The Most Dangerous Phrase in Your Business Might Be “It’s Obvious”

There’s a peculiar thing that happens when you’ve been inside a business for a while. You stop being able to see it properly. Not because you’re bad at what you do. Quite the opposite, usually. You know the business so well that you’ve forgotten what it feels like not to know it.

You know what that service is. You know who it’s for. You know why it costs more than the other one. You know that the button marked “Enquire” eventually takes somebody to the right person. You know what happens after they fill in the form. You know that Dave only works Tuesdays and Thursdays, that Package B includes everything in Package A except the thing with Susan, and that when the website says “bespoke solutions” it actually refers to three very specific and genuinely useful things.

Your customer knows none of this. And somewhere in the gap between those two realities lives one of my least favourite phrases in business: “But it’s obvious.”

It probably is. To you.

The curse of knowing too much

I see this all the time, and it makes complete sense when you think about it.

When you work inside a business, you’re surrounded by context. You’ve heard the conversations that led to the new service. You know why the pricing changed. You remember the customer who asked for something slightly different three years ago and accidentally caused an entirely new offer to exist.

You know the language. More importantly, you know what the language means.

Then somebody arrives at your website after finding you on Google at 10.47pm while half-watching something on Netflix, and we somehow expect them to arrive carrying all that context with them.

They don't. They’re starting at the beginning…and businesses are surprisingly bad at remembering where the beginning actually is.

I’ve watched this happen with everything from websites and booking systems to event pages, service menus and enquiry processes. Someone inside the business will look at the thing and genuinely struggle to understand why a customer might be confused.

“The information is all there.”

And sometimes it is. It’s just in six different places, written in terminology the customer doesn’t use, underneath a menu heading they wouldn’t think to click, after a paragraph that assumes they already know what they’re looking for.

Technically there. Practically invisible.

Your customer is not stupid

This bit matters.

When people don't understand what a business is offering, businesses have a horrible habit of quietly blaming the person trying to buy it.

They didn't read properly. They should have clicked the link. It says it on the website. We explained it on Facebook. Nobody reads anything anymore.

Hmmm… Maybe.

But I think there’s a more useful question: Why did they miss it?

Because if one person fails to find something, perhaps they weren't paying attention. If twenty people keep asking you the same question despite the answer apparently being “right there”, I’d stop getting irritated with the twenty people. They’ve just given you useful information.

Something that feels obvious from inside the business is not obvious from outside it.

That doesn't necessarily mean you need more information, either. In fact, sometimes the problem is that there is far too bloody much of it.

More information isn't always more clarity

This is where businesses can go in the opposite direction.

Someone says customers don't understand the offer, so we add another paragraph. Then an FAQ. Then a pop-up. Then another menu item. Then a helpful little box explaining the terminology from the paragraph we added to explain the original terminology.

Three years later the customer needs crampons and a packed lunch to reach the checkout.

Clarity isn't about explaining everything you know, it's about understanding what they need to know next.

If I’ve just discovered your business, I probably don't need the entire history of your methodology. I need to know whether you do the thing I need. Once I know that, I might want to know whether you do it for people like me.

Then I might want to know roughly what it costs, what happens if I enquire, how long it takes, whether I have to talk to somebody, whether I'm committing to anything, or whether there’s some important catch lurking three clicks further in.

Different businesses have different journeys, obviously. But customers generally move through them one decision at a time.

Do I understand this?

Is it for me?

Do I trust it?

Do I want it?

What do I do now?

Every time they have to stop and decipher something you thought was obvious, you’ve added friction to one of those decisions. And friction doesn't always look dramatic.

Sometimes nobody complains. They just leave.

The dangerous thing about being the expert

There’s another version of this that crops up particularly in businesses run by people who are very good at what they do.

Expertise changes your vocabulary.

Spend long enough working in any industry and you acquire shorthand. Acronyms appear. Processes get names. Distinctions that matter enormously to you become second nature. That language can be useful internally. The problem starts when it escapes.

Your customer shouldn't need a small qualification in your industry to work out which service to buy.

And this isn't an argument for talking to people like idiots. I hate that too.

There’s a huge difference between making something understandable and dumbing it down.

Good communication respects somebody's intelligence without requiring your expertise. You can be sophisticated without being incomprehensible. You can be knowledgeable without making the customer learn your internal language before they’re allowed through the door. And you can explain something clearly without explaining absolutely bloody everything.

Try being a stranger

One of the most useful things you can do occasionally is attempt to encounter your own business as though you know nothing about it.

Which is also almost impossible. You already know too much.

You can't un-know where the booking button is. You can't forget what your product names mean. You can't genuinely experience your homepage without knowing what happens on the next page. But you can at least try to catch yourself making assumptions.

Search for your business rather than typing the address directly and look at what comes up. If you knew nothing else, what would you think you did? Land on a page you don't normally use as your starting point and follow the route you're asking a customer to follow. Read the words without mentally filling in the bits that aren't actually written there. Try to buy something or make an enquiry and notice the places where your existing knowledge is doing some of the work for you.

And every time your brain says “Well, obviously…”, stop and ask yourself: obviously what? And, more importantly, obvious to whom? Because that little moment is often where the interesting stuff is hiding.

You don't have to change everything

This is the other side of the work I do that perhaps gets talked about less.

Looking critically at a business doesn't mean finding fault with everything.

Sometimes I encounter something slightly unusual, old-fashioned or completely contrary to whatever marketing people are currently shouting about on the internet and think: That's absolutely fine. Leave it alone.

It works, the customers understand it, it suits the people running the business and it earns money. There is no prize for replacing something perfectly functional with something shinier because somebody on LinkedIn said businesses are supposed to.

The point isn't constant optimisation. It's intention.

Know why something is there. Know who it's helping. Know what job it's doing. And know whether the person encountering it from outside has enough information to make the next decision without needing access to everything that exists inside your head.

Because your business doesn't need to be obvious to you. You already bought it.

It needs to make sense to the person who hasn't yet.