Avoid the Parity Trap – Webinar Replay

Good morning and even good evening for some of the places that I see in the chat box. I want to start today's webinar on avoid the parody trap with this question that I'd like you to put your answer into the chat box. And here's the question once you've got that chat box open. What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when I say Sir Isaac Newton? What is the first word or phrase that comes to your mind when I say Sir Isaac Newton? Apple. Almost everybody. Apple or gravity? Apple or gravity or some definition thereof. And I would bet I could ask that of anybody and get the same response. Why? Now, yes, it's a fun little fact that we probably learned at some point in grammar school along the road that Sir Isaac Newton came up with gravity because an apple fell on his head. Well, it's not quite that simple. But what is quite interesting about it was that Sir Isaac Newton was an incredibly smart individual. Gravity, calculus, you name it. But he was also a phenomenal storyteller because Sir Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity in the year 1666. In fact, when he was trying to hide from the plague that was overtaking Cambridge in the UK in that horrible year, 1666. But I want you to read this quote from his biographer shared in 1724, 3 years before Newton's death, almost 60 years after he came up with his theory of gravity. And I want you to look at just how Newton tells this story to his biographer. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground? thought he to himself, occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's center? Assuredly, the reason is that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. Look at how Isaac Newton tells that story to his biographer William Stley in 1724. Look at the detail that's in that perpendicular to the ground. You know exactly the direction that Sir Isaac Newton is talking about. He sat in contemplative mood. You have a picture now of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under that tree. Assuredly the reason is just the adjectives that are being pulled out a drawing power in matter. What a great way to think of gravity. Now, what does all of this have to do with avoiding the parody trap and making sure that your solutions are as remarkable as they should be in the stories that you tell? Well, unfortunately, not every marketer or seller is as strong at telling their story that more than 400 years later, we can remember a minor anecdote about something so compelling. And in fact, we recently

launched an industry survey to take a look at exactly that to see can and do marketers and sellers believe that they are telling a compelling story about what makes them different. And unfortunately, the answer is not particularly. And in fact, the first question we asked in our industry survey was, are your competitors offering similar capabilities? The clients that we work with, your peers and colleagues on this webinar today, offered perhaps an unsurprising response that 89% of you believe that your offerings are similar to very similar to those out there in the marketplace. Put another way, if you aren't telling a great story about your products and services, it is highly likely that there's another provider out there that can tell a remarkably similar story. Now, my eye was drawn to this small bar up here. And in fact, there was literally one study participant who said that their products and services were not at all similar to their competition. I would love to meet that individual. I'd love to know what business they were in so we can all develop our businesses that same way. But that n equals 1 was not the 89% who said actually my stuff is awful similar to everybody else's stuff. But then the question became okay so it's similar. Maybe everybody's quite confident about their ability to distinguish it. Well unfortunately that's not true either. As you look at the your peers and colleagues responses to this question, while 89% say, "Heck, we're pretty similar to our competition in what we offer," 89% are actually less than confident that their customers can actually understand that unique value. This was a little bit more than n equals one down here this time, but by and large you can see everybody's admitting that yeah, my stuff's pretty similar to what my customers could get from other people. But yet, I am not very confident at all that they actually know what is uniquely ours. There's not a lot of Isaac Newton storytelling happening out there in the marketplace. So then our question became, all right, so then what are marketers and sellers doing? How are they attempting at least to describe their capabilities in a way that might break out of this conundrum between highly similar but not confident in unique value? And so we asked multiple questions about this. How are you trying to differentiate? And I'm just going to put all three of these up here on the screen at the same time. because we asked a variety of questions. We asked, "Do you use adjectives or superlatives to describe your solution? Do you use descriptive emotional language? Or do you believe more in a less is more type approach to describing your capabilities? " And the specific numbers aren't as important here because I just want to draw what I noticed as I was going through this data. Every single one of these questions came back almost perfectly like the bell curve. Some folks thought they were doing it, didn't. But in each instance, a lot of folks were kind of meh about it. And you know what that tells us here at Corporate Visions? That tells us that this is an area right for study. Because if that many marketers and sellers are right in the middle of the road of each of these questions, that tells us that they don't believe there may be a single right answer to how you should be describing your unique capabilities in a way that's actually going to make a difference in the minds of your audience. And so as we set out to study this topic, we were guided by some research and content here at Corporate Visions

