Reduce the Time it Takes for Your Customer to Achieve their Dream Outcome
TL;DR
There are 4 key components to communicating your value effectively, we are focusing on reducing the time it takes for your customer to achieve their Dream Outcome if they work with you.
Your potential customers want to reach their desired destination and they want to be there as soon as possible. So tell them how long it will take.
Look at what actually drives results for your customers. Strip away as many things as you can that get in the way of achieving results and reduce time-to-value as much as possible.
Implement a quick win in your customer journey to reduce time to value and increase the confidence your newest customers have in you.
We can’t forget… Communicating the value you bring to your target customers is essential to getting new ones. The best marketers are hyper focused on the value they bring and are great at communicating it in a simple and quick way.
Marketing often has many goals but in the context of creating demand and helping drive more new business, marketing’s job is to create an offer your ideal client would be foolish not to accept.
There are 4 components to demonstrating value (shout out to Alex Hermosi for this framework):
Dream Outcome (DO)
Increase perceived likelihood to achieve DO
Reduce time to achieve DO
Reduce effort & sacrifice to achieve DO
Today we will cover the 3rd part of communicating value, reducing the time it takes for your customers to achieve their Dream Outcome.
I Want it All and I Want it Now
Queen’s 1989 hit perfectly describes the dream scenario of just about any customer.
Your potential customers want to reach their desired destination and they want to be there as soon as possible.
Increasing the speed to which you bring your customer to their dream outcome is an excellent way to get more of them. The fast-food industry has focused on this almost exclusively.
Speed is a major factor why people will gladly choose to eat below average food from a fast-food restaurant rather than cook something decent (or great) themselves.
Think about it, you can have an okay burger in 1 minute OR you can have a really good burger in 20… which do you want?”
Let's take this example to the business realm. You run an SEO agency and you help people grow their organic rankings and traffic. If you are able to double someone's organic traffic in 30 days and your top competitor does that in 12 months, you are clearly a FAR more valuable agency than any other around.
If you are faster you can charge more for your services, you can be more selective with the clients you bring on and you can be massively more profitable all because you bring more value.
Tell Time
You NEED to tell your prospective customers how long it will take them to achieve their dream outcome if they work with you. They want to hear it.
This is where I see SOOOO many marketers get nervous. Being nervous is fine but don’t use that as an excuse to hide from this.
I’m not asking you to guarantee results you can’t deliver on… far from it!
I’m telling you that your potential customers are craving for this information and if you don’t give it to them, you leave it up to their imagination. Don’t do that.
Reduce “time to value” as much as possible
There’s a whole school of thought on time to value. Books have been written on this topic, seminars have been preached
If you haven’t already decided on the dream outcome you know your customer wants to achieve, now is the time to pause and figure that out.
Once you have that dream outcome in your brain (or preferably written down), write down how long on average it takes you to help current customers to achieve that dream outcome.
If you don’t have any current customers, give it your best educated guess. Write it down and look at it. Then, ask yourself these questions:
Does it sound valuable to you?
Would your target customer be a fool for not hiring you if they saw it?
How much would a reasonable person be willing to pay for that outcome in that timeframe?
Try to be objective in answering these questions. This is a building block for constructing a great offer and great offers get accepted consistently… you want a great offer.
Possibly the most important question to answer is, “is there anything you can do to shorten your customers time to achieve their dream outcome?”
This is huge.
Look at what actually drives results for your customers. Strip away as many things as you can that get in the way of achieving results and cut the time as much as possible.
Implement a Quick Win
You may be saying to yourself, “this may be fine for a lot of businesses but the value I bring to my clients works its way out over years and there’s no way I can reduce that time scale.”
If this is you, it's time to implement a quick win.
A quick win is an objective milestone that is important to your customer that you set a time you will achieve it. Let's go back to the SEO agency example. SEO work can take many months and often years to see results. And those results are difficult to predict.
In the absence of being able to predict when your customer will achieve their dream outcome of “generating consistent organic traffic and leads”, set a milestone you know you can achieve that your customer will see as highly valuable. It could be something like:
4 new pieces of content posted to your site in the first 4 days
10 new backlinks generated in the first 2 weeks
5 pages optimized for your top keywords in the first week
By giving your potential customer a quick win, you immediately place significant value on the offer.
This is why diet brands promise people will lose 5 pounds in the first week. Its a quick win that drives value through the entire engagement.
P.S. - a quick win not only helps bolster an offer, it gives your customers confidence you will pull through on your original promises. Getting an early win is a great way to keep customers for a very long time.