When having more to sell becomes the nemesis of selling.

Does the drive for expansion now diminish your value?

When Dan Sullivan coined The Ceiling of Complexity, he discusses the idea that as you expand, there is a subtle pressure to increase your responsibilities and expectations. Eventually, these expectations add a layer of complexity that becomes a ceiling on any further progress.

Here’s how I see this playing out in organisations.

You start with feeling like you don’t have enough of something; not enough products to sell, not enough proof points, not enough routes to market – even insufficient slides to make a valid argument. This then leads to expansion, which starts out as a positive. We go into creator mode, resolving this feeling by doing and creating more and more.

The problem is that we don’t stop. We just keep expanding. And as we do so, there is the silent expectation that we have to keep everything going. We need to sell everything, squeeze every poof point in every ad on every channel – and we simply must present every single slide in the deck.

Ever felt the expectation to include more, just because it was there?

This is when we really hit the ceiling of complexity. Your expansion has become your nemesis. In my experience, this is the point at which you are significantly diminishing your value, and even becoming hard to buy.

This is the point at which you are allowing your complexity to cloud the real value in your solutions – and as a result, it is getting harder to convert business.

That determination to fulfil against self-imposed expectations and those constant efforts to increase your offering have been left unchecked. And now, it is limiting your growth.

As Barry Schwartz outlines, in his great work The Paradox of Choice, choice can be surprisingly demotivating. When presented with a selection of 24 different jams, only 3% of shoppers purchased. However, when only six jams were on display, this number increased to 30%.

Fun fact: When we put more out, we get less back.

The breakthrough comes when you can tame expectations by using a customer lens. Aligning with their specific needs and simplifying what you do will redefine the value of your offer, and at the same time empower the freedom to be selective.

But haven’t we lost those things that we spent time creating? Actually, no. Because what you have achieved is an understanding of what matters most. Your investment into expansion is fine-tuned, enabling you to move straight to the problem & resolution conversation. This will unlock more value for you and for your customers than any shopping list ever will.

The real challenge lies in not relapsing back into that expansion mindset, and learning to extract the most from what you already have before you seek to add more.

How close are you to that ceiling? Let’s chat about how we can simplify your offering through a customer lens and let your value translate into results.