and Decision Labs that some of you admittedly may be familiar with, but is worth a quick review because as you seek to find your differentiation and as you think about all of the different capabilities, solutions, products, offerings that you bring out to the marketplace, that's a pretty wide scope and certainly great marketers, great sellers looking to find the overlap between your capabilities and what your prospects and customers care most about. Open up that chat panel though for a quick moment. As you look at this diagram, though, there's a pretty significant component missing. What's missing in this ven diagram right now? What's a third circle that should be on here? Because there's not just you and the prospect. You're right. for those all of you that are putting it in there, the competition, your competition gets to play a role in this too. And so when you put those three things together, too many of the marketers and sellers that we work with here at Corporate Visions, as you saw by those survey results, fall into the middle of this ven diagram where they are messaging to value parody. They are messaging yes to those things that they do. Yes, that the prospect or customer cares about, but also that the competition does. Now, I want us to be honest with one another. Safe space here on this webinar. Type into chat your honest estimation of what percentage of your messaging about your capabilities falls into that red area in the middle. Just be honest with yourself. Just type in the chat what percentage of your messaging falls into that red area in the middle. I'm trying to do averages on the fly and I think we're averaging so far probably about 60% or so. Heck if I know Terry. I love that answer as well. I love the honesty. But let's just say that the rough answer to that is too much. Whether that's 60%, 80%, 30%, yes, you have to talk about these things. Your customer cares about it, but it's too much. And if you're focusing there, where are you not focusing? You're not focusing on your value wedge, that area of intersection between what you can uniquely provide and what your prospect or customer cares about. And so, think back, think back to Isaac Newton for a moment. We all knew that Isaac Newton's value wedge 400 years later, Apple and Gravity, he told a strong enough story that almost everybody on this webinar thought of those things instantaneously. But yet, when it comes down to your own products and services, 89% said, "We're selling something similar. " Selling something similar, middle of the ven diagram. And 89% said actually I'm not confident that my customer can identify that value wedge. And so the value wedge itself has three

tests. Three tests. First is your capability unique to you? Second is it important to your prospect? And third is it defensible? If you have a capability that falls in your value wedge, you have something that is obviously unique and that should drive customer your confidence in whether or not your customers understand it. Now, last but not least, we have found in previous research, in previous work that how you talk about your value wedge matters. And in fact, too many

clients, even when they know what that value wedge is, focuses too much on the bottom level of this pyramid. Simply telling customers and prospects what that capability is, literally the bells and whistles, the feeds and speeds. Not nearly enough marketers and sellers focus on the top two levels of this pyramid. What can your prospect or customer do differently as a result of that capability and what does that mean to your customer or prospect? So we arrived here at this point where we found that clients and customers of ours know that they compete in highly similar competitive categories with a lack of confidence that they are differentiating themselves well. And even then, even if they know exactly that they have a capability in the value wedge that is unique, important to the customer, defensible, and they are framing that as to what the customer can do differently. Despite all that across the multiple hundreds of customers we work with every year, there was still this need for research and in particular research around this question. And if

you're sitting, if you happen to have a pen and paper with you, I'm going to leave this question up on the screen because it's going to anchor the rest of the conversation here today because this is what we wanted to study here at Decision Labs around this topic of differentiation. I'll leave that up on the screen. Maybe take a screen capture or jot this down. Can one version of your story consistently and materially defeat a different version of your story even when both stories are based on the exact same capability set? Let me repeat that. Why is this question so important to this research? Because when you compete in competitive categories, when multiple vendors, your direct competitors could say very similar things about their capabilities. If you aren't different and you tell a bad story, can you lose simply because of the story you tell? even if your capabilities are different. And so this is what we set out to study. And for those of you who may be new to decision labs, we run for studies like this behavioral research where we are trying to get into the minds of your buyers, B2B customers, to understand their reactions to live fire simulations. This