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The Decisions that make your world go round
All sorts of things can take your time, attention and focus, and many of these things can lead you away from what really counts, people making the decision to choose you.
Decisions that count
Start by deciding what outcomes you’re aiming for: eg. someone signing up to your service, emailing an enquiry, calling you, joining your community, making a purchase online, referring someone to you… Start with understanding the decisions that will grow your business, these are the metrics that define your business growth success and help focus your marketing efforts.
People like making decisions, help them.
Now since you know the decisions that people can make with you, you have to know how they’ll make them. Your customers are really just like you. Both of you want them to understand your value and aquire and enjoy it. When you think about peoples decision making process, think about states of knowledge or states of mind.
more than warm fuzzy’s – the knowledge to choose
What knowledge do people have when they first see you, and what knowledge do they need to have before they can enquire, purchase, or make one of the decisions that counts. The more you understand the knowledge state of a person just looking and one who is ready to make a decision to choose you, the better you can help more people transition to a decision to choose you.
Simple and easy to access
The biggest inhibitor to decision making regardless of what the decision is or whos involved, is the inability to have all the knowledge together in one moment. If people have to hold together disparate sources of information or concepts because of how they’ve been presented to them, they wont feel like they’re ready to make a decision, something will be missing, an uncertainty, a gut feeling to wait until it comes clear.
This means throwing away your existing ways of looking at and presenting your service which may be a little ‘me centric’, and structure and deliver yourself and your service around your customers knowledge requirements. If you do complex things, great, many great solutions are complex, but its your job to sift through the complexity and figure our a simple perspective, so your customers and your team can understand it easily. If theres alot to what you offer then the best thing you can do is provide a simple way for a portion of the market to get to some of what you do easily.
Communicate & Deliver
And finally, once you’ve got direction clear and you make super simple sense, you design and deliver a smooth flow that helps lead people through the the process of aquiring what they need to choose you. Your branding, website, language, everything sending the same clear messages to people.
Hello, my name is Natalie, I have a business called 
March 12th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
I agree that the flow of a decision must be clean, consistent and provide timely information or knowledge to support the business decision, but it has been widely shown that while people talk about making decisions rationally they are more often emotionally moved to commit. With the web2.0 drive to make the user experience key, how do you continue to move people emotionally and not just slip back into functional use?
Don’t potential consumers desire engagement just as much as clarity in making a decision?
March 19th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Yea, the idea in focusing on the decision making process or people is about orieninting your whole business, including your marketing around it. When we say ‘knowledge to make a decision’, we’re working on the basis that ones knowledge includes rationale and emotion. We wouldn’t advocate people making an imbalanced decision (ie. one which is heavily based solely on emotion or rationale), a its likely to be something people regret.
We working on the basis that your marketing something of value to people, and theres no doubt that the best value is that which offers utility and emotional satisfaction.