Do we know what our prospects and customers really want? 

A conversation with Caleb, my 5-year-old, made me wonder the same.

Caleb needed $18 to buy a toy he has been wanting for a while, but his piggy bank only had $8 in it and so I chipped in, saying:

“Alright, I’ll loan you the difference and you can pay me back, dollar by dollar, by doing chores.”

“Dad, what’s a loan?”

As I explained what a loan meant, I could see the wheels turning in his head. 

If you’ve read my daily blog in the past, you know that this is followed by silence which tells me that I need to gear up for an incoming question.

And sure enough, he had one!

“Dad, so you are going to loan me $10 and I’ll have to pay that $10 back to you later on?”

“Yes. Are we on the same page?”

“Kinda.”

“Kinda?”

“Well, what if you could make more money?”

“What?”

“See, if you give me $10 today and I can give that back to you soon, why don’t you give me $20 now? That way, I can get another toy and give you the extra $10 back later on.”

And that, my friends, is the same logic that caused the Subprime lending fiasco to rock our world in 2007!

Caleb thought that giving me more money back would be of great value and a motivating factor for me to give him a bigger loan now. 

Nice try, but are we guilty of that too?

Do we think that customers and prospects will really like something, then later on it turns out that they don’t?