In this episode, I’m diving into a psychological trap that kills credibility in sales and marketing: the "Gold Delusion Effect." Drawing on research from the University of Chicago, I explain why stacking more benefits into your pitch actually makes people believe them less. It turns out that when you try to promise everything—saving time, saving money, increasing morale, and boosting revenue—you often end up being the "12-page menu" restaurant that no one trusts to make a great burger.

I share real-world examples of "zero delusion" brands like Raising Cane’s and WD-40 that have built empires by doing one thing exceptionally well. But even if you run a complex, multi-service business, I’ll show you how to use "umbrella branding" and surgical discovery to keep your message undiluted. Join me as I break down why one message per moment is the key to building real belief in your prospects.

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Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.

About Ray:

→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.

→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.

→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com

→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.

→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com

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The more benefits that you add to your pitch, the less people believe any of them. And that's not just my opinion; the researchers at the University of Chicago actually proved this. So, what they did was they ran an experiment—and once you go through it, you're like, "Hey, this makes me rethink value and benefits in sales and marketing".

And what they did was they split people into two groups and they told them about tomatoes. And they tell Group 1 that tomatoes improve heart health, and that's it—just the one benefit. They tell Group 2 that tomatoes improve heart health and strengthen bones. So, they get two benefits. So, logically, you think tomatoes are more valuable and more beneficial to them, right?

So, they then ask both groups how effective are tomatoes at improving heart health, and the group that was given more information actually rated tomatoes nearly 10% less effective at the thing that both groups were told about. So, when they added a second benefit, it weakened the perception of the first benefit. And they didn't just run this one study; they actually ran six different experiments and confirmed the same thing: adding benefits to something erodes the perceived value of each one. And they call it the "Gold Delusion Effect".

And you've probably already realized this—intuitively you kind of know this, you've felt it before. So, you know, if you go to a restaurant with, you know, they've got the 12-page menu and they're serving pizza, they're serving Thai, they've got Italian, they've got sushi, they've got burgers, some Mexican food—like virtually everything is on the menu—and the server comes up and says, "Yeah, we have the absolute best burgers in town," you're probably going to question it. Because you—I mean, you just look at the sheer volume of shit that they're making and you go, "Really? Out of all this, you make the very best burger in town?"

Now, if you hear that the place down the street that serves only ramen is five-star ramen, the best that you're ever going to have—like, it's a much more believable argument, right? The same's true with, like, if you've got a "do-everything" type of handyman, you know? Is that the best person to diagnose your foundation issue? Is that the first person you're going to call to fix your foundation if there's a problem? Probably not.

Or if you, like in medicine, think about if you get diagnosed with a serious issue, and are you going to pick the doctor who just does that one thing all the time? Like, that's the only thing that they do every day, all day? Or are you going to pick the doctor that says they do cardiology, they do dermatology, they do orthopedics, they do some nutrition counseling on the side? Like, you already know the answer, right? And that is delusion, and once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere.

So, you know, it's like a lot in sales—like with the sales pitch—where we try to stack as many benefits as possible. And so you've got like a sales rep says, "Hey, this is going to—it's going to help save you money, it's going to save you time, it's going to reduce your risk, it's going to improve team morale, it's going to increase revenue, it's going to reduce, you know, expenses"—like, it's going to do everything. You hear that pitch and you go, "Really?" Right? Now you kind of half-believe everything that has been listed for you, you know? And with each additional one, it reduces the credibility of the main one or the first one.

You know, I'm sure you've seen, you know, there's like an entrepreneur on LinkedIn who's got—they're CEO of eight companies, okay? And they've got a content company, a consulting company, and they've got five other companies—of course they've got an AI company. Now, assuming this isn't Elon Musk, do you think any of those companies when you see that are going to be absolute best-in-class in their industry? Probably not.

Or you get proposals that go out after you've—after you've talked to a prospect, and, you know, you talk to a prospect about sales coaching, right? In my world. And then you send a proposal that says we're going to do sales coaching, we're going to help with recruiting, onboarding playbooks, CRM setup, marketing strategy, going to get, you know, a dashboard and weekly reporting—like, now they're confused on what they even bought.

And I've made this mistake personally, you know? It's like earlier in my career where I need to hire somebody, but I think, "Well, you know, if I could also get that person to also do this". So I need a sales closer, but it would also be nice if they could help with this and this and this. So you put up the job posting and it's like the requirements are, you know, it's—we need sales, project management experience, leadership, technical knowledge, CRM expertise, written communication, public speaking—and now the closer that you really needed shows to that job posting and's like, "All right, this isn't a sales job, this isn't for me". Again, like that's—that is the impact of Gold Delusion, okay?

Now, the flip side to this is absolute focus, and some companies like take this concept and run with it as a complete business strategy. So you take like a company like Raising Cane's, and they do nearly $4 billion a year and they've got five food items on their menu, right? They've got chicken fingers, fries, coleslaw, Texas toast, and a dipping sauce. One sauce, right? Like, you don't even get to pick. They—and you know that they've had conversations over the years about adding stuff to this menu: should they add wings, should they add sandwiches, could they add salads, could they add this, could they add that? They won't, right? Because that constraint is the business.

