Why it’s hard to talk about what you do
Known For Podcast - Ep. 002
Four reasons consultants fumble when it matters most, and the one fix that cuts through all of them.
Three Things You’ll Learn:
Why knowing your work so well can work against you when talking to a prospect
What first-time buyers need to hear before they can understand what you do
How to collect the words your clients use, and why that changes how you show up
You’re a pro. You know your work. So why does it feel like a stumble when a prospect turns to you and says, “Tell me exactly how we’d work together”?
Erin Braford walks through four reasons consultants get stuck in those moments: the curse of knowledge, first-time buyers who have no mental model for what you do, the pull toward abstract outcomes over the concrete problems clients are living with, and jargon that signals expertise but creates distance.
[00:03:19] “The first part of the argument really has to be around helping someone understand that you speak their language.”
The fix Erin keeps coming back to is one thing: capture real client language. Mine old prospect emails to see how they described the problem, or run listening interviews with current clients. When you start from their words, you stop translating and start connecting.
[00:13:51] “If you can really say it clearly in one context, you can say it clearly in pretty much any context.”
Transcription, Episode 002 - Known For - Why it’s hard to talk about what you do
Host and Speaker: Erin Braford
(0:05) Picture this, you are sitting at the table with a big-time prospect, you're very excited about the opportunity that you have to possibly work together. (0:18) And the moment comes where they've told you a little about themselves, they turn the whole conversation toward you and say, great, tell us a little bit about exactly how we work together. (0:30) And you feel a pit in your stomach.
(0:35) You're a pro, you've done this a bunch of times, so you know how to get to an answer. (0:40) But how does it feel in that moment? (0:44) Sometimes not so great, right?
(0:47) You're sitting there with a happy client, they try to introduce you to somebody, and they can't exactly explain the magic that happened. (0:57) It ends maybe with a little bit of like, oh, just talk to them. (1:01) They'll just change everything.
(1:03) They're so great. (1:05) Or some equally abstract, not quite helpful, not quite salesy talking point. (1:14) Yeah, so this begs the question, why is it so hard to talk about what you do?
(1:23) We're gonna get into that today, because these moments are just so critical for creating opportunities for meeting new people for building your reputation. (1:35) And I want to make sure that you feel more equipped today than you did yesterday to answer some of these questions. (1:40) So let's talk about what gets in the way.
(1:42) And then I'll offer some tips about what you can do to help build more confidence in how you talk about the work that you do at these critical moments. (1:52) I'm Erin Braford, and this is Known For. (1:55) So why do we fumble these very important opportunities, when of course, you know what your work is, you know what you do?
(2:04) Yeah, it's kind of complex, but at the end, you're the expert. (2:08) No one understands it better than you. (2:10) So it doesn't feel great to not be able to very clearly and concisely explain the work.
(2:16) So here are some things that I know to be true, from my years of helping consultants get clear about their message, and build their confidence and their ability to share about the work that they do. (2:29) One, this idea of the curse of knowledge. (2:32) Have you heard of this?
(2:33) It's the idea that you know so much about your expertise, you know, the ins and outs, you've probably been doing it long enough that you've seen your industry change, mature, die, and come back, who knows, you've seen it all, right? (2:47) And you know, that works so well, as a result, that you kind of forget what it's like to have a beginner's mind to think about it from the point of view that your prospective client is bringing to the table. (3:00) Sometimes it's easier as a practitioner to sit in with our methodologies at our fingertips to be thinking about how we actually do the work to get into the sausage making because it also sounds cool, like it sounds really important.
(3:16) And we want to convey that we have a known process. (3:19) But the first part of the argument really has to be around helping someone understand that you speak their language, right, that you know their problem the way that they do, that you understand the problem the way that they understand it. (3:33) And so when we lose touch with how our clients think about the problem they have, you know, it can get harder to bridge that gap in our messaging.
(3:44) Another thing that comes up for a lot of my clients is that, you know, we sell complex services, and people don't necessarily buy that service over and over and over again, or more likely they've never bought it before. (3:58) So when you have a first time buyer, they really don't have a mental model for what you do. (4:04) They don't have a schema.
