Speaking Ancient Greek to the construction worker

Monday Morning and Tuesday Afternoon, I wrote about business stupidity and delusions. In this article I would like to talk about communicating with the prospect.

Can you describe the prospect to me? How old is he or she? Is he married, single or divorced? Does he/she have children? Are they young or old? What is distracting him or her from listening to you?

Does your prospect know how to speak technobabble? If you are in the financial industry, can the prospect speak like Barrons, WSJ and an HBS faculty PHD?

There are two major problems that occur when many entrepreneurs attempt to speak to their prospects. First they don't know who their prospect is and Second, they try to speak as if their prospect is an industry insider.

Oh and just to make it more complicated, their target market is not homogenous. (That's technobabble for say that there is a lot of diversity among their prospects.)

To successfully market to your prospects, you need to identify (and I don't mean Guess) the different categories of prospects you have, you need to identify (and I don't mean guess) what their lifestyles (or if you are B2B, what their company is like on the inside) and then you have to learn their language.

Mike Moran wrote a nice article entitled "Do We Really Understand Personas?"