One of the hardest parts of my work is explaining a complicated idea in a way that interests someone who does not know it as well as we do.
I have been thinking about this while working on an investment proposal. You have to take everything behind a project, organize it and help another person understand the opportunity. Then comes an equally important part: explaining what it will take to move it forward.
From the inside, everything feels connected. You know why a decision was made, what was ruled out and how one part depends on another. But the person receiving the proposal was not in those conversations.
Sometimes we forget that.
The urge to explain everything
When you believe in a project, you want to explain every detail. Everything feels relevant because you know the work behind it.
I enjoy that part: understanding an idea, finding its possibilities and thinking about how to present it. The challenge comes when we must decide what the other person needs to know first and what can wait.
If someone must first understand the entire operation before they can understand the opportunity, we are giving them a very large task.
They need a point of entry. They need to know what we are proposing, whom it serves and why the conversation is worth continuing.
There will be time to go deeper.
Knowing a project well does not mean we already know how to explain it well.
Make it attractive without removing what matters
When I say that someone does not need to understand the complete project from the start, I do not mean they should make a decision with incomplete information.
I mean they should not have to become an expert before they can begin to understand its value.
If there is an important condition, a risk or something that still needs to be resolved, it must be clear. Making a proposal attractive also requires knowing how to explain those less comfortable parts.
For me, that is a large part of commercial work: finding a way to explain a project that creates interest and allows people to ask good questions.
What does it contribute?
How would it work?
What do you need from me?
What must happen for this to move forward?
I want the conversation to reach those questions without asking the other person to first decipher what we are trying to say.
How we build interest
To make a proposal attractive, I first need to understand what may matter to the person receiving it.
Not everyone gets excited about the same part of a project. One person wants to see the opportunity for growth; another needs to understand how the operation would work. Someone else may first want to know who will be responsible for making things happen.
The project is the same, but the conversation does not always have to begin in the same place.
That is where I look for the right entry point: which part deserves to come first, which example makes it easier to understand and which detail we are explaining too soon. I try to make each part of the proposal answer a question and give the reader a reason to continue.
That is what I mean by making it attractive: the other person finds something relevant to them and wants to know more.
Then we have to listen.
The questions that follow are part of the work. If something creates confusion, we should revisit how we are explaining it. If it creates interest, it is worth going deeper. If there is an objection, we need to understand whether information is missing or whether part of the project still needs to be resolved.
The proposal becomes sharper through those conversations. That is why I do not see selling as preparing a presentation, sending it and waiting for an answer.
We also have to support what comes next: return to a concern, obtain an answer and clarify what we would need to review together to move forward. Sometimes that means another meeting; sometimes it means sharing information or involving someone else. What matters is that both sides understand the purpose of the next step.
I like it when the conversation begins to shift from “explain what this is” to “let’s see how we could do it.” There is still work ahead, of course. But now the conversation is much more concrete.
And then, how does it happen?
We can make someone like an idea and still leave them without a clear picture of what happens next.
That is why explaining the route matters so much to me: where we begin, what is required, who needs to be involved and which decisions remain open.
The first presentation does not need to contain a complete operating plan. But it should provide enough clarity for someone to imagine how the idea starts becoming something concrete.
That clarity also makes the proposal more attractive. The person can better understand what participation would involve, what is expected of them and what still needs to be resolved.
Now there is something real to discuss, question and decide.
What we are building at GMD
This is one of the parts I enjoy most about what we are building at GMD Consulting: working with ideas that have a great deal behind them and finding a way to bring them closer to other people.
It requires me to listen, ask questions and revisit things that may have seemed obvious from the inside. It also requires accepting that knowing a project well does not mean we already know how to explain it well.
I keep refining that skill with every engagement. I enjoy it because it combines what interests me most about business development: understanding a business, finding a way to connect with the person on the other side and supporting the conversation until we can decide whether moving forward together makes sense.
In the end, that person has not spent months thinking about our idea.
It is our job to give them a good way into it.