Archives
All archived posts.
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A product description is not a value proposition.
The document arrives from product under a different name, full of enthusiasm and the corporate holy trinity. A value proposition has four parts, and a product description answers roughly one of them.
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A filter is not an audience.
Two buyers with identical job titles can be in opposite situations, and the business card cannot tell them apart. A filter shows you who is allowed on the list, not who actually has the problem, so define the audience by behaviour and situation instead.
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The sales team doesn’t cold-call Antarctica.
Sooner or later every kickoff asks who the product is for, and the answer is always everyone. It is the one answer nobody in the room objects to, and the only one that cannot be executed.
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You find what you came looking for.
Customer conversations rarely find problems. They confirm the one you walked in with. The filter sits in the hearing, not the asking, and there is a boring fix that works.
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Marketing only describes the external problem.
B2B marketing consistently describes only one layer of the problem. The buyer experiences four. The other three are the reason they don't call back.
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Every problem has four layers.
Most B2B companies describe the external problem accurately and then ask for the sale. There are four layers to every real problem, and the one that determines whether a deal closes is usually the last one most marketers think to name.
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The part you can point at is not the whole problem
A founder described the problem his product solves in purely functional terms. Everything he said was true. But the external problem is only the surface, and it is not the part that tells you whether anything is worth building.
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The detector wasn't the problem. The smoke was.
The smoke detector was too close to the kitchen. Instead of fixing the smoke, I dealt with the alarm. Every B2B company does a version of this with leads.
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The canary doesn't cause the mine to be dangerous
Replace the agency. Rewrite the messaging. Rebuild the funnel. The pipeline stays flat until someone goes back to the foundation that was never fixed.
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Problem discovery isn't the same as problem construction
Most founders don't start with a problem. They start with a product, then construct a problem to fit. A constructed problem behaves nothing like a discovered one.
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Your expertise is the obstacle
The longer you spend inside your product, the more completely you lose the ability to see it from the outside. The curse of knowledge in B2B marketing.