You might not instantly recognise the name Bjorn Ulvaeus, but I can guarantee you recognise the words he’s written. You’ve seen them, or more likely heard them, hundreds…perhaps thousands…of times.
That’s no exaggeration. As the primary lyricist for Swedish supergroup ABBA, every time you hear Dancing Queen, SOS, or Waterloo you’re listening to words Bjorn has written. (His songwriting partner Benny Andersson – the other “B” in ABBA – mainly wrote the music.)
So it might not surprise you that “The Day Before You Came” is another of Bjorn’s lyrics. And, I think, his finest.
It might not be the ABBA song everyone thinks about first, and it was – by ABBA’s standards – a very minor hit in the UK when it was released back in 1982. But lyrically and musically, it’s a stand-out piece of work.
In case you’re not familiar with the song, I’ve linked to it below, but really all you need to know for the purposes of this article is that it’s a relatively downbeat listing of the events in a woman’s life the day before she met someone who had a big impact on her.
Whether that’s a huge positive impact or a huge negative impact we don’t know. Bjorn’s storytelling skills mean that is left entirely to our imagination. You can interpret the lyrics either way.
The genius of “The Day Before You Came”, in both lyrics and music, is that it’s a very un-ABBA song.
There are no gaudy outfits, over-the-top stage performances, or glitz and glamour about it. The lyrics are – not be unkind to one of the most popular songwriters of the 20th century – a pretty boring recitation of the events of a day in someone’s life, delivered largely without emotion.
And Benny Andersson’s music is the perfect accompaniment. Just for a change, the song is not particularly melody-driven, there’s no sing-along chorus (or any chorus at all, for that matter), and you’d be hard pushed to dance to it.
But it’s a hypnotic, rhythmic, constant cycling through the verses which beautifully complements Agnetha’s voice as she runs through the succession of trivialities that made up a typical day in her life before this mystery person came along.
All those elements together make “The Day Before You Came” an wonderful pop song.
“So what?” I hear you ask
This is all well and good, I’m sure. But The Bottom Line Bulletin is supposed to be about ways to grow your bottom line (the clue is in the title, after all). What do ABBA songs have to do with that, you might be wondering.
Well, I’ll tell you.
“The Day Before You Came” is a bit of a metaphor for your customers.
You see, just like the fictional character Agnetha Faltskog sings about, there’s probably nobody out there eagerly waiting for you to show up and transform their lives.
They are in a groove, going through the motions, living their lives. And doing so, mostly, in complete ignorance that your business even exists.
Because most businesspeople are busy running marketing campaigns, posting on social media, writing blogs, and whatever else they get up to, business owners often think everyone in the world knows about them and their business.
The reality is almost nobody does. Tiny percentages of people respond to your marketing campaigns or social media posts. An even smaller percentage read your company blog.
Of course all the platforms like to trumpet how many impressions your post got. They all do some version of: “Whoopee! The photo of your warehouse you posted had 3,000 impressions yesterday – would you like to pay us some cold hard cash to boost your post even further and promote your brand?”
When you realise an impression means that someone spent a nano-second scrolling past your post at warp speed looking for something else entirely, you’d probably get a good deal less wrapped up in the platform’s feigned excitement about the number of impressions you got.
And, implicitly, that assumes the right sets of eyes were counted, which I can guarantee you isn’t the case 100% of the time. For a while I was counted as an “impression” every time I scrolled past the regular ads I got in my Twitter feed for construction jobs in Toronto, even though I have no construction-related skills and I don’t live anywhere near Toronto.
That doesn’t mean there’s no point at all in posting on socials, running ads, or promoting your business on-line. Of course there’s a place for all those things as part of getting the word out about your business.
Just don’t imagine that, except in the tiny, tiny fractions of a percentage point, it’s likely to make much of a difference to your business unless you’re putting some serious investment into your campaigns.
Whatever you’re doing is unlikely to cut through the ingrained habit patterns in your customers’ lives. Just because you check out all your own social media posts doesn’t mean anyone else does.
Focus out, not in
If you want to find more customers and boost your sales, you need to do something very few businesses do – start wherever your customers are now.
