You want new customers to knock on your door. This is the most desired state.
Prospective new customers will want to contact you when they believe that there is a semblance of a solution for them. But what makes them believe that this is the case? The situation that you are painting must resemble their situation in order to allow them to self-identify. This is what causes things to click.
From the perspective of customers, there is always more than one way to deal with a specific situation. And so what is it that makes one solution preferred? When potential customers are cast into a marketplace where the vendors are all striving to differentiate their offering, it all becomes much less obvious which solutions merit more attention.
To get through this wall, the context of your messaging must allow potential customers to see themselves. An understanding of all those great capabilities and benefits will not do it alone. There is often that lingering doubt. Will it work for me? Is it worth it? Should I wait?
But if a prospective customer hears of the story of someone who was in a similar situation, it becomes the ultimate trump card. The whole mindset shifts to one where the situations are compared to decide whether one can serve as a proxy for the other. And if there is a match, it is quite likely that the propensity for engagement increases.
A skilled salesperson would be able to readily determine which solutions present themselves as a good fit for new customers. And they would be able to naturally migrate a customer through progressively changing needs. But therein lies the problem. With the plethora of solutions out there, new customers do not want to engage directly, until they themselves have determined that your solution could be a good fit.
In absentia of direct human contact and without another customer proxy, it becomes necessary for new customers to use the information that you provide, to self-diagnose their own situation. So the onus is on the solution provider to create self-diagnostic methods for prospective customers. This is what the incognito customer really is trying to do. They are trying to self-qualify themselves before they reach out to a supplier. By establishing an effective way to guide the self-diagnosis, the prospective customer will arrive at the level of self-awareness which enables self-identification for the solution that is being offered.
The process is simple enough. The challenge lies in how you present the stories, and how you enable potential customers to self-qualify. Deriving the key insights from actual customer experience is not always apparent, and does require a closer communication with those real users. Determining how best to break down the self-diagnosis or self-qualification steps also may not be immediately apparent. They can only be uncovered from a true understanding of how customers are dealing with their current situation.
So there you have it. The greatest propensity to action is when a potential customer initiates first contact. To get to this much desired state, you must enable a prospective customer to easily self-identify with the problem you are solving. They must see themselves within the messaging context that you create. And that is when the great epiphany occurs. Round peg meets round hole.