Talking to vs about customers

Are you talking to your customers, or to fellow founders and marketers? The difference is subtle but it makes a big impact. Be clear on who you’re speaking to in your customer-facing messaging.

👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, career growth, and standing out as a high-performing leader.

In this week’s newsletter, you’ll learn about a common mistake when writing public-facing copy.

The line between writing TO vs ABOUT your customers isn’t always obvious. If you conflate the two, you risk appearing distant and manipulative to your customers.

Here’s how to avoid that.

Read time: 8 minutes

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I’ve noticed that founders can accidentally talk about their customers, when they intend to talk to their customers.

The below is homepage messaging from a vendor I hired, with light edits to anonymize. It’s an excellent illustration of this concept.

I color-coded to make it easier to see parts that are TO vs ABOUT the customer.

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The text in red is about the customer and would appeal to fellow industry professionals. The green is talking to the customer.

Here’s the text:

Why charging a premium got us more clients

In the X industry, so many business owners stress about being “outbid” or “outpriced” by their competition. However, the reality is that the most successful X are also the most expensive. If you want to build a company that has enough resources to expand, market, etc, you need to have a healthy margin. Deep down, you know this.

“How do I give the cheapest price to our customers?” is not our question. Our question is, “How can I charge a client a premium for my service and have customers be 100% satisfied with the value we provide?”

Here are the reasons why Acme charges more for our prices today:

1. Most people who look for a service are not just looking at you. They’re checking out a few options. If you’re the lowest price, they will likely wonder why. Do you not have much experience? Are they going to get screwed somehow? Are there things they need that won’t be included? Are you going to disappear into the wind if something goes wrong? Yes, people price shop, but price isn’t what will make their final decision. If you’re in the normal ballpark of price, stats indicate that 80% of their decision will be made on whether they like you or not.

2. Charging a premium price gives potential clients confidence that we know what we are doing and they’ll be taken care of.

3. It allows us to take on fewer clients and give more attention to the ones we have. Clients want that attention and want to hire someone who will provide it.

4. Higher price = higher perceived value. Lower price = lower perceived value. People want the biggest bang for their buck, not the lowest price. [X service] is not cheap and cheap X is not skilled. Remember you get what you pay for.

Quick question: Are you planning on getting 2-3 quotes? If so, we respect this. I want to let you know in advance our prices are on the high end of the range. The reason for this is because we offer exceptional service and experience in this field, and we charge for it. Acme as a brand is not the lowest cost solution. This is something we let our customers know prior to giving an estimate.

History has proven that our clients after seeing the value, professionalism, reliability, and pride we put into our services, turn into a much higher closing rate.

Why this doesn’t work:

• You refers to the potential customer and fellow service providers. They refers to both parties too. This is a tell-tale sign, but most of the time it’s less obvious. The writer is switching between addressing both groups.

• Be mindful if you share how the sausage is made. The writer is talking about how a higher price makes customers think there’s higher value. As a customer, after reading your post, I’m thinking, “Oh you priced higher just to make me think this was better, but I guess you’re not actually better.”

• If you want to build a company that has enough resources to expand, market, etc, you need to have a healthy margin. This is talking to fellow vendors who want to expand their businesses. This is jarring to read as a potential customer.

• Here are the reasons why Acme charges more for our prices today. This header isn’t bad if you follow up with reasons geared toward your customer. The problem is half the reasons are about how to win more deals as a vendor.

• …turn into a much higher closing rate. Your customers don’t want to know about your closing rate. For sales copy intended for customers, a better alternative would be: “History has proven that our clients after seeing the value, professionalism, reliability, and pride we put into our services, choose to invest in working with us.”

Don’t think you’re too smart to write like this. I saw examples of this all the time when editing copy for my team. I don’t have screenshots of those examples, so I’m using this example above which I came across more recently.

This color-coded example is more obvious and egregious, which helps illustrate the concept. Usually, instances of “to vs about your customer” are more subtle.

But make no mistake: It can just as easily sneak into your writing.

With the trend of building in public, the line between talking to vs about customers gets even blurrier

Let’s say you want to share screenshots showing you’re making $50k ARR.

