Choosing What to Choose - Are You Confusing Your Customers With Too Many Options? Part 2 of 2

Subscribe to this newsletter.

In part 1 of this article, you discovered why it’s important to avoid presenting too many options to your potential and existing customers. Information overload can lead to confusion, decision fatigue, and lost sales.

So, how can you avoid or fix this?

That’s what we’ll cover here in part 2.

Consider this…in his book, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut , David Shenk wrote,

It is estimated that one weekday edition of today's New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime.

As Smooth Operators, we bear the onus of producing information that’s short on words, well-organized, and chocked with images to speed processing and help our customers make informed choices.

We can achieve this by deploying a number of tactics including Process & Categorize, The Rule of 3, and The A3.

Process & Categorize

Sheena Iyengar is a leading expert on choice. In fact, her TED Talk on How to Make Choosing Easier is one of my favorites. She recommends using the following methods for making it easier for your customers to choose and thus speeding the path to sales:

1)????Cut

2)????Concretize

3)????Categorize

4)????Condition for Complexity?

Cutting likely needs no explanation, but you may find it challenging to objectively reduce your product or service offering. This is where data can help. Many years ago, I used Pareto's 80/20 rule to help me figure out how to reduce my services from 20 down to three. Not only did it go a long way in helping customers quickly figure out what they wanted, but it also made it easier to standardize and train on our processes for delivering those few, select services.

In this summary of Iyengar's definitive talk, you can learn more about what she means by concretization and conditioning for complexity.

Once you've cut the number of products and/or services you offer, try categorizing them to help your customers quickly filter though the myriad of choices. This is a highly effective technique because it also provides a degree of customization without overwhelm.

This is where a simple process can also guide customers through a series of choices. For example, after seeing the picture I took of the dizzying drive-thru menu shown in part 1 of this article, Melanie Flores shared this picture with me. It's a menu from a Boloco fast-food restaurant she used to frequent:

Like Chipotle , their process begins with step one where customers select the type of meal they want. Steps two and three offer more choices, but they are strategically categorized by protein type and toppings.

Equally as important as the process and categorization of options is the actual layout or design of how options are presented. My friend Keith Finger took his commentary on part 1 of this article a step further by sharing this article on designing menu boards and signs. It's an example that provides important lessons even if your organization is in a different industry.

The Rule of 3

The Rule of 3 "...states that any ideas, thoughts, events, characters or sentences that are presented in threes are more effective and memorable." ?This succinct definition comes from the learning company, Harappa .

Think of it as another way of categorizing information that you present information. This method is particularly effective in service-based companies and is likely the reason so many SaaS companies present pricing options like "free, small business, and enterprise."

The example above comes from Podcast Movement . Notice their conference options are limited to three. Another effective tool when implementing the Rule of 3 is to place the option that you think will entice the most people to buy in the middle. Following the bell curve logic, the distribution of customers will likely fall in the center with the outliers choosing the first and third options.

The A3

When it comes to presenting solutions to my customers, I have a personal mantra...

If you can’t fit it onto one page, you probably don’t understand it.

With every proposal, my team and I challenge ourselves to fit our ideas onto one page. A particularly effective tool that brings together the other choice solutions is the A3 template. It’s a Lean Six Sigma tool designed to fit information onto one sheet of paper, usually 11"x17". It's used to communicate things like business cases, status reports, and due diligence reports.

In this template below from Kaufman Global , you can see how information is categorized into sections. Note the Implementation Plan section – this is where you can leverage the Rule of 3 to present different solutions.

The other sections are designed for embedding charts and other visual aids to help decision makers quickly scan information.?

Show & Tell: The Brain is an Image-Associating Mechanism

In a busy, noisy world we must present information to customers that is easy to consume and process. Though long prose can help with things like SEO and reducing liability, depending on the complexity of the decision, customers need icons, images, and other mental heuristics (shortcuts) to aid in quickly making choices. As humans we remember pictures before words. It’s the reason why that picture of the fast-food menu I shared in part 1 generated the reaction it did.

Simplifying the options you present to your audience, whether they be your customers, your boss, or your team, can itself be a Herculean effort. ?

But if you want the information you’re presenting to stick and prompt a win-win decision, then it’s worth the effort. In the next issue I’ll share more details about how to use the A3 to present your best solutions.?

Be sure to subscribe so that you’ll receive a notification when it becomes available!?

______________________________

?Alicia Butler Pierre is the Founder & CEO of Equilibria, Inc. – an operations management firm specializing in business infrastructure for fast-growing small businesses. She’s the author of the two-time Amazon bestseller Behind the Fa?ade and host of the top 2% Business Infrastructure podcast . Alicia’s also an adjunct instructor at Purdue University and Nichols College . A chemical engineer turned entrepreneur, she’s advised, designed, and optimized processes for companies including Shell Oil, Coca-Cola, and The Home Depot.