You’ve probably heard the old adage, “The customer is always right.” You may be putting your customer first when it comes to customer service—and you should be—but what about when it comes to your sales pitch? Read on to find out more.

The mistake many business owners make.

Not every business owner is a natural writer or a marketer, but if you own a company—or are any type of business professional—it’s important to know the best way to speak to your customers. You want to put your customer first when communicating to them, by focusing on their wants, their problems and their needs.

This seems obvious, but often business owners have a tendency to focus on their product or service instead. When they give a sales pitch or craft their website, they talk about how great their company is and detail all the fantastic features of their product or service. And it’s easy to fall into this mindset—as a business owner or professional, your every day revolves around your company, your product or service, but that doesn't always help customers choose you.

How to get it right.

Step one is knowing and understanding your customer, your target market. If you aren’t there yet, that’s a whole other topic, but is very doable with some market research.

After that, all you have to do is switch around how you talk about your product or service. You still want to share why it’s so great, but you want to do it from the point of view of the customer. What keeps your customers up at night? What do your customers value? Focus on how your product speaks to those details, to make your pitch speak emotionally to a prospective client.

Here’s an example. A software company has just released a brand-new product, and it has several exciting features the company wants to promote. Here’s the wrong way to promote it:

ABC Company is excited to announce the release of Product X, which is fully equipped with Feature 1, Feature 2 and Feature 3.

So how would improve this to appeal more to our target market? The key is to focus on the customer, where the above focused only on the company and the product. Let’s say that ABC Company created Product X because their customer feedback and market research showed that customers were frustrated with complex and time-consuming workflows in other similar products. A better pitch would be:

Experience streamlined workflows and save time with the all-new Product X, just released by ABC Company. Forget complexity that bogs you down: Feature 1, Feature 2 and Feature 3 work together to make your day easier.

We still included all the pertinent information about the product and its features, but we also packed this pitch with benefits to the potential customer, helping them imagine how Product X could make their life easier. This type of marketing more effectively drives purchasing decisions, because it connects the dots for your customer (why does your product matter to them) and taps into their emotional side (your product solving a problem).

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic—how do you pitch your products to best appeal to your customers? Leave a comment below!