Another example—it's restaurant too, but it's like Five Guys. When Five Guys went into business, they were relentless about being the burger and fries company, and that's like—that's all they wanted to do. And, you know, so you've got McDonald's over here that's trying to put, you know, fruit into the side items of kids' meals instead of french fries and adding salads and adding, you know, becoming a cafe and all these other sorts of things. So while they've got 50 things on the menu trying to please everybody, Five Guys said, "We're going to be burgers and fries," and people believe their burgers and fries are worth twice the price.

And a non-food example is WD-40. It was wild to learn—like, they do nearly $600 million a year on one product. That's it—like, that blue and yellow can. For 70 years they've been in business, and you know that they've had conversations too about, "Hey, should we do some other sprays? How should we leverage this brand and the logo? Like, should we do some other lubricants, cleaning supplies?" And they haven't. Like, and that's because when you hear WD-40, you don't wonder what it does; you know what it does and you know that it works, right? And that's what zero delusion looks like.

Some businesses run with this concept as a business strategy, but a lot of people I work with—and you, for—if you're listening—may be like an IT company, maybe you've got multiple offers and multiple services that you're already offering. Say you're like a full-service IT company, right? "Hey, Ray, that's cool, but I'm not WD-40, I can't just offer one thing". If you're a full-service IT company, you know, you've got help desk, you've got cybersecurity, cloud, you know, compliance, VOIP—I mean, you've got—you've got a lot happening there, you can't really pretend that you do just one. And you're right; like if you want to be a fully outsourced IT provider, you can't really shrink the business down to one service.

But that's not—like that's not the only way to think about the Gold Delusion effect. Like you take Five Guys and Raising Cane's, WD-40—they leverage zero delusion by changing what they do. But you can also leverage that same psychology and the perception of credibility about the benefits that you offer by changing what you say about what you do.

Go look at your homepage. If the first thing that someone sees above the fold is, "Hey, we're the best at cybersecurity and cloud migration and help desk and compliance and voice and backup and disaster and you know, this and this and this," you are the 12-page restaurant menu. And the prospect who came looking for cybersecurity now trusts you to do that less because of everything else that you've listed.

And the same thing applies with all of your sales and marketing—like, that's just one example—like trying to convince people that you can do everything really well typically leads to them believing that you're the best at nothing, which isn't where you want to go.

So, what do you do instead? You zoom out—like, you go up a level. So, like for example with above the fold on the website, you don't lead with the services you offer, right? You lead with one outcome: "We make IT the last thing you worry about," or "Your entire IT department without the overhead," or "Start making technology your competitive advantage". But you've got one promise, one belief, and it's an umbrella that's big enough to basically hold all your services underneath without listing them all and killing your credibility for each one. And then below the fold, you've got clickable cards for each of the things that you do—cybersecurity, help desk, cloud, whatever it is—and each one links to its own page where that service gets a singular undiluted message treatment, right? Like, it's not going to get diluted by having cybersecurity also mention three other things. So it gets hyper-focused that way.

And the same thing actually applies to like your sales pitch. You don't want to stack every single benefit that you can offer into a slide deck and give that to a prospect and expect that to close them. Again, more is not necessarily better.

So, sticking with, you know, IT company, if you've run a proper discovery with a prospect and say you find six things that are a challenge with their current provider or the incumbent provider—you know, they've got slow response time, bad communication, security gaps, the tech stack sucks, satisfaction, you know, scores like from a customer service standpoint suck, they haven't done an audit in a couple years, whatever it is. The normal instinct is to address all six in the proposal and then throw on more for good measure—like just throw in the kitchen sink, right? Add on like certification and years of business and eight other things because I'm going to address all six of those, I'm going to add eight more, and then this is going to close the deal. It's like shock and awe.

But more is not better. Like now you know, like Gold Delusion happens, and so every item that you're adding dilutes the one before it. Ten selling points don't actually hit ten times harder; each one hits a fraction as hard. And so the discipline is getting really surgical.

And so, when I'm thinking about proposals, I think, "Okay, how do I—how do I get surgical with this and hit on the things that I need to hit on without diluting as much as I can?" Well, two questions you can ask yourself: like what did they tell you was most important to them? In the discovery, in the conversations, go back and listen to it—what did they tell you was most important? Start there, prioritize that. And then what are the things that are going to have the biggest impact on their business, particularly in the areas that seem important to them? So if they reference that sales and marketing or growing revenues are their biggest issue, you know, look at what you found in discovery or if you did like a network assessment or something like that—what are the areas that are going to impact them in the areas that they care about most? Then prioritize that.

But you want to resist the urge to like throw in the kitchen sink thinking it's going to help you close the deal because the "more is better" mindset kind of backfires on you. And so it's again, it's not—not shock and awe, it's how to get really surgical with this.

And what was interesting was the researchers found that it wasn't just that people believed less; it was that the association between the product and the benefit got weaker because they measured it in reaction times from the respondents. So, more benefits that you attach to one thing, the weaker the mental connection becomes. And that's actually how beliefs form in people.

So, whether it's your homepage, whether it's your pitch, your proposal, like marketing emails, LinkedIn headline, whatever it is—the discipline is really the same: less is more. One message per moment—and not because you can only do one thing, but because they can only believe one thing at a time. And it's—it's easy to say, it's harder to do and put into practice, I know that. But if you come back to this and know that it's rooted in psychology and understand that every time you're stacking more, you're diluting the effect of everything that you've put on, it helps enforce the discipline.

So, I hope it helps. Adios.