TJ Walker lost a prospect by over-explaining his media training system, which made it sound like clients would seem unnatural. He argues that complexity kills business communication and you need to match how much you say to where the buyer is in the sales process.
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Is complexity your enemy when it comes to communicating about your business? Here's a fundamental problem anyone faces if they are an expert in a particular industry. The more you're in an industry, the more you work in it, day in and day out, for weeks, months, years, sometimes decades, the more you know. Which in theory is helpful to your clients, to your patience, to your customers. But there's also a real danger that it makes it harder for you to communicate. You don't know what it is that you know and don't know, and you don't know what your prospects don't know. And you can end up confusing them. Now, I wish I could say I always did this perfectly, but I'm guilty of that too. Even though I'm a communications expert. Just last week I had a prospect who I thought just loved me, wrote to me in an email and said, wow, tj, you clearly know media training. You have the best structured system. You have more books, more videos, more online tutorials. You have the best structured media system of any media trainer we've talked to. But we decided to hire someone else. My fear was that our CEO wouldn't be able to be himself. He wouldn't seem natural after going through your system, your whole process. Wow. It made me realize I had failed. Now, this was my fault, not the prospect's fault. And remember, it's never our audience's fault. It's never our prospect's fault if they don't get our message. It's always our fault. As the communicator, the business owner. Now here's what I had done. And I don't know if this is something I'm always doing wrong, but in an attempt to demonstrate my expertise, my experience, my thoroughness, I told the prospect, well, here's my system. Everyone I work with, I give them not one, but two media training books. An online media training school with more than 100 videos. I have follow up and it involves this and this. So I laid out the whole system and it just seemed too structured somehow. I had failed to communicate. And that's my challenge to you. Look at what you're communicating to your prospects. There's a danger either way. If you communicate too little, people don't understand what's special about you, what your value proposition is. But if you communicate too much, you can communicate some unintended message. In this case, I communicated the message that I was essentially putting someone under a microscope and chopping them up and removing 90% of their identity. That's not my message. It's certainly not what I do. As I had told the prospect later, I said, hey, everything I do is about making your CEO, your people come across naturally in their best light and not to do what most people do when they get in front of a camera, which is stiffen up, seem frozen stiff, scared, uncomfortable. But at that point, it was too late. They'd already hired another firm. So you live and learn. I mean, part of the challenge is you realize you can't get every single prospect. I certainly realize that. But it hurts nonetheless, especially for hey, professional communicator. My advice to you, always be on the lookout for over complexity. Always make sure you're not communicating too much or too many points at a certain stage of the sales cycle. Otherwise you might be getting the same email I did. And I gotta tell you, it hurts. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Sometimes it's helpful just to have an outsider's perspective. And that's what we do here at Media Training Worldwide. Whether it's helping you with your speech, your sales pitch, your media messages, sometimes it's just helpful to have somebody on the outside whose ignorance level is closer to your prospects or to the reporters covering you. So that's what we do. If we can help you, please call 212-764-4955.
