Attention Grabber 4: Relevance and Clarity

You may have heard the expression in marketing, “What’s in it for me?” The idea is that we listen to all new information with this question in the back of our minds. The Attention Grabber principle behind this is relevance. You may use the other attention grabbers and get someone to notice you for a split second, but if your information is not relevant to them, you will not actually grab their attention long enough for anything to happen.

Remember that our initial goal is to make people not have to think. When you lack a clear message, people may be interested in you (often because of one of the other attention grabbers), but your message is too diffuse to grab their attention. It requires too much work for them to try to figure out exactly what you do and how you can help them or their clients.

In order to immediately show your relevance, you may need to do some background investigation. Relevance relates closely with the last principle about meaning—if you can show how you and your ideas are personally meaningful to someone, you will be relevant and command their attention. I recently gave a keynote address to an association of interior designers. Before my talk, I conducted a brief three-question survey of the members of the organization. I began the talk: “What are the three most common problems in marketing an interior design business? Here’s what you told me …” My information was immediately relevant to them.

Before contacting or meeting with someone new, be sure that you have done your homework and can quickly show how what you do is relevant to them. To be relevant, you must show your key similarities and how you fill a need, as we discussed in Chapter 1.

Sacrifice what is not relevant. We often want to throw everything out there in hopes that something will stick. This is like those English class essays we wrote in high school where we included everything but the kitchen sink, hoping to get those +1 points in red ink for everything that counted. Don’t do this. The only way relevance works is when it is very simple. Do not even bring up things that are not immediately relevant. You might make a note to yourself to discuss certain opportunities in the future, but remember that when it comes to relationship building, the key is to go one step at a time. If you were on a first date and you started talking about how many kids you wanted to have and what you wanted to name them, you might not get a second date.