Get your free personalized podcast brief

We scan new podcasts and send you the top 5 insights daily.

People have limited cognitive bandwidth. When pitching a new feature or strategy, presenting more than three benefits is counterproductive, as stakeholders won't remember any of them. It is more effective to isolate the two or three most compelling arguments and hammer them home.

Related Insights

Founders mistakenly believe more information leads to better understanding. The opposite is true. Adding features, technical details, or concepts increases the customer's cognitive load, making it less likely they will grasp the core value and buy. The art of sales is compressing information to only what matters for their specific problem.

Don't overwhelm an enterprise buying committee by pitching all of your product's features. Instead, survey each member to find the 2-3 features that resonate most broadly. Focus all messaging and demos on just those features to create a clear, concentrated value proposition.

To ensure clarity and impact, mandate that any explanation of the platform team's work to non-technical stakeholders must be understandable in under three minutes. This forces the team to distill their message to its core value, cutting through technical jargon.

Bupa's Head of Product Teresa Wang requires her team to explain their work and its value to non-technical people within three minutes. This forces clarity, brevity, and a focus on the 'why' and 'so what' rather than the technical 'how,' ensuring stakeholders immediately grasp the concept and its importance.

Limit your key points, pain points, or takeaways to three. This cognitive principle makes information easier for prospects to receive, understand, and retain, preventing them from being overwhelmed by too much information.

When presenting to a CFO, brevity is critical. They think in summaries and bullet points, and a lengthy presentation is a sign of disrespect for their time. Your entire business case should be distilled into a single, powerful page to maintain their attention.

When stakeholders demand cramming too many product updates into one email, position yourself as the expert. Explain the science of audience attention—that users won't read past a certain point or absorb more than a few items. This shifts the conversation from personal opinion to data-backed strategy.

When presenting a long list of actions, such as ten ways to improve a team, group them into three distinct, memorable categories. A coach successfully reframed ten tips into a three-step framework of 'alignment, process, and resilience,' making his advice more digestible and actionable for the audience.

A sales pitch doesn't need to convince a prospect they have a problem; it needs to align with their existing demand. This allows a 20+ slide deck to be reduced to two core slides: 1) "Here's the progress customers are trying to make," and 2) "Here's how our product helps them achieve it."

Structure core ideas into groups of three powerful words or short phrases. This 'trifecta' technique, honed in political communication, makes messages concise, easy to remember, and impactful for audiences with short attention spans. Examples include 'relationships, service, and purpose' or 'think bold, start small'.