Don't get caught smoking your competitors'
marketing.
Like,
just because they said it doesn't mean it's anything.
You've said that you see about 40 to 60%
of B2B deals end in no decision.
Most marketing leaders in this case,
they blame sales execution.
You in your case,
you usually blame positioning.
Sometimes customers will tell you it's too expensive,
but what they really mean is it's too risky.
What if I pick this thing and,
you know,
I get in trouble with my boss?
because we don't
things don't work out.
And so this idea of indecision is the main thing that's causing these companies to basically go dark right at the very end.
And in a lot of cases,
the company even says,
yes,
we picked you,
let's go,
and then they ghost you.
Their worst competition is that.
They win the deal,
but they never get the money.
When you were speaking about the homepage redesign,
because marketers are bored,
usually I see two things happening with my clients as well.
Is number one,
they see their competitor change their homepage or change something on the website.
And it's like,
because they did it,
it means they're right.
But you know,
you know,
this feeling like if they did this,
it means they're right.
and
Because we haven't changed,
it means we are wrong.
But it doesn't mean anything.
Usually I'm like,
yeah,
but if everybody thinks this way,
then you're always changing.
Because anyway,
market is changing,
is moving every time.
There's a lot of bad marketing out there,
man.
Because they're running a campaign talking about something or changing their stuff talking about something,
it doesn't mean it's working.
So where we really have to pay attention,
is again,
if you have a sales team where we really have to pay attention is what's happening in sales.
So do all of a sudden we start to see them showing up in deals because that message is really hitting and customers are starting to consider them where they didn't before.
That's scary.
But I had an old boss and he used to,
his line when people talked about that is he's like,
don't get caught smoking your competitor's marketing.
Just because they said it.
Doesn't mean it's anything,
right?
And they might change it again two weeks from now because it ain't working.
Like,
you know,
I think it's okay to stay on top of what your competitors are doing and have a look at that stuff.
But what you see externally on the marketing side is often not a reflection of the go-to-market strategy or the sales strategy.
You don't know what their segmentation looks like.
You don't know where they're getting traction and where they're not.
You don't know where they're struggling and where they're not.
Where you really see it is in sales.
Like if they start showing up in deals,
well,
that's where we got to take it seriously.
But often what you'll get in marketing is the marketers are very afraid of the companies that are spending a lot of money on marketing.
And because they're everywhere and they're competing for marketing dollars or whatever and channels.
And they're like,
oh,
man,
I see these guys everywhere.
But we've seen lots and lots of cases of companies that raise a spectacular amount of money.
blow their brains out on marketing and then flame out.
And two years later,
we don't see them anywhere anymore.
Oh yeah.
And especially in the past five years,
we've seen a lot of companies like these.
Right.
Yeah.
So,
so yeah,
so I'm with you,
like,
just because they're doing it,
it doesn't mean you should be doing it.
Like,
yeah.
And you know,
it's always this thing,
like,
if,
if the competitor moving is,
pulling the market with him or her,
It means the first to speak is the one who wins,
but it doesn't work this way.
And the second thing I wanted to say is...
If only we'd all just be moving really fast,
everything would look different if that was true.
Yeah,
true.
And second thing is,
and I think your example with the vibe coding tools and,
hey,
these are our new competitors,
et cetera.
I also think sometimes a lot of people,
they want to be part of the cool kids.
And you see,
like,
for the past two years,
the vibe coding tools like Replit and Lovable,
et cetera,
they attracted so much attention that
I feel a lot of companies wanted to be part of this cool kids club.
And so I'm not surprised you see a lot of companies wanting to.
What I see is a lot of companies are scared stiff,
right?
They're like,
you know,
if you...
If you could look into your crystal ball and say,
man,
like maybe someone could build a tool that looks like ours,
only super highly customized to their situation and do it without any real.
like without having a development team and without,
you know,
having a software company,
like you say,
like with seemingly very little effort.
And,
you know,
potentially we get to a spot where that is true,
but we're also notoriously bad at predicting the future.
So just because it,
you know,
that is one potential future.
There's another potential future.
where,
you know,
that becomes a bit like,
like when I started out and when I started in tech,
everybody,
everybody built their own stuff.
Like if you wanted a CRM,
you built your own CRM,
or you got a company to build a CRM for you.
And then you babysat that CRM after you didn't buy package software.
There was no package software for anything back when I started.
And then package software came and people were like,
wow,
I could just buy a CRM.
I don't have to code my own.
That's amazing.
And you know,
We were selling packaged software.
We'd come in and say,
look,
do you want to be a software company or do you want to be a bank?
Why don't you go be a bank and let us be a software company and let us handle the software?
Now we're potentially entering this age where maybe if you're a bank,
you are a software company.
Maybe if you're a bank,
you could.
The question is timelines.
Is that next year?
The year after?
Five years from now?
Maybe we get to a point where
You know,
we hit some kind of a wall on that stuff and say,
you know what,
it's good for prototyping and we can get in certain kinds of applications.
We can do it.
But other kinds of applications,
we can't because of whatever there's security or compliance things or things that are difficult or I don't know what.
But we don't know what that looks like yet.
We don't know what that looks like.
So it's important to be on top of it and to be thinking about it.
for your investors.
That's a totally different conversation.
So your investors,
they've got a different view of the world than your customers.
Your customers are thinking about right now,
right?
