I’ve been busy the past week taking advantage of all the wonderful produce available in Maine in August – I’ve made blueberry ice cream, ratatouille, zucchini bread, and pickled beets.
When I get into cooking modes like this, I’m often reminded of Julia Child, who’s inspired so many home cooks and helped them become heroes in their own kitchen.
It got me thinking about how anyone with a business can learn from her – because as a business owner, your goal should also be to make your customers the heroes of their own stories.
Your Customer Wants to Be the Hero
As Donald Miller notes in Building a Storybrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, people who are interested in your product or service aren’t looking for a hero. They don’t want to hear about all your wonderful deeds – they want to know what they can do to help their business.
This makes sense when you consider that people waiting to be rescued are quite passive. If someone goes out of their way looking for help, though, they’re taking a more active role.
Instead of wanting someone to save them, they’re looking for someone to help them become their own hero.
In short, they’re looking for a guide.
As Miller said, “Nearly every human being is looking for a guide (or guides) to help them win the day.” (p. 32)
Let’s go back to Julia Child. Would her TV show have been a success if it was only showing off her culinary skills and talking about what a great chef she was?
Of course not. Viewers would quickly have gotten bored because they wouldn’t be able to see how this helped them. Julia Child being a great chef wouldn’t make them any better in the kitchen.
Instead, Child gave people the tools to work their own magic in the kitchen. She became a guide through the complicated culinary world, and people loved her for it.
How, then, do you make your customer the hero and yourself the guide? Here are three tips to get you started.
1: Focus on Your Customer’s Problem
Your prospects wouldn’t be interested in your product or service if they already had everything figured out. They’re turning to you because they have a problem.
From a sustainability perspective, maybe the problem is they’re spending too much on electricity and want to switch to solar for energy independence.
Going back to the kitchen, maybe they’re concerned about food waste and need help composting food scraps. Or maybe they’re looking for ways to reduce their use of plastic.
Whatever it is, when they come to you, they want to see that you understand their concerns, and that your focus is on their problem. If all they hear about is your own success, they’ll look elsewhere.
After all, in the story of their lives, they want to be Luke Skywalker, not Obi-Wan Kenobi.
2: Don’t Get Sidetracked
While it’s important to understand your customer’s problems, you don’t want to get sidetracked by focusing on all of them at once.
As a guide, you need to have a single focus about what you’re helping your customer achieve. Even if your business has a variety of solutions, look for the unifying message to share on your website and in the other places where you interact with prospects.
Similarly, each message you send should have a single focus. Otherwise, your prospect will get confused about their direction.
Going back to the Star Wars example, Luke needed to stay focused on destroying the Death Star. He had to take a number of steps to get there, but the Death Star was his ultimate goal. If Obi-Wan had simply tried to teach him about the Force, without having a problem to solve, the teaching wouldn’t have been as effective, and Luke wouldn’t have been a hero.
Or think about if Julia Child had tried to show more styles of cooking in her shows. In The French Chef, if she’d suddenly started talking about Indian cuisine, she would have lost people.
If you stay focused, your customers will also be able to stay on the path that will help them become a hero.
3: Don’t Try to Be Perfect
As a guide, you want to show that you’ve been able to overcome challenges, but this doesn’t mean you’re perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and if you admit to some of your own, and then show how you got past it, your customers and prospects will find you more authentic and trust you more.
Julia Child excelled at this. It helped that she came to cooking late in life, so she likely remembered her own “growing pains” in the kitchen. Even more, she wasn’t afraid to make mistakes. By showing how she recovered from those errors, she modeled a way for her viewers to get through their own mistakes.
She also helped them understand that failure wasn’t something to be afraid of – as you can see in this video, she reminds us that failing is the way we learn.
If you use this same approach yourself, you’ll remind your prospects that even heroes aren’t perfect, which gives them hope that they can also achieve hero status.
Remember – It’s Not About You
Even if you feel like you’re a hero to your customer, you should never present yourself that way.
Instead, keep the focus on them, and how you can guide them to become heroes themselves, and you’ll both be much more likely to succeed.
What guides have you found in your life? What have you learned from them? Share any of their tips in the comments.