Stick the Landing

Borrow a style point from gymnastics. If you don't stick the landing when you write - your story is liable to wobble and not hold up.

I’m a huge gymnastics fan - and while watching the Olympics, I got to wondering what "stick the landing" really meant. I Googled “how to stick a landing in gymnastics” and found

• “landing without moving your feet”

• “a non-wobbly finish after dismounting from a gymnastic apparatus”

Well those are pretty obvious. And I also know that you receive a huge deduction if you don't stick it – but how do you actually do it? And then I discovered what I was looking for in a USA Gymnastics’ handbook.

Before answering the question, USA Gymnastics took me through the difference between side and back loading (and how side loading SHREDS your ACL). Turns out sticking your landing is not just about pleasing the judges – but allowing your feet, knees, and back to handle the tremendous force of a dismount. USA Gymnastics answered the question by offering this description of back loading:

Back flat, knees over the toes and weight distributed evenly over the feet. Abdominals are braced and glutes activated so they can hold perfect posture. Make sure that the athletes’ knees are not caving in and shoulder blades are pulled back and down.

Now I understand what Stick the Landing means, and how doing it wrong can cause physical injury – in addition to reduction in points.

Meaningful Specific vs Wandering Generalities

This example – and that very clear definition – is what Zig Ziglar called being “Meaningful specific” (versus offering “wandering generalities.”) The first description of sticking the landing —  looks (or maybe sounds) good but is filled with empty calories. The USA Gymnastics description though – now that has meat. 

I’m sure at this point you are wondering why I am stuck on the concept of sticking the landing. Well, just about all of us spend much of our time writing (or editing) blogs, presentations, white papers, meet ups, webinars. And often we fall back on wandering generalities and not a lot of meat. We use words, usually adjectives, that are virtually meaningless unless you take it a bit deeper.

I’m going to give a very specific example that plays out in B2B database and search companies. But a similar scenario plays out in virtually every industry — whether B2B or B2C.

An overused word in high tech is “scaling.” Companies say “we do X – at scale.”

Think about how generic this is. In reality, every tech offers scaling ... if you don’t mind data loss, or you don’t mind manually copying the entire database onto a new system to create a cluster, or you don’t mind instances being slightly out of sync.

What if these companies approached discussing scaling like USA gymnastics – by pointing out the distinctions that can go wrong – and answering the question differently. For example, by scaling do they mean:

Scaling Retrieval? (Searching through petabytes of information and having to deliver it back to the person in a second or less — all while new information is being added to the database.)

Or Scaling Throughput? (15 million people all having to choose their healthcare selections in a 2-week period – and assume that most people do it between the hours of 9am ET and 9pm PT – so 100s of thousands of people are sending queries to your system at one time.)

Or is it both? 

Both examples offer concrete specifics. If you are a marketer you can obviously go into the pain of what happens when you scale incorrectly –

• Spend oodles on hardware and software

• Worry about consistency across all these systems (can information be lost?)

• Can you build up for high demand and then shrink back (how does this work?) 

Now, if you have the nerve, bring it home.

Do competitors scale the same way? If the answer is HELL NO! Then say it!! Say, hell no they don’t scale the same way – and tell them why!

Where to Start

We all fall into assuming everyone knows what we mean. My suggestion is you take a look at the adjectives you use: best, easy, comprehensive, affordable, biggest.

Chances are your audience is doing one of two things — dismissing it because they don’t believe you are the easiest, or asking a follow-up question. Is it easy for someone with no experience? (If it is, say that!) Are there pains they are grappling with?

Don’t be afraid to go deep. Think about how consumer brands use active ingredients to differentiate their products. Few of us know that hyaluronic acid is a linear polysaccharide that is made up two repeating disaccharides. But people of a certain age know to look for it in anti-wrinkle formulas.

Dextromethorphan is a synthetic compound that is better known as DM on cough medicines. It might have been tempting for brand marketers to say, "you will feel better faster with our product,” but instead they took the time to introduce DM. They educated us to the fact that if it your cough medicine has DM it will help stop an unproductive cough.

So how do you find that magical “active ingredient” in your industry? Listen to your prospects. What is it that they just aren’t getting? Is there a specific condition being overlooked?

We have to spend hours training people before they can use the product.

If your product can get them there without formal training — that is a much more specific description than “easier!”

Write Specifically to One Person

Now here’s a trick I have learned over the years when trying to write 
”meaningful specifics.” I don’t try to write to everyone. I write with one person in mind; someone I know and respect. This is important since none of us would ever belittle or be patronizing to someone we respect. Since I know the person, I already know a lot about what s/he knows – and where s/he is having trouble understanding. I also know (or think I do) of how much of my sense of humor s/he can handle.

Second, I have a behavior in mind that I want to change. For example, you, my dear reader, are a terrific communicator, but you could be more impactful if you wrote with more specifics.

Ouch. I would have a tough time saying something so directly to a friend who hasn’t asked for advice.

Instead I might use a silly example to draw you in and pique your curiosity while giving enough specifics so you know what you might consider doing differently.

Let me know if I stuck the landing.