One thing that we think about constantly at Selling Has Value is how we can improve our sales efforts and our results. Regular readers of this blog will know that in our quest to improve we preach a few common themes:
- Really care about the customer
- Ask the questions you really want answers to (even if they are hard)
- Keep your presentations short & engaging – apply the points above and respect the intelligence of your audience
it’s # 3 that I want to focus on in this post.
Earlier today I was catching up on the posts from one of my favorite bloggers, Pat Flynn, of Smart Passive Income. The post, “It’s Dumb Not To Dumb It Down“, is a great read! Pat refers in this post to a concept from Chip & Dan Heath’s book Made To Stick known as “The Curse of Knowledge”.
“The Curse of Knowledge” refers to knowledge you have in your head, which makes something self-evident to you, but not to the people who are not in your head (note that if you have a lot of “people” in your head you may have problems that are far worse than your presentations!).
But another issue that can be even worse than this is the failure to “Dumb It Down”…
Pat doesn’t really like this phrase and I agree. It’s not really dumbing it down per se – it’s about raising up your expectations of the intelligence of your audience!
The post gives a great example of what this means:
Let’s pretend you are showing someone how to search for a word definition using Google – hopefully you would NOT explain it like this:
Step 1: With your hand on top of your mouse, move the cursor (the arrow on your monitor) to the top of your screen and click on “FILE”, located on the left hand side.
Step 2: In the “FILE” menu, click on “Open a New Window”. A new blank window will appear on your screen.
Step 3: Using your keyboard, type in the following website address…
If you explained each and every step in agonizing detail, 1) your audience will get bored and tune out fast and, 2) they might think your belittling them.
However, if you raise your acceptance of the intelligence of your audience you can instead explain it like this:
Step 1: Go to http://www.google.com.
Step 2: In the search field, type in “Definition: word” (replace word with the actual word you’re looking to define), and press search.
Step 3: Read through the various definitions that show up in the results.
If you take this approach to your technical presentations, you will get much better results, and trust me – your audience will thank you!
