Why people don’t understand you and what can you do about it?
Author: Mayur Bardolia
How do you feel when the customer doesn’t understand what you mean no matter how precisely you say?
We say something we know very well but they don’t have any clue what we are talking about. This is exactly what happens with miscommunications. How can you become a better communicator and get more people to understand you?
In this podcast, We will discuss why it’s difficult for people to understand you and how to make it easy for them to understand you?
Right click here to save this episode
In 1990, a graduate student named ‘Elizabeth Newton’ from Stanford University studied a simple game. She assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday to you,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out.
Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%.
But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. The tappers got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. Why? When a tapper taps, it is impossible for her to avoid hearing the tune playing along to her taps. Meanwhile, all the listener can hear is a kind of bizarre random sound. Yet the tappers were amazed by how hard the listeners had to work to pick up the tune.
The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it.
Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others. In marketing, We try to communicate the music that we play but the customers don’t understand. We say something we know very well but they don’t have any clue what we are talking about.
This is exactly what happens with miscommunications.
It’s very hard for experts to realize why the listener does not understand the concepts. This is called the curse of knowledge. So how can you overcome this curse of knowledge? How can you become a better communicator and get more people to understand you?
In this podcast, we will discuss three things.
- Why it’s difficult for people to understand you?
- How to know how much they know?
- How to make it easy for them to understand you?
Let’s dive in.
In 1992, I visited an amusement park in Mumbai with my school friends.
It’s called an Essel World. There was a maze. A maze is where you need to find a way from one end to another end. It’s complicated because you can’t see except some ways and walls around you. You mostly guess how to get out. So, I went inside this maze and got lost. I thought I will find the way out but I kept coming back to the same place. I was so confused.
After some time, I was scared. I could not figure out the way out.
I needed someone who can get me out of this confusion. Suddenly, one of my friends met me and he found me lost in the maze. He said he knew the way out. So, I followed him and indeed, I was out of the maze and got out of it from another end. Finally, I was happy.
Now, the gap between you and your customer is just like a maze.
You both are at the different ends. You are at the B – end of the maze that means another end of the maze. Your customer is at point A that means at the beginning of the maze. Point A is the level of knowledge your customer has about you and your business/product. Point B is the level of knowledge you have about you, your business or product.
You assume that customer understands exactly what you understand.
The customer has no idea about what you have to offer. Things which are obvious to you are not obvious for your customers. Customers don’t buy the best product or service. Customers buy what they understand easily.
When you talk the language people don’t understand, you lose them immediately.
The same as we talked earlier on about the game that Elizabeth Newton played, you are playing the song correctly in your brain but people don’t understand exactly what song you are talking about when you explain to them. It’s because they are at the Point A of the maze and you are at point B of the maze. All they see is the confusing ways and walls. They don’t know how to reach your level of understanding. So, how are you going to make them understand you but before we do that, let’s find how to know how much they understand. Let’s discuss
If you look at the professional dancers, they dance magnificently.
We can only imagine dancing like them. You see them jumping and moving their body like a rubber band. Their moves are sudden and it looks spectacular. You wonder how can they dance so well and so effortlessly. They can dance well because they learned the basics well.
When they first started, they learned very basic steps only.
That’s where they started learning. They start from the starting point. This is how we learn. We need to start from the very beginning. Just like we learn 12345 before we learn 100-200-254-378-1750. We learn ABCDE to XYZ before we learn the spelling of STAR or UMBRELLA.
In the first part of this podcast, we talked about how I got lost in the maze and how one of my friends got me out.
Your customer is lost too. He is standing at point A and you are at the other end at point B. Now, what you need to do? You should go to point A (the level of knowledge your customer has about your product) and ethically take them to point B.
You need to guide them along with you step by step.
The distance and journey between point A and point B are giving them information about your product. The point A is a little or no information about your product and point B is the complete understanding of your product.
Marketing and selling are all about educating your customers about why they need to buy.
You need to start from the basics. You need to know how much your customer knows and start educating from there. When the customer hasn’t got the knowledge about your product as much as you have, they will not take the pain to understand you.
If you don’t tell your story, they will create the story about your product.