(4:07) This is where analogies and things can actually be quite helpful to you. (4:11) But we have to be able to break our work down to its simplest components in the first place in order to create a strong analogy, right? (4:18) So this compounds that curse of knowledge experience, you know, so much they know nothing, and we're not meeting them in the middle meeting them where they really are.
(4:29) So you're actually speaking two totally different languages with two completely different perspectives. (4:35) A third thing that I have observed and have wrestled with myself is this idea of abstract versus concrete thinking. (4:45) The ability to kind of be worried that what we have to do or have to say actually sounds too simple.
(4:54) Sometimes when the work itself is complex, but the need our client has is quite simple. (5:03) We default to these kind of abstract outcomes like, I'll help you grow your company, or this work will transform your operations. (5:16) Like that sounds like a payoff that our client is looking for.
(5:19) It sounds like the thing that they want. (5:23) But really, they are thinking much more concretely. (5:28) Nine times out of 10, nine and a half times out of 10.
(5:32) Because they are in their problem space, they are thinking about what is getting in their way, the pain they want to remove, the barrier that is keeping them from the next thing they want to do. (5:44) And so they're experiencing this problem in the day to day, not necessarily like the long term vision of complete transformation of XYZ. (5:54) And so sometimes when the actual problem sounds simple, I told you, well, I'll give you an example from my own work.
(6:02) I've been for years, wrestling with this idea that the thing I hear, I hear two things the most from from my established expert firms, which is, I don't know what to say in these situations, just like what we're talking about today. (6:21) Or I just want my whole team to know what to say and feel confident about it. (6:26) So really, what does that mean?
(6:28) I solve, if I had to fill out my own, I solve the problem of, in my work, it's I solve the problem of helping you know what to say. (6:38) Well, that does not sound very B2B, fancy, important. (6:44) It sounds like very much a need.
(6:48) And I know that it is the foundation of showing up with energy to your sales conversations. (6:55) I know that knowing what to say means that you actually have a lot more room to improvise or adjust because you are very familiar with your script. (7:05) I know all of that.
(7:07) But if I just put it out there in the world that way, that's kind of risky, right? (7:12) So what I'm trying to articulate here is that there's really this trap of what is the simplest thing that you do? (7:18) The work itself might be complex, but the deliverable or the end problem that you solve might not sound like it is so complex.
(7:29) And so therefore, we tend to avoid a simple and clear description. (7:35) There's just something in it. (7:36) I'll call it ego.
(7:37) I'll call it the fear of not sounding professional. (7:41) I'll call it, again, back to that curse of knowledge, just being so deeply into our own jargon. (7:48) Yeah, whatever it is, that's kind of some work.
(7:50) The work to do is to unpack all of that and kind of get to the real root from, back to number two, the perspective of your actual buyer. (8:00) Okay, and then a fourth thing, of course, that we can't have a podcast about messaging without talking about, you know, the downsides of jargon. (8:11) Jargon is insider industry language.
(8:14) Sometimes I think it actually does a really good job of keeping people out. (8:20) You have to be really clear about who you want in and who you want out before you use it in that way, right? (8:25) So said more simply, when we use a lot of jargon, it's immediately putting you back into the I'm the expert space, not into the help me understand your problem from your point of view space, which is where we want to play when we're talking about how to talk about our work.
(8:43) So you can always add layers of complexity. (8:46) There is this whole meet them where they are scenario. (8:50) If you know that these people speak the same language, and using jargon actually is clearer, or it makes it easier to understand, great.
(9:04) If you're not sure, don't don't lead with that. (9:09) You know, if you're not sure, or you, you know, there is a more clear way to get to your point. (9:17) Take my own advice.
(9:19) It's going to be better to to try to come up with in advance the ways that you would talk about your work without that jargon. (9:26) And as I was about to say, you can always add in layers of complexity. (9:30) You know, as you go deeper into conversation, and there's more and more head nodding or understanding of what you're saying, great, but you can't, it's really hard to subtract it out once you've kind of put an idea out there.
(9:43) Once there's a little bit of confusion in the system, meaning in the conversation you're having with a buyer, you know, that's, that's not good. (9:50) We want to avoid that at all costs. (9:53) Anything that creates friction is not good for a sales experience.
