Are You Falling Victim to the Familiarity Trap?

Your Audience Doesn’t Know Your Solution – Communicate Accordingly

October 11, 2022
🤔 Are you falling victim to the “Familiarity Trap”? Most of us in Presales and Sales are unknowingly guilty of this phenomenon that puts our deals at risk.

💡The Familiarity Trap is the concept that because we’re all so familiar with our product and our space, we tend to under-explain concepts that we erroneously assume our prospects fully comprehend.

🔎 Complicating the situation, it often takes an objective third party observer to point out when it’s happening because your colleagues may also have the same blinders on.

If you’ve ever used your own company’s jargon or acronyms in a demo, but didn’t explain what they meant the first time you used them, you’ve been guilty of this.

Whenever you tell an audience “you’ll notice that…”, you’re probably about to be guilty of the Familiarity Trap, especially when talking to prospects who have never seen your product before.

So how do we avoid it?

One way is to pretend you’re demoing to your grandparents. Unless Bill Gates is your grandfather, chances are you’d substantially simplify how you deliver your messaging when explaining how your solution can help. I’m not suggesting dumbing down your messaging, which can come across as patronizing, but instead improving the clarity with which you deliver it so that anyone can understand it.

In the second episode of Navattic’s SE interview series – I share tips for fighting the Familiarly Trap and resources to discover which SE tooling is right for your company.

Episode highlights include:
▪️ The “familiarity trap”
▪️ How the presales software space is booming
▪️ A tool that helps you keep track of all of your persona logins

Resources mentioned:
⭐️ Presales Buyer’s Guide
⭐️ Demostory