isn't a survey. This isn't asking them how they are feeling. This is trying to present them with different simulations and get them to respond in the moment to how they would actually act, not how they say they would act. And so I want to set up for you just what the study design looked like and what we were attempting to study. And then I'm going to bring in my research partner, Dr. Nick Lee from War University to add some color here as well. So here at Decision Labs, the first thing we need to do is determine what we want to test. And test was the question you just saw. From there, we build out a series of test conditions. And you can think of test conditions as typical approaches to how companies in the market solve that problem today. And so as we looked at this world of capabilities and how to message those capabilities in a unique fashion, we developed four different test conditions. The first is what we called features. This was a test condition that solely described the capabilities. Second typical approach that we see a lot of is a benefit type approach where you're describing the benefits of those capabilities and what those features will actually do for the buyer. So we hear a lot of this in the marketplace. What are the features? What are the benefits? The third we hear a lot about as well is just a superlative approach. Think of this as best-in-class, comprehensive, streamline, fit for purpose. Name your cliche adjective that often gets added to those marketing materials as a way to try and frame the features and benefits uniquely, but is really just a superlative approach. Last but not least, telling details. An approach where you're adding specific information, more detailed emotional language around your capabilities and the value that they provide. And I'm going to put up on the screen one after a time. What was unique about this study for us was that we actually took a real go to market message, anonymized it of course, but we took a real message and then in the fullness of that message, from that message, we developed each of these four typical approaches. So that you're about to see exactly how these approaches played out. You're just going to see a short snip, not the full thing. We'd be here all day, but you're going to see a short snip of what each of those typical approaches sounded like to the participant on the other side. Features, benefits, superlatives, and telling details, all built off of the exact same capability set from the exact same real go to market message. So, let's play out features first. Here's your first approach, and I'll just leave it up on the screen for a moment. I'll call out a couple things. As you read the feature test condition here, this is part of it. You'll notice it truly is a list of features. We have a database. We actually played this out as a trucking trucker recruitment company. We have an efficient onboarding process. We have full-time recruiters. We have tenured regional managers. basically a list of things. Now, in this instance, these things were indeed unique, but as you read through it, it is truly a tick list. And I imagine if we're honest with ourselves, you'd probably find some messaging like this in your own organization. So, that's features. Now, see how that compares to the benefits test condition. And I just realized I'm going to need to delete some of these. I'm not going to highlight anything further. Uh but as you look here at the benefit test condition, look at the bolded words here. We're talking about how that large driver database can get you ahead on recruiting qualified drivers. Instead of tenur regional managers, we're talking about the geographic footprint that can scale your business. This is all about what the customer can do with those features. Again, I imagine you've seen some messaging like this in your organization. Third, here's the superlative condition. And again, look at those bolded words. And sometimes I'm sure you have to stop yourself because we've all done it. We've put these words into messaging hoping for an increase in customer response. One-stop shop, all-in-one, streamlined, comprehensive, words that sound good, but we want you to study. Do they actually add any value? Last but not least, here's your telling details. condition. And you can see how it combines a bunch of different approaches. But the big thing here that we were a little worried about, and again, I'll pull Dr. Nick in here in a moment. This is pretty long. In fact, a telling details pitch was the longest of the four that we wanted to test. And we often know that the longer you go, the more customers might shut down. So, as much as we were intrigued by this particular test condition, we were also concerned that a pitch like this would fall on deaf ears and that folks would tune out. That's a quick overview of the forum. While I pull up this uh next slide here, what we did, we tested that telling details condition against each of the other three because the telling details was the richest. that contained the most of the original go-to market message and we wanted to see how it performed against the others against a series of outcome variables that we then recruited participants for and compared the response. But let me introduce my colleague Dr. Nick Lee. Dr. Nick works at uh the business school at Warick University out of the United Kingdom. He's been our research partner for quite some time. Um and Nick, I'd love for you to chime in here first just really on study design. how we framed up this study, um how it was perhaps a little bit different than what we've done uh in the past, as well as your thoughts as to what we might find even before we pressed go on the study. — Thanks. Thanks, Doug. That