The Curse No Salesperson Said They Suffer From – Ever!
Sales and marketing people fall for it constantly, yet almost nobody names it: the curse of knowledge. It’s the reason your simplest, most obvious message keeps landing flat with the people you’re trying to reach.
My family always plays games on Christmas Day and one of our favourites is Charades. Not only do we find it massively amusing, but the person who is up front generally gets so bemused and frustrated at why their simple label cannot be guessed in such a relatively short time-frame, especially considering all the clues they are giving.
And like many of us, we know what we are conveying yet wonder how something so simple, complete with our own clues and instructions, cannot be understood by those we are working with.
Many of us have also heard the phrase ‘once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it’ perfectly portrayed in this optical illusion that went crazy on the internet begging the question as to how can her legs be so shiny or, once using peripheral vision, realising they, in fact, have been painted. You now can’t un-see it!
‘When we learn something, we can’t not know it again’ and that leads us to not remember what it was like not knowing it. In addition to that, the longer we know something, the more we assume other people already know what we know.
This is referred to as ‘The Curse of Knowledge’ and can ruin any form of idea transfer.
I am an avid learner and like you, none of us can unlearn what we learn, so therefore our empathy or patience for those who don’t know what we know, is unconsciously lessened. This is a huge learning curve for many who present, teach, coach, market and most of all, sell.
When we share our insights, teach some new idea or demonstrate a new product, we can’t just launch straight into it purely because we know about it, nor can we use our jargon or industry speak, nor even assume the complexities around what we are discussing are going to be understood – no matter the intelligence of the people around the table.
We need to frame what we are going to share, and just like building up a joke and leading to the punchline, we also need to stage our ideation.
What Is the Curse of Knowledge?
The curse of knowledge is what happens once you know something so well that you can no longer imagine not knowing it. You skip steps, drop context, and use shorthand – all while assuming your audience is following along, when they’re actually lost several sentences back.
How we stage the transfer of any idea, marketing message or benefits of any new product, can be helped by executing the following ideas:
- Know your audience and their level of knowledge or understanding through clarification, discovery or qualification questions. Some know more than others but you need to know what they do and don’t know and what their expectations are.
- Share how your idea came about, provide a bit of history and reasoning, so that your readers or audience or customers can put what you are about to say into context allowing them to receive the idea or information in a simple way that they know what to do with it once you are done.
- Be aware that when they nod their head, they may not be agreeing or even understanding what you are saying. Instead, they might just be someone who is acknowledging that they have heard you. If you don’t check in, you run the risk of losing them, and because the majority of people don’t want to be seen as not ‘getting it’, they will never let you know and therefore won’t do anything with that information.
- Tell stories and create meaning around your ideas because we know that stories tap into our emotions and sell and putting ideas into context helps us make sense of things.
- Bring in concrete examples such as case studies, customer testimonials and proof statements because they provide an even more relevant and relatable level of understanding around your ideas and teachings.
- Use simple language or lay terms. I remember hearing a story about a company who were going through a bit of strife and the executive group gathered in the board room to nut it out. At the end of this session that had so deeply entrenched themselves into strategies and tactics with highfalutin ideas and inflated rhetoric around ‘maximising return to shareholder’and ‘holding market position’ MBA jargon, that they had lost sight of what they were trying to communicate. When the new hire sitting at the table was asked what he took away from his initial strategy meeting, his answer was simple, ‘I’m guessing you want us to kick the competition’s ass’. Sometimes, keeping things simple will create more cut through than any convoluted industry speak or highly contagious assumption – just because you know it.
It’s not necessarily a case of ‘dumbing down’ the ideas that you want to convey – it’s about not assuming your audience know what you know. It’s about making sure your language, words and instructions are memorable, meaningful and emotional, yet conveyed in simple to understand, concrete terms, unlike this 1776 speaking Charade example.
My first makes all nature appear of one face; At the next we find music, and beauty and grace; And, if this Charade is most easily read, I think that the third shou’d be thrown at my head.
[The answer is “snow-ball.”]
It’s so easy to, and yet so important you don’t, fall victim to this curse because the last thing you want is for people to be second guessing you, your message or your game-plan, either – for their sake and yours!
Spotting the Curse of Knowledge in Your Own Pitch
The curse of knowledge is sneaky precisely because it feels like confidence. You sound fluent, you sound like an expert – and that’s exactly the problem. The curse of knowledge convinces you that fluency equals clarity, when really your buyer is nodding along while quietly lost.
A simple test for the curse of knowledge: read your pitch or proposal out loud to someone outside your industry. If they can’t repeat back the core idea in their own words within a sentence or two, the curse of knowledge has crept in, and it’s time to strip the jargon back out.
Curing the Curse of Knowledge, One Conversation at a Time
Curing the curse of knowledge doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not a one-off fix. Every time you write a pitch, brief a script, or explain a product, ask yourself the same question: am I explaining this the way I understand it, or the way a first-time listener needs to hear it? That single habit is the fastest way to keep the curse of knowledge from creeping back into your message.
Breaking Free of the Curse of Knowledge
If you’d like help training your sales team to recognise and break the curse of knowledge in every pitch, demo and proposal, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations tackle this exact problem – turning expert knowledge back into a message anyone can follow.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
