During the early years of my career I became obsessed with design and creating visuals. I was talented in this area. It was always a discipline where things came relatively easy to me. Communicating with visuals was just something I naturally was gifted with.
As I grew, I became more interested in the technical side of the skill set. I devoured lessons on all aspects of creating visual art. It was not uncommon for me to spend my leisure time learning the ins and outs of all Adobe software, especially Photoshop (as I’ve been using it now for 30 years). Then I moved into other tools like Illustrator. I needed to know exactly how to create artwork in the fastest time possible. At one point a fellow colleague and I had contests on who could know the most keyboard shortcuts to achieve a task. I always won of course!
With the knowledge I acquired I soon became fluent in technical talk about the tools. When I became a web developer I did the same thing. Build the knowledge, talk to the language. Then again the same as I became a marketer. I built a vast collection of skills over time.
As I became an entrepreneur and I had to do other things, like sales, I realized something real quick. People were looking at me like I was talking a language from some foreign planet in a galaxy far far away. I lost their focus.
I needed to learn how to not talk technical to decision makers when trying to close a deal. The prospect didn’t care about how I was describing the latest marketing technique we used. All they really cared about were two things:
- What problems would I be able to solve when hiring me?
- Could they trust that I could achieve this for them and get results?
Even though I was proud of the 2 decades of knowledge I had and I knew the value I could deliver, I needed to leave out the techno babble. I was losing the prospective client by speaking this language.
So I made adjustments and moved on. And guess what happened? I closed more deals!
All I had to do was to create content that showed I was able to achieve an outcome and solve a problem that my audience was having. Use less big words. Show results. Build confidence and sound professional.
I bring this up today, because I was recently reminded of how easy it is to lose your audience. I’m a technically savvy guy and even my conversations with my web developer loses me at times. I have to remind him, just keep it simple and give me the bullet points. I know you can achieve the task.
So today, I remind you, leave out the techno babble and keep things short. Answer questions with confidence and I assure you will grow your business faster that way.