📄 Are you forcing people to pay interaction-tax?

To follow on from the idea of ‘selling people a problem’ - i.e. when the buyer perceives a complication or cost that goes along with your solution - today let's look at interaction-tax.

And while it’s a word I made up, almost all of us force others to pay that tax.

• An email that’s long, and carelessly worded?

Now your buyer needs to allocate mental resources to even grasp the core of your message: you're making them pay interaction-tax.

• A Zoom call with a buyer, where you let them ramble and you don’t guide the conversation to a result of some sort?

They just spent an hour with you, and no real advance was made: Interaction tax.

• Need to tell an employee that you’d like to see them take more responsibility - but you cloak it in a ranting complaint about company morale?

Interaction tax.

• Present a demo📄 Are you selling them a problem? (Pt. 1 - Interaction tax) with logic gaps, and your listener needs to think to connect the dots? Interaction tax.

In so many ways, so very often, we force people to pay a cost to interacting with us, and it goes directly against results, and against everybody’s interests.

My favourite pet-peeve in this context?

Those blighted audio messages people are always sending each other on Whatsapp. Horrible things.

Ok, so you can’t be bothered to think out, and type up, a pithy, 1-sentence message?

Well, now the recipient needs to spend 90 seconds listening to you rambling and thinking into a microphone, about something that could have been said in 5 seconds, and read in 3 seconds. Your recipient pays interaction tax.

Of course it’s not your intention - but it’s crazily easy to levy interaction tax on others, and we all do it, all the time.

So be careful to avoid it, especially when you’re dealing with a buyer.

Any interaction they have with you, be it written feedback on something, or an email or text reply, or a work meeting or coaching session:

Carefully tailor your interaction and messaging to be as friction-free and low-cost as possible for the other.

Keep the cost to interacting with you low and frictionless, and you’ll magically start seeing things move more smoothly with everyone - including your buyers.

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