 Great photo by Grok. We had a client who recently showed us a whole new program they were going to present to their clients and new prospects alike.
It was well thought-out. It was super detailed. It had lots of impressive features. It promised to deliver a ton of value and ROI. And it was terrifying. Who sees what—and when This may seem contradictory, if not counterintuitive. Here it is, we’d just lauded this new program which our client had created and unveiled to us. And then we undercut that review with the dreaded T-word. What gives? We can give you a little more detail now, and you’ll certainly say “Ohhhh…!” Our client—like many business owners—lives and breathes in spreadsheets. So that’s what they’d shared with us. Indeed, they screen-shared it with us. And this spreadsheet (was it Excel? was it Google? who cares?) was about 40 rows deep by about 25 columns across. All at once. Yep. Terrifying. The good news: We were the first, and only, ones to see it in this state. Our client was justifiably and understandably excited by the cool new program they’d worked so hard to develop. But boy was it ever un-exciting when presented as a swimming sea of spreadsheet cells. This is hardly a tragic story. And you likely can see exactly where it’s going, even if our client wasn’t able at the time. We patiently listened to the whole presentation, which took about a half hour. We took notes. And then we asked some pointed questions:
The idea was to turn down the spigot on this fire hose so it would better resemble a soda straw. The client—they’re very smart—immediately saw where we were going. Easier than you think Once our client realized that they needed to carve their presentation of this new program into bite-sized chunks, all that was left was the execution. And here we can describe a kind of MVP or minimum-viable-product version of that effort: Sure, the client could have gone on and created a snazzy new PowerPoint deck, with discrete slides for the different phases of this proposed program. But that would take time, effort, and resources—and at this point, the client really just wanted to test out this idea: socialize it with existing clients and see how receptive they’d be. So why even make a PowerPoint? The solution was even simpler: Tabs. Yep. That’s all they needed. If this program has five phases, then carve the spreadsheet into five clickable tabs. Simply screen-share a single tab when you present it. And if the conversation leads to a discussion of Phase Two, then click the Phase Two tab. Done. Steve Jobs famously said that simple is hard. But sometimes it’s hard to see what’s simple, and staring right at you. Do you really need to spend a fortune on a shiny new CRM (customer relationship management) platform when your Excel is still working fine? Of course not. Wait for the expense to be more than justified. Ditto for things like learning management systems or LMSs, or even slick PowerPoints as we’d described in this story. Have a marketing challenge that you suspect is simpler than it appears? Contact us and let us put a fresh set of eyes on it for you.
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