Less is more

You’ve heard the saying all your life, but the truth of it comes home to you in the oddest of times. For me, that was when I started online dating after divorce and it was a brutal and unforgiving lesson that less truly is more. There is nothing more personal than marketing yourself!

To put it simply, the more detail provided in a lady’s profile, the more likely I was to reject the person. What was happening?

What I found was that as I read through the detail I was actually going through what in any other context would be called the buying process. You look at a person’s likes, dislikes, favourite TV shows, etc. and see if you match up. The more specific they were, the more likely I was to rule them out.

Let me give you a couple of example profile– totally made up, based on the many I saw of course – so you can see what I mean.

Female 35, never married, no children. Non-smoker, social drinker.

I am looking for the love of my life. I look forward to spending our evenings and weekends together, going hiking, skiing and to add a bit of spice to a relationship for the occasional burlesque show.

I enjoy travel, and have been to 32 countries so far. My favourite places to visit are Bangkok and Paris. I could spend several weeks each year taking in the lifestyle in the Loire Valley or at Lake Como.

I speak four foreign languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Swahili) as well as playing the guitar and the piano.

I like going to art galleries when it is raining, and will always be found in the sun when it isn’t raining. Do you like extreme sports? I do.

I like catching up with friends, and having pets as a part of my life is a must. You have to like cats to be part of my life.

I go to the gym several times a week, and am considered an awesome aunt by my 15 nephews and nieces.

I look forward to meeting you soon.

See what I mean with this one. The ‘hypothetical’ lady in question is putting up information that relates to her lifestyle as a single, things she did when she was younger that she might no longer do, and several contradictory messages. She may be even putting up things she has tried once or likes the idea of but which aren’t part of her life. I am sure the male equivalents were doing the same.

While it is pretty easy to screen this person out, however, they may in fact be quite different to their profile and highly compatible with you.

Try this one instead.

Female 35, never married, no children. Non-smoker, social drinker.

I’m looking for a companion for life. Someone to be there when I come home from a hard day at work. Someone to care for me and someone for me to care for no matter what comes.

I am interested in starting a family if I can and am looking for the same in a partner. I would be pleased to hear from you if you have children.

I look forward to hearing from you

This could be the same person, but without all the verbiage. What this gets right is the core values and wishes, and recognises that the detail is something you will work out when you meet the person. Compatibility isn’t reduced to a list of attributes.

Simply put, when there is less of a description, you imagine the rest, and are a bit intrigued to know more.

The same applies to business and marketing.

I am fascinated by the websites of top cloud services such as Dropbox and Asana. They have a simple splash page, very little description, and a few FAQ, plus pricing. Basically they want you to try it, so give you enough detail to think that their product might be good for your purposes, but not so much that you don’t try it out.

Your customers are also looking at you in the same way. They will look for certain categories of service or products, but then if you provide too much detail they will go to an alternate vendor.

What you want your client to do is to get in touch and initiate the sales and negotiation process. You might well be able to fulfill their needs, but if your website or promo literature has specific lists and you don’t mention what they want they are more likely to dismiss your company.

When the customer gets in touch you can have more technical details or information available to suit their questions. But, don’t give that all upfront. Make it implicit in the fact that your company offers services or products in that category.

A good example I know from a highly experienced architecture and construction company is that they never put concept drawings or any form of visualisation into the tender package for any bid they enter. The reason is simple, the client may hate the building concept, and then reject a perfectly good bid.

Another trick is to bundling services and only providing a few choices for your customers. Web developers do this. They bundle graphic design and web hosting as a compulsory component, then base the pricing on the level of graphic design and feature sets. By limiting choices you make things simple and may elicit a buy response in the face of confusing offerings from competitors.

For service companies, I’d recommend online profiles of your people be limited to a description of one paragraph at most, and consider eliminating profiles altogether as it makes you look like a small company. That plus customers may read your profile and decide they don’t like you.

Make your marketing about the product or service and what it means for the client. You are not important except that you will need to deliver and may need to prove your ability and bona fides later in the buying process.

The three key outcomes you achieve with the less is more approach are:

• You retain the flexibility to offer solutions that match their needs by not being prescriptive.
• You don’t ‘talk back the sale’ through excessive detail, and you keep choices simple.
• It can funnel customers into engaging with you in the sales process rather than making up their minds without getting in touch.