Do Ockham’s Razor and agency new business best practice work hand-in-hand? We think they can. If you aren’t familiar with Ockham’s Razor, here is a Wikipedia article.
Ockham’s razor (also written as Occams razor, and lex parsimoniae in Latin, which means law of parsimony) is a problem-solving principle attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. The principle can be interpreted as stating Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
In science, Ockham’s razor is used as a heuristic technique (discovery tool) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models, rather than as an arbiter between published models. In the scientific method, Ockham’s razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion.
For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives, because one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified; therefore, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.
The principal is well known in coding, for example, where the more lines of code there are the greater the chance of errors being made; hence the need to par code of unnecessary components.
So, going back to my original question. Can we use Ockham’s Razor and Agency New Business when deciding on how to go about new business outreach? The answer is, of course yes. If you have a very compelling reason why a prospect should meet with you, how do you get the message across to them? Tweet them? Comment on a LinkedIn article they have written?
Or how about choosing the most straightforward? Pick up the telephone and talk to them! Don’t have time or the personality to cold call them? Get someone else to do it for you – like us maybe.
