Packaging Your Ideas

When you go to the store to buy new light bulbs, you don’t just pick them up out of a bulk bin of glass orbs, right? Of course not, they are logical sorted and packaged on shelves so you know which kind of bulbs you’re buying and for what use they are intended. You need to package your ideas in a similar way if you expect your customers and prospects to understand which ones will work best in their situation.

Package and present ideas like you package and present products and you’ll get more buyers

Ever try to sort through a bin of bulk discount items?
Every once in a while I’ll be browsing at a BestBuy store and run across a giant bin of CDs or DVDs with a sign advertising a ridiculously low price. The problem is, you can’t find anything inside the bin. It’s like trying to find a friend in a mosh pit at a rock concert. You can grab at random people slamming past you, but chances are slim that you’ll find your friend in a crowd like that.

The same goes for your proposals and presentations.
You may have come up with dozens of ideas for your client, but you need to start by selecting the one you think is the best suited for your prospect based on the needs you uncovered during your discovery sessions and present them wrapped in a bow sitting on a satin pillow — and keep your bulk bin of brilliant ideas in reserve for future use with other clients (or perhaps for use as back-up ideas with this client if you did a poor job of matching their needs with your first idea).

You can’t just do a mind-dump of dozens of ideas or products that your customer “might” like and expect them to manually shuffle through them as if they were in search of a favorite band among all the Greatest Hits CDs from Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam in the BestBuy discount bin.