I’m not sure if you can relate to this story or not…
Late last week I took a quick jog around my neighborhood.
About halfway through my 3 mile route a car pulled up beside me and flagged me down.
“Excuse me,” said a young mother with her 2 toddlers in the back seat. “Can you tell me how to get to Horsethief Canyon Park? We’re late for a birthday party.”
I take my two beagles to the dog park near there quite often, so I knew it well.
Now, in the seconds before I actually gave her the directions, I was reminded of a fact that I had learned in my PSY101 class regarding how people tend to give and accept directions.
Research had shown that men have a tendency to give, and prefer receiving, directions using distance and cardinal references (i.e., north, south, etc.). Women, on the other hand, prefer to give and receive directions using landmarks and right or left turns.
Neither method is in itself “correct” or “incorrect” as each method CAN work to help someone get from point A to point B; and yet it’s useful to know if my goal is to get her to the park in the most efficient way possible.
So I told her, “Just go down the street here. At the second stop sign, turn left. Keep going straight, past the first stop light. Take your first left and follow the signs to the park.”
Simple, straight to the point.
Nothing really remarkable, until you consider that I could have added all kinds of intricate and irrelevant details like steering around the big dip in the road ahead, the baby Rottweiler that barks and how his master takes him for a walk every day at 4pm, that if she turned south there’s an empty lot where a good burger joint used to be, and on and on and on…
Could you imagine what she would have done if I had told her all of that?
I’m going to take a guess that you’d think I would have been a COMPLETE MORON (or at the very least, someone that just LOVES to talk and show off all that I know) to give all those details, and that I was right to keep it simple.
If that’s the case, then I want you to ask yourself the following question:
“How do I help my own customers and prospects navigate properly to get from where they are to actually buying from me?”
Do you give them easy ways to respond? Do you inundate them with all kinds of noise about you and your company that they absolutely could care less about? Are you speaking their “language” when you’re giving them directions?
When I first went to an IKEA store, one of the best things about my visit was on the floor: big blue arrows pointing me in the direction to navigate the enormous maze of furniture and household goods.
You know what?
All the arrows at IKEA lead to their cash registers.
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