Humans have complex grammar and tens of thousands of words at our disposal. We should be flawless communicators, and yet we routinely fail to say what we really mean.
Miscommunications can make for great fiction. If Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy were any good at expressing themselves, Pride & Prejudice would either be very short or very boring. But if you’re trying to win customers, what you need is clarity.
When I run messaging workshops, I often find that people struggle to explain clearly what their product does, let alone why potential customers should use it.
This doesn’t mean they don’t understand their own business – far from it. Often they’re so close to the product it’s difficult to see it from an outside perspective, and as I explain in this blog, perspective matters.
But it does mean they need help finding their offering’s core value – the part that will resonate with the rest of the world – and you can locate that value by asking the right questions.
The two kinds of question
There are two classic ways of asking questions: like a Lawyer, or like a Journalist:
Lawyers ask closed questions to confirm what they already believe:
“Colonel Mustard, you were in the kitchen at 7:43pm, weren’t you?”
Journalists ask open questions to explore what they don’t know:
“Colonel Mustard, why were you in the kitchen?”
If you want to find the core of your company’s message, you need both approaches: open questions to reveal possibilities, closed questions to test them.
Asking the right questions to find your company’s message
Socrates was famously a guy who knew how to ask questions. In fact, his ‘Socratic Method’ of asking probing questions to help people ‘give birth’ to their own understanding earned him the nickname ‘Midwife of the Truth.’
By thoughtfully posing a series of open-ended Journalist’s questions and closed Lawyer’s questions in a kind of ‘Socratic Dialogue,’ a skilled messaging consultant can help your team identify, understand, and express the core value of your business.
Let’s try it out with a made-up B2B SaaS Fintech:
Question
What does your business do?
Answer
We provide a white-label embedded finance product that e-commerce platforms can offer to small businesses for financing.
Question
Okay. So what problem are you solving?
Answer
Small businesses often have cashflow issues.
Question
That’s a real problem for those small businesses, but are they your customers?
Answer
No, the e-commerce platforms are.
Question
Right. So whose problem are you actually solving?
Answer
The platforms’.
Question
Good. And what’s the fundamental problem every e-commerce platform faces?
Answer
Getting businesses to use and stay on their platform.
Question
Exactly. So how does your product help them do that?
Answer
We give them a financing tool that helps their merchants manage cashflow.
Question
Which means?
Answer
They can offer more support to their merchants, making them less likely to churn.
Question
So your real value is…?
Answer
Helping e-commerce platforms retain merchants by giving them a powerful new support feature.
Question
Nicely put. So, this product isn’t just embedded finance, it’s a way for platforms to attract and keep customers by offering them more support.
Answer
Yes! That’s it.
Look how we’ve gone from a technical description of a product:
A white-label embedded finance product that e-commerce platforms can offer to small businesses for financing.
…to a clear and concise notion of its value…
A way for platforms to attract and keep customers by offering them more support.
There’s nothing vague about this final message, no buzzwords or jargon to mask a lack of real understanding. It’s a simple sentence, but it tells us what the company does, who they do it for, and how they can help.
That’s messaging with substance, and it’s what someone who knows how to ask the right questions can help you find for your business.
I’ve asked questions as a documentary maker for the BBC, a science and technology writer for the Guardian, and a messaging consultant for Fintechs, Impact VCs, and a range of other clients.
If you’d like to ask me a question – like how I can help you uncover your core message – get in touch.
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