The Black Box or The Fish Bowl?

Transcription

Today we segway into the Fourth Activator, message or the messaging. I’m really excited about this because this is an area where a lot of people drop the ball. Again, I wish I could say one activator’s more important than the other but honestly they’re all equally important.

So today, let’s look at the spectrum of where you might be, where you want to be. So, on the low end of the spectrum in terms of your messaging, here’s the statement that may reflect that. You can’t quite clarify your message. It’s vague and unclear. Prospects aren’t quite sure what you do.

How many of you can relate to that? Well, I think, a lot because when I look at websites and when I look at landing pages, when I look at offers, actually one of our clients just posted one of her new landing pages in our group, and I was like, I’m not too sure I understand this. But again, I’m not her target market, so maybe that’s why. Anyways, the opposite of the spectrum, which is the ideal, is your message is crystal clear and is impossible to be misunderstood. That’s the key phrase. Impossible to be misunderstood. It means one thing and everyone gets it. Okay, got that?

The Black Box Analogy

All right. So, let me give you an analogy to make sense of this. Actually before that, let’s go back to how the brain works. When you feel overwhelmed, like you’ve got 1000 things to do, right? How do you feel? Do you feel clear or do you feel like you’re going into stress fight or flight mode? Probably the latter, right? More stress, fight or flight. You don’t feel comfortable and that’s because your brain is having to work harder to make sense of what’s going on. If we think of email and inbox, right? So, you’ve an email that comes in and what do you do with that email? Well, some people have a whole process where maybe they follow a get stuff done process, right, which I think, I can’t even remember the author of that whole program but as I remember reading years ago and one of the things was, if it takes under two minutes, get it done right now.

So, if you have an email that comes through, and the email can really quickly respond, you can get rid of it, boom, get it out of the inbox, keep the inbox clean. Now, I’m very guilty about not doing this enough because my inbox starts to accumulate, which I don’t like, and the reason for that is because I get emails that come in that require me to think more than I want to. So instead of me taking action immediately, they sit there and I delay my response in many cases.

So, if we think of this as an example of how the brain works, when you put a message in front of someone, and they have to think more than they want to, that is going to hurt your conversions. What that means is that if you’re messaging isn’t crystal clear, where almost at the snap of a finger, they understand what it is you do or what it is you’re offering, it’s going to be very challenging for you to convert them into clients, a lead, whatever, you know, whatever you want. So, the fourth client activator is clear messaging.

So, let’s look at this analogy. I love this analogy. Let’s say that we are on Fear Factor. Remember that show way back in the day? Joe Rogan was the host, and I’m asking you to put your hand inside of a black box. Now, you don’t know what’s inside this black box. You might as well have a blindfold on, you have no clue. There could be a million dollars in there but there could also be a cobra snake. There could be jelly beans or there could be dog droppings. You don’t know. Now, if you don’t already have a high degree of know, like and trust with me, then what is the likelihood of you putting your hand into that box? Pretty slim, right? Okay.

Putting Your Hand In The Fishbowl

So, that’s the black box, and the flip side would be, let’s see, we have the black box on one table and then another box on another table. This box is essentially a fish bowl, and I say to you, “Just put your hand in that fish bowl because there’s a key at the bottom and if you grab that key, it’ll unlock all your dreams.” You’re like, “Yeah sure, no problem. I’ll just put my hand, cool, awesome, thanks.”

What was the difference? The difference is that in the fish bowl, you see exactly what you’re getting into, and you can see the outcome. In the black box you’ve got no idea of what’s about to happen. It could be great but it could also be really bad, right?

So, the analogy here is that a lot of messaging that I see and that I’ve been guilty of putting out into the market place, especially early on in my career, was black box marketing. That’s actually a pretty good name, right? Black box marketing. How to create a market that no one cares about. There we go. What that means is the message I was using meant nothing. It was so vague and confusing and unclear that very few people took action because either they didn’t want it, they didn’t care about it or they didn’t understand it. Does that make sense?

Now, on the flip side, the fish bowl is really what we want. It’s crystal clear like a bowl, a glass bowl would be. You can see right through it. It’s impossible to misunderstand. Hey, there’s a fish there, I see a fish. Everyone sees a fish, so it means the same thing to everyone. It doesn’t just mean a fish to some people and a whale to other people. It’s a fish. It’s a goldfish to every single person who sees it. I really want you to think about this because when you are crafting a message, like on your homepage for your website, which again, we don’t really care about because no one sees your website anyways, but more important, your landing page.

