Don’t Sell What You Care About

Hey guys, Kevon here. Welcome back to my show. This show is where I share what I'm learning in business with you and today I have an exciting topic. I think it's exciting because we all encountered this at some point in our business journey. For example, you care about something like authenticity. You really care about this, but then you try to sell that to another person by labeling everything about authenticity.

And you realize you cannot sell that because that's not what people want. So you realize that's really sad. So today, let's talk about that. But first, before we go there, I want to tell you. What happened over the last weekend in my family? You know, ever since having two daughters, it has been a very tiring journey, right?

Taking care of them, going out to play with them. But Sunday was my most exhausting day ever. I woke up at 6:45 and then I took my one-year-old daughter out to the playground to play for an hour, just two of us. And then we have family lunch. Then I took my three-year-old daughter out to explore for three hours. And again, it's one on one. And then we have reunited and had a family dinner with grandma as well. The main reason I am doing these one on one hangout with my daughter is because, you know, I'm a girl dad. So oftentimes I feel like the kids. They're very attached to their mommy. So they're basically mommy this, mommy that. Sometimes I feel like I need to build up my presence. Honestly, I just want to deepen our bonding a bit more So, I have to do something without mommy's presence.

With two kids, you have to do it twice, because you cannot hang out with two kids at the same time. That's not really deep bonding. Going back to my one-year-old, that is super easy. Basically, I just pick her up and then we can go anywhere. She has no say. But the thing about the three-year-old is that, It is very hard.

She starts to really understand everything and in order to get her to say yes I have to convince her. I have to convince her that it will be fun to spend three hours with Daddy one-on-one. As I said, we went out for family lunch and then my three-year-old actually took a nap in the car, and then after waking up from the nap, it was just Avery and me, and immediately she cried a little bit.

She was like, I want mommy, where's mommy? Where is my little sister as well? So maybe she's thinking they're hanging out. At this point, I knew that I could not sell her the idea of, Hey Avery, let's spend some time together. This is really important. That's not gonna work. Not because she's a kiddo, but because that's not what she wants.

So I quickly improvised on the spot and I thought about, Hey, Avery, why don't we have a mission today? Mother's Day is coming up. So why don't we go for a gift hunting? Maybe we'll go walk around and then we'll find mommy something. Before we do that, maybe we can go get some ice cream? You like ice cream, right? And amazingly, she was okay immediately. Well, maybe because of the dessert, the ice cream. But I also think that the mission, the challenge that we're going to do together. That was really interesting. Why am I telling you this story? Well, because I think it's a great example of how you cannot sell the truth, how you cannot sell the things that you really care about, because that's not what the other person wants. But at the end of the day, what you care about can be passed down to the other person in the experience.

And the other person doesn't even need to know it. If you are selling a course, okay, back to Authenticity. You don't have to sell Authenticity. But within your course, because of the way you speak, because of the languages you use, people will know that authenticity is extremely important.

Now let's dive a little deeper into this topic, because this is actually a real question from one of my students in Build in Public Mastery. She asked me in Office Hour, and I thought this is a really interesting topic for the podcast. When I think about what we care about and what the customers want. I think of that classic comparison between features and benefits, because as product builders, as entrepreneurs, we're very drawn to talking about the features because we work on them so hard. So we think, okay, the features are amazing. Let's talk about it more.

The thing we need to understand is customers. They are just a user of the product. Honestly, they don't care. They don't really care about what features they are. They just want to get the job done. They just want to know what we can do for them.

So why don't we have a real life example? Why don't we use me? Right now, I'm building a new business called Small School. The reason why I call it small is not because I want the school to be like tiny, tiny. It's just that I care about the learning experience. I don't like that so many creators just care about scaling the revenue, grow a huge audience and then just, yeah, always focusing on those topics.

I don't like it. I think teaching is an art. So if you can level up your teaching, if you can really make the students progress from point A to point B. I think your influence will just grow. So that's why the focus on small is like doing things right. Taking a small steps approach. Then I thought about if I put that on the front page, you know, in my mission statement or whatever, I don't think people would like that or resonate with it because most of the time, what do people care about?

At the end of the day, they want to grow a bigger, bigger education business themselves. It's not like they would go and say, I want to teach better. No, I don't think a lot of people or the majority of people would say that.

So this is a great example that what you care about is fine. You can do it in the experience. You can spread that philosophy, but in the positioning, in the brand statement, you want to always focus on the finish line because people care about that destination that your business will take them. So finish line is what you should focus on.

In this case, I'm helping them successfully share and sell their knowledge and have that flexible and fulfilling life. So I definitely should use that as the positioning to be the first impression. So then at least they feel like, wow, I'm very interested in Small School, I want to see what they can teach me.

And then I said something about, you know, you can still spread your philosophy in the experience. So in theory, how do you do that? You're listening to me right now. With my words, with my tone with the things that I talk about you kind of get what kind of person I am. So if you are sharing your knowledge people can really read into the details. What examples are you using?

What are the things that you repeat like five different times just to get across to them? Those would be the things that you care about. Like you don't have to tell people that I really care about this. I really care about, let's say football. No, you don't have to say that. If in your conversations, you're mentioning football all the time. People know that you care about football.

So the next time you try to describe something, don't think about what you care about. Think about what the customers care about.

If you are in for another example, I also went on a family trip with my two girls, my wife and my wife's parents a couple of weeks ago. With kids, we are always looking for places that they can enjoy like zoo, like kids friendly cafes and all that. So a couple of weeks ago, we did go to this kid's cafe and it was amazing.

Well, first of all, there's a huge kids play area. There's trampoline, there's a ball pit, there's a makeup station, there's a kitchen station, there's a slide and all that indoor, by the way. And then on the other hand, half of the space is food and drinks. So you can order coffee, you can order orange juice, and the quality is really, really high.

I was impressed when we ordered orange juice, they actually took out a basket of oranges and start squeezing it with the machine in front of us. So that glass of orange juice has five oranges in it. I was blown away. That moment, I thought that, wow, the founders really care about the quality of food.

Well, at the end of the day, it's a cafe, right? But of course they didn't use that to impress people or to be their marketing message because we are not going there for the food. Us parents what we really care about is well, we need a place for the kids who play so then they have something to do. And then on the other side, we don't have to watch them a hundred percent of the time. We can order some coffee, some food, and just relax.

This is what we want. This is what the customer wants. So of course they use that as the marketing message as well.

So to wrap up this episode. Why don't we talk a little bit about what's going on at Small School, right now? I'm working on a new product called Momentum Marketing Mastery. MMM. Yeah, the three Ms to help you really leverage the community power to launch your product so that you can have a buzz and you can have customers already lining up to pay you. I know there are a lot of people launch formulas out there, but I really haven't seen one that is not just talking about the logistic of things.

For example, you know, build a product, set a launch day, write some emails and then just announce the product. I think we can do much better than that because we are in the era of community or audience, and my approach has always been, well, you have this small community around you. Why don't you work with them?

So then they can give you a lot of good things like feedback, reviews, testimonials, they can help share the message. You can do that. So the MMM, Momentum Marketing Mastery product will focus on teaching you the steps to make that happen. So if you're interested, you can go to broc.to/MMM. B-R-O-C dot T-O slash M-M-M, and you can get on the wait list. Only people on the waitlist can get Momentum Marketing Mastery.

Make sure you check it out and I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you around. Bye. Bye.

Before we go, rock and roll!

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