Tailoring Content for Complex Decision Making

The limitations of data

Do you ever pour your soul into a pitch only to have blank faces staring back at you?

There is a lot of simple marketing advice in the world. Most often it says have one message and back it up with data and social proof. Yet you may reel off a series of impressive numbers only to be met by shrugs. When this happens your service is too complex to be conveyed in statistics and you must rethink how you market and sell.

One character we meet on my resolving team conflicts course is the Calculator. This is the personality type most common among tech founders, even though it describes only a minority of the wider population. The Calculator seeks to persuade with a volley of statistics and, if it doesn’t work, reloads and fires again. Calculators do not make great salespeople.

Arguments are like seeds

In his book Four Ways of Thinking, David Sumpter tells the story of charity worker Aisha. She struggles to engage her audience with the fact that one in 52, or 170,000 people, are homeless in London. The numbers don’t reflect the scale of the problem, or the tragedy of those she meets every day.

Sumpter shows that complexity is the length of the program that describes an output. The more complex a situation, the harder it is to summarise. For Aisha, the facts are not enough to convey the intricacies of homelessness and what must be done to address it. She needs an alternative and opts for a story.

Jackie lost her job and was evicted from her flat when she fell behind on the rent. She lived out of her car, fell into depression and after six months took an overdose of her medication. Aisha’s organisation found her a place to stay and a temporary job, and now the future is bright.

The audience of donors laps it up and wants to know how they can help others like Jackie, with the fortitude to get back on their feet. But Aisha needs help for the thousands whose situation is different and the audience has skipped over the critical role her organisation played in Jackie’s recovery. One case study is not enough.

Rather than detail individual stories, Aisha makes a film telling Jackie’s tale interwoven with that of an insurance broker who turned to alcohol when his girlfriend left him, a Syrian refugee with no connections or access to help, and a man who had slept rough for 20 years. The film has enough detail to attract Calculator personalities, but context and emotion to appeal to everyone else.

The complex picture of London’s homelessness forms in the minds of donors through a variety of relatable, personal stories. The most persuasive arguments we can make are seeds that grow in the imagination of our audience.

Long enough and no more

I sat in on a sales call recently, where the prospect asked for examples of how to use AI to help private equity firms. The case study left her cold and it was only once the boss excused herself that it became clear the firm needed a consultant. The person in charge of efficiency felt unable to ask for the help she needs in front of her manager.

Deploying AI is a complex process and a single story is unlikely to resonate with the precise requirements of potential clients. The head of data science at a client told me that the only common theme among 15 AI projects was the conversational interface. This revelation requires a rewriting of the website to reflect the depth of the challenge of deploying AI.

Google ranks webpages rather than sites. That means its algorithm has to believe a page is the most important on the internet for that particular subject. If you sell a complex service or product, then taglines and headline grabbing data are not going to attract an audience, any more than they will convince people in a presentation.

What you need instead is a blend of rational, emotional, data-driven and comparative narratives that appeal to a wide range of people. The content must be long enough to describe your service as unique, but need not be any longer.

Questions to Ask and Answer

1. Are there a lot of steps in my sales process?

2. How complicated is onboarding clients and getting them up to speed?

3. Do my clients require a lot of after sales service, training and hand holding?

Whenever you are ready there are three ways I can help you:

1. The Profit Through Process Planner: My flagship course on how to design and invigorate a business that scales. I share 30 years of experience of researching, investing and running businesses that I intermingle with science and stories.

2. Resolving Team Conflicts: A free email course tackling an issue that no one ever teaches you as a manager. The course also serves as an excellent introduction to the foundational understanding of The Profit Through Process Planner.

3. Schedule a Call. I have a limited number of slots available to work with companies and entrepreneurs who want to accelerate their growth.