“Don’t sabotage sales with your expertise – use your superior knowledge sparingly.” – Rule 24

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Doing IT work, web design, and generally techy and computery stuff for people I learned very quickly not to flaunt my knowledge or throw industry jargon around too heavily. After a while, people start looking at you like you’re an alien from the future…

I’ve learned to summarize and break things down into understandable steps. I’ve also learned that people don’t necessarily want the answer to questions they ask. I’ve started answering the question, “why is my computer doing that,” with something like, “because it’s being temperamental because of the new update, don’t worry, I’ll patch it up,” instead of something like, “well, you have a few registry errors, outdated drivers, and I think you’ve been trying to defragment your solid state drive.”

5 thoughts on “Use superior knowledge sparingly”
  1. Wait, you mean I’m not supposed to defragment my solid state drive? It’s interesting that sometimes the technically accurate answer is actually in some ways less truthful or at least less helpful then a simpler answer.

  2. The whole point is finding and fixing a need, answering questions in a complicated way can cause confusion and sometimes create more pain in some ways.

  3. This is a perfect example of finding a pain point or a problem for a customer and utilizing an agitation approach as opposed to an irritation approach.

  4. Your absolutely right, and in some cases it’s a fine a line to walk because your potential clients want to know that you’re the expert, but at the same they don’t want to feel confused or like they are dumb.

  5. You’re absolutely right, and in some cases it’s a fine a line to walk because your potential clients want to know that you’re the expert, but at the same they don’t want to feel confused or like they are dumb.

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