What Your Listeners Don’t Care About

Like this will ever happen

Have you ever shelled out extra money to buy your dog that special dog chow, the one in the commercial that shows the dogs enjoying the meaty flavor of flame-broiled filet mignon served on pure silver? You feel good about it, but Poochy doesn’t care. Poochy, if he’s like my dogs, just wants something in his dish that will fill him up—and lots of it.

Whenever you try to sell a product, service or idea to an audience, you’re probably pretty proud of what you have to offer. You’ve got a great story to tell. You work for a fantastic company. Your product is the greatest thing since cold beer. You’ve put in hours of hard work to create eye-popping slides. And best of all, you have passion.

Guess what?

They don’t care.

Your listeners don’t care that you have a great story to tell. They have seen hundreds of presentations that open with the seller’s story, complete with company history and photos of your snazzy new headquarters building. They care about their own story, and whether you can help them have a happy ending.

Your listeners don’t care that your company is fantastic. They care about whether you can make their company fantastic.

Your listeners don’t care that your product is fantastic. Well, that’s not totally true. They expect that it will be fantastic, so they first want to focus on why they might need it.

Your listeners especially don’t care about your eye-popping slides. If you can just talk to them, peer to peer, in plain language and show them how to produce eye popping results, they do care about that.

Lastly, your listeners don’t care about your passion. In fact, they may view passion with suspicion because they think it may blind you to objective truth. They care about how you can show them how to advance their passions.

Of course, I’m not advocating buying any old junk to feed your dog. As a responsible owner who loves your pet, you take your charge seriously to give them solid, healthy nutrition; you just don’t waste resources on stuff they don’t need and don’t care about.

Why should it be any different with your customers?