Mistake #1: Taking knowledge for granted.

I visit hundreds of sites every month and am noticing a disturbing trend; 'the assumed knowledge error'. In our rush to achieve an 'expert' or 'latest and greatest' position in our markets' mind, we forget that not all visitors have an intimate understanding of 'what' we produce. Our focus on being smart is, at times, at the expense of being clear. We go on at length describing our expertise in 'X' industry[s] and will allude as to what we sell, but don't actually come right out on our landing pages and say 'we produce/provide Y to accomplish Z'. 

Among the many offenders of 'the assumed knowledge error' are software and app providers when they invite visitors to download a trial version with out really explaining the product or offering a walk through on their site first. Unless the product is well known and comes highly recommended from a trusted source, our prospect needs to be convinced of value before exposing their computer to blackbox, and always at the back of their mind, potentially malicious code. This is true of SaaS or cloud products as well, as they too need to interface with our internal systems.

A simple example I ran across yesterday is a site 'twinfluenza.com'. Evidently it's some sort of game. The only descriptive content, letting us know what it is, is on the home page. It goes as follows:

Welcome!
Are you bored because you can't go out?
Are you quarantined? paranoid?
Then just login using your twitter account and start infecting people with twInfluenza!

For all I know it's a really great, fun, useful, etc app. Given the only description intimates that the goal of the game is to infect my Twitter followers, there's not a snowballs chance in _ _ _ _ that I'm going anywhere near it though. Had they explained what the game actually does and effectively removed perceived risk I may have tried it out. After all I'm an active Twitter user and new media enthusiast. It's not my intent to embarrass or discredit teams such as twInfluenza, rather the opposite. Presumably they've invested alot of sweat equity in creating their app and it's not actually malicious [or Twitter would shut them out] and subsequently deserve a shot at success. I suspect with a little tweak of their descriptive content and maybe a little show-and-tell they'll be much better positioned to achieve the goal.

In short... understanding of what it is we specifically produce is an absolute precursor to making the sale. Accepting this to be true, it is a mistake to assume our prospects already know what it is.