What's obvious to you isn't obvious to everyone

A prospect meeting reminded me that the most dangerous assumption a specialist can make is that everyone else knows what they know.

I recently sat down with a business owner who was thinking about working with Data Bloom. Good conversation, a genuine problem to solve, and a real chance to help. We were discussing how good commercial reporting can show what is and isn't working in a business, and I gave the example of tracking marketing campaigns: how much is going on PPC spend, and what the CTR on each advert looks like.

I carried on for a couple of minutes before they interrupted, a little timidly and with a slight smirk: "Sorry, what does any of this mean? What's PPC? Or CTR?"

That was the moment it clicked. I'd been rattling off acronyms I use every day, never stopping to consider that they might not use them at all.

The acronyms themselves don't really matter. What matters is the assumption sitting underneath them. Without thinking, I'd treated something I've learned over years of doing this work as if it were common knowledge across the whole of business. It isn't. And that's exactly why people come to specialists in the first place.

Expertise quietly rewires what feels "normal"

Psychologists call this the "curse of knowledge". Once you know something well, it becomes genuinely hard to remember what it was like not to know it. In a well-known Stanford experiment, people tapped out the rhythm of famous songs and predicted how many listeners would name the tune. They expected about half to get it. Hardly anyone did. The tappers could hear the melody in their heads. The listeners just heard knocking.

Every specialist has a version of this. Years of experience build up a huge amount of background knowledge: the vocabulary, yes, but also the reasoning, the context, the "everybody knows that" steps you no longer think about. Because you're surrounded by people in your own field, it all starts to feel like the baseline. Then you walk into a meeting with someone from a different world and carry on as if they share it.

Your years of experience are your value. Don't assume everyone else has had them too.

Why the gap rarely gets spotted in the room

You might expect someone to say "sorry, I'm not following". Sometimes they do. More often they don't, and the reasons are very human:

• Nobody wants to look out of their depth, especially a business owner who's used to being the expert in their own field.
• They don't want to slow things down, so they tell themselves they'll work it out later.
• They don't know what they don't know. If a whole step in your reasoning is missing for them, they can't ask about something they can't see.

So the specialist leaves thinking they explained things clearly, and the client leaves with a vague feeling that it went over their head. Neither is a great start to a working relationship.

It works both ways

Most of the businesses I work with are specialists themselves. Accountants, solicitors and recruiters all carry years of knowledge that feels obvious to them and is anything but obvious to their clients. An accountant might assume a client understands how their tax position works. A solicitor might assume a client knows what happens between instruction and completion. A recruiter might assume a hiring manager knows how the market has shifted.

If you're a specialist in anything, this applies to you too. The knowledge that makes you good at your job is the same knowledge that makes it easy to lose the people you're trying to help.

How I'm approaching conversations now

Since that meeting, I've been more deliberate about not assuming. None of this is complicated, and it works whatever your field.

• Find out what they already know before diving in. A couple of open questions at the start ("how do you handle enquiries at the moment?", "what have you tried before?") tells you where to pitch everything else.
• Start from their world, not yours. Talk about the problem in terms of their clients, their team and their day, then bring in the technical side only where it helps.
• Don't skip the "obvious" steps. If something feels too basic to mention, that's often a sign it's a step you stopped noticing years ago.
• Make it easy to ask. Saying upfront that you'd genuinely like to be stopped if something doesn't make sense gives people permission to do it.
• Watch for the polite nod. Agreement isn't the same as understanding. A quick "how does that sound for your setup?" invites them to put it in their own words.
• Follow up in plain English. A short written summary after a meeting catches anything that got lost.

Why it matters even more with systems

A lot of my work is setting up CRM systems and automating business processes. Here, assuming knowledge doesn't just make a meeting awkward. It can sink a project.

If I assume a team understands why a pipeline is structured a certain way, or what a report is telling them, the system won't get used properly. The best setup in the world is worthless if the people using it are quietly confused. So the same rule applies: don't assume what people know. Find out, then build and explain from there.

Being understood beats sounding clever

That meeting was a useful reminder. The person opposite me didn't need me to show how much I knew. They needed to understand how I could help. Those are very different things.

So next time you're talking to a client or prospect, pause and ask yourself: is this something they'd know, or something I know because I've spent years doing it? If you're not sure, assume the second. Nobody has ever lost a client for being too easy to understand.