I often find myself guilty of over-explaining strategies and solutions we are trying to implement. When we build a direction from data, facts, and figures, it is easy to want to share that basis with the audience. But the reality is that the audience rarely comes in with the same general knowledge or basic understanding to allow them to grasp the nuance and rationale behind the full depth of information.
The other day one of my early draft presentations was called “wonk-ish.” For those unfamiliar with the term, in this use it would mean something along the lines of being overly specialized and detailed on a particular subject. Basically, the material was way too deep for a pitch that needed to focus on getting the solution sold to a group that does not care about the level of detail. It can feel good to craft presentations and stories that show off your own skill and capability, but often that approach is self-defeating because it turns off the audience. Smugness and over-confidence are easily detectable.
I made the classic mistake of focusing on all the various elements of the solution and stacking them together to create a grand mosaic of a solution. In reality, I needed to simply say that “doing X causes Y at a cost of Z.” While the details are fascinating to me, no one else really cared. Unless I had come to a counter-intuitive direction, they just want to know that the math checks out.
Sales starts and ends with a focus on the customer. They rarely care what programming language was used to build the tool or how the data is transported or how some challenge was overcome with a novel implementation of process. What they want to know is what their day-to-day will be like. How their life will be easier. How the solution solves a problem. How deciding to make a purchase will not come back on them as a bad decision.
There is a time and place for being the smartest person in the room and overwhelming an audience with facts and figures. But that time and place is rare. It is usually wisest to focus on the facts that matter to others than the cleverness of the solution itself.