Help your audience!

We spent February on the formula for a great story. This month - how to deliver it!

Here’s something: When you drown your prospective customer in details, they will find a way to make it YOUR fault that they don’t understand. And it IS your fault.

I understand why you can’t wait to tell everyone everything. You’ve worked SO hard! You’ve built an amazing solution that’s so innovative in its approach. You want to tell everyone how brilliant and radically new your stuff is. Of course you do!

But 80% of your audience just wants their business problems solved. They don’t want to know HOW you do it, just that you WILL do it. Outcomes are everything.

For every audience EXCEPT engineering: “Here’s our high-level approach. If any of you would like me to double-click on this, please let me know” is way better than showing everyone in the room a dense diagram of your full stack that only you and the VP of Engineering could possibly grasp.

When you are communicating to executives, line of business managers, or end users, less is more. Always.

In fact, if you give non-technical executives too much detail, you’ll confuse them. They will feel dumb. They don’t like to feel dumb. And they won’t like you, because they didn’t feel dumb until you started talking.

The dense and chewy 80% of your message that explains everything about how you built what you did is perfect for the 20% of the people in an organization who want to tear apart your assumptions, examine your architecture, and understand your future plans. Knock yourself out. Tell them anything and everything!

Calibrate your expectations and your message to your audience. Every time!