A prospect should be able to recognise themselves in your communication. Can yours?

Ask a business owner what their company does, and the answer will often make sense. Ask what a customer sees on the website, in an advertisement or in the sales presentation, and the picture can become less clear.

There are services, credentials, photographs and a reassuring promise of quality. Everything looks professional. Yet the visitor still has to work out whether this business is right for them. That is a lot to ask of someone who has several other options open in their browser.

Our previous YGS blog looked at keeping an enquiry moving through useful follow-up. This time, we are going a step earlier. Before someone enquires, do they understand why they should consider you?

A perfectly good business can be difficult to understand

Many businesses can work with a wide range of customers. That flexibility is valuable. It can also make communication harder when every audience is squeezed into the same message.

A developer buying a cleaning service for a sales office may care about presentation, reliability and readiness before customer visits. A factory manager may be more concerned about schedules, access and disruption to operations. Both need cleaning. Their reasons for choosing a provider are different.

If the message only says “Complete cleaning solutions for all your needs”, neither person gets much help making that choice.

You do not have to abandon one audience to communicate clearly with another. You can create separate landing pages, examples or sales material around the situations each audience faces. The practical question is which customers you want to attract first, and what they need to understand before a conversation begins.

Start with the situation your customer recognises

Inside a company, it is easy to become fluent in your own capabilities. You know the technology, the processes and the effort behind the work. A new customer does not share that background. They arrive with something they need to solve.

Perhaps their enquiries are inconsistent. Perhaps their team spends too much time explaining the same thing. Perhaps they have a good product but struggle to justify its price.

Communication becomes more useful when it connects your capability to that situation. “WhatsApp automation” describes a service. Explaining how an enquiry can reach the right salesperson, with a reminder for the next action, helps someone understand its purpose.

You still need to explain what you offer. But begin close enough to the customer’s concern for them to recognise why the explanation matters.

Give your promise something solid to stand on

Words such as premium, innovative, trusted and customer focused appear everywhere. A prospect may reasonably ask what they mean in your case. What can you show them?

For a residential project, that might be the number of homes on each floor, a clearly explained layout or completed work they can visit. For a service business, it might be a relevant example, an agreed process or the people who will handle the assignment.

Choose evidence that supports the particular promise you are making. If your claim is personal attention, explain how the customer will experience it. If your claim is speed, be clear about the conditions under which the timeline applies.

There is no need to make every sentence louder. Sometimes the most persuasive thing you can do is make one important claim easier to believe.

The same clarity should carry into the sales conversation. A prospect should not hear one promise in the advertisement and an entirely different explanation when they call.

Six questions to sharpen your message

Before commissioning another campaign, try reading your current communication as someone encountering the business for the first time.

1. Audience

   Can we name the customer this particular message is meant to reach?

2. Situation

   Does it address something that customer actually wants to solve or achieve?

3. Value

   Is the benefit clear without requiring an explanation from our team?

4. Evidence

   Have we given the prospect a credible reason to believe the promise?

5. Consistency

   Do our website, content and sales presentation tell the same story?

6. Next step

   Is it obvious what an interested person should do next?

Ask someone outside the business to read one page and explain what they understood. Resist the urge to help them along. Where they hesitate may tell you more than another internal discussion about the headline.