You just presented your game-changing technology to a prospect’s management team. After you leave, there’s a very good chance that they will be asking each other “What is it these guys do, again?” Same problem when they visit your website.

This is because the skill set you need to communicate about a product is vastly different from the genius it took to invent and engineer it.

Most scientists and engineers get too complicated when they explain their product and business. They take the developer’s perspective instead of the customer’s. The same problem can show up on their homepage, which reads more like a spec sheet than an engaging entry point.

Time to simplify
It may be hard to do, but you need to simplify. It helps a lot to pretend that you’re talking to a six-year old. Find a partner of any age, make a statement, and have them keep asking you two questions:

- Why?
- So what?

This gets you past the buzzwords right to the heart of the matter. You’ll have some interesting insights too.

Where’s the main pain?
Try starting out by taking the point of view of the customer. What problem are they having that your solution fixes? What’s the main “pain” that you relieve? What kinds of struggles are they having with the current ways of doing things? Most engineers would start out by talking about how the technology works. When you’re in a commercialization or marketing mode you need to address what it does first. State the benefit.

Quick, in two sentences!
You need to be able to explain your technology in two easy-to-grasp sentences. The components are these sentences are:
- Your product category (the space you are playing in)
- The un-met need: the pain you fix
- How your solution is different from and better than the other alternatives. (“Unlike X, we Y”)

Only then do you can explain the unique breakthrough that makes this possible, again in simple language first.

Even your fellow engineers and scientists will thank you
Not only will top management, the “approvers”, be nodding (in understanding, not slumber) and getting their checkbooks out. Technologists, who may in fact be the direct “users”, will also appreciate getting a clear topline before digging into the details of your elegant solution.