TL;DR
Humans are sold my images and concrete things that they can verify with their eyes.
Whom am I speaking to? Who is this going to help?
The smart kid who is unable to convince others of his ideas.
My Practical Experience
People selling me on “complicated “home services
Two guys come to my home to inspect my AC unit, and after some quiet investigation, they start telling me everything that’s wrong with the “flux capacitor”, “gizmo watts”, and “hydropowered radio”.
Speaking from the buyer’s side of anything, I never understand what the expects are saying because, through their own expertise, they go through a bunch of jargon that makes the skeptical side of me thing, “Oh shit, are they trying to up sell me on my stupidity?”
As a defense mechanism, skeptical sellers like myself pretend we know what’s going on in order to make it seem like we’re smart enough to not get swindled.
I call these “complicated” simply because they’re actually quite easy fixes many times, but our own egos, fears, and prejudice towards people limits our ability to ask questions that exposes our lack of knowledge.
A lesson from my close mentor
There was once a time when I was working closely with my mentor, Sutanay, on a project using distributed and high performance computing. The more advance my work tasks became, the more confused I started becoming and asking, “What the hell am I using this for?”.
Seeing my bubbling stress and confusion, Sutanay effortlessly guided me towards the hardware unit itself, and he began showing me PICTURES of what the inside of the unit looked like. He explained how my programming protocol had a direct impact on how the machine would interpret my code, and how the machine’s physical architecture was specifically made to switch between CPU resources and GPU ones.
The point was, he better sold me on the importance of the project by showing me the impact of my work.
The big idea
People are sold on the image of their dreams.
Describe a narrative about your service or product to match the story your sellers have in mind.
Ideally, if speaking in person, show pictures using your smart phone.
Thanks for the advice, now how can I practically put this to use in a simple way for daily execution?
Here are practical tips when explaining anything:
- Speak calmly, using as few words as possible
- your audience will ask for elaboration on parts they have questions on
- Use images to sell your ideas
- This is 2023, USE YOUR SMARTPHONE to pull up images
- Especially in the era of virtual conferences, SHOW YOUR WORK
- Understand that YOU have a stronger ability to visualize things that others cannot see
- Knowing this, be of practical use by showing images of what you explain to others
- Imagine you are selling to a 5-year-old who is in a rush