Uncover It: The Most Valuable Thing You Know Is the Thing You Think Is Obvious

Discover proved you own something. Uncover is where you find out what it actually is. Knowing the asset exists and being able to say what it is are two very different problems, and the second one is harder.

Packaging Intelligence is the practice of capturing a packaging company's niche expertise and organizing it so the company can find and win more of its best-fit customers.

I asked a packaging company owner a simple question last year. What do you know that your competitors do not?

He thought about it for a while. Then he said, honestly, nothing really. We just do it right.

That man had been in the business thirty one years. He could look at a sample and tell you where it was going to fail before anyone ran a test. He had a customer list full of accounts that had stayed with him through two recessions and a price increase. He had walked into a plant in the middle of a shutdown and found the problem in twenty minutes when the equipment guys had been on it for two days.

Nothing really.

That is the whole problem with this step, and it is why most companies never get past it. The expert is the last person in the building who can see his own expertise.

Why you cannot see it

Knowledge stops feeling like knowledge once you have held it long enough. It turns into common sense. It becomes the way things obviously are, and things that are obvious do not feel worth saying out loud.

So the man who knows the most says the least. He assumes everyone in the industry knows what he knows, because everyone he talks to does. His customers know it. His competitors know it. His own people know it. The room he stands in has agreed on it for thirty years.

What he forgets is that the buyer is not in that room. The buyer is three weeks into a problem he has never seen before, typing a question into a search bar at ten at night, and the thing your veteran considers too obvious to mention is the exact answer that would end his search.

Obvious to you is not obvious. Obvious to you is thirty years of compression.

Discover proves there is ore. Uncover finds out what it is.

These two get blurred constantly, so here is the line between them.

Discover is about existence. You have an asset, it is real, it is worth money, and here are the four places it hides. That step ends when a company stops saying we are not really that different and starts saying there is something here we have never counted.

Uncover is about substance. Now that we know something is there, what specifically is it. What do we know that is not written down anywhere, that a competitor cannot say, and that a buyer would pay to understand.

The difference matters because the two steps fail differently. Companies that skip Discover never start. Companies that skip Uncover start and then produce material about packaging in general, because they never stopped to find out what they specifically owned.

Discover can be done from a conference room. Uncover cannot. It only happens in front of the people who hold the knowledge, and it takes the right questions, because the direct question does not work. Ask a veteran what he knows and he will tell you nothing really. You have to come at it sideways.

The five questions that pull it out

These are the ones that work. Not because they are clever, but because none of them asks a man to summarize himself. Each one asks about something that actually happened.

1. What do customers get wrong before they call you?

Every specialist has a list of recurring mistakes he has watched people make for decades. He fixes them so routinely that he has stopped noticing he is fixing them.

That list is not a complaint. It is a content library, and every item on it is a question a buyer is searching right now.

2. What do you turn down, and why?

Refusal is the clearest signal of judgment there is. Anybody can say what they do. Very few can say precisely what they will not do and explain exactly why.

A company that can articulate what it is wrong for is instantly more believable about what it is right for.

3. What can you read off a sample in ten seconds that takes someone else a week?

This is where the compression lives. The instant read. The thing your best person does without conscious thought is a competent person elsewhere has to work through step by step.

Slow that down, explain it, and you have something nobody else in your category has published.

4. What went wrong once that you have never let happen again?

The scars. Every serious company has a handful of expensive lessons that are now baked into how it operates.

Nobody wants to talk about these, which is exactly why they carry more weight than anything on your capabilities page. A supplier who will tell you what went wrong is a supplier who is telling you the truth about everything else.

5. Which customer would you take at a lower price, and what makes him different?

This is the best-fit question in disguise, and it works because it forces a real answer. Everyone claims they know their ideal customer. Ask which one they would take a haircut to keep, and you find out what they actually value.

That answer is the specification for every buyer you should be chasing.

How you know you actually uncovered something

Two tests. Both are simple and both are unforgiving.

The discomfort test

If the answer makes nobody in the room shift in his seat, you have not gotten to it yet.

Real expertise almost always contains something you would rather soften. A failure rate. A material that is oversold. A category where the honest answer is that you are not the right supplier. If everything you uncovered is flattering, you uncovered your brochure.

The fingerprint test

Could any other company in your category have said this exact thing? If yes, it is not yours. It is industry wallpaper.

What you are looking for is the sentence that could only have come out of your building, with a specific year in it, a specific line, a specific customer you cannot name but can describe.

Generic passes every internal review and moves nobody. Specific makes people nervous and convinces everybody.

Why this is worth doing now

Two reasons, and they run on different clocks.

The commercial one. Buyers do their research long before they contact a supplier, and increasingly they do it by asking a full question and reading the answer. What gets returned is whoever has published the clearest, most trustworthy explanation of that specific problem. In most packaging niches nobody has published anything at all. That is a strange and temporary situation, and it ends one niche at a time, whenever somebody decides to fill it.

The other one is quieter and it has a hard deadline. Most packaging companies have one or two people carrying knowledge that exists in no document and has no successor. Every year that goes by uncaptured is a bet that nothing happens to them. That is not a strategy. That is luck, and it runs out.

What this step is not

Uncover is not writing. Uncover is not publishing. Nothing goes on a website in this step.

Uncover is the inventory. It is walking out of a room with a written list of the things your company knows that nobody else does, ranked by how much a buyer would care. That is the whole job here, and it is enough for one step.

Getting that knowledge out of the heads and into a durable form is Capture. Turning it into something a buyer can read and a machine can quote is Develop. Do not run ahead.

The one thing to do this week

Sit down with the person in your company who knows the most and ask him question one. What do customers get wrong before they call you?

Do not take notes on your phone. Do not schedule an hour. Ask it and then be quiet, and let the silence sit long enough to be uncomfortable, because the first answer is never the real one. The real one shows up about ninety seconds in, usually starting with the words, well, the thing nobody understands is.

Write that down. That is the first thing you have ever uncovered.

Go deeper on Uncover: Consider Below:

Why your best expert says he knows nothing special?

What customers get wrong before they call you, and why that list is worth money?

The instant read: what your veteran sees in ten seconds?

Why the scars are worth more than the capabilities page?

The discomfort test and the fingerprint test?

LINK: Packaging Intelligence Audit START WITH YOUR OWN COMPANY

Find what makes you irreplaceable

If you run a packaging company and you want help naming what you actually know, start with the Packaging Intelligence Audit. A straight read on where your expertise is trapped and where your best buyers are already looking.

David Marinac . ABC Packaging Direct . DavidMarinac.com . 216.373.1005 . SpecPkgMarketplace.com

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LINK: What is Packaging Intelligence

LINK: Discover Packaging Intelligence

LINK: Capture Packaging Intelligence

LINK: Develop Packaging Intelligence

LINK: Packaging Intelligence FAQs

LINK: Packaging Intelligence Glossary

LINK: Reach the Right People with Packaging Intelligence

LINK: Put Packaging Intelligence to Work

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