Good work still needs to be understood

Sometimes I look at a business people are enormously impressed by and think that what they’re responding to is the marketing. The offer is clear, the communication is consistent and someone has thought carefully about how to take a person from being interested to becoming a customer. There is real work involved in doing that well, although it isn’t necessarily the mysterious thing it can appear to be from the outside.

I see people with excellent products become distracted by this. They admire what another business is doing, but when it comes to putting a similar process in place themselves, they resist it. Their work is different, their audience is different, and somehow that comes to mean they need to find an entirely different way of selling it.

Of course there will be things that need adapting. But however unusual your expertise, people still need to understand what they’re buying, why it might be useful to them and what happens after they pay. Being exceptional at your work doesn’t make those questions go away.

There are reasons certain approaches keep appearing. A useful introduction, a clearly explained offer and a thoughtful follow-up can do a great deal, and you can make all of those feel appropriate to your business without inventing a new sales process every time you launch. I think people sometimes make this harder than it needs to be because they worry that following a familiar structure will somehow diminish what makes their work distinctive.

What concerns me just as much, though, is how easily a polished sales process can make us assume the product itself must be good. A confident launch might persuade someone to buy, but it tells us very little about what they will receive or whether the experience will live up to the promise.

That is where I want to look more closely. I want to understand whether as much thought has gone into serving the customer as acquiring them, and whether the business can deliver what its marketing leads people to expect.

I don’t want excellent work to remain difficult to find or unnecessarily complicated to buy, any more than I want to help make something ordinary sound extraordinary. The work and the way it is sold need to stand up to the same scrutiny.