Most probably it’s not the way you want them to create your story. Here, you are leading the customer from Point A to Point B. As we said earlier, Customers don’t buy the best product or service. Customers buy what they understand easily. For example, Steve Jobs was not selling world-class computers, phones or music players. He was selling the clearest, simplest and most easy to understand technology brand. That takes us to the 3rd part which is the final part.
If you look at the game called LEGO Blocks, you see some random blocks.
You also get the pictures of things you can build using LEGO blocks. You look at the blocks and you look at the picture. You pick up one thing you want to build. You start from one block and then you connect another block. Then another one. And you keep adding more and more blocks. Finally, you build the complete thing. Whether it’s a house, car, building or anything.
It all started from one block and then step by step you added one block at a time.
That’s exactly how we understand things. We all are teachers in the business. As we said earlier, our customers don’t understand us because they don’t know exactly what we know. So, it’s our job to explain to them piece by piece, block by block just like a teacher.
We learn from how the best teachers teach young kids in school.
Think back to the best teacher you had in school. And you will find that she broke things down to its basics, and used a lot of stories to convey the lesson. You can use stories and case studies to explain your points. You should have testimonials from your existing clients if you are already in the business.
If you need to show people, then show them. Don’t just tell them.
Do not use technical terms. Talk in the language that your customer understands. Stop impressing with some cool jargons or fancy words. It sounds boring. And you don’t want to bore people. You want to have effective communication and want to keep the conversation flowing. You want to leave clients with ‘feel-good’ vibe after interactions, don’t you? That takes us to the end of the podcast.
Let’s summarise what we have covered so far
In marketing, We try to communicate the music that we play but the customers don’t understand.
We say something we know very well but they don’t have any clue what we are talking about. This is exactly what happens with miscommunications. It’s very hard for experts to realize why the listener does not understand the concepts. This is called the curse of knowledge.
So how can you overcome this curse of knowledge?
How can you become a better communicator and get more people to understand you? We started with Why it’s difficult for people to understand you? We talked about the maze I was lost in when I visited an amusement park in 1992. Yes, the maze where we get stuck in and we need help someone to take out.
Our customer is at the beginning of the maze at Point A and we are at the end which is point B.
They are in the whole different place than we are right now. Things which are obvious to you are not obvious for your customers. You assume that customer understands exactly what you understand. The customer has no idea about what you have to offer.
Customers don’t buy the best product or service.
Customers buy what they understand easily. When you talk the language people don’t understand, you lose them immediately. Then, we talked about how to know how much they understand. We discussed the example of a dancer and how a professional dancer started the journey from the very basic dance movements. We learn 12345 before we learn 100-200-254-378-1750. We learn ABCDE to XYZ before we learn the spelling of STAR or UMBRELLA. Considering the example of Maze, You should go to point A (the level of knowledge your customer has about your product) and ethically take them point B.
You need to guide them along with you step by step.
The distance and journey between point A and point B are giving them information about your product. The point A is a little or no information about your product and point B is the complete understanding of your product. Marketing and selling are all about educating your customers about why they need to buy. You need to start from basic. You need to know how much your customer knows and start educating from there.
Then, in the end, we discussed, how to make it easy for them to understand you?
In here we talked about the LEGO Blocks game and how connecting each block with each other step by step can eventually turn into a building. That’s exactly how we understand things. We all are teachers in the business. As we said earlier, our customers don’t understand us because they don’t know exactly what we know.
It’s our job to explain to them piece by piece, block by block just like a teacher.
We learn from how the best teachers teach young kids in school. Think back to the best teacher you had in school. And you will find that she broke things down to its basics, and used a lot of stories to convey the lesson. Use case studies and stories to explain. They are really powerful. If you need to show them, just show them rather than telling them. Do not use technical terms. Talk in the language that your customer understands.
You want to have effective communication and want to keep the conversation flowing. You want to leave clients with ‘feel-good’ vibe after interactions, don’t you?
Next: People think it’s not possible to come up with innovative ideas. Still, you too can find ideas.
Find out, How to discover innovative ideas even if you are not a creative genius?
The One-Liner Report:
Why Customers Don’t Listen? – How to get them to listen to you with your One-Liner?
This report will show you how to explain your business in just one-line so that your customers listen and understand you as quickly as possible. Click on the button below and get a detailed ‘The One Liner Report’. It will take only 15 minutes to read.
