How to Make Them Care

You have a great solution. You’ve labored over it. You can really help people. But sometimes they just don’t seem to care. Here's how to fix that.

What do you do? What does your business do?

What is special about your product or service?

What is the feature you are so proud of that you can’t wait to explain it?

Here’s the thing. You probably do good work. Your ideal customers probably really need your product. Your features may be amazing.

But …

No one cares!

No matter what you say. No matter how fast you talk. No matter how excited you are. No one cares a tenth as much as you do.

Wisdom Partners coach (tag his linked in: Alex Caveny) says new products are like babies. Their parents love them more than any baby in the world. Everyone else has seen lots of babies, and they just aren’t that impressed. No one cares about your product or what your business does.

This is a difficult but crucial lesson to learn. For a long time at Wisdom Partners, we said things like:

• We do four things: coaching, community, consulting, and offsites. (We couldn’t figure out how to get that last one as a C.)

• We help founders scale their business.

• We help founders sort out their inner game so their outer game is more successful.

Those are all true descriptions of what we do and important for our ideal customers (founders leading growing businesses).

But …

Nobody cared. At least not enough.

Not because the work wasn’t real. Not because we weren’t good at it. But because we were leading with what we do instead of why it matters to them. And those are two completely different conversations.

Here’s the thing about human attention: it goes where the pain is. Always. If you want someone to lean in when you’re talking about your product or your company, you have to start where their nerve endings are, not where your features are.

Money follows pain. Which means attention does too.

Step one: Know (and love) your ICP.

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. But I want to push past the marketing definition for a second, because knowing your ICP is an empathy exercise.

You need to know your customer well enough to feel their frustration. To understand what keeps them up at night. To recognize the moment they walk into a room carrying the exact problem you solve.

More than that, as cheesy as it may sound, you need to develop a genuine love for your ideal customers. You need to have such compassion for them that you feel their pain as deeply your pain. You need to care about their success deep in your bones.

If you can’t do that, you’re going to keep pitching at people instead of connecting with them.

At Wisdom Partners, our ICP is a founder who has built something that works. They have product, they have revenue, maybe they have funding, but they’re stuck firefighting instead of company-building. They’re the bottleneck in their own business. They’re at the elbow of the hockey stick, where the demands of the next phase are outpacing what got them here.

That’s specific. That’s a person with a real, nameable pain. And when we describe that out loud, founders laugh and nod and moan and say, “Yep, that’s me.”

That’s what knowing your ICP actually feels like.

Step two: Get them to explain their pain.

This is the move most founders skip. They get in front of a potential customer and immediately start talking about their product. They lead with the solution before they’ve confirmed the problem. More importantly, they push the solution before the customer has really owned the pain of the problem.

Don’t do that.

Instead, ask questions that draw the pain out. Then, as follow-up questions that dig even deeper. Let them describe it in their own words. What’s not working? What does a good week look like versus a bad one? Where are they losing time, money, or sleep?

Two things happen when you do this. First, they feel heard, which is rare and creates real trust. Second, you learn exactly which version of your solution to offer, in the exact language that will resonate with them. You stop guessing what matters and start responding to what they’ve told you.

People don’t buy solutions. They buy relief from specific pain, described in their own words.

Step three: Then — and only then — offer your medicine.

Once the pain is on the table, and they’ve articulated it themselves, that’s your moment. Not before. Not at the top of the conversation. Not after the first hint or mention of pain. After they explained the real pain in deeply honest words. After.

It feels like you’re waiting too long. It can actually be scary to wait and keep digging into their pain. It feels like you might miss your window. But you’re actually transforming the narrow window that barely shows the light into a huge door that they will invite you to walk through.

Because now your solution isn’t a pitch. It’s a response to their story. You’re not telling them what you do. You’re showing them that you understand exactly what they’re going through, and here is what relieves it.

That’s a completely different dynamic. The resistance drops. They’re asking themselves if this is the thing that fixes the deep pain they just described. And if you’ve listened carefully enough, the answer is obvious.

The short version.

Money follows pain. So stop leading with what you do, and start leading with what hurts. Know your customer well enough to feel it. Get them to say it out loud. Then offer the solution.

That’s how you make them care.

Note: This blog post was originally a workshop presentation at Informal Spaces in Oakland, CA, hosted by the amazing Kyle Valiton - who is a Wisdom Partners client and collaborator.