And so what? And so what then?

Rule 22 - What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

• Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

I used to work at a big tech company across Asia-Pacific pitching creative ideas to the world’s biggest brands.

I interrupted a director one day with: “I need your help”.

He humoured me: “go on”.

“There’s this big opportunity and this isn’t happening and I need this because of that…” I yammered about it for a while longer.

“What’s the size of the opportunity?”

It was about half a million dollars USD.

“This isn’t for me to get involved then.”

The whole exchange was cordial, took all of five minutes, and I got schooled on the “so what” for that business.

It’s similar with your product. You’re going to love it. Think about it all the time. Live and breathe every sale.

Your customer doesn’t care.

They don’t know who you are, what you’re about, and are sick and tired of being interrupted all of the time.

It doesn’t matter if you have a World Peace Creation kit - your customer doesn’t care. You’re in their world, and if you do your job well, you’ll learn to create a narrow bridge from their world into a world that offers something.

But it takes persistence, and a deep understanding of what they care about and on their terms.

An exercise for getting there is to pretend YOU are the cool executive in the room to YOUR offer.

Read through the details, and at every point you can ask yourself out loud “so what?”

Then try and answer the so what.

Then put your executive hat on again and ask: “so what then?”

The customer needs your connection to their world to be spelled out to them with pedantic clarity.

A way to combine this with what you’ve already learned is to plot it out on a table. We’ll start with the offer, then look at its features, and then connect it “so what”.

The product:

A book for learning how to start marketing on your own

The offer:

Buy the book for what you think from $10 or $20 through the zero

Features

• An easy-to-understand approach for learning marketing
• In ebook form to read on your favourite device
• Distilled from nearly two decades of digital marketing wisdom

Benefits:

• Helps you focus your learning without overwhelm
• Enables you to learn on your terms at a time that suits you
• Expertise that brands pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for

So what #1:

• Feeling overwhelmed is one of the biggest reasons for preventing you from learning
• Making this information accessible to you is important
• You’re getting a huge amount of value for next-to-nothing

So what #2:

• I want you to feel comfortable learning
• You can decide when this is important
• There’s a good chance you don’t know who I am so I want to be as useful as I can without expectation to earn your trust

By drilling down this way, you’re able to really connect with a customer. The digging gets to the good stuff that’s more subconscious. With the right prompts you’ll be able to connect in a way that’s far more authentic and coming from a better place.