was super interesting. I enjoyed listening to that. Um it was a great introduction to how we we're doing things. What I think is interesting about what we've done here is we kind of took a method that's pretty common um in say communication research or advertising research or uh Google uses it a huge amount for example which you probably have heard about as basically AB testing. So instead of just getting a bunch of people to give us their opinion of one message um and then comparing those opinions, what we wanted them to do was um compare messages because that's a little bit more realistic to what happens. And we had a long discussion about this and this is the first time we've ever used this technique at Corporate Visions um to my knowledge anyway. Um, and one of the things we've sat down and thought about is it realistic that somebody only ever sees one message and that you're only ever going to get their opinion on one thing. Well, that really goes against everything that we talk about and that you're really in a competitive space. So, what we wanted to do was think about whether or not we could get people to tell us which one they liked better or which one they felt was more convincing or which one convinced them more and which was more credible to them. And that's how we kind of brought in this AB testing model. um which um certainly led to some what I think are some pretty powerful findings um that I don't think we would have got if we had just got people to look at things individually. Um and then to speak to the other thing that Doug was talking about um we had a kind of I mean we have a very similar conversation every time we run one of these studies and Doug will tell you and Doug presents me with stuff that he wants my opinion on and I always say it's too long Doug it's too long. uh you can never we can never do this and we had a long conversation about this time and I said this in particular that this um features one is so much shorter and the telling details longer that I think that's going to you know that's going to influence our results by quite a bit. Um, and you know, we looked at trying to normalize this a little bit and I think that would have it would have taken away the realism from the telling details one in particular. And so we kind of agreed to um to see what happened and my kind of opinion was probably that we would get an effect of length and that telling details wouldn't really — perform as well as maybe the theory might suggest it did. and as you'll see that maybe that didn't happen. So, I don't know if you want me to say anymore. — Yeah, we we'll pause there to keep the results hidden for just a moment, — but there are a couple things, Nick, that u you know, I learned from you as we were going through this as well. Um, and things that any client on this webinar here today, I think, can take into their own organization immediately. We know that there are a lot of companies out there doing this AB testing. I think the key for us in this one was a couple things. One was that a participant, our participants saw the messages in random order. Um, so it wasn't just that everybody in this top box saw telling details first and then features. In fact, 50% of the pool saw one first, the other 50% saw the other. Um, similarly, as we were going through there, we also did we also asked a couple different batteries of questions. We asked some batteries of questions specific to each message individually and then also asking the comparative questions between the two. And I think what was interesting to me about that was to see if we got different answers there, like when they were just asked about a specific message, did we get something different and did that at all contradict what they said when they were comparing the two? So I think we tried to pursue the question from a variety of different angles so that we could provide the best answer um to the folks on this webinar really to the research question of again can one version of your story consistently and materially defeat a different version of it. Um especially when they're based on the exact same capability set. So without further ado, let's get into some of those very results and then I'll call on you again, Nick, to give your opinion as we go. The first results

which pitch did you prefer? Again, remember every participant saw telling details and every participant saw one of the other three messages. Take a look at this finding. There is an difference 85% difference between what pitch they preferred with telling details winning the day. Now that's just telling details against all the other messages aggregated up. But I also want to blow this out a bit further so you can see just how stark this distinction was. And I realiz I drew on the screen again before it was fully animated. Take a look at this here. Um, one more thing to note in the pitch. You might have seen this on an earlier slide. The telling details company was fictionalized as onroad logistics. The other conditions were called highway fleet services. But just take a look at that graphic there for a moment. This isn't a small effect. This is a monster effect between what telling details gets you. Just compare the 120 plus participants who liked onroad by a lot who preferred them to roughly the 20 plus participants who said highway fleet was better. That is a 6x difference in preference between a telling detail specific pitch and one based on features, benefits or superlatives. a 6x difference in preference across telling details and superlatives. And I know it gets a little nerdy here, Nick. Um, but I think it's worth it. Um, especially for this test. Um, I'd love for you to share a little bit on just the types of