The Cheugy Trap

Are your Sales techniques and collaterals cheugy?

If so, then you’ll perhaps struggle to make your numbers selling to those perhaps more chic (or even less old) than you.

This noun of the moment has for a while been used by the Millennials to mock their elders. Specifically when they try, and fail, to keep their personal style on-trend. Originally in female fashion terms among peers reminiscent, to this outsider anyway, of the glorious trope of 90s movie classics, Clueless and Heathers.

Pronounced chew-gee (hard ‘g’ as in geek). It means all of basic, uncool, trying to hard, the opposite of trendy, out-of-date.

Examples of cheugy selling strike me as from the initial approach. Both by medium. Who aged under 40 sends cold emails or makes an unsolicited phone call these days? And by meaning. Still delivering a breathless me-me-me ten-second catch-all pitch upfront?

Then there are the materials you deploy. Still sending slidedecks with dozens of pages, a fifty-page pdf centrepiece, or a five-hundred word piece of dense prose over email?

In fairness, even before Gen Z-ers get born, such as these were almost dating past their sell-by.

Even when fashions become recycled, there is a crucial nuance of ‘remix’ which means you cannot use the hack of taking something direct from a long locked wardrobe.

Then there are the dangers of taking the freshly modern ways and trying to appropriate them.

A TikTok style clip sent to a prospect. Giphy your key point. Podcast a central conversation.

These could be powerful. Get them wrong though and you’ll likely spin into irrelevance.

Yet crack their code, and you could indeed rocket sky high.

Ready to show you’ve not only still got it, but never lost it?