If you’re offering a webinar that people are going to register for, obviously this is something you highly recommend because they’re amazing but again, your webinar has to be, not just the webinar but the thinking leading up to the webinar. What is the promise? What’s the messaging around the webinar that is going to get someone to be like, yeah, I need to attend this thing. I don’t care if it’s five hours, I’m going to watch this. If that is not clear, if people land on that page and they’re looking at the headline and they’re like, what? What is this all about? I have no clue what this is. They’re gone, right? Because they’re going to have to think and if they have to think, that creates a micro-stress response and that stress response is going to lead them to feeling not good, right? Not in a depressed fashion but just at a really cerebral level, a really surface like I don’t feel comfortable. I’m not sure why I’d want to do this, type of thing. I’m not clear what it is.

Keep It Simple, Concise and Crystal Clear

But if the flip side to that is, here’s a very specific thing you want. Here’s exactly what you’re going to get. Boom. Okay then. That’s interesting. That’s a bit more compelling. So, your marketing within your marketing your message. The words that you use need to be very clear.

So, the client activator scorecard is a two page tool that helps you identify the nine activators that turn cold leads into high paying clients. Now that is all, I think, very clear except for the nine activators. Now the nine activators, what does that do? That invokes curiosity and curiosity is a good thing and you can use curiosity in your messaging as long as the overall objective of the message is very clear, right?

So, you want to discover what these nine activators are. Well, what are you going to do? Well you got to go opt into grab the PDF, right? So go to healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. So, if I said, there’s this scorecard thing and it’s got a bunch of things and a bunch of scores and it’s going to help you identify what’s going on in your business and then how you can create a breakthrough in your business. It becomes way too, like it’s … Dude, spend some time thinking to reduce the number of words you’re using to clarify your thinking. I don’t know if it was Oscar Wilde or one of those famous writers or whatever, back in the day, said something along the lines of, “I’m sorry it took so long to write such a short thing. If I had less time, I would have written something longer.” That’s the thing. The fewer words you use, the more thinking you have to incorporate because it requires thinking to clarify your message.

It’s very easy to ramble on but it’s harder to simplify and clarify and I think that’s a really great hallmark sign of someone who really understands their stuff is they can simplify, distill and clarify what it is that they’re trying to get across. So, if your message is vague, unclear, cloudy. If when the person’s reading this or hearing this, they’re not able to form very clear vivid images in their mind of what’s about to happen, that doesn’t create certainty and if they don’t have certainty, they’re not going to convert. Let’s look at the example of a phone conversation with a prospect. You talk about, you know, you get to the part of the call where you talk about your program and how it’s going to help them and in their mind they’re thinking, “I have no clue what you’re talking about. I can’t see this in my … How does this work? I don’t understand.”

So, that’s what they’re thinking in their mind, gets to the part of the call where you’re like, hey, do you want to work together and they say something like, I need to think about it, or I need to talk to my spouse. I need to talk to my dog. I need to talk to my postman. Whatever excuse they’re going to throw at you and the only reason they’re using that excuse is because in their minds, they have not been able to bridge what they want for where they are now with what they want and they can’t see your program as the visible bridge. It’s like, they see part of the bridge but then the rest of it is in the clouds and most people don’t have enough faith to just take it step by step, they have to be able to see the end result and see how it’s all going to tie together.

So, the more clear you can communicate what you do on a phone call, the better off you’re going to be converting people into clients. That’s a higher level example of how you take a prospect into paying you money but we can bring it all the way back down into a landing page to get someone to opt in. Clarity of message at every step of the process is extremely important.

So, that is our fourth client activator. Again, it’s our first one within the message pillar.

Now, in the next episode, we’re going to talk about the second client activator in the message pillar or the fifth client activator overall. Hey, I’m not going to even tell you what it is, right? So, you’ve got to join me on that episode. It’s coming up in two days.

For now, remember to grab the client activator scorecard over at healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. Download it today. Get your score. See where the leaks and opportunities are and then attend the deep-dive training so I can show you how to increase your score so you can get more clients, serve more people and make more money.

That’s all from me today. Thanks for joining me. I’ll see you in the next episode.