What was getting in the way
The firm had a real advantage. Its software raised an alert in about half a second, where the nearest competitor was at least 5 seconds.Every pitch in that market quotes speed. Half a second against several seconds reads like a spec sheet, and the people who decide don't read spec sheets. The story wasn't getting through.
Why we went this way
Police officers in the US have been trained since 1983 on a simple drill. A person with a knife can cover 21 feet in about one and half seconds. Every officer knows the number, so nobody has to be taught it.So we talked about the product it terms of that distance. An alert in half a second leaves most of the 21 feet, and time to act. An alert in five seconds arrives long after the person does. One leaves time to act. The other only records what happened.We built it as a short animation, with the arithmetic beside it, so a buyer could check the sums for themselves.
How well it worked
The 21 feet ran through the site and the report, and the cost case followed from it.The raw technology was the client's. We just brought the spec sheet to life.
What we'd do differently
The 21 feet turned up halfway through the fortnight. We might have got there quicker if we had the opportunity to ask a "why" a couple more times. Sometimes metrics can stay hidden because they're so intrinsic to the team.Depending on the audience, animations might not land as well as a graph. We chose to stick with crudely drawn stick figures, as it keeps the idea as the central point.