(9:56) And so if we can take out the jargon, then you have a much better chance of being understood and getting an opportunity to go deeper with your client or with the prospect. (10:08) Okay, so we've talked about, you know, these things that are kind of getting in the way, there's a curse of knowledge, you might have a first time buyer, it's easy to default to the abstract versions of things when we don't know exactly what to say or don't feel confident in what we're saying. (10:25) And then of course, there's jargon that needs to be calibrated appropriately.
(10:29) So what do you do to make your, make it easier for you to speak about the work you do? (10:37) How do you make communicating about your complex service easier? (10:41) I'm always going to go back to kind of one overarching suggestion or recommendation, which is capturing real client language.
(10:51) There's still some interpretation that has to be done once that client language is captured. (10:54) But the point is that we need to start with listening. (10:58) So if you work on capturing the language of your client, you can really return better to that beginner's mind, meaning thinking about the problem the way they are thinking about it, not the way you the expert thinks about it.
(11:11) And so there are kind of three pretty accessible ways to do that today. (11:15) One, you can go and mine your past emails, look at sales inquiries, look at letters or letters, look at emails from referral partners who've said, hey, I've got a great person I want you to meet. (11:28) And here's what I think they're looking for.
(11:31) But if you go back through those old prospect emails, you should be able to see how they describe the problem that they're having. (11:38) Now, they are usually talking about symptoms. (11:42) And you as an expert know that there's very likely a deeper set of challenges underlying that symptom.
(11:51) But if they're using that symptom as their entry point, that is how they are framing the problem. (11:57) And so that is really important language to pay attention to. (12:00) Another thing you can do, something I do for my clients, is customer listening interviews.
(12:05) You go and talk to past or even your current clients about what triggered them to reach out to you in the first place, how they were thinking about the problem when they first hired you, how they think about some of the vocabulary or jargon that you have historically used. (12:19) There are lots of areas you can go in to test and capture from them, how they speak about, think about the problem space that they're in. (12:29) And then another sort of desk research version is just to do some social listening where your ideal clients are hanging out.
(12:36) So that could be LinkedIn, Reddit, of course, is a great tool, industry forums, conferences. (12:43) You can see how people talk about the problem when you're not in the room. (12:49) And of course, you can use AI to help you identify some of those patterns.
(12:53) I would just be very careful not to, you know, bias your search with terms that you're trying to understand. (13:02) Because again, if you're putting into the search engine, the search engine or the AI engine, what the term is that you're trying to understand, you're going to get answers that speak specifically to that, not necessarily the, not the meet my client where they are kind of language. (13:20) You know, what does all of this point back to?
(13:22) Again, it's really about collecting how they talk about it so that you can invite them into your way of thinking, not put more barriers in the way of understanding. (13:33) And also, in a positive light, to feel confident, to feel confident to know what your talking points are, and make sure that your the rest of your team actually has those same talking points when you start getting to thinking about scaling your message beyond just yourself as a founder, or as a lead business development person. (13:51) So if you can really say it clearly in one context, you can say it clearly in pretty much any context.
(13:59) If you know the idea well enough, it's easy to adjust easier to adjust the volume up and down. (14:06) And when I say the idea, I mean, the way that your clients think about the problem is probably the best place to start. (14:14) And then you can adjust your altitude from there, based on how knowledgeable the person on the other on the receiving end of the conversation really is.
(14:23) So with all that in mind, I'll invite you this week to go find three real examples of how your clients actually talk about their problems using any of the three methods we just covered. (14:36) Or feel free to shoot me a message and let me know, you know, something else that you've tried and that has worked in this way. (14:42) If you have any questions or you want to talk through what you're learning, I would love to dig in with you. (14:49) I'm always here to answer those questions. (14:52) So go ahead and reach out. (14:53) You can email me at Erin at HeyDreamboat, H-E-Y-D-R-E-A-M-B-O-A-T dot com.
(15:00) Hey, Dreamboat.
(15:01) And yeah, let me know how it goes. (15:04) I want to hear what comes up and what you've learned.
(15:07) Until next time.
