Cincelar

Any offer is a foreign body. An element that when it does not belong to the specific space where it was formulated, it is not heard, it does not exist. When we make an offer, we are contributing, albeit one more drop, into the ocean of stimuli we receive all of the time.

Everything we do to each other is an offer. Therefore, the amount of colective filtering has grown, also in our individual bodies, to not pay attention.

We’ve become sophisticated to the point that we no longer see the posters on the sidewalks, we do not notice the ad in the commercial breaks (given that we’ve decided not to go directly to platforms without an advertising space) and hence we do not hear the supposed added value that comes from whoever is making such an offer.

Tunning our message to the environment, to the people listening and to the time and place in which we promote it is the first step in a chain of paces necessary to break with the cognitive inertia of the 21st century brain.

How to carry out the preparatory research?

We have an arsenal of information sources at our disposal today. Going out to talk with people we do not know is just plain unjustifiable.

Every listener is a source of information we should not disregard. Everything they tell us about our idea / product / service should be part of a communication toolkit to better understand the ecosystem in which we participate or want to participate in.

On our way to make a fitted offer, that information can not be resisted, we need to tune our message with those who are listening.

The task is not always simple and sometimes it can be simply impossible, either because our public are few people and inaccessible (CEOs of multinational companies) or in the opposite direction, because we do not have a concrete and reliable definition about our possible targets.

The severity of the cases in which tuning is almost an impossible factor to control is directly proportional to the number of people who listen to us. That is to say: to tune our offer with a single person is something that is completely within our reach power, an audience with 10,000 people (of course that is place where you want to get , but the tuning does not stop being a problem because of it) can result complex given that opinions and expectations can be very contradictory and opposed when the audience is large.

In cases of faceless masses, the main indicator becomes the average.

“The average is the strongest data because it is based on statistics but is also the only information that may not describe any of the people participating in the measurement”

Our audience has an average age, a technical experience that is the most representative (say teachers, or sales agents), an origin that has a certain general form. When there are many people in the audience the speaker is talking to a statistical entity that does not really exist. And there is where the challenge is. The infamous example is that a room with a thousand people and Bill Gates in it is, on average, a room full of millionaires. It is probably not the case.

When we are going to share our message in front of a small group, today’s technology allows us to meet those with whom we are going to talk in detail, both operative and historical.

Here, depending on the industry where I am making my offer, there may be certain qualitative differences.

The most common for entrepreneurs seeking financing is the round of investment against a group of “angels” that has a pattern of behavior that can be ascertained. What is sometimes overlooked is that this group of people will be more than happy to expose that pattern of behavior with anyone who wants to know. Certainly, knowing how they have made decisions so far is a determining factor of any group.

Something similar happens in sales offers that are relevant, either because of their total price or because of the effort involved in changing suppliers. Any of the two factors can cause us to reject the offer. Of the pair, price and effort, it is certainly more relevant and more repetitive the rejection by effort (how much work will take the potential client to reach the same state of cruise speed with the new provider) than by price.

In the case of new artistic proposals or of expressive nature, such as a proposal for a play to the owner of a theater or a producer that finances the project, it will also be important to take into account the aesthetic factors that have been relevant in the project in the past for said director or producer. Aesthetics does not matter often, but it is decisive in the artistic and entertainment scene and that is why it is worth mentioning.

It is easy to assimilate the rest of the offers to one of these three fields, but all the offers that we make, if they are innovative and challenging, if they really add value to the client or are an opportunity to dominate the market, will be spaces of high uncertainty for who listens to us. As a first consequence of that, the one who has to take matters at hand for solving (or mitigating as much as possible the risk) is precisely who is putting on the table the new possibility, the opportunity, the offer.

“Everything that is new is difficult to accept and she who offers should take into account this emotionality of she who hears it”

It will be important then to take the time to make our offer something tailored, tuned to the frequency of the client and for that it may be useful to bear in mind that:

Most of the actions of the world are recorded today on the web. It is very difficult to be invisible and it is even more difficult if we have a role that requires interacting with people. We are, some more some less, public figures.

There are information indexes and groupings for all types of industries, regardless of the vertical: sales, medicine, risk investment, clubs of angel investors, cameras of the footwear industry. In almost any role we are playing, there will be a space where events agendas, sector news and networking interactions accumulate. Our history when making decisions is transparent to whoever wants to find it. I am not saying that this is a risk of some kind but rather I am in a position to communicate that there are almost no excuses for not making preliminary inquiries about the group of people with whom I am going to express my offer.