Most businesses start with what they want to sell. Only rarely do they start with what a customer might want to buy.
Start by trying to understand your customers – from their perspective, not based on what you think they “ought” to want.
Find out what they are doing or not doing now. Try to pick up on the rhythms of their business and the criteria they use to make decisions.
When you start wherever your customer is, rather than where you are, and put the focus on them, rather than on your internal processes or your some high-falutin’ marketing strategy dreamed up in a corporate boardroom somewhere, you’re much more likely to understand your customers well enough to make a sale.
That’s what I mean about “focusing out” on the customer, rather than “focusing in” on your own business.
When you do this well, you’ll discover that, except in the largest multinationals where there are some economies of scale to be gained from specialisation, nobody is even thinking about your category all that often, never mind actively trying to find other suppliers beyond whoever they use now.
A bit like in “The Day Before You Came”, there’s a constant rhythm to your customers’ lives. Odds are they’re not thinking about your business, or even the product you sell, more than once in a blue moon.
I often tell clients that their biggest competitor, but one that very few businesses recognise or build into their marketing plans, is inertia.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong, the person who buys whatever you sell is likely to keep buying from wherever they buy it now, thanks to inertia.
They don’t have the time and energy to spend hours looking for new paperclip suppliers when their current supplier does a reasonable job at what seems to be a market rate for paperclips. (If you don’t sell paperclips, insert whatever you do sell into the sentence above for the full effect.)
So they’re in a constant, repetitive rhythm of buying the same things from the same place unless either you’re going to cut the price in half or the MD of the current supplier runs off with their boss’s wife.
Best sales quote ever
Once you get over the shock that most of your sales prospects are not thinking about your business as often as your marketing platform of choice would like you to believe they are, it becomes quite liberating.
Because now you know what you’re really working with.
The best advice I ever heard on sales is a quote from an American copywriter called Robert Collier who said you should “Always enter the conversation already occurring in your customer’s mind”.
Now, he was talking from the perspective of writing sales copy, but exactly the same advice applies for making an in-person sale.
To give a simple example, if your sales pitch is based entirely around your offer to supply for 30% less than your incumbent competitor, you might feel that’s a strong pitch.
But imagine their current supplier is woefully unreliable. I don’t know about you, but I’d need a lot of convincing that someone offering to do the same thing for 30% less than a woefully unreliable supplier is going to be more reliable than the supplier I have now.
I’m trying to solve a “lack of reliability” problem – that’s the conversation that takes place in my mind when products like yours come up for discussion. While naturally I want a fair price too, that’s the least of my issues when the factory is at a standstill because our current supplier is late with their delivery again.
Give me a “30% off” pitch in those circumstances, and I’m probably not buying. The conversation taking place in my mind is that you’re likely to cut even more corners than my current supplier and therefore are likely to be even less reliable. That amplifies my problem, it doesn’t solve it in any way. So the price is irrelevant.
However, if I lead a pitch to the same prospect citing our on-time delivery performance of 99.9% compared to an industry average of under 80%, now I’m entering the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind, which is probably something along the lines of “Jeez, why are all the people in this sector so staggeringly unreliable?”.
Now I’m in with a chance.
You need more than information
Now I recognise that “get as close as you can to your customer” is one of the key lessons in Basic Sales Advice 101.
And nowadays on the internet, there are a lot of ways to gather information. There are cookies on your website, prequalification questionnaires your prospects fill in, the desk research you do on LinkedIn before you pick up the phone to a prospect.
It’s not difficult to start the call with lots of information. But frankly that’s more or less useless – it’s far too easy to make a set of entirely unwarranted assumptions that’ll scupper a sale faster than someone can say “get out of my office”.
My personal favourite is something men, mostly, do when selling to other men. They try to bond over a sport – usually football or rugby.
Now, if you know me IRL, you will know I often talk about taking my son to football matches, and the hours I spent on the touchline cheering him on when he played junior football – which he did to a very high level.
So the lazy sales approach is to ask whether I had a good weekend. I say something like “I went to the football with my son”. And the sales rep launches into a whole spiel about football, trying to work the team I went to see into the narrative somewhere, thinking they’re bonding with me and it’s going to make a sale more likely.
