How Many Reasons?
Northern hemisphere mock exam season for youngsters looms over the festive period. I fondly remember writing the History essays of my schooldays. Its exam strangely always last in the rota. I always loved the subject, despite being a maths addict back then.
One key realisation came from examiner rubric. You'd get roughly forty minutes to answer by way of essay. Given marks from a maximum of 20. You'd earn a tick for every cogent, relevant, unique point you made. Each one worth half a mark. So if you managed to scribe at a point per minute, you could pull off a 20-out-of-20 full marks guaranteed 'A' Grade.
It was far from easy.
Take the first half of last century.
How many reasons could you cite[*] for causes of WWI? Or Hitler's rise to power? Or China's switch from dictatorial dynasty to communist authoritarianism?
Even when studying these, it's tricky to know when a point qualifies as impactful, where one might start and another end, and how to keep as weighty as you can in your most concise sculpted form.
Let alone mine anywhere near the 40 of the diamond number.
Yet a frustration could strike, that essential detail was often derailed by the nuance-blasting headline.
It seems the case that how we're taught to show our knowledge when sixteen does not align with how we progress our B2B selling ambitions.
Such similar haze can smother our pitching.
We feel two conflicting pincers:
Demonstrating all the reasons why your prospect may really need your wares.
Knowing the sharpest way to single out the key one that'll make the difference.
Can we start from listing everything that we happily enable?
Not just what we hope. But those which our clients tell us.
Note also to do an objections check. What are they? Have you ever managed to dig up more than a dozen genuine such hurdles in your arena? From what mis-understandings do their barriers emerge? When these lift, how does our success flow?
There's the trap to miss tripping into, where you start to rattle off all the wonders you unleash. You'll often find a potential buyer then grunt dismissively to each one in turn. They don't need such. Doesn't apply to them. They're already sorted for whatever.
That's not proper selling.
We might eventually have our full history-essay ace-ing list of marvels. Yet ideally we don't go through them.
We make the best connections, and optimal Sale, when we home-in on the one over-riding unique impact that each individual buyer senses will rock their world.
Why then over-sell?
That leads to misery.
There tends to be a primary driver that creates urgency and action. Which alone tends to be enough.
Of all the arrows in your quiver, for each of your current deals, how happy are you that you know which this best one is?
* Incidentally, I asked the latest ChatGPT. On the Great War, it spat back two, vague bullets each under seven of eight general headings. Fifteen points in all, yet not a single one had an actual example as required. In fact, the closest it came to meriting the desired half-mark was to label the infamous Sarajevo assassination as 'trigger'. When persevering to further explain the output format necessary - as in the essay style required - it never managed to succeed in either detail, or the brevity of its instant handwrite in the required real-time. Worse still, when asked to put it all in a coherent framework, intertwining topic combined with themes and chronology, it was all over the place.
Don't let such tools serve you similar Fail grades for your selling.