Withhold your details

In the tech industry, we spend an ENORMOUS amount of energy on what to build. Founders start with analyzing the problem that exists in the market. You come up with a new way to solve it. You envision how your solution should work. You define the user experience and functionality. Founders, software architects, UX designers, data scientists and QA managers fiercely debate every choice.

Which is why, when you approach the market, you REALLY want to talk about what you made and how it works. Because that’s where you’ve been relentlessly focused for months (if not years). That’s where you put all of the brain power you have to offer.

Your customers, though, they care about their businesses. In the vast majority of organizations, the people who write the checks wouldn’t be able to follow a conversation about what your product does. They only care about business outcomes. What business problem does your product solve? Is it our most urgent problem? Great, let’s buy now.

Yes, there ARE a few people in your customer organization who want to deeply understand your what your product is and how it works – the people who will actually use it.

Think of your message like the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower is really skinny until the very bottom. You communicate at a very high level – in outcomes only – to 80% of your audience. This 80% includes the business managers, the check writers, the executives. This audience gets the glossy top 20% of your story, the outcomes part. Don’t confuse them with the facts.

You go deep – the thick base of the Eiffel Tower tower – with your potential users. 80% of your message goes to the 20% of the people in an organization who will get their hands on your product. If they want to talk about your architectural choices for days, great, go there! They will understand. They need to understand.

Lots of brilliant start ups forget that focusing on that glossy top 20% of the story matters just as much (if not more) than the thorough and complicated foundational 80%. That simple, compelling outcome story is what slices through the noise in our cluttered world.

It may seem like a paradox, but the less you say about what you do the more you’ll succeed in reaching your target audiences.

Your business must scale, and you must scale with it. You need to hire a great team, forge strong customer relationships and lead your market with a powerful point of view. You can do none of these things without exceptional communication skills. Click here to receive pragmatic communications advice in your inbox every month.