Pitch The Full Case Figures Range

The oft-entertaining Aussie Dr Karl spoke recently about the forever tardy.

I ought set out my stall. I hate people that are always late.

From discovering the phrase “just now” in South African means pretty much the opposite of what it does in England to people who think it’s fine for their lack of adherence to a deadline to become my crisis.

Indeed, the similar ill is with last minute merchants. Proven to precede poorer performance.

Being reliably late gives rise to total unreliability.

Dr Karl quotes American examiner of “self-defeating patterns of … chronic procrastination”, Dr Linda Sapadin, and her quartet of personality types that should be shot; perfectionist, crisis-maker, defier & dreamer.

What caught my Sales eye were differing perceptions of a minute;

We all experience the passage of time in our own way. One study suggested that people who are achievement-oriented and highly strung will perceive a minute as passing in 58 seconds, and not surprisingly, they tend to be punctual. But the more laid-back and relaxed people think that it took a leisurely 77 seconds for that minute to drift by.

I can’t help but think this maps onto a selling display of time. Namely when it’s concerned with money.

Yes. The good old business case.

What delivered in your best conservative business-like tone you may state as a dollar uplift is easily seen as perhaps as much a dollar-ten by your most ardent supporters, yet not even ninety cents and so unworthy a pursuit by your scheming detractors.

You can often be up against in-built cynicism presenting a “returns” spreadsheet. Who’s ever known one to turn out as pitched?

Yet the same discrepancies felt when faced by the clock can be at play when judging numbers on a proposed payback schedule.

What sensitivity bandings are put to use? Where do the go/no-go launch lines lie? Which assumptions can be graded?

We’re not given to provide best-case scenarios with these. Mainly due to the obvious banana skin of worse-case emerging from the disinclined.

In my experience people do not buy solely because of your shiny telephone-numbers T&M study update.

Time and Motion. Now there was a construct. Trick and Manipulation as cynics would moan. Put those stopwatches away and understand true value.

Whichever your stance, put enough holes in it and it becomes less likely to be a crutch to their emotional propulsion to buy.

Factor in from the outset that there will be those that consider your figures as higher, and others who frame them as lower. And if you can spot who does which, then try and isolate them for special, individual number crunching.