Reading List: 'Affordance' in Sales Messaging

When delivering your PowerPoint pitch to potential clients or investors, have you ever considered 'affordance'? No, didn’t think so.

To be honest, we hadn’t really heard of the term until we read this Smashing Magazine post by Natasha Postolovski last week.

In the fascinatingly detailed post, Postolovski refers to 'affordance' as “the most underrated word in web design” but we believe its logic can stretch much further than that.

For the record, Bing defines 'affordance' as: “A relation between an object, or an environment, and an organism that affords the opportunity for that organism to perform an action.”

When you are browsing the web, how do you know what to click, when scroll, how to slide? Web pages are designed in a way that 'affords' their capabilities to users. Why stop at web design? Your sales presentations could certainly benefit from the logic.

What action, for example, do you want the audience to take after hearing your pitch? Do your presentation slides 'afford' this action? Could the sales message be more obvious? How often is it repeated?

Make every call to action 'afford' something in your next sales presentation. We believe it could be like a deal clincher.

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Reading List is a new kind of post for our Effective Business Communication blog. Each week, we’ll point to an article, video or graphic that has taken our interest. The posts that made us stop scrolling and listen. We’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.