One of my customers told me about a CyberSecurity conference they participated in last week.
“Attracting attention proved to be very challenging,” he said. “We were in the Startup pavilion – So much noise – it was very hard to stand out.”
“What did you do?” I asked
“Well,” he continued, “We did two experiments. The first was to find a 1-second hook to make people instantly decide – ‘For me / Not for me.’ The second experiment we did was to determine which storyline worked best to spark genuine interest and open a meaningful conversation.”
“What was the result? I asked.
“The winner for experiment one was connecting to the category they’re interested in – for us, that was “Interested in Risk Management?” The winner for experiment two was to sharply take position when people asked us, “So, what do you do?”
“Fascinating,” I responded. “What did you say?”
“One line did it – and it’s this one: ‘We believe that the current CyberSecurity industry is ridiculous.’ It instantly sparked a reaction from the people we talked to, that returned the question: “Really, why?” That allowed us to address the fundamental market problem: Security spending has skyrocketed from 1% to 15% of IT budgets in less than ten years – and security risk is just getting worse.
Here’s the thing:
What’s happening here is typical. First, you have to stop people from their doing. And you have 1 second. Once you have their attention, then you have another 7 seconds to spark their curiosity. And a perfect way to do that is to leverage the philosophical problem, i.e., something that’s just plain wrong for your customers to be burdened with.
As Donald Miller, CEO of Storybrand, says: Philosophical problems matter deeply in stories and our businesses. You want to be involved in stories bigger than yourselves. You want to position your solution as tools your customers can use to fight back against something that ought not to be.
Question for you to reflect upon:
What’s the philosophical problem your SaaS company solves? How can you articulate that in 1 simple sentence?
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