No One Wants a Drill, What They Want Is A Hole, With Roland Frasier

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You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to the show. This is the producer Darren Clark. And this week we're wrapping up 2020 with a couple of our favorite timeless episodes. We really appreciate all your support, the subscribes, the shares and the five star reviews on Apple Podcasts. But today we have a short and smart tidbit from our host, Roland Fraser. So take this insight into 2021 and you'll go far. Here's Roland.

What do your prospects really want? What are the leads that you're generating really, really want? Nobody wants a drill. What they want is the hole. It's one of the most insightful things that I ever heard with respect to marketing, and it's frequently attributed to a Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen. And he wrote a book called the Innovator's Dilemma, which Steve Jobs credits with a lot of learning. Clayton credits a gentleman who is also a professor at Harvard Business School named Theodore Levitt. But the truth is, if you do the research, this quote, this, no one wants a drill. What they want is a hole. Goes all the way back to 1946, when a gentleman named Le Doc Hobbs, who was the district sales manager for the Manhattan Mutual Life Company, ran an ad in a Manhattan, Kansas newspaper that said, quote, we don't want to sell you life insurance. We want you to know and have what life insurance will do. A quarter million drills were sold last year. No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole. That's really a pretty insightful thing. And this was all the way back in 1946, right. So what's cool is that inspiration came from a 1923 ad for plumbing. And this one said, quote, unquote, when you buy a razor, you buy a smooth chin. But you could wear a beard. When you buy a new suit, you buy an improved appearance, but you could make the old one do. When you buy an automobile, you buy speedy transportation, but you could walk. But when you buy plumbing, you buy cleanliness, for which there's no substitute. So I think that what we can take from this is that really, very often we get lost in selling the product. The thing that is the middle person, the middleman, if you will, between what our prospect or customer wants and where they are right now. And that's the wrong place to focus. We don't want to focus on selling the razor. We want to focus on the future pacing of the smooth chin that will result when the razor, which is the means to achieving this result, is deployed and when we're trying to sell suits, we don't want to talk about the suit. We don't want to say, here's the feature of the suit, it's double knit, it's got inserts, it's got a liner, it's got all this wonderful stuff. We want to talk about how you're going to look in it when you're buying a car. When you're selling a car, we don't want to talk so much about all the features. It's got 28 cubic feet of storage space in the back and it corners this much and has this many foot pounds of torque. Who even knows what a foot pound of torque is, right? You want something that makes you look good, that gets you to where you want to go, that lasts and is dependable. That's what people are looking for. And I really like the last one that they did in that ad, that first ad, way back in 1923, and said, when you buy plumbing, you're buying cleanliness. It's just a great reminder for you. Whenever you're thinking about your marketing, whenever you're reviewing your marketing, whenever you're trying to optimize an ad or figure out how to make your product better, really focus on the end result. Really think about what it is that they want and recognize that your product is just in the middle. Your product is actually in the way of them getting what they want. And what you're trying to do is let them know that the product is a conduit. It's a means to achieving what they want. But just remember, no one wants a drill. What they want is the hole.

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