Risk, a game with messy trade-offs and hard choices.
Technology buyers live in a messy world with few easy choices. If the choices were easy, they would already have made them.
If you tell them a story that is too clean and too tidy, it’s not going to be credible. If you acknowledge that the situation is complicated, that you understand there are trade-offs, if you go into detail about those issues, you are going to gain credibility.
Imagine if you were thinking about putting solar panels on your house to generate electricity. You not only need to learn more about it, you’re not even sure it will work. You have some friends that have had success putting panels on their roof, but others that were not successful. A few people have even told you horror stories about their experience with the solar panel installers.
A solar panel installer that visits you with a story that is too neat and tidy is going to make you wonder. But one that is frank with you, that explains the trade-offs of different alternatives, that tells you where the potential risks are, this installer is going to be a lot more credible.
Perry Marshall calls this the gray area, the area where “practical people understand that there are no perfect solutions, but that interesting compromises exist.” Marshall says that “Gray areas are the places where you’ll most easily find new customers and people who are willing to listen to new ideas. People who are in transition.”
This isn’t to say that you aren’t willing to take a position, to make the case why you can solve the problem at hand despite the issues and tradeoffs. You have to take a position and make the case that you can solve the problem. You just have to do it in the context of the issues.
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