How it makes them feel, and how it makes them look

Here is a question with three parts. Answer them about your own customers as you go.

What does your service do for them? What does it let them stop feeling? And what does it let them look like, to whoever is watching?

Most owners answer the first one immediately and in detail. The second takes a moment. The third one stops people, and it is frequently the one carrying the decision.

Three layers, and only one of them gets used

Anything anyone buys is doing three jobs at once.

• The functional job. The practical thing. Get the return lodged, get the roof fixed, get the numbers ready for the bank.
• The emotional job. How they want to feel, or more often what they want to stop feeling. Not lying awake about it. Not dreading the envelope. Not carrying it around.
• The social job. How it makes them look to somebody whose opinion they care about. Their staff, their family, their board, their customers, the person who referred them.

Almost every business describes itself entirely in the first layer. Look at your own website and count. It will be a list of functional outcomes, and every competitor will have a nearly identical list, because at the functional layer you are all genuinely doing the same thing.

Which means that if you only compete there, the only thing left to compete on is price.

The emotional layer is usually relief

A common mistake is to assume the emotional job has to be something uplifting. In most ordinary business relationships it is not. It is the removal of a low-grade dread.

Someone engaging an accountant is often not chasing a feeling of financial mastery. They want to stop having a bad week every quarter. Someone hiring a builder wants to stop worrying that they are being taken for a ride by a person who knows more than they do.

That reframes what you are selling and it changes what you should say. If the real job is removing dread, then your updates are not admin. They are the product. Silence is the thing your customer is paying you to prevent, and most businesses treat communication as an overhead to be minimised rather than as the main thing they are delivering.

The social layer decides more than people admit

This is the one that gets skipped, and it is the sharpest of the three.

Almost nobody buys anything meaningful without somebody else finding out. Your customer has to tell their spouse what they spent. Or justify the decision to a co-owner. Or answer for it in front of staff when it is going badly.

So there is nearly always a second audience, and your customer is buying something for them too. Looking prudent. Looking decisive. Looking like someone who has it handled. Being able to say the name of who they used without having to explain the choice.

This is why the cheapest quote often loses. It is not that people enjoy paying more. It is that the cheapest option can be harder to defend to the person who asks about it later.

Once you can see that audience you can serve them directly. A summary written so it can be forwarded without editing. A document that makes your customer look organised in front of their bank. A way of explaining your work that they can repeat accurately. All of that is cheap, and all of it is aimed at someone you will never meet.

Fill in the three columns

Take your most common type of customer. Three columns, one per layer.

Fill the functional one first, quickly, because you know it. Then force yourself to put at least two things in each of the others. If you are stuck on the third column, the question to ask is simply this. Who does this person have to explain the decision to?

Then look at your website, your quotes and the way you describe yourself on the phone. Count how much of it sits in column one.

For most businesses the answer is nearly all of it, and the interesting material has been sitting in the other two columns the whole time, unused, being the actual reason people picked them.