Your customer’s perspective is powerful.
Seeing the world through your customers’ eyes is a powerful thing. It’s more than just attracting your right people. It’s the foundation for a business that is truly social, truly sustainable, and truly successful.
Click here to learn about my next Customer Perspective Process boot camp.