statistical tests that you are looking at. Um, and why a result like this speaks volumes to how much the telling details pitch was preferred by our study participants. Yeah. Uh, thanks Doug. So, I guess the first thing I would do is reemphasize what Doug said about the random ordering. Um, a little learning point you can take away from this. If you're doing AB testing in your own firm, you have to randomly order those things because there is always an effect of there seems to be a preference for the last thing that people see. So, that's one of the things we take out. So just to reemphasize that what we've done with these we used a bunch of different statistics but this particular um set of analysis is done on a paired sample t test. So what we kind of do is or a one sample t test I should say. What we're doing is comparing those scores with the what would be the average score if that makes sense to see whether people tend to score above the average or what we would say above the midpoint or below the midpoint. And I mean these are really significantly large results. Um, you we've been working on projects for a long time now, probably four or five, maybe more than five years now. And these are by far the biggest, you know, most convincing, most consistent um largest results that we've ever seen. Um, which is I think it's interesting because I mean, if you're what you would I would guess a lay person and to some extent I don't sit around or I don't visit clients. and it sell every day. I look at those pictures and I think, well, you know, why is one of them that much better? Um, and I think if you showed that to a typical person, they would say the same thing. But when you actually ask people questions about them, it's clear that one of them is preferred and more convincing. And I think that's fascinating. And one of the things we are going to talk about is what makes this even stronger is that you tend to find with these kind of long treatments with lots of different elements in them, you tend to get a bit of a regression to the mean effect. And this Doug and I always argue about this as well. And I always say Doug, you know, we have to make this only change one thing at a time. because you know you might get one thing improves people's opinions or one thing you know drops them down and in the end everything kind of goes into a bit of a mush. Um but in this case it's clear that is definitely not happening and that there is something about that telling details execution that is consistently stronger and more convincing and more credible. Um, and every way we asked the question, it won out. And that it's not that's not super usual, I have to say. You know, every everything we did worked out. — Yeah. — And just to get to a couple of those other results where it did win out, here's the question around which pitch was more credible. Again, a 96% difference between telling details and all the others. And again, let me blow that out across that scale. Here we asked the comparison across a six-point scale rather than a four-point scale. But again, similar effect. These three bars, again, I'm looking at the chat just to be so that I'm perfectly clear as well. These three bars that you see here equal the number of participants in this bar over here, and these three orange bars yield this orange bar over here. But I think again as we were looking at building each of these test conditions off of the same underlying message to see study participants again this sort of 6x effect holds here as well between about 60 plus participants who preferred the telling details pitch by a lot all the way down over here to those that preferred anything else by a lot about 10 or so folks here. Again, you've got a 6x difference at the extremes, which again tells us something that's happening in that telling details pitch that is really resonating with any study participant along the way. And it's not just credibility. And this one's interesting, credibility because again, same underlying capabilities. Think back to the messages, just the short snips I showed you. One of those capabilities was a large driver database, a database of truckers that this firm could provide at a moment's notice. Simply how that single capability is framed can yield this difference in credibility along the way. But ultimately, all of our studies are designed to get after

perhaps one question more than others, which is, okay, all that's good and well, who are you going to purchase from? And here again a 95% difference between the telling details pitch and all the others which again played out as we see across the telling details in the blue this on-road pitch by a lot. Again compare that to the ones all the others by a lot. It's again almost it's kind of odd this 6x effect from a lot that preferred telling details to everything else. And so there are a couple questions in the chat that I do want to answer and I'm going to ask Nick to chime in here as well. Um how we ran this study. Um we actually did a voiceover recording. So each study participant heard the telling details pitch which was about roughly about three minutes long. It was a one person for three minutes giving the pitch. Each of the three different highway fleet presentations, again, features, benefits, and superlatives, each of them were roughly about two minutes long with the feature pitch being the shortest because again, it was just a tick list of features. And so, again, Nick, to your point that you were making a little bit earlier, imagine this, and this is what was most interesting to me. Imagine they heard the feature pitch first, which was roughly about a minute 30. They answered a few questions, then they heard a threeinut telling details. I