In truth, it’s the opposite. I love my son, but I viscerally hate sport of every kind. I go to football matches to be with my son, not because I’ve got the slightest interest in sport. So the more a salesperson tries to “get close to me” talking about football, the less and less likely that sale gets. They rarely pick up on the clues, like me not engaging much in their chatter, they’re just happy to assume I’m interested and rabbit on regardless.
That’s why information alone is not very helpful. Yes, even information that AI produces, and even in the unlikely event that information is correct.
Information is a commodity. It’s not been a USP for anyone since the 1980s.
We see that in “The Day Before You Came”. It’s really easy to look down a list of facts and draw a whole raft of entirely unwarranted conclusions which someone might think of using to “get closer to the customer”.
Consider this line: “I left the house at eight, because I always do”
That sounds like someone with a routine, a steady rhythm to their life, an early starter perhaps. You might think about building that into your sales approach.
But maybe the office where Agnetha works is locked until 9am, so the reason she gets the 8am train is that’s the latest one she can catch to get to the office at 9am if she has an hour-long commute. The information that she leaves the house at 8am every day is, on its own, more or less useless.
Or this line: “I must have gone to lunch at half-past twelve or so, the usual place, the usual bunch”
Does that mean she has a close-knit group of friends at work, or does it mean there’s only one half-decent place anywhere near her office so, by default, everyone goes there for lunch each day?
Or what about: “The train back home again / Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then / Oh, yes, I’m sure my life was well within its usual frame / The day before you came”.
It’s easy to imagine this is someone who lives a very lonely life, and who therefore is aching for something more. Many salespeople would identify that as a pain point, and try to sell a solution for it.
But what if Agnetha preferred solitude because, in her head, she was planning out a novel she was going to write…what if her entire family had recently passed away in a terrible accident on the motorway and she was still processing her grief…what if she was just content as she was and had no desire to conform to society’s ideas of how she ought to live her life…?
Now I don’t know the answer to those questions any more than you do. But the point here is that understanding how your customers live their lives might seem like it gives you an edge when you try to sell them on something.
But information alone is useless. If you doubt me, try to sell me something after you’ve started the conversation talking about football just because I mentioned I went to a match with my son at the weekend.
If you’re trying to understand the conversation already taking place in your customer’s mind, just make sure it’s the real conversation, not some lazy generalisation of what you think your customers ought to be thinking.
Because I can virtually guarantee you it’s not that. Lazy thinking about your customers’ motives is probably not going to jolt them out of their inertia and stop them buying whatever it is they buy now.
The key question
So ask yourself – if someone is a potential buyer of your product or service, what were they doing the day before you came.
Odds are, like Agnetha, they were happy enough in their routine, living their life the way they had lived it for some time. And almost certainly they weren’t thinking about you or your business.
There’s a fashion in the marketing world at the moment to talk about the 95/5 rule which, simplistically put, means that at any given time 95% of your potential customers are not looking to buy whatever it is you sell. The 5% who are ready to buy cycle in and out as their needs get fulfilled, being replaced by a different 5%, and so on, over time.
If you want, you can try to fight it out with the 5% who are in the market, competing on price against the other 3-5 quotes they probably got for whatever you sell.
Or you can focus on the 95% who aren’t in the market at the moment and really get to know and understand them and their key drivers. Not superficial-level knowledge and projection like “he goes to football matches, so he must be a football fan”, or “she never mentions seeing any friends in the evening, so she must be lonely”.
The first part of both those statements is a fact. The second part is pure conjecture – and the more of that you do, the less likely it it you’re really understanding your customers at all. So, no matter how much sales effort you put in, there won’t be a sale coming out the other side of that process any time soon.
To get the maximum bottom line impact from your sales and marketing, you need to work to understand – really understand – the 95% of your market who isn’t looking to buy anything now.
Because a proportion of them will move into the 5% who are going to buy next – and if you have truly understood their needs and their hopes and aspirations before they move into buying mode, the more likely it is your pitch will hit the points they were looking to satisfy more effectively than anyone else.
So the key question is, what were your customers doing the day before you came?