How to stop losing prospects by giving them the context they need to say yes

Somewhere in your sales process, a customer is being asked to understand the answer before anyone has explained the question.

Imagine a prospect who sees a LinkedIn post about a problem she recognizes. She clicks through to learn more. The page promises a platform that will “take your strategy to the next level,” offers a downloadable guide, and invites her to book a demo. What it does not tell her is what the platform actually does.

Perhaps the guide explains it. Perhaps the salesperson would explain it during the demo. She will never know. She closes the tab and gets back to work.

Your analytics may record a visitor who failed to engage. She would describe the experience differently: she walked into a class halfway through the semester, and everyone assumed she had done the reading.

The Syllabus Exists Only Inside Your Company

Most businesses have a story they intend customers to follow. First comes the awareness campaign. Then the website, an explainer, a case study, a demo, and finally a proposal. Each piece builds on the one before it.

That sequence makes sense in a marketing meeting. Customers, however, do not enter through the door marked Start Here. They find a page through a search result. A colleague forwards a case study. A manager sees the proposal without having attended the demo. Someone encounters a single social post and decides whether it is worth another click.

Yet each piece of communication is often written as though the audience has seen everything that preceded it. Marketing assumes the website will explain the offer. The website sends visitors to a guide. The demo begins where the guide leaves off. The proposal assumes the decision maker attended the demo.

Everyone has assigned the explanation to someone else.

In the last You’re On Mute, I wrote about how expertise can cause us to leave out information that feels obvious to us. Here is a related problem: even when the explanation exists, we assume the customer has already encountered it. That assumption can survive every handoff inside the company while failing at the first point of contact with a prospect.

As You Know

You can hear the missing prerequisites in ordinary business language.

A social post announces, “Our new solution changes everything,” without saying what it changes. A demo opens with an advanced feature and the phrase “As you know…” when some people in the room do not know. A proposal presents a price and scope of work to an executive who has never heard a clear account of the problem the work would solve.

None of these messages needs to explain everything. But each needs to explain enough for the person receiving it to get oriented. Why should this matter to me? What am I looking at? What happens if I take the next step?

There is a cognitive cost to leaving those questions unanswered. Working memory has limited capacity. When people must hold unfamiliar terms in mind while trying to infer the missing background, they have less capacity available to evaluate the actual offer. Research on cognitive load helps explain why adding information may not help when the basic path through it is unclear.

The customer may be perfectly capable of understanding your solution. You are making them assemble the lesson plan before they can begin.

They Will Not Ask for Lesson One

A prospect who is confused rarely writes to say, “I think I missed some foundational material. Could you send it to me?” More often, they leave the page, postpone the conversation, or turn to a competitor whose offer they can explain to a colleague.

That matters because buying decisions seldom stay with one person. Your contact may understand what you do after a long conversation, but can they carry that understanding into a meeting where you are absent? If the proposal makes sense only to someone who heard your explanation firsthand, the handoff is where the sale becomes vulnerable.

Nor should you assume that interest creates an appetite for homework. Prospects are comparing options while doing their own jobs. Asking them to read a guide or schedule a call simply to discover what you mean demands effort before you have given them a reason to invest it.

This is a behavioral problem with a practical remedy. Make the first useful explanation available at the point where the customer arrives.

Give Every Entry Point a First Day

Before publishing any message, ask three questions.

First, orient the person. Who is this for, and what situation might make them care? Second, explain what you help them do in language they can understand without a glossary. Third, advance them to a next step that fits what they know now.

Consider the page our prospect visited. “Take your strategy to the next level” could describe almost anything. A clearer opening might say: “When customer inquiries get lost between your website and sales team, our platform shows you where they stall and helps your team follow up.” Now the visitor can decide whether this addresses a problem she has. A short example of a stalled inquiry might be a more useful next step than an immediate invitation to book a demo.

The same principle applies later in the journey. A case study can begin by naming the situation the customer faced. A demo can open with the problem it will address. A proposal can briefly restate the business case so the person approving the expenditure does not have to reconstruct it from someone else’s notes.

That is useful repetition, especially when the audience has changed.

Here is a simple test: take one recent post, landing page, demo opening, and proposal. Give each one, by itself, to someone unfamiliar with your business. Ask who it is for, what it would help them do, and what they would need to know before continuing. Resist the urge to explain. Their questions reveal the prerequisites you have hidden in your own head or elsewhere in your sales process.

The prospect at the beginning of this article was interested enough to click. She left because understanding your offer required reading she did not know existed. Meet customers wherever they arrive, and give them what they need to take the next step.

If your prospect has to complete three lessons before your message makes sense, you may have built an excellent course. But as a sales message, you’re on mute!

TL:DR? Watch our 3-minute summary on YouTube: https://youtu.be/t1V2Jk2vlq