#86: The Reason Most Businesses Fail (SUMMER REPLAY)

0:00The real reason most businesses fail is not because they don't have a good product. It's not because people don't want the product. It's not because product is too expensive. It is because your message is confusing. Unclear messages are interpreted as potential danger and something to avoid. The very idea of me having to overanalyze or think about something that isn't about my survival is in itself a threat. So that's why today I'm going to uncover three simple things that you can do to get customers to buy from you by using language that answers specific questions. And that translates, by the way, directly into action.

0:37Hey, podcast producer Bobby Richards here. And this summer, we're bringing back a few of our most valuable StoryBrand podcast episodes, the ones we believe are worth hearing more than once. Let's jump right in. you're listening to the story brand podcast based on donald miller's best-selling book building a story brand the story brand framework is made up of seven key elements all of them anchored in one powerful idea your customer is the hero and you are their guide each week on the podcast you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business now let's dive in with your host donald miller

1:23Your message is confusing. And every once in a while, I just want to come back to that idea on this podcast and give you another view of it, give you another understanding of it, and give you practical tools that you can use to make sure you are not confusing your customers. Listen, this is the hardest thing to do. I always say that clarifying your message is something I can do for every company except my own. It's hard for me to do it for StoryBrand because I'm just so close to it. it's called the curse of knowledge. That's a phrase that Lila Fever uses in his book, The Art of Explanation. He talks about the fact that you're so close to your product that you're cursed with knowledge that your customer doesn't have.

2:02And you're projecting that knowledge onto the customer. And so you're talking over their heads. That's one thing. You're talking over their heads. The next thing that we do that kills our businesses is we try to sound smart or sophisticated. This is almost always a mistake to try to sound smart and sophisticated. it. Whenever, you know, I'll do this in an exercise in a workshop or something, I'll have people sit down and say, hey, I want you to write a sentence that defines the problem your product solves. And they'll write that sentence. And then I'll say, okay, read me the sentence. And an individual at the workshop will read me the sentence.

2:34And then I'll say this. I'll say, what do you mean by that? And then they will say the thing that I wish they would have written down. In other words, they know they're trying to sound smart and sophisticated. And when they translate it into common language, they nail it. That's what you should be saying. And we have a phrase around here, zero cognitive load. And cognitive load is the amount of effort it takes me to try to figure out, the amount of mental energy it takes for me to figure out what in the heck you're saying. And the higher the cognitive load, the less sales happen. The real reason businesses fail.

3:12It's not bad product or service. It's because customers are confused about what you sell. Confusion is the villain. It is the villain of StoryBrand. It's what we attack. It creates stress in the customer's mind. It's light, mild stress, but everybody runs from stress. They see it as a threat. It makes the brain feel like it doesn't understand, which makes you feel stupid. It makes the brain work harder to figure out what kind of survival asset your product actually is. If I have to work harder. The brain is an incredibly complicated machine. It's incredibly complex, but it doesn't like to overuse its ability.

3:52The brain is always looking for survival assets. It wants to know how your product is a survival asset without having to think. And because it's conserving calories all day long, because if I overthink, if I overthink, I can't function. If I overthink and overanalyze everything, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning, right? Because I'm overthinking and analyzing. The brain has learned to reject almost all information that is in front of it. Now, you say, Don, it doesn't reject almost all information. I want you to just stop for a second think about it. Unless you're driving, look around. Look at everything in the room with you and notice the fact you hadn't thought about it.

4:41How many people are in the room? Is there a chair in the room? Is there a clock? Is the clock five minutes off? Look at everything in the room that you did not think about. And now I want you to agree with me on this point. Your brain made a decision to not think about those things. Instead, you thought about pulling up this podcast, listening to this podcast, and trying to glean some wisdom from this podcast that will help you grow your business, which is a survival asset. It's how you make money. It's how you experience meaning in life. It's how you play your role in the world. All that associates with your your survival.

5:24The brain is almost exclusively interested in its own survival. If you make me think too hard to figure out how you can help me survive, I'm telling you, your customers are turning away. Because having to think too hard is itself a survival liability. Let me give you an example. I was just working with a gentleman two days ago. He came to town, and he's delivering a TED Talk-style talk. One of the first things I do when I help somebody create their talk is we define the controlling idea. I have a template of slides, and it's a narrative template. The customer has to start in a hole. You have to empathize with the customer.

