The exciting climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest goes like this:
Eva Marie Saint is about to fall off a cliff.
Cary Grant is reaching down to try to keep her from falling.
“I can’t,” she says.
“Yes you can,” he says.
And then one of the evil guy’s henchmen comes and starts to crush Cary’s fingers underfoot. But Cary needs those fingers to hold on to the cliff, and to keep himself and Eva from death below.
Like I said, that’s the climax.
But don’t worry.
It all turns out fine. The police arrive and shoot the evil henchman, who falls off the cliff. The main bad guy is caught. The secret microfilm is safe. And some time later, Cary and Eva, who made it off the cliff and got married in the meantime, head back east by train to start a new life together. The end.
Pretty usual Hollywood, right?
Right. The only unusual thing is the speed:
That entire anti-climactic sequence, from the moment Cary gets his fingers crushed to the train ride home, takes a total of 43 seconds.
​​43 seconds!
For reference, North By Northwest is a movie that lasts 2 hours and 16 minutes.
Of the total, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 17 seconds goes to building up tension and misery.
The last 43 seconds goes to relieving it.
And yet people watch. And more relevant for us, they buy.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve previously had the task of selling many generic, unremarkable, sometimes suspect physical products. To boot, these products often sold at 3-4 times the price you could find on Amazon.
How can you possibly sell millions of dollars of a commodity at three times the price that anybody can get, just by shopping as they always do?
In my case, the answer was stories. Full of tension and misery. That’s how the bulk of the sales message went.
And when you thought things were bad, an evil henchman came to make it all worse.
The relief of all that tension, in the form of talking about the product, was really an afterthought. Not quite at Hitchcock levels, but still.
So that’s my takeaway for you.
Don’t sell overpriced crap.
​​But even if you sell something great, it probably makes sense to talk less about it than you want to. Instead, focus more of your prospect’s time and attention on that “I can’t/Yes you can” drama.
And in case you want more storytelling and selling ideas: