How Dan works
The Mirror
The Mirror is the research stage of Dan Ilett's B2B messaging work. Dan interviews your customers, your lost prospects and your own people, reads the competition, and hands back what the market thinks of you, in its own words. It is the evidence the sales story is built on.
What happens
- Dan agrees with you who to hear from: existing customers, prospects you won, prospects you lost and a few people who have never heard of you.
- He interviews them himself, one to one, usually ten to fifteen conversations. A survey is possible but usually overkill.
- He reads how your competitors describe themselves and where the claims are crowded.
- He runs a workshop with your own leadership and sales team to hear how they explain the business today.
- You get the mirror: what the market values, what it hesitates over, the words it uses and the gap between that and what you say.
What you get
- The customer's number-one problem in the customer's words.
- Why the buyers you lost chose someone else.
- Where the competition is crowded and where there is clear ground.
- The one-page brief that the messaging framework is written from.
Who runs the interviews?
Dan Ilett does, personally. A former journalist who has interviewed CEOs for the Financial Times, he gets more from thirty minutes than a survey gets from a thousand responses.
How long does The Mirror take?
Usually three to five weeks from the first interview to the workshop that plays the findings back.
Do I have to buy the whole programme?
No. The Mirror is bought on its own, fixed price and fixed scope. Most clients go on to The Message because the research makes the story obvious, but you decide when you have seen the findings.