Compelling Illustrations: Better Stories
You’ve got a great story to tell to your investors/readers/constituents; and you’ve tried it out on your neighbors, friends and relatives successfully - they ‘get it.’
Now do everyone a favor and illustrate your story for better impact.
One of my clients, Attensa, is in the enterprise RSS business. They sell to CXOs and IT professionals - both of whom speak different languages.
There’s no better bridge to help across language barriers than a picture.
It so happens that pretty much anyone loves word pictures (tell me a story)… But if you’re selling to engineers or IT folks, nothing says loving like a beautiful schematic. We love schematics!
Consider the following schematic, lifted right out of Attensa’s Feed Server brochure:
It’s truly a thing of beauty for anyone who’s trying to figure out how this new enterprise RSS platform would fit into their existing ecosystem; plus it showcases all types of RSS readers (and devices) it serves.
Now, it takes vision and a lot of hard work to come up with such an elegant picture. But I guarantee that the illustration above has:
Saved time - entire discussions have likely been resolved using this illustration - possibly without involving anyone from Attensa at all - because it shows so much capability visually.
Moved the sales process along - per my point above, I have seen (over and over again) the power of a “picture/pass-along” to keep things moving in a sales cycle.
Again, as you’re marketing your products, consider giving your prospects tools they can share with others who may (literally or figuratively) speak and understand information differently than you do.
And remember that illustrations tell compelling stories in themselves.