6:10You have to help them out of the hole with an idea or a product. It's a template of slides that we use as a baseline. And the first slide is controlling idea. And his controlling idea, I don't want to give away his talk because he's still working on it, But his controlling idea was something like disruption and methodologies to navigate their realities. I'm butchering it, but it was something akin to that.

6:48and we came up with a different controlling idea and it was how to make decisions when the world won't stop changing. Do you hear the difference? It's the same sentence, but do you hear the difference? How to make decisions in a world that won't stop changing, positions the world that won't stop changing is kind of a bully. It's trying to take you down. making decisions is very important if you want to survive. And the other one sounded smart and sophisticated, but it caused me to think too much. You could just close your eyes and picture each of those talk titles on YouTube. And the one that how to make decisions in a world that won't stop changing.

7:32And by the way, that's not what he's going to go with. I've changed it to protect his IP. But you can see 5 million views next to that one. and the navigating disruption, blah, blah, blah. You can see 100 views next to that one. It's the same talk. At the top of the funnel, at the introduction, when I'm first understanding your product or being introduced to your product, you got to go zero cognitive load. There's two things. One is, how hard do I have to think, and how quickly can I associate this with my survival? Words like survive, how to survive in a whatever. Literally words like survive are very, very good in terms of triggering that primitive instinct.

8:18If I'm a real estate agent, one of the things that I want to say is how to sell your house and survive in an environment with high interest rates or something like that. Just try to get the word survive in there because the word survive actually triggers the brain that you have something that helps them survive. They don't have to think about it. When you're talking about introductory communication, the very first level, top of funnel communication, we're not talking about after you deliver the product or after I've spent an hour watching you on YouTube. You can get into the weeds all you want there.

8:55I'm talking about that entry-level communication. Zero cognitive load associated with the customer survival is paramount. This is, by the way, my job. It's what I spend 75 % of my time doing with clients. is translating what they're saying back to zero cognitive load and back to survival instinct language. And what we see is sales go up. We see sales go up when we do that. Why? What do we mean? What do I mean when I say your customer is confused? Your customer isn't confused about something that we can't define. The customer is confused about what the heck you're saying and what it has to do with me surviving.

9:36And my job as a messaging guy is just to dial that back and get it back to zero cognitive load. Do you ever wonder why some marketing instantly grabs your attention while other marketing you just ignore? It's not about luck. It's not about a bigger budget. It's that the marketing that works actually follows just a few simple principles that actually makes it easier to understand, makes it memorable, and most important, impossible to overlook. That's why StoryBrand has a free guide, the four rules of messaging that will teach you those principles. In just a few minutes, you'll have a simple framework for evaluating every message you create from your website and emails to your ads and sales conversations.

10:17Download your free copy of those four rules today by clicking the link in the show notes. Now your customer's response to your confusing message is not, I'm confused. I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying. I feel like your cognitive load is too high, and I don't exactly understand how this is a survival asset. They will never, ever tell you that. What they will say is, I'll think about it. Or they won't say anything. They'll just pass you up and go to your competition. That silence is deadly, by the way. I'll think about it. Here's what I'll think about it means. It doesn't mean I'm passive-aggressively getting out of this conversation.

10:52That's not what it means. What it actually means is, I'll think about it. I am going to go home and try to figure out what the heck you just said and whether or not it has anything to do with my survival. That's what I think about it means. I'll think about it really means you didn't communicate it clearly. So I'm going to go think about it. And that's where we get into trouble. Therefore, the language that you are using to describe your products in your product description, that Amazon copy that you're using to describe your product, that paragraph on the back cover of your book, That tagline, that header above the fold on your website, the name of that lead generator, the opening statement in your podcast, the closing statement in your podcast, your social media bio, what you actually say on social media, all of that, if it is confusing, is actually perceived as a mild threat to the customer's survival, which explains why your business is not growing.

11:52And we want to fix that today. Customers decide about seven seconds whether it's worth the mental energy to keep listening to you. So everything you say has to buy more time. And if they can't quickly understand what you do, what you offer, their brain checks out. A human's brain saying there's nothing here that's going to help me survive. I'm going to conserve energy. The brain burns a ton of calories a day, 600 to 800 calories. 20 % of the calories your body burns are burned by your brain. And your brain doesn't like to burn those calories. It wants to conserve them. It only wants to burn those calories on things that matter.

