TMI Over-rides Helpfulness

I was in an informal first-meet the other day. It lasted around half-an-hour in a coffee shop that offered that wonderful Zumex-enabled fresh orange juice I’m so fond of.

The chap the ‘other side’ of the table was interested in one specific project, for which we had a neat one-page summary pdf we could send through (that we’d earlier crafted for a previous, yet fortunately very similar, request).  He asked for this alone, and despite knowledge of a wealth of further documentation available from us, specifically stated that it would be enough to go in before we spoke again.

So what would you have sent?

I was firmly on the side of sending the 1-pager as agreed and following up. My painful findings are that it is more often the case that too much, rather than too little, info curtails your plans.

I had quite a job persuading the person responsible for sending that this was the reality. It struck me that there really is a prevailing view among those with no sales experience that it is always best to send through as much as you can. The belief persisting that this shows you being ‘helpful’ is a giant misnomer.

Where did this come from? Isn’t it time to change the world, one tiny step at a time…?