You think it makes sense. They think it’s twaddle.
I was sitting in the reception of a Cambridge telephony company, waiting for my client to arrive back in the office for a meeting with me.
When he arrived (a touch late) he was clearly in a bad mood, muttering under his breath before shaking my hand and leading me through to the boardroom.
He clearly had to get something off his chest as he poured the coffee.
“I have just spent three days at an exhibition in London, showcasing our new telephony product. And, do you know what? I spent most of the time answering questions about what the product did!’
This seemed perfectly reasonable to me, so I asked him why this was a problem.
“We had a huge panel — the size of a door — that explained everything for all to see. Our technical guys worked on it for weeks. And STILL people were asking questions. I think people are stupid sometimes!’
I have experienced this tangible sense of frustration lots of times when meeting founders or inventors. Particularly when their products seem revolutionary and/or complicated. Or if they are spin-outs from academia.
The products are invariably brilliant but, for some reason, the penny doesn’t drop with the potential customer.
That reason is that it is a real skill to explain something to someone who knows a lot less than you, or comes from a totally different background. Because you are speaking a different language.
You need a translator.
This, I hasten to add, is not about dumbing down. It’s not about oversimplification. It’s about truly understanding what makes an idea brilliant and distilling it into something palatable and digestible.
My frustrated client was talking technology to a market that wanted to hear how his telephony could make them money. In other words, entrepreneurs, not IT specialists.
So, to them, the long explanation on the door was twaddle.
Nobody buys into an idea they don’t get. No matter how great the idea is, it needs to be translated into something — a sentence, a concept, a mental picture — they can understand.
One simple way of checking if your translation is working is to pitch your idea to someone who could, potentially, be a client.
This way, instead of assuming your idea is a killer, they will tell you. They will ask you all kinds of questions — some of which you may not have asked yourself.
They will help you avoid the twaddle.
And you won’t need a panel the size of a door to make your point.
