Pay No Attention to the Man Behind The Curtain

I am up early today.  I'm on the west coast and my body clock hasn't adjusted just yet so my body still thinks it's three hours later and can't seem to understand that the clock says 3:00 am.  I've got a few hours before I need to be somewhere so I thought I'd ramble a bit.

The reason I'm on the west coast is that I'm part of our national sales meeting.  We brought together the team that is responsible for discovering client needs and providing solutions.  In the old days I'd say it was our "sales force" but I think a more apt description is our "discovery force."  One of the topics we hit on yesterday was how the "selling" process has changed over the years.  The net of that conversation was that people still buy from people they like and trust.  Can't argue with that.

But... the process to get people to like and trust you has changed considerably.  Less face-to-face, more people involved in a buying decision, more equality of information between buyer and seller, and most importantly - much more complexity in the solution sets we bring to the table.  As I was sitting in the room listening and watching this unfold I thought that this is probably happening everywhere - to some degree or another - and we're not unique in this challenge.

It also occurred to me that the complexity issue is a huge paradox that we need to work through.

What I mean by a paradox is that as technology has increased the complexity of developing a solution for clients - it also has created a "simplicity" in the clients mind when they see the final solution.

Think about the web - you click a button, a browser page opens to say, Google.  You type in your request and viola - the world is at your finger tips.  Simple, huh?  Or in our world, the client gives you a feed of data from five different systems and almost immediately, a portal is updated with all the information, connections, and metrics on their target audience.  So simple.  So easy.

However, what we forget is that in order for the end result to look simple a tremendous amount of complexity was managed.  I call this the "Wizard of OZ" phenomena.  The client says - "All I want is a portal where my people or my distributors can go and see what's being rewarded, report or verify a sale or action, get their reward, redeem their reward (for anything - read more complexity) and I can go and see the results compared to last week, month, year."

We forget about all the "stuff" that's going on behind the curtain that created that simple image on the screen of the client's computer.

And from a sales perspective the last thing you want to say to a client is that what they are asking for is hard.  You want to say - "no problem, that's easy."

But it ain't.  Getting the results to look simple is very, very hard.  And very, very complex.

My point is this.  If you have a substantial business problem, and the person or company creates a solution that is easy to use, understand and works - my guess is that there is a lot going on behind the curtain.  My advice...pay attention to the man behind the curtain - he's working very hard to make your life easy.