Why expertise makes it harder to explain what your customers need to understand
by David A. Saltzman
Recently, I attended two large national conventions, each with an exhibit hall packed with companies eager to attract prospective customers. Between the two events, I walked past more than 100 booths filled with towering displays, glowing screens, clever giveaways, polished sales teams, and enough branded merchandise to stock a small department store.
But only six booths made it clear why I should stop and talk to them. The others told me their company names, displayed product names and industry jargon, and made technical claims or broad promises about innovation, transformation, and better results.
Not one of them mentioned the problem they could solve for me. That omission was not caused by a lack of expertise. In most cases, it was probably caused by too much of it. The people who created those displays knew their products so well that they could no longer see what a passing prospect did not know.
They assumed I could connect the dots, but I could not. That is the curse of knowing too much, and it causes companies to lose prospective customers before the first conversation ever begins.
What You Know Changes What You See
Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge, sometimes referred to as knowledge bias. Once we know something, it becomes remarkably difficult to imagine what it was like not to know it.
The people staffing those convention booths already knew what their companies did. They understood the products, the terminology, the competitive differences, and the problems their technology was designed to solve. When they looked at their displays, their brains automatically supplied all the missing context.
They saw a complete story because they already knew the story. I saw a company name, a product category, and perhaps a slogan about innovation. I was being asked to do the intellectual work of determining whether any of it mattered to me. In a crowded exhibit hall, with dozens of other companies competing for my attention, I was not going to do that work, and neither will most of your prospects.
The Expert Blind Spot
Expertise changes the way the brain organizes information. Over time, we build mental frameworks, called schemas, that allow us to recognize patterns and process familiar subjects quickly. A few words can activate an entire network of meaning.
That efficiency is useful for experts, but dangerous for communicators. When an expert hears “automated eligibility reconciliation,” the phrase may summon a complete picture of errors prevented, administrative hours saved, and financial risk reduced. A prospective customer may simply hear four words that sound technical and expensive.
The expert’s brain fills in what the message leaves out, but the customer’s brain cannot retrieve information it was never given. This creates an expert blind spot: The better you understand your subject, the less likely you are to notice the intermediate steps another person needs to follow your reasoning.
What Companies Leave Out
The most damaging omissions are rarely obscure technical facts. Companies leave out the fundamental information customers need to make a buying decision.
What problem do you solve? What does that problem cost me? Why should I address it now? What will improve if I choose your solution? How is your approach different? Why should I believe you? What happens after I say yes? These questions may sound elementary, but that is precisely why experts skip them. The answers seem so obvious that no one thinks to state them.
Instead, companies fill their communications with information that matters to them. They describe their history, capabilities, methodology, technology, awards, and features. They tell prospects what they have built without first establishing why the prospect should care. The result is an odd contradiction: The company provides too much information while omitting what matters most.
Customers rarely reject propositions they fully understand and genuinely value. More often, they postpone decisions they do not understand well enough to trust. Confusion does not always produce an objection. Sometimes it produces silence, delay, or a prospect who walks past your booth.
The Biases Behind the Blind Spot
The curse of knowledge does not operate alone. Several other cognitive biases make the problem worse.
The false-consensus effect encourages us to assume that other people see the situation much as we do. Fluency bias makes familiar language feel clearer than it actually is, while overconfidence causes experienced people to overestimate how effectively they have explained something.
Confirmation bias adds another layer. We notice the prospect who nods and assume understanding. We discount the blank expression, the vague response, or the absence of meaningful questions. We interpret politeness as comprehension.
Then cognitive load takes over. When customers appear uncertain, experts often respond by adding more detail, more slides, more specifications, and more explanations. Unfortunately, working memory has limits. Every additional detail competes for the customer’s attention, making it harder to identify the one idea that matters.
Finally, ambiguity aversion influences the buying decision. When people cannot clearly understand a problem, a solution, or the consequences of choosing incorrectly, they often avoid the decision altogether. Doing nothing feels safer than making a choice they cannot confidently evaluate.
Clarity Is Not Completeness
Experts frequently confuse completeness with clarity. They believe a message is successful when it contains everything a prospect could possibly want to know.
But clarity is not determined by the amount of information you provide. It depends on the order in which you provide it. Begin with the customer’s problem, establish what that problem costs and why it matters now, and describe the outcome the customer wants. Only then should you explain how your solution helps produce that outcome.
In StoryBrand terms, the customer is the hero and your company is the guide. A good guide does not begin by reciting a resume or describing every tool in the backpack. The guide demonstrates an understanding of the hero’s problem and provides a believable path forward.
Your expertise still matters, but it needs to appear at the right moment and in the right form. The goal is not to hide what you know. The goal is to translate what you know into something the customer can recognize, understand, and use.
Escaping the Curse
Before approving a website, presentation, proposal, or convention display, ask what you are assuming the prospect already knows. Identify the connections that seem obvious to insiders and make those connections explicit.
Then show the message to an intelligent person who is unfamiliar with your company. Ask that person to explain what problem you solve, why it matters, how your solution helps, and what the customer should do next. Do not explain what the message was supposed to mean. Listen to what the person actually understood, because the gap between those two things is where self-inflicted sales losses occur.
Expertise becomes commercially valuable only when customers can use it. The best communicators do not demonstrate their knowledge by displaying everything they know. They demonstrate judgment by selecting and sequencing what the customer needs to know.
Your customers cannot act on connections that exist only inside your head. If your expertise causes you to omit the information they need to understand the problem, trust your solution, and make a decision, you may know everything about your business. But to the customer, you’re on mute!
To get the full story, and to subscribe to the full weekly You’re On Mute! Why Your Clients Can’t Hear You, go to TheSaltzmanGroup.com
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Production note: AI assisted in developing this episode and creating its illustrative graphics under my direction. The ideas, perspective, and final editorial decisions are mine.
