People are overloaded:
They won't listen to you

Here's a different approach to marketing
that could triple your sales

 

In a Nutshell: 

The Product with the
Easiest Decision Path
Wins

The key insights:

Today's overloaded customers don't want to spend a lot of energy choosing products.

They try to pick the products and services that require the least decision effort. 

So, the product with the easier decisions usually wins!

Therefore, give them what they want: Make your product the one with the decision path of least resistance.

The key to marketing today is to add real value to your products by giving customers the simpler, more user-friendly customer decision experience — while your competitors make customers jump through hoops.

We call it Decision EZification. We've made it Easy:

1. Map the decision steps.
   
   Identify the choices your customers have to make as they go down the convoluted decision path to become shoppers, triers, buyers, most importantly, evangelists. 
    
2. Find the major stumbling blocks where the most people slow down or drop out.
   
   Anything that costs time, effort, attention, thought, fear, uncertainty, doubt, resources — we typically find about 20 major ones quickly.
    
3. Narrow them down.
   
   Starting with the 2-3 decision barriers that hold back sales the most. These are the ones that are killing you.
    
4. Lessen or eliminate them.
   
   Talk to customers who have overcome these barriers, evangelists who have helped others overcome the barriers, flounderers who are stuck and dropouts who are casualties of the barriers. Also, get the successful evangelists to talk to flounderers and find out how they actually turn skeptics around. They will help you find shortcuts, smooth the path and lower the resistance.

The decision obstacles are often surprisingly easy to eliminate. The only reason you haven't is that you never gave them a high priority.

Voilà. Faster decisions. More customers, sooner.

Decision EZification examples:

A product that physicians wanted to prescribe, but couldn't get insurance companies to approve — until we gave them the simple sentence that the approvers not only needed needed to hear, but which legally compelled approval, tripling sales. We EZified the approval decisions.	In a more complex approval situation, the technical buyers didn't know how to address the financial concerns of the company's top management. We got permission to give out a "fill in the blanks" version of the presentation and spreadsheet that a customer used successfully to convince his company's management — one that (unlike our client's) talked their language and actually worked! We Ezified the presentation construction and persuasion decisions and collapsed the learning curve.
A product's acceptance depended upon a crucial fact that could only be established by an accepted industry expert. We asked potential customers to tell us exactly what reassurance they needed, from whom. We then went to the most-named industry expert and drew out of him the perfect testimonial that used the words the customers said they needed to hear — increasing sales more than tenfold, establishing an industry record that has never been broken. We Ezified the fact-checking and "justification of use" barriers.	Several of our clients' products and services had gorgeous Web sites that were abstract, information dense and cerebral — missing the vivid, involving language that comes from the customer’s hearts and real-life experiences. We formed an Advisory Group that provided emotionally compelling language that we put into simplified, less Flashy, focused web sites and presentations. The usual reaction is, "Wow, you really get what it's like to be in my shoes." We EZify the trust-building barriers.
We've compressed the years-long decision processes of many products into a few weeks with teleconferences that put enthusiasts together with prospects, allowing them to gather more experiences in weeks than they could have in years. We EZified the long, tedious and risky learning, verification and trial processes that usually take so long, particularly in the pharma industry.	We often find that complex products and services aren't understood by their customers and their bosses. We distilled their essence into a simple phrase that replaced the page-long incomprehensible nonsense that the high-tech client and their ad agency thought was crystal clear and irresistible. We EZified the cognitive burden.

 

Is there an underlying principle? There sure is:

 

By overcoming a small number of hidden, critical obstacles on your customers’ decision paths, you can lower your marketing costs and multiply sales.

 

Why do I need a new approach?

There are basically two complementary marketing approaches: Promote the benefits and remove the obstacles. Most marketers understandably concentrate on the first. The latter is woefully neglected up and down the decision process, except for a few areas, like providing guarantees, or running sales. We are urging you make a small shift in emphasis.

