Millions of people hours are spent every day confronting the issue, “How do we get our customers to be interested in us?”
Marketing spends millions in content strategies, overlaid with all sorts of promotion programs. Sales looks for insights or provocation. Together, marketing and sales looks for provocative prospecting messages and approaches. In the escalating volume and noise of digital/social platforms, being provocative or even outrageous seems to rule.
All focused on the concept of being interesting to our prospects and customers.
In reality, being interesting isn’t that difficult. To be interesting, we have to be interested.
We have to be curious, learning about our customers as enterprises and individuals.
We have to learn about their dreams, challenges, opportunities, strategies, goals, aspirations.
We have to take the time to get to know them, to listen, hearing both what they say and what they don’t say.
We have to listen to the people they are listening to: their customers, markets, competitors.
We have to learn to see/hear things first through their eyes/ears, not through what we may want them to see/hear.
By being genuinely interested in them, we connect more effectively.
Related Article: 8 Tips for Effective Listening
More importantly, by being interested in them, we begin to discover the things they miss, where they might be blind/deaf to the things they should be seeing or listening to.
It’s at that moment, we become interesting to them.
At that moment, we become interesting because we care. We help them discover what they may be missing, what they may not see, how they might grow, improve.
It’s pretty simple, we don’t need to spend millions in all sorts of programs, or look at how provocative we might be.
Being interesting starts with being interested.