Tell Them Why

Dateline: May 9, 2014

Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

Andy Sernovitz, an online marketing expert, recently published a blog post titled, The “Tell Them Why” Issue, which describes why it’s important to make sure customers understand what is behind the service you are selling.  It occurs to me that this is relevant to IT leaders, too.

Often we build (or procure) systems that have many features, but our customers only use a small portion.  Additional value could be found in really understanding why the additional features are useful.  Here’s Andy’s advice:

You can have all of the fantastic features you want, but if your customers don’t know why they’re fantastic, those features mean nothing. You have to give them the “why.”  You have to say “because…”

Here are four ways to do it:

  1.  Explain your behind-the-scenes process

  2.  Share a little-known fact

  3.  Make an effort to be transparent

  4.  Check it out: Feed fish from your computer