You’ve probably heard the idea that what feels obvious to you can be revelatory to someone else. That happened to me twice this week, with the exact same piece of information. Both times, I was working with a consultant on how to make their know-how shine. And both times, I found myself saying this:

“There’s an old advertising adage. The more concrete the thing you’re selling, the more ephemeral the advertising can be. The more ephemeral the thing you’re selling, the more concrete the advertising needs to be.

“What’s that mean?

“If you’re selling a tangible product, say a car, and you advertise that it has 500 horsepower, but I’m selling a car with 600 horsepower, I win. That’s one reason car advertising so often avoids specifics and instead leans into qualities, moods, and feelings. Things that are hard to measure, and therefore harder to out-compare.

“But if you’re selling something ephemeral, like advice, strategy, or insight, people want the opposite. They want to know what they’re actually buying.

“They want to know how many years you’ve been doing this. Who you’ve worked with. How many clients come back. What you believe. What frameworks you use. How you think.

“In other words, they want proof that you’re not just some person with opinions.”

So you have to do something slightly counterintuitive. You have to conceptually build a house for them. Good floor plan. Solid walls. A sense of structure they can walk around in. Only then can something intangible start to feel real. Only then do they realize that there’s a “there” there.