You know, something really bothers me about most marketing and sales funnels. They’re skipping a massively important step. And that is the step of understanding.
No matter what kind of funnel you’re looking at, whether it’s three stages or four stages or five stages, each stage of those funnels—awareness, interest, decision, action, retention, loyalty—represents someone being interested enough in your idea to engage further and ideally to act.
The problem is, in order for any of that to happen, somebody has to understand your idea. And that’s where we run into problems.
That’s because of one critically important principle about building buy-in for ideas and that is
That every decision has a story.
And I don’t mean once-upon-a-time stories. I mean the stories our brain builds pre-consciously to establish the relationship between cause and effect. Between problem and solution.
Those stories have a specific structure, just like the stories we tell other people. And in fact, in many ways, they are identical. But without every part of that story in place, someone cannot understand your idea.
And that’s usually because we’ve only presented the solution.
“You need to buy this.”
“You need to do this.”
But without why you would do it, without a reason to do it, people don’t understand. Or worse, they will fill in their own blank, which may not be the one you want.
This is why Simon Sinek’s advice to start with why is so important. Because if people don’t understand, they cannot be interested, and they cannot act.
The issue, though, is a lot of times that the why we establish publicly is a why that people don’t know they have.
So one of the key things about establishing understanding right from the get go is making sure that you are anchoring your message every time in a question that your ideal audience is actively and knowingly asking right now.
Sometimes that’s going to feel like the wrong question to you. That’s okay.
But it’s a question that they’re looking for an answer for, which means they’re already going to be bought into finding an answer for it. If your product, approach, or idea provides that answer—and you link it to that question they’re asking right now—they will find you.
But if you leave it out, they won’t.
The other way I’ve seen that we lose people on their understanding is that we use terms and complicated concepts that they do not understand. We use trademarked phrases without explaining what they mean. We come up with new words, new concepts that people have never heard before. We think that’s going to get them interested,
That’s not how curiosity and interest actually work.
If people don’t understand something, they are negatively curious about it. It actually repels them.
So when you’re building your messages and you want that buy-in, make sure those messages are first and foremost understandable to your audience. That way, they’re going to just slide on down that funnel.