I just finished reading So What?: How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience by Mark Magnacca. This book really opened my eyes. I found it highly applicable for both product management and business development.
The premise of the book is that your message should focus on what your product can do for your customer. There’s nothing new or revolutionary about this idea. In fact, most of it boils down to understanding the difference between features and benefits (it’s benefits that matter), figuring out which benefit matters the most to your customer, and then making sure that they hear it. It’s a good reminder that many marketers need to hear from time to time. But where this book excels is in helping you apply this idea in ways that you might not have thought of. This book is a nice evolution in how you can market yourself, your product, or business.
Key Take-Aways:
1) Your potential customer or partner is thinking “so what?” All your thoughts and efforts as a marketer should be focused on finding the “So What Benefit” for your customer or partner. They don’t care about you, your product, or your company until they know how it benefits them.
Having taken hundreds of phone calls from other companies wanting to partner with my company, I can tell you that this is the only thing I cared about when taking these calls. If the caller couldn’t quickly articulate what was in it for me, then it was over.
2) Think through the “So What Matrix” when giving a presentation:
- “For What?” – Why are you giving the presentation?
- “So What?” – Why is it important to the customer?
- “Now What?” – What do you want the customer to do as a result of the presentation?
I’ve always been been stunned by how many product and partnership proposals I’ve seen that didn’t get these points across.
3) The goal is to get your customer to say:
- “I love it.”
- “I need it.”
- “I’ll buy it.”
4) If you can’t think of a “So What Benefit,” just ask your customer or partner. The author suggests saying the following: “One of the the things that I have found that is really helpful in prioritizing what’s most important is to ask you to complete the following sentence regarding this product/service.”
“All I really care about is ______________ .”
This is the recommendation that I really like. It’s so simple, why not just ask what someone wants? The problem is that people don’t always want to tell you what they want or can’t articulate it. The author gives good tips on how to get past this.
5) The author suggests creating a “personal biography” – a little about you, your background, what makes you different, and how you can benefit your customer. This helps your customer or partner better relate to you. The book goes into detail on how to do this and provides good examples.
This really changed my thinking in regards to the “about me” section on my blog, as well as my resume, my cover letter, and my personal business cards.
6) Next the author suggests creating a “So What Positioning Statement.” This helps you to answer the question “What do you do?” in such a way that people will easily understand how you can benefit them or other people they know. Most people waste the opportunity every time they are asked this question. The book goes into detail on this.
Answering this question properly isn’t easy to do. The author completely changed my thinking on how to do it.
7) And, finally, the author suggests that once you’ve identified your “So What Benefit,” you have to make sure that your product or service is always visible and consistent, and that your “So What Benefit” is constantly repeated. He calls this the “So What Reminder” – visibility, consistency, and repetition. Don’t assume people will remember your message. Make sure they remember it.
