An unsurprising number that no one in sales can afford to ignore …

I ran a poll on LinkedIn earlier this week and I asked a simple question – 

How do you prefer to have a complex concept explained to you?

There was no reference to sales, learning styles, leadership or anything else that I thought might influence the results.  I simply wanted to know how people preferred to have complex ideas shared with them.

I expected the visual option to be the higher subscribed response but the number is quite staggering.

As the graph shows, at the time of writing 7% wanted the information told to them, 9% wanted it written out for them and a whopping 84% wanted it visually shown to them.

The post also triggered a lot of conversation about learning styles and other aspects of influence.  All important topics, but not the focus on my poll.

I just wanted to know how people PREFERRED to receive their complex information.

I wasn’t exploring the best way to communicate, I was exploring receiver preferences for the method of communication.  Overwhelmingly, people want to receive complex information visually.

So imagine you let someone know that you preferred to receive information visually and they said “we’ll just book a call for a chat” or “I’ll write out a brief and send it to you”.  How would you feel about that?

What if I told you there are three channels you can use to share your message with an audience – 7% of the audience are on one channel, 9% are on another and 84% are on the third channel.  Each channel uses a different way to communicate but you can choose whichever one you want.  Which one would you choose?

If we want others to really hear us, we need to remove as many barriers to communication as possible.  Obviously one way to do that is to turn to visual tools – like visual models.

How are you visually showing your complex concept behind your product or service to your prospects?