Talking about how much money you’re making might work if your customers are creators, business owners, and founders. They want to grow their businesses, too, and they like the sneak peek behind the scenes.

But what if your customer is an in-house operator—and your goal is to get them to buy your software?

They probably aren’t as interested in your revenue dashboard. They want to know how your software will save them money or time, whether you speak their language, and who else at similar companies is using your product.

In fact, hearing your revenue updates could even backfire. “Cool, this company is making money off me. I’m another pawn in their quest to become a billion-dollar company.”

Here’s how I see the difference:

• Talking about the customer: Topics like your next fundraising round, trying to become a unicorn, talking about how the sausage is made, speaking about your customer like you’re an analyst writing about the state of the industry

• Talking to the customer: Discussing problems your customer is facing, how broken x system is and how unfair this is for your customers’ profession, sharing stories where your customer sees themselves in those stories

I believe it's important for founders and marketers to be aware of the difference between talking TO vs ABOUT customers, so you can make a deliberate choice about which path to take. 

One isn’t better than the other. They are simply different. Sometimes you want to talk about your customer, other times you want to talk to them. When you talk about your customer, you’re actually talking to another stakeholder, such as investors and fellow founders.

Sometimes, a news announcement is interesting to both your customers and your investors, fellow founders, etc. When you post publicly, you can’t control who will see your messaging.

But you should still write for one primary audience in mind, and only share what you’re comfortable with your secondary audience and everyone else seeing if you share in a public channel.

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For example, let’s say you’re selling analytics software and your buyer is a CMO. Here’s what talking ABOUT vs TO your customer might look like:

Talking about the customer: “Here’s why it’s getting increasingly harder to reach CMO decision-makers these days.”

^ This is more likely to attract fellow salespeople who are also trying to sell to CMOs. They want tips on how to not get ignored when sending mass DMs.

Talking to the customer: “Here’s what most CEOs get wrong about marketing analytics, and how this creates unrealistic expectations for CMOs.”

^ You show that you understand your buyer’s frustrations. This is more likely to attract marketers who are glad you’re giving a voice to what they’ve been trying to tell their org.

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Another example. This is based on a real product announcement I recently saw a startup CEO share:

Talking about the customer: “We’re excited to share that we’re updating our business model. This should help us get to product-market fit.”

^ This positioning is mainly interesting for startup folks looking for product-market fit because they want to learn from other companies on a similar journey.

Talking to the customer: “We’re excited to share that we’re updating our business model. This will help us better serve our customers because...”

^ This is interesting for customers.

Basically, most of what you’d tell your investors is talking ABOUT your customer. In that world, your startup is the main character and customers are minor characters along the way.

This might seem obvious, but I've seen many sharp operators speak to a different audience than they intended without realizing it.

When in doubt, make your customers the center of your story. Do this by talking directly TO them about what they’d find interesting and valuable.

Identify who your audience is and speak to them

Time for a pop quiz: Let’s say you want to write about how v2 of your product is easier for your engineering team to maintain on the backend. Is this talking to or about your customer?

The answer: It depends on your goal and the audience you’re writing for.

If your goal is to attract potential customers:

• As a lead, I don’t care that your new offering makes YOUR engineering team’s life easier. In fact, if this makes your operations so much easier, you should pass along those cost savings to me…

• It makes me think you’re optimizing to make your internal team’s life easier—instead of optimizing for what’s best for me (your customer).

• Obviously, those two things are not mutually exclusive because companies need to operate sustainably. But when you are talking to customers, focus on what matters to them.

If your goal is to recruit an engineering job candidate:

• If you’re hiring, then talking about the juicy engineering challenges you’re facing is talking “to your customer” because your “customer” is an engineer in this case.

• This might impact the channel you choose to share this message. You might write about this on social, your engineering blog, startup communities, etc.

The key: Be clear about who you’re speaking to and what action you want them to take.

Now that you know this concept, try to spot examples where you might accidentally be conflating writing TO vs ABOUT your customer. Look for it in own work and point it out for your colleagues.

Have you encountered this in the wild? Where might you be conflating talking TO vs ABOUT customers? Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.

Wes

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