think what you were worried about in that scenario, Nick, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that by the time they may have gotten halfway through that telling details pitch, they might have tuned out and they might not have cared anymore. Um, and so I'm interested in your thoughts around that and what it tells us again about the significance of the results. Yeah, I mean I think that's a relatively consistent thing we find in behavioral studies in that there's an effect of length. So that it there tends to be an advantage to a shorter um pitch for example or a shorter thing that they have to read listen to. Um and to some extent I think yeah what Doug is saying is something that we would be concerned about but also concerned about it the other way round because there's also a recency effect which is what we're trying to you know normalize out by randomizing everything. uh there's that you tend to rate the thing that you saw re most recently higher which is why when you see these lists of best songs ever you know it's all it's almost always relatively recent songs and same with sports people um so I was very worried that that effect would combine to some extent and really obscure the differences but the important differences um and those are relatively consistent things we see and that we didn't see those things. I think probably speaks to the strength of this telling details thing. We I mean we could probably dig into that and actually compare the orders and all of that stuff and see if that actually did make any difference. Um but which we haven't done yet. And to speak to another one of those questions about demographics, we have a fairly decent amount of that data as well. Um and we could again dig into whether there's any kind of age or um various company size type metrics and stuff like that. But we haven't done that yet because these effects are so consistent at the moment — across the whole sample. Um that anything we would find with this kind of strength would be relatively marginal. Uh, I would say unless it was crazy large, which it almost certainly isn't. — Well, that to the tea test you mentioned before, I think great to, you know, great to know that we've got statistical significance here. I was blown away uh by the effect size on each of these as well. Um, we weren't finding statistically significant small variation. We were finding statistically significant large variation. Um, and I remember when you and I, Nick, worked on another decision lab study a couple years ago on the right apology framework for customers. Um, we similarly thought we weren't going to see a victor, but yet one consistent winner occurred. Um, so it's always nice to have ourh our hypothesis uh disproven sometimes as well. — Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. — Go ahead, Nick. Sorry. — It's okay. I was just going to say it's good you mentioned the apology study because that's probably the only other one that's even come close to the strength of these and these were by far the biggest effects that we've seen on these studies. — So the answer to this question that

formed our research question is quite simple. Yes, it can. Um and it makes a huge difference. But those results that Nick and I just shared were in the aggregate. They were comparing telling details to all of the other three conditions combined. We dug in further to see was there much difference between each of the other three conditions individually because we wanted to get down to the level of recommendation to if you are a marketer that is developing a message for your capabilities getting your prospects and customers to answer that why you question where should you spend your time and effort. And so as we looked at telling details against the three, we're back to this preference question. What percentage of respondents preferred telling details when compared against each of the three? I'm going to start with features. 61% of respondents when they heard telling details against the feature pitch preferred telling details. So good percentage, healthy percentage, 61%. Well, how about against the superlatives? 70% of respondents preferred the telling details, the rich, emotional detail versus the superlative pitch. How about versus the benefits pitch? Well, 80% of respondents who heard telling details and benefits preferred the telling details pitch. This caused us to sit up and take notice because it tells us frankly that too many marketers and sellers are wasting their time if they don't hit the telling details ideal in their messaging. Because what this tells us is actually flip these numbers around 61 70 80 that's 39% preferred features 30% preferred superlatives and 20% preferred benefits. So what this data tells us is that you are better off simply listing your features than trying to add in superlatives. Just talk about benefits. If you can't get to this telling details idea in your messaging with the emotional approach, the detail behind your message, you are better off simply listing your features. Now, that was on preference. You might say, "Okay, okay, that's one question. How about the others? " I'm glad you asked. Let's look at likelihood to purchase again. So again, respondents that are most likely to purchase from our fake company, On-road Logistics, that telling details condition. Let's start again with features. 66% preferred Onroad and would be likely to purchase. So again, just for the math wiz at home, that means 34% actually preferred the feature pitch. 74% were more likely to purchase from the telling details pitch. 26 would rather purchase from the superlative pitch. And you can probably see where this is going. 