Add Theatre To Your Explanation

What does their reception area approach reveal about a company? It’s amazing what you can see when they’ve a telly on the wall.

Daytime tv was showing at a place I waited Monday morning.

Made a strange change from rolling news.

Some hyperactive, self-styled consumer champ was talking about saving money on booking train fares.

There’s a well-known British money pit around standard return prices. Many now invest time in”split-ticketing”. It’s where a point-to-point return is way more expensive than two returns. Where there-and-back from a specific stop somewhere along the route, without needing to change train costs much less.

He quoted a now out-of-date example where London-Penzance was £250. Yet split your tickets through Plymouth and the price plummets to just £50. A full two hundred quid rescued.

A slew of current fare savings followed. The last being Newcastle-Oxford. He aimed to expose the ridiculousness of the system.

Whilst describing it, he dealt into the air like a pack of playing cards ticket after ticket. 28 tickets flew around then littered the studio table and surrounds.

He revelled in saying these splits saved the traveller £30.

Yet the ‘cheap trick’ demo and its point was what stayed with you.

I thought back to similar treatments I’d seen work wonders.

An old style computer-printout stack allowed to concertina to the floor, compared to a single, coloured page held aloft to hammer home the new ease of sales data reporting.

The throwing of paper across a stage to show how slow approval procedures could be quickened to ‘instant’ with new scanner kit.

Even carrying along in your arms a then-cutting edge server which could replace an entire computer room of obsolete kit. With the added use of a calculator to suggest the new world was like the moon landings power being now the same as a simple palm-held calc.

With the march of tech and the ubiquity of the cloud for almost every task, such stage antics may not be readily open to you. But where you can spot a problem that can have a physical metaphor, giving prospects a sense of theatrics can get the stalls very much on your side.