Your Customers Won’t Take Action Until Challenged to Do So

Once you’ve established your credibility as the guide and provide a solid plan, it’s time to call your customer to action in no gentle way

Jim Farina

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Photo by MaddiesCreation on Unsplash

In AMC’s hit series Breaking Bad, high school chemistry teacher Walter White starts manufacturing crystal meth. Would he have done that if he didn’t think he was dying from cancer and looking for a means to provide for his family?

It’s no different from Liam Neeson’s character in the movie, Taken. There’s no way he would’ve chased those sex slavers to Europe if his daughter wasn’t kidnapped.

There’s no way Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) would’ve journeyed to pick up his autistic older brother, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), until he learns his estranged father has died.

Heroes (and anti-heroes) need to be challenged by outside forces as motivation to take action. Best-selling author Donald Miller lays it out very neatly in his book, Building a Story Brand.

Miller further elaborates: “If I wrote a story about a guy who wants to climb Everest and then one day decides to look in the mirror and do it, I’d lose the audience.”

That’s not how people work. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, and so do your customers.

When you consider your customers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages daily, it only behooves you to be as bold and clear as possible in your call to action. Anything less, and they will go unnoticed.

Wake Up Your Customers from Their Zombie-like State

The quickest way to accelerate a company’s growth is to make a clear call to action. Not just once, but over and over. Think of the times you are browsing a site; a product catches your eye. You are intrigued enough to click on the link and begin exploring — maybe you scan the reviews to see what others are saying about the product. You bookmark it for later consideration, and you move on.

It happens to me often. I was recently scrolling a social media platform and came upon this T-shirt company that caught my eye…

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