79% preferred telling details. Would rather purchase from telling details, which means 21% would rather purchase from the benefit pitch. And this held true across almost every maybe with one exception, almost every variable we studied. You are better off simply listing out your features than trying to use superlatives in your messaging than trying to go for just benefits alone. You need to reach. Now, as you can tell by these numbers, telling details is still absolutely the way to go. And remember too, features was the shortest Telling details was the longest pitch. in those fullness of the message, the features as you saw was just the list of capabilities. Nick, I'd love your comments on these two because this was a gain an interesting finding for us, especially since we see a lot of clients trying to get to the superlative or benefit level, but when positioned the wrong way, it certainly seems like that's actually not as good of an approach as people think it might be. I think I mean one of the things I always like about working on these projects is that you know you'll always come up with a different way of looking at the data because I would I wouldn't really have thought of doing this and when you reported this idea to me this really made me think a lot because we teach a lot of this stuff you know in MBA classes about selling benefits versus features and that's particularly something we teach a lot in consumer level marketing because a lot of MBA BA level marketing stuff is consumer level. Whether or not it applies at the B2B level with these kind of pitchbased things is a question we haven't looked at too much. Um and to some extent um I think there's a little bit of a um length driver there a little bit. I think you know still you're right to point out features is the shortest. But I think that I think it's interesting. I thought about this for the last few days and what would I say about this to a class when I'd just gone in and said we always got to focus on benefits versus features. And I think if you if you're just lengthening out your pitch without making those benefits mean something, I think that becomes problematic because what you're probably doing is what everybody else is doing. And that's how I would look at it. And I think we never really get to that level of subtlety sometimes. And I think if you're going to do what everybody else is doing, you might as well do it quickly and respect their time. Uh I don't know. What do you think about that, Doug? I've been thinking about this for a couple of days now. — That's a good question, which I hadn't necessarily considered. Uh but I think the and gonna weave in some chat questions with that point, Nick. I think the one thing I want to be 100% clear on the telling details pitch included no superlatives. So there was not a comprehensive streamline just in time. There were no superlatives in the telling details. But what the telling details did have, and you can see this when you take a look at the research brief, uh, as well, were those heightened specifics, those heightened adjectives that were highly specific. So again, I got to get back to that large driver database ideal, large driver database. Okay, in and of itself, that's a feature. What can that large driver database do for the customer differently? That becomes a benefit. Well, it can help shorten recruitment times. It's not a all-in-one database. We didn't put that in. But for telling details, we said it was an 80,000 plus driver database that can help shorten recruiting times and ensure that drivers known to this company would pass their background checks and be fully capable to start work as soon as you had an open recruiting need. So, it was the level of specificity that was just amped up for the buyer. such that it was in their language in their world with a level of detail that I think and this is gets to your point Nick where it was almost obvious that the seller in the scenario truly understood the depth and detail of the customer's business and the business challenge behind the customer's world that they didn't need the superlatives because they showed by the detail that they knew it and understood it. Yes, there were some benefit statements in there, but truly in a way, not just the benefit of what they can do differently, but to that message pyramid, what that will actually mean for them. So, to me, it's the combination of all of those factors where superlatives just sound frankly a bit like you're stretching and it sounds trying to make something there that isn't. But on the telling details being the fullness of the message, getting down to that emotional language and a true understanding of the customer challenge and what the feature could actually help them accomplish, I think is what made the real difference um in why it was so far ahead. And so I want to leave uh I really want to summarize that with three things

to take away immediately in your marketing and sales messaging around your capabilities, especially for those of you that operate in those similar categories where your competitors can say very similar things. First, use rich, detailed language about those specifics. Make your message more emotional and concrete. That's what wins the day. Secondly, I mean, Nick and I didn't quite answer this one yet, but how you tell your story can make the difference in these competitive categories. And here's the key. Regardless of when your customer hears it. Now, obviously, for those of you who know us here at corporate visions and decision labs, well, you absolutely know that why change needs to come before YU. So, that's not what I mean here. What I mean here is that this study says that maybe you're second or third in those finalist presentations. Maybe you aren't the first