Solving Problems, or Realizing Dreams?

          Those feel really different, don’t they? 

I wrote the following to a Marketing Guru, Chris Brogan, this morning, in response to his Sunday morning blog. Current marketing gurus tell us to focus NOT on “How great my company is”, or “What a wonderful therapist I am”, or “Have you seen my far-out web site?”, but to focus on “What problem does the client have that I am going to solve?”  Those first three are about me, and the client/customer/buyer could be left wondering “Yeah, I hear YOU are a great wonderment, but I want to hear about ME, and how this is going go help ME…”

 

Well, it occurred to me that sometimes that might NOT be the tack you want to take. Sometimes rather than focus on what is wrong with your world, I want to focus on what could be wonderful in your world, meaningful in your world. That has a whole different feel, different vibration. Focusing on dreams and solutions, not so much on problems or pain or lack…Whether you are a therapist, or a social media person, or an artist, you can imagine a way to present that is problem or lack based, and you can also imagine how to offer to make the person’s life richer and more fully what they want it to be. Practice that…

 

Anyway, here it is…

 

Today at 7:25 AM

 

I would like to offer a bit of advice back, grateful as I am for all that you offer us. I am the president of a graduate school, and my product costs as much as a great car. (A master’s degree.) While I have read a lot about solving customer problems (Seth Godin, you), and I agree with that approach much of the time, maybe even all of the time (would have to think about that), there are times when offering somebody their dreams, offering them meaning in their work lives, and the like, creates the energetic pull I am looking for, whereas “solving their problem” (which I very well might be) can sound more problem-based rather than bliss-based. I do not want to start with negativity (“your current life and job suck, right?”), but with “Imagine a life in which your destiny and your career path are the same road…”

 

Just a thought. There is nothing ostensibly “broken” that needs to be fixed (well, sometimes there is, but), but there are dreams to be realized and manifested, and that is what I am “selling”….offering, actually…

 

Thanks for listening…

Jim Nolan