“The relevant information to obtain has two profiles, the historical evolution of the numbers, and the changes in the operative decisions”

While groups of people, like individuals tend to respect their history (acting in a predictable way), there is no one who can resist an exception worthwhile. Put in thermodynamic terms, the entropy of the universe has to increase, and that means exceptions.

The operational profile may be more important than the historical profile for highly specialized industries. For example if the options that are considered are in a range of money and that range today has few options, all industries are willing to incorporate a new player that respects the operating rules.

This basically means that when making our offer, if we want to find a universe with little resistance, we must make this offer so that it is not a round peg in a square hole.

The creation of context is at the opposite end of the rope and consumes time of the exhibition itself. If the context is not given, I will have to spend some minutes, hours or days depending on the case, creating it.

Fashions in documents and formalities

Everything is a victim of the passage of time. Nothing is permanent. The practices change to the rhythm of the economic humor and the financial climate as well as, of course, with the social heats and moral winters.

“The only responsible for creating trends or not staying within the norms are the innovators, who in many cases are also entrepreneurs.”

The speed at which transformations are taking place in the last century is such that we have no problem remembering even within the same generation, as things were “before”. There was a time when the question: “Do you have a Business Plan that you can send me?” Was perfectly common. Not only that, in addition, the answer that was repeated was that yes, that there was a business plan and that if the interested party facilitated his contact, he could be contacted as soon as possible. This was fashionable in all areas and in all types of relationships. Most of the intentions to generate new things were accompanied by a plan prepared to withstand the inclemencies that could become once the activity began.

Thus, artists, intellectuals, architects and businessmen went through banks to obtain financing for their Business Plan.

That time has passed. The way in which western society works at the beginning of the century no longer sees long-term planning with favor. Not because it is a less respectable activity, but because the effort invested does not bring any benefit. In the same way that we can no longer rest in a five-year plan to justify our value proposition, we can not offer our idea in the same way as we did in the past.

The justifications that lead us to make decisions are more honest. Today, relevant figures from the risky investment industry (and others who are not as relevant but with equally valid opinions) publicly and openly admit that they do not look at a business plan no matter who sends it.

In the same way, museum curators provide workshops on how to buy with “the stomach” and those responsible for large design stores are based on what they feel to assemble the collections. It is not that the money or the price does not matter, they matter but it is a factor.

These people are key players, who are interacting at this moment with people who want to communicate their ideas and their projects and it is they who are saying “Do not send me a document that I will not look at”. The group of people who asked for the Business Plan at the beginning and these are largely coincidental. The world has changed fast and what served as a support element to make my offer a few years ago is no longer used today. Not only that. Sometimes it may be rejected.

“We run the risk of being ignored by tying ourselves to past fashions”

There is no one who can be considered outside of fashions. Today, the cluster of 40 pages, 7 chapters, analysis and projections has gone out of fashion. He does not play anymore The book printed on photographic paper does not go. The stiff cover letter, outside. The desktop presentation and the Deck of graphics and tables, rejected.

The same thing happens with the rest of the forms of communication:

· Executive summaries have mutated in Pitch Decks

· Project technical sheets today are business model Canvas

· The pitches of before today are videos and the videos from before are clips in Instagram.

There is a current tendency towards conceptualization in images and the reduction of content to its minimum expression. That’s true. But this will not be the first moment in history where minimalism wins the scene and then leave room for too much ornamentation, detail and detail.

When they also give us the opportunity to get on stage, this is particularly important given the prominence that innovators and interns have received in recent years.

The universalization of the TED format, for example, sets very clear rules about how to be strong with our history. At the same time, the TV (Shark Tank, Master Chef and everyone else) with its live reality television programming means that our way of communicating at all times is mediated by that univocal opinion that is multimedia.

This way in which our way of interacting evolves, and particularly the description of the situation today, has advantages and disadvantages. As the composers of the classical period said:

“Since there are rules I am absolutely free”

Because yes, the rules imply that if I comply with the rules, then I can do what I want and no one will issue a complaint. But the rules are there and that is, at least, a limitation.

We can never, fashion or no fashion, conform to all aesthetic and technical opinions with a unique offer. The demonstration of this can be seen in any party or social gathering where the guests are always ready to make their judgments about the food as well as the ornamentation and the costumes of the other guests. It is not common that there is unanimity in a table of 10 people, I would dare to say that it is impossible.

Even so, not complying with the fashion guidelines means that there is a majority of the population that will not agree, and that is not (normally) a desired result by design if what we are trying to do is that our offer is accepted, that buy us, that they tell us yes.

So it is convenient to respect the rules of the day while we are attentive with an eye to not distort central issues of our message so that they are lost within the torrent of what is today, the common opinion. The other eye must be watching what happens with the form of communication, whose mutation is unpredictable and completely unstoppable.