Are You Tunnelling Your Benefits Better Than New Tube Or Subway Lines?

Recently I caught an interview with the chairman of Crossrail, Terry Morgan. The entertaining business journo Jeff Randall was clearly excited about his £15bn project that tunnels across London. And it seems, with good reason. Not just because it’ll afford him new travel options from what he described as “Randall Towers” at the eastern terminus of Shenfield.

Amazingly, after so many debacles, like The Dome, Wembley Stadium and Heathrow Terminal 5, the capital’s latest big ticket infrastructure has been delivered in world-beating fashion. Just like the Olympic Park, Crossrail is on both time and budget.

Excellent news indeed. So Jeff pushed for a summing up of what the new train line would really mean for the traveller. The response wasn’t perhaps as polished as it could be, but it was a winner.

Mr Morgan waffled a touch to begin with, talking about the sheer scope of lateral line cutting under London. But he hit his straps with his end punch, something like this;

…which means that your journey across London will be roughly half what it is now

Terrific. What every commuter wants to hear. And their website has a long list of benefit bullets. Unfortunately they’re not written by a winning salesperson, but there are a few good ones. You certainly sense a solid platform from facts like the 10% capacity increase, 1.5m people more within 45 minutes of city centre, and Liverpool St to Heathrow times down from 55 to 32 minutes.

It reminded me of the proud ads I saw last year on the New York subway. They extolled the virtues of their ongoing network extensions. I particularly recall the purple, line 7 posters. They said something like ‘50,000 people will save 45 mins off their journey through the new Hell’s Kitchen station’. (Note those figures aren’t, I’m sure, quite the right ones, but should give you the idea).

In both cases, there’s a lovely “metric” to be had in there.

It’s a good reminder to know what the impact of what you offer in solution selling should be.

Those from my old-school classes will insist you put hard and fast financial amounts on this.

Yet if such vital spice alludes you for the moment, there’s nothing wrong with having as your starting point say, something like, ‘from what I bring someone will go on to save half their time‘.

You can progress through into the details accordingly.

And if you’re not saving (or giving) someone loads of time, and therefore money, then you still might get by on emotion alone, but you are probably on shaky ground.