You’ve already put a lot of work into presenting your product’s benefits persuasively. Maybe you could do it a little better, but you have probably reached the point of diminishing returns. Your Ad agency is unlikely to come up with that magical slogan or image that dramatically increases sales and becomes a marketing legend. It rarely happens. It’s very expensive. You can dream on or get practical.

Most Web site redesigns don't work because they lose sight of the fact that the site is ultimately there to help people through the decision process to choose your product. Most Web designers are graphic designers, not persuasion designers. They create complicated, distracting, "Flash"y, artistic designs, with too much unfocused information (but not enough useful information), that actually causes people to drop out of the decision process, or go to third-party sites. Is your web site designed to help the customer make a better decision more easily? Or is it making them work in ways you can't see because you know too much.

There used to be only a handful of basic marketing techniques. Now there are hundreds.

Most marketers are overwhelmed with too many marketing options in much the same way that your customers feel about your product! Decision EZification simplifies everything for both you and the customer and lets you concentrate your resources on actions that will make a difference with a high Return on Investment.

We can always find 2 or 3 major decision barriers that can be eliminated or reduced. You just have to know where and how to look. On this site, we'll show you how it’s done.

What will that do?

Presenting benefits better (the old approach) typically results in 10-30% increase in sales the rare times that it’s successful. Decision EZification — starting with first removing 2 or 3 decision barriers — usually multiplies sales 3-10x. You read that right, threefold to tenfold. We will not take on a client that we don't think has the potential of a tenfold increase. That way a "failure" is when we only triple sales. Your choice is between a low payoff, unlikely approach and one that is much more leveraged with a high likelihood of success.

What’s the catch?

There are two "catches":

Catch #1:  You usually need to have a superior product — or a product that can be made superior through adding value by making it the product with the least decision burden.

Catch #2: You can’t do it by yourself, and we don’t mean that as an insult. You’re the expert. You know everything about your product and the competition, except what it’s like to know nothing.

To make things simple for the customer, you would have to be both an expert AND a beginner. Can’t be done.

It isn’t easy to make things simple — and it isn’t simple to make things easy. So, how can you make it easy? We'll make it easy for you. You need a world-class guide to simplifying the product decision process who isn’t the world’s leading expert on your product. That’s us. Our President, George Silverman, has done this hundreds of times. 

Your agencies focus on finding customers and wowing them with advocacy. We focus on getting customers to find you, then make their choices simple, easy, fun and fast. Your customers will eagerly follow a guide or a friend but resist a salesman. 

It's not a lot of work for you

As a client once said, "I don't want a whole course on cooking theory. I just want Betty Crocker to come over and show me a few simple steps to bake my favorite cake." We combine our expertise in Decision EZification — the psychology of making choices simple and easy — with your product and industry expertise. We can't do it alone and neither can you. But we do most of the work, and most of the rest is done by your best customers.

Next Steps

We've constructed this web site to be an example of what we're advising: We'll make your process simple, easy, fun and fast. We invite you to jump around and learn more. Despite the fact that you can’t do all if it from your perspective, there is a lot you can do, with immediate results. 

Then, you might want to have a consultation with George Silverman over the phone. After a short interview with you, he will point out major decision barriers you haven't addressed. He'll outline ways to break the barriers. Some people say it's the most valuable and practical phone call they ever had with a marketing consultant!

On this Site, you'll learn about several areas:

How to find the hidden barriers by using focus groups in a new way:  ● How to use focus groups as laboratories to get customers to reveal the hidden decision barriers they often don't even know they have. ● How to figure out how to remove the barriers and shorten the decision process.

How to EZify every step of the decision process. ● Learn how people actually make product decisions in your category and where they get stuck. ● Why they became prospects, customers, flounderers or rejecters.

How to use Word-of-Mouth Marketing to shorten huge chunks of the decision process. You can actually follow along as I revise the first edition of "The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing" — the only systematic approach to WOM marketing that approaches it from the customer decision process, not the technical tools.

Also, you can follow along as I write my next book, Non-Friction Marketing: How EZifying Customer Decisions Will Multiply Your Sales.