I bought a cold plunge pool last year, which quite frankly I look back on wondering what I was thinking, because the thought of jumping into ice-cold water is genuinely something that makes me want to run in the opposite direction. I didn’t buy it because I love being cold. I got drawn in by the promise of more energy, alertness, and the feeling of doing something a bit out of the ordinary that most people wouldn’t bother with.
The marketing worked and I bought it. What it didn’t do was get me to consistently use it, and the cold plunge is now folded away in a cupboard after the algae situation got out of hand. But the point resonated with me: what got me over the line wasn’t the product, it was the outcome it promised and the version of myself it sold me, whether that was realised or not.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because I realised I’d been making the exact opposite mistake in areas of my own work.
I’d been using an organisational tool called the GC Index, which maps where people’s energy sits for making impact. It is a genuinely useful tool, and in my conversations I was leading with the tool itself, its methodology, how it works, the framework behind it. People were genuinely interested, but it wasn’t fully landing. The answer is sort of obvious now: nobody buys a profiling tool. They buy the conversation it unlocks, the moment when an underperforming team member suddenly makes sense because you realise they’ve been in entirely the wrong kind of role. The insight that changes how a leader builds their team for the next twelve months. That’s the thing worth paying for, not the assessment itself.
As a keen baker, I was selling the ingredients rather than the look, feel and taste of the cake.
I don’t think this is just a mistake independent consultants make. I think leaders fall into the same trap, they just don’t always recognise it because the language is different.
Think about the last time a Finance Director put forward a business case for a new system. How was it framed? Often it centres on the technology. “We’re implementing a new HCM.” “We’re upgrading our ERP.” “We’re building an enterprise data model.” These are ingredients. The leaders hearing that pitch, or the board reviewing the investment paper, aren’t buying a system. They are buying:
The ability to trust the numbers they present to investors. The capacity to see workforce capability, costs, and revenue in the same view for the first time, so they can actually make decisions about where to invest. A planning process that doesn’t fall apart every quarter because five different sources are telling five different stories.
I’ve sat in rooms where a programme team has spent weeks building a case around technical scope, implementation timelines, and vendor comparisons, and the exec sponsor has looked at it and said “but what does this actually give us?” Not because the work was wrong, but because nobody had translated the what into the why. The ingredients were all there but the cake was nowhere to be seen.
It happens with teams too, not just programmes. Consider an HR Director trying to justify investment in their function by describing what their team does: recruitment and talent acquisition, learning and development, reward, employee relations, policy. What actually lands with a CEO is something more like “we are the reason your top fifty leaders stay, overall employee turnover is low, and here is the impact when it isn’t.”
I think there’s a reason people default to selling the what: it feels safer. You can evidence it quickly. You can point at the system, the process, the deliverable. Describing the outcome requires you to make a claim about value, which is often based on a range of assumptions, and you can feel exposed when someone challenges it or if the outcome doesn’t land. Sticking with the ingredients keeps you on solid ground, or at least it feels that way.
But I don’t want to eat eggs, sugar, and flour as individual items. I want the taste of them all together, and the experience of enjoying something that is the result of organisation, method, and execution making the whole worth more than its parts.
This has been a genuinely useful period of reflection on some of my own positioning, and recognising that the ingredients approach just makes you easier to compare. If you’re selling a programme, you get compared to other programme people. If you’re selling a system implementation, you get compared on methodology and day rate. If you’re selling activity, you’re competing with everyone else who does that activity. The moment you describe the outcome, clearly and specifically in language that connects to what the person across the table actually cares about, you move into a different conversation entirely.
My own positioning has always been around walking into something messy, seeing how the pieces connect across finance, people, operations and technology, and making it make sense for the person who needs to act on it. The main focus is providing clarity, insight, and a way forward that enables clients to take action and see progress for themselves and their business.
Are you describing what you do, or why it matters? Because in my experience, the people who get investment, who get listened to, who get the seat at the table, are the ones who have worked out how to describe the cake.
The Impact Architect is a newsletter for CFOs and transformation leaders navigating complex change. If this resonated, I’d welcome you sharing it with someone who’d find it useful. To get in touch about how I can support your business and finance transformation activities, reach me at neilalderson@neilaldersonltd.co.uk