12:27Confusing messages don't matter. Here's the crime. Here's the injustice. You actually do have a product that can help somebody survive. You're just not talking about it right. And the brain will not go, well, let me think about this to find out if they do have something that helps me survive. It can't take that risk. It can't take that risk.

12:49So language like, we provide integrated, scalable solutions to optimize operational efficiency across multiple platforms, is a ridiculously high cognitive load. It sounds impressive, but it's really, really unclear. And when the brain has to work to answer the simple question, what do you actually sell? What's in this for me? It simply opts out. Vague messaging creates all sorts of friction. and friction causes hesitation. Hesitation kills momentum. Momentum drives sales. We got to translate that stuff into language that makes sense. Clarity, though, is your secret weapon. Talking at zero cognitive load.

13:31By the way, this is what got Donald Trump elected president. This is what got Mondami in New York, elected mayor. Zero cognitive load messages associated with customer survival. People think, well, culture's moving to the left, culture's moving to the right. No, it's not. Culture is moving toward clarity always. The votes will move toward clarity always. People don't move left or right. They move toward clarity. Trump was clear. Trump won. Mandami's clear. Mandami won. Complete opposite candidates doesn't matter. Both the clearest candidates, political candidates right now, period. And they're both winning.

14:15If that doesn't prove to you that clarity wins, I don't know what will. You need to answer three questions at least. I'm going to give you more later, but you need to answer what do you offer? Really, what is it? I'm a messaging consultant. I help you clarify your message. That's what I offer. I'm a messaging consultant. How it helps them. That's the second thing that your message needs to explain. What you offer and how it helps them. I help you clarify your message so customers engage. and they buy from you. I'm a messaging consultant. I'll help you clarify your message so customers engage and buy from you.

14:52Then what they're supposed to do next, go to storybrand.com. You can hire me there. You can come to my workshop there. You can watch my on-demand courses there. Now, you tell me, was that zero cognitive load? Yeah. You'd have to think. Now, did I sound sophisticated? No. Did I sound clever? No. Did I sound smart? No. But I've built a significant business answering those three questions. Now let's go back to that complicated sentence I said earlier. What if that customer just said, we help small businesses save 10 hours a week by automating their billing? Was that zero cognitive load? Yeah, zero cognitive load.

15:37The brain relaxes when it hears this. It doesn't have to think. It doesn't feel threatened by the algebra trying to figure out what you're saying. In every great story, the customer is the hero, your brand is the guide, and your message is the map that helps them understand where to go. A clear message can be condensed into, we help this customer solve this problem so they can experience this positive outcome. I want to repeat that. Just write that down. We help small business owners, customers, this customer solve this problem, solve the problem of confusing messaging so that customers will engage.

16:22We help this customer solve this problem so that they can experience this positive outcome. When the message is clear, customers feel that relief and relief builds trust. Trust leads to action. People like brands that are clear. Listen, marketing is not about being clever. Messaging is not about being clever. It's not about being sophisticated. It's about being clear. The brands that win in this world are the brands that reduce cognitive load, not the ones that add to it. If you want customers to buy from you, remove confusion. Clarify your message and invite them to act. Confusion is the villain that is holding you back.

17:07Those three questions that need to be answered. What do you offer? How will it help the customer? And what are they supposed to do next? If you do this, your message becomes the map your customer can follow to solve their problem, to use your product to solve their problem. You're going to reduce cognitive load. Your customer's brain is going to relax. They'll feel relief, and that relief is going to create trust. That trust is going to lead to action, which is to buy your product. So the brands that win are the ones that are clear, not the ones that are clever. When you remove confusion, when you clarify your message, you will invite your customer to act, and you will see sales go up.

17:48Just another friendly reminder from us at StoryBrand, clarify your message so customers engage. If you want us to help you do that, go to storybrand.com. We have on-demand resources. We have a live workshop that over 100 small business owners show up here in Nashville to attend. And at Marketing Made Simple, we have StoryBrand certified guides. These are freelance marketers who have been certified and trained by me to create your messaging campaign for you. So go to marketingmadesimple.com to hire one of our guides. Thanks for listening to the StoryBrand podcast. no matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey, get the tools, the training, and the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com.

18:28And don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can unpack to help your business grow in a future episode. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.

18:50Thank you.