August 9, 2017
[ICC] The patient sees the symptom, not the disease
FYI - I’m currently off-grid at a lodge on a lake in a remote corner of Maine. I’ll be back in the saddle on Monday, August 14th. In the meantime, here’s a popular post from the Inner Circle Collection:
The patient sees the symptom, not the disease
An interesting question came up in my coaching Slack room yesterday:
If you were giving a live presentation to conference audience, would you take a minute to explain WHY they should care? I think I’ve seen you do that with your “ditch hourly billing” stuff. There’s a brief amount of time spent explaining why hourly billing is madness.
Yes, I try to always begin presentations by explicitly stating the problem to be solved.
Perhaps more importantly, I believe that it’s important to put the problem in their terms.
For example:
Lots of credit unions have an atrocious on-boarding experience on mobile and I do presentations explaining what to do about it.
So, you might think I’d lead off a talk like this with something like:
“Your on-boarding experience on mobile stinks and it’s killing your business.”
But...
In their opinion, they’re proud of their mobile experience because they’ve spent (i.e., wasted) a lot of money on it.
Therefore, this opening would completely close them down to anything further I had to say.
The patient doesn’t see the disease, they see the symptom.
The symptom that credit union leadership sees is that they’re not attracting younger members.
So...
I’d start a talk to this group by leading with something like:
“Your membership is aging and you can’t figure out what to do about it.”
This opening will perk them up because they recognize the problem and are wondering (hopeful, even) that I’ll offer a possible solution.
To paraphrase Dale Carnegie:
Don’t bait your hook with food you like. Bait your hook with food fish like.
Yours,
—J
P.S. Would you like to read through the entire back catalog of messages? The Inner Circle Collection is now available (use code DAILY25 at checkout for 25% off any volume) -> https://jonathanstark.com/icc