to go. But what this tells us because of that randomizing effect in the study that you actually might have that chance to still win the day even if you aren't first or for that matter last. Last but not least, don't waste your time on the wrong messaging strategies. Because if all you're getting to is the superlatives or benefit statements alone, as you just saw in the prior two slides, that's actually going to make your message perform worse than simply listing out the features. You need the rich, detailed, emotional language to make your story as compelling as possible. Nick, anything I might have missed there in as I was going through the data and the results that stuck out to you or any other thoughts from your side? — Not really. I mean, I'd want to add a little bit more um detail on this shorter versus longer idea because a couple of questions have popped up on that. Um, and we thought about this a little bit over the weekend as well. One of the things we don't want to give the impression is that shorter is always better. Okay, whatever. You know, a bad short message is not as good as a good long message. I think that's key. And um, yeah, that reminds me of a really common misunderstanding of um, some philosophical stuff. I mean, some of you might have heard of the idea of AAM's razor, which says which people often say means that simple answers are always better than complicated answers. But that that's not really what it means at all. What it means is that between two answers that are equally likely to be correct, the simpler one is a better idea. So, if you have two equally good messages, the shorter message is going to perform better almost certainly. But that's of course not often the case. So, I don't want to give the impression that you should be driving down length every single time. In fact, that's not what this um study would say at all. It would actually say that when you have the right message, the length of that message doesn't matter as much. That you can be confident in a rich detailed pitch. So, — absolutely, — I think it's that's really what this says. Yes, if you could manage to create two perfectly equal quality pictures, the shorter one would be the preference, but you almost could never do that. So that I want to make that point clear, especially — that's a great that's a fantastic point. I think we are in all of the message work that we do and that we help our clients to do. That's the goal. The goal is the level of detail that the telling details pitch contained. strive for excellence and then worry about length. But what this study showed us was the excellence beats the length and it doesn't have to be shorter 100%. Now I uh specifically for those of you who may be new to decision labs uh here at corporate visions what you've seen in today's uh in today's webinar was about this behavioral research where we are developing these test conditions studying it with B2B buyers but as you can see on the slide there are two other tracks of research that we're working on brain studies and field trials and I want to briefly preview a study of each that is coming down the pipe really within the next 30 days. Um, first a field trial where we were actually out there testing static content assets versus interactive assessment tools um, live in the field with prospects so that we can actually draw verifiable conclusions about which of those two was better at driving pipeline in prospecting campaigns. So for marketers, acquisition sellers who are using content in their cadences, in their touch patterns, in their calls, make sure you join us uh here soon for those field trial results. And secondly, on the brain study side of things, we put together a test to testify to test unified memory. Basically, we all know we're all on these webinars now with at least two or three decision makers. Is there a way that you can design your presentation to actually maximize the impact that multiple decision makers are actually having pretty similar thoughts at the same time in your presentation to drive consensus decision-m and I'll draw your attention to that last bolded line first B2B buyer study where we're using hyperscanning technology. Um so I'm excited for both of those studies. I hope you are as well. um furthering the work that Decision Labs is doing. But before I close, uh one I want to thank Dr. Nick Lee for his research partnership for joining us here on the call today. Um but then again summarizing, you need to use telling details to differentiate your capabilities when you're in these highly competitive similar categories. We found in this research that one version of your pitch can materially defeat another version of it even if it's based on the same capabilities. You need rich, detailed language. You need to tell a story that is more emotional and concrete. And you need to make sure that you're spending your time on the right messaging strategy because too often the efforts that we are seeing actually aren't any better than simply listing out your features. I appreciate everybody's time today. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you, Nick. Uh, I appreciate it. And last but not least, I encourage everyone to download the associated research brief. Um, please go to that website that you see on your screen. It is case-sensitive, but if you go to that site, enter your details, you can see the full research behind the study that we just included. Thanks everyone. Everyone want to hope to see you at our next decision labs webinar where we're going to dive deep into some field testing, some brain studies, and further the study of what your B2B buyers are actually doing, not what they say they are. Thanks everybody. Have a great afternoon.