What you’ll read:
- Your customers can’t “feel” what the future will hold if they invest in your brand, making them more hesitant to do so from the start
- Your job is to help your potential customers empathize with their future selves — and see the importance of taking immediate action to bring this future vision to life.
- You can achieve this by asking them to reflect on what they want through questionaires that give them the opportunity to choose a path and ways to imagine their future selves achieving their goals with your products via relevant case studies, success stories, and other forms of social proof.
As a service provider, you may have a pretty clear idea of what a successful customer looks like.
You’re likely familiar with where they start out, how their journey will unfold, and what they can expect upon reaching their goals.
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You understand all this because you’ve seen it all happen time and again within your customer base. You’ve seen countless individuals transform from “who they are” to “who they want to be.” And, you know exactly how this transformation actually takes place.
The thing is, your prospective customers don’t typically understand what “becoming their future selves” will actually involve. In fact, as clinical psychologist Meg Jay explains, people in general find it quite difficult to imagine what their lives will truly be like in the future — and what it will take to actually get there.
This “empathy gap,” as Jay calls it, often causes us to freeze in our tracks. This keeps us from doing what’s necessary to become the people we really want to become.
Unfortunately, this psychological phenomenon can also impact your prospects’ willingness to get started with your brand. Since they can’t truly “feel” what the future will hold should they dive in, they’ll ultimately be more hesitant to do so from the get-go.
It’s your job, then, to help your potential customers empathize with their future selves — and to instill in them the importance of taking immediate action in order to bring this future vision into reality.
Here’s how.
Help Your Customers Ask the Tough Questions
Jay talks about the importance of asking the “tough questions” about life in order to begin empathizing with our future selves.
More than the usual “Where do you see yourself in 5-25 years?”-type questions, Jay prompts her listeners to consider why they answered as they did — and how they intend to make it happen.
The good news, Jay says, is that most of the people she interacts with want to confront these deeper, tougher questions. And, once they do, they usually take action in order to more fully control their own destiny.
For our purposes, the first step in helping your prospects succeed is helping them understand the root cause of the issue they’re facing — and why a change in this area is needed for their overall situation to improve.
Quizzes and surveys can help prospects pinpoint their specific needs immediately.
Thankfully, you probably don’t have to get too existential here.
For the consumer, this allows for more self-reflection and paves the path for them to take more intentional action moving forward. On your end, you’ll collect a ton of insight into your prospects’ needs and expectations from their very first interactions with your brand — and can use this data to ensure their success from the get-go.
Help Your Customers Care About Their Future Selves
Even after honest and intentional self-reflection, it’s still difficult for us humans to “see” our future selves to the point of empathizing with them.
From a psychological standpoint, Jay explains, it’s just not in our nature to care about a hypothetical being that doesn’t yet exist. Even if we can picture our future selves in our minds, we don’t necessarily think of this image as a human being with feelings and emotions. And we certainly don’t imagine what it’s like to be that person.
To this end, Jay asks listeners to think about what it will be like to actually live the reality they’re imagining. She prompts them to consider what it took to land there, what they’ll be looking forward to next…and even what they would do if they were unhappy with their situation.
Going even further, Jay guides her listeners toward a more holistic understanding of their future selves. In seeing this image within the context of the “real world,” they become increasingly empathetic toward this hypothetical version of who they’ll be in the future. This again spurs them to actively work toward making this vision a reality.
For our purposes, the lesson here is to make your prospects care about their future selves in a more realistic sense.
One effective way to do this is to deliver highly-relevant case studies, success stories, and other forms of social proof featuring customers just like your prospects. Use the details of their journeys to paint a complete picture for your prospects — at the very least stimulate what their own journeys will look and feel like.
Sequential email series’ and drip campaigns can help your prospects visualize their path to success, as well. Here, the idea is to create a continuum in which the prospect prepares for future steps — making it easy for them to see exactly where they’re headed on their journey.
Ironically, these tactics cause your prospects to empathize with their future selves because they show them what they’re missing out on. In creating this sense of FOMO, you’ll make the pain of not taking action as real as ever in your prospect’s mind — and make them more likely to dive in as quickly as possible.
Help Your Customers Set Goals and Create a Plan
At one point in her TED Talk, Jay is asked the rather practical question of what listeners are supposed to do with the insights and answers they’ve unearthed.
Jay’s advice here is to get it all on paper to make it more visible and tangible. From there, you can play with your findings as you begin to set clear goals and formulate a plan of attack.As providers, we’re responsible for doing all this on behalf of our customers.
At this point, you’ll know what your prospects want to achieve — and why they want to achieve it. Moreover, your soon-to-be customers will be champing at the bit to get started.
But they’ll still rely on you to guide them.It starts with a comprehensive onboarding process.
Here, you’ll help your customer:
- Set clear performance goals to better monitor progress
- Develop a personalized, dynamic plan to achieve these goals
- Use your products and/or services to put this plan in motion
Here’s where we and Jay diverge a bit.
Jay tells her listeners that it’s their duty to hold themselves accountable for their own success. This is true when it comes to personal growth and achievement.
When it comes to our customers, though, we should always be prepared to lend a hand whenever they need it — even if they don’t specifically ask for it.
This means:
- Providing self-service options (e.g., chatbots, knowledge bases, etc.)
- Delivering behaviorally-triggered messages and guidance
- Requesting feedback at regular intervals and milestones
Simply put, your customers should never feel like they’re going it alone when doing anything at all related to your products or services. If there’s something you can be doing to help them along their path, you should be doing it.
Make your dedication clear to your customers whenever they engage with your brand, and they’ll have every reason to keep coming back for more.