Get Clay Onto The Worktable

Dan Kennedy’s advice to business owners who are beginning to take ownership of their marketing is to ‘get clay onto the worktable.’

The most difficult part for an outside marketing consultant is to walk into a business and try to understand exactly who the customers are. Business owners themselves might not fully understand this either. Over years of experience one can intuit things about their clientele, but when challenged to sit down and explain it in words, they struggle.

Kennedy’s advice is to approach marketing and persuasion as an extension of really understanding a person.

He uses the example of a HVAC salesperson pitching an elderly client. After giving a grandiose speech about the furnace technical specs, it’s warranty, service agreements and home construction, the client asks the one question that matters - “Will this keep me warm?”

Now in a direct face-to-face sales situation, there are customers that will want all that information. If this company was selling directly to engineers, the salesperson would have been spot on with their approach. Because there is a direct interaction, the salesperson has an opportunity to course-correct and save the sale. Writers of marketing pieces don’t necessarily have that luxury.

Instead, the writer of marketing pieces has to rely on gathering as much information about the clientele upfront - ‘getting the clay onto the worktable.’

On the one hand, there’s the biographical data. Let’s call this the Google-able information. Age, gender, income, zip codes, political leanings, and anything else that you might call ‘analytics’. All these are things you should know. On the other hand, there’s the knowing the client, and experiencing the client.

The weakness of the analytical approach is that it misses the little details that make impactful marketing material. For example, looking at the zip codes on a map gives you one impression, actually driving through those neighborhoods gives you another. What’s it like on a Monday morning? Or a Thursday night? Is it a gated community? Is it run down? Is there a noisy airstrip nearby? What does it feel like to live there?

If the clientele has a trade journal, read it. If there are conferences, attend them. If there’s an opportunity to interact with them at a hotel bar, or a golf course, or even walk through their offices, you should take it.

From that you can start filling in the gaps. You’ll know the words they use, the trends they’re following, what constitutes a success for them, what a failure looks like, and what their bias are.

With enough clay to work with, you can start putting yourself in their heads and experiencing what they experience. How their day starts, how it ends, what frustrates them, what they quietly desire the most, what keeps them up at night, and what fills them with anger, rage, or fear.

Once you can experience all this inside your mind, it will become obvious what marketing strategies will have an impact and which ones will flop. You can run your marketing material through your own mental filter and ask “How would the client respond to this?”

That HVAC salesperson had the clay, but arrived at the wrong finished product. The good news is that had they missed the sale, then at least they had an opportunity to learn something. Gathering the clay is an ongoing process - the better you understand your clientele, the better your marketing material will be. The better your sales revenue will be too.