So your customers are like,
I got to get this problem solved right now.
And what's the best way to solve it?
And I'm going to spend some money solving this problem right now.
Your investors are like,
is this company still going to be good in 10 years?
So you may,
in your investor positioning,
have to position against those vibe coding tools because Thanks.
Who knows what 10 years looks like?
And if the investors are very sold on this idea that,
you know,
in the future,
everybody's going to have their own custom software,
well,
then you're going to have to have a response for that.
But do not confuse that with your customer positioning for right now.
Right now,
you've got to fight the fight that you're in right now to do deals right now to get customers money right now.
And if they're not looking at vibe coding tools,
you don't have to position against them.
I agree.
All right.
You've said that you see about 40 to 60%
of B2B deals end in no decision.
It's not like the company lost to a competitor.
They just abandoned.
And you know,
most marketing leaders in this case,
they blame sales execution.
But you in your case,
you usually blame positioning.
Sort of.
I mean,
it's not always that.
Yeah.
So walk us through that argument and that thinking.
Yeah.
So there's some interesting data around this.
So if you read,
Matt Dixon put out a book called The Jolt Effect.
I forget when that came out,
a couple of years back.
And what they had done was a study.
They did it during COVID and everybody moved to not having face-to-face sales meetings and everyone is doing meetings on Zoom.
And they worked with a bunch of companies and they analyzed 2 million sales calls.
And then they worked with the company and they analyzed first sales call and then what eventually happened with the deal.
So did the deal close?
Did it not close?
What happened?
And they came up with this number,
which was 40 to 60%,
depending on what industry you're in,
whatever,
46%
of sales purchase processes,
meaning they got into the purchase process.
They looked at stuff 40 to 60%
of the time,
the deal ended in no decision.
So because they're doing this big study,
they could also look at,
well,
why was that?
You know,
so they interviewed customers and find out,
you know,
what was this no decision all about in the majority of the time.
Now,
sometimes the no decision was,
um,
the company looked at the other options and decided that the thing they were doing now was good enough.
And,
you know,
the other options look,
maybe it's too hard.
I don't know what,
but the,
but you know,
I'll just stick with the thing I've got,
which might be legacy software.
It might be
doing it manually or it might be whatever.
But the majority of the cases,
that was not true.
In the majority of the cases.
They ended up in a point of indecision.
So the solutions all kind of look the same or worse.
The solutions look scary,
like there is risk involved.
So,
you know,
what if I pick this thing and it doesn't work the way the vendor says it's going to work?
Or what if I pick this thing and,
you know,
I get in trouble with my boss because,
you know,
things don't work out or it goes over budget or something like that?
Or what if I pick this thing?
And the users all hate it.
And then they don't adopt it.
And then the project fails.
And so this idea of indecision is the main thing that's causing these companies to basically go dark right at the very end.
And in a lot of cases,
the company even says,
yes,
we picked you.
Let's go.
And then they ghost you.
So if you talk to companies that sell
B2B enterprise software.
Everybody,
this is their worst competition.
Their worst competition is that.
They win the deal,
but they never get the money.
And so what we have to worry about is,
well,
what's causing that indecision?
So if the indecision is the products all kind of look the same,
well,
that's a failure of positioning,
right?
I failed to position myself as being anything special from the other guys.
Company couldn't make a decision and feel confident that they were picking the best thing for them.
deal didn't happen.
So that's a positioning thing.
We need to get really sharp on our differentiated value.
Why us versus the other guys?
But then there's also other things that we need to think about.
So,
you know,
has the company,
does the company feel confident that they understand all the other guys too?
Not just you,
but all the other guys.
So one of the things we can do is in our positioning,
make it very clear,
Here's what the other guys do.
And here's what we do.
And this is how it's different.
You might actually pick the other guys if you have this situation.
But if you're in this situation,
you should pick us and here's why.
So that education is helping make the customer feel confident that they've done their due diligence.
They're not going to make a bad choice here.
The other thing is this concept of risk.
And particularly if we're talking about B2B enterprise software,
it's usually risk around the deployment.
is this
project going to fail?
Nobody wants that.
And so that's where we need to emphasize all the things we can do to de-risk the solution.
So do we have professional services to help them?
What does our training look like?
How hands-on are we after this deal?
What can we do to make the customer feel good that,
you know,
they're going to take this big risk on buying our stuff?
What are we going to do to ensure that nothing bad happens?
Sometimes we do this with packaging and pricing.
So you've seen companies do something in their terms and conditions that,
you know,
if the thing is not deployed in this much time,
you're going to get your money back or you're going to get,
you know,
we're going to give you three months free or we're going to give the deployment months free.
And so,
you know,
you don't start paying until this thing is successfully deployed.
The other thing I've seen a lot of companies I've worked with is if the deal's too big,
it often feels too scary.
to bite it all off at once.
So we'll break the deal into chunks or phases and say,
okay,
we're going to start with phase one.
Phase one's kind of small and easy,
and we're going to get to know each other.
We're going to close that deal,
deploy that deal.
Now you feel confident that we do what we say we do.
We can deliver on our promises.
If that goes all good,
then we're going to go to stage two.
Then we're going to go to stage three.
So there's a lot of things we can do to kind of make the customer feel more comfortable and get them out of this situation of indecision.
But we got to kind of assess the indecision first and decide what our best course of action is and what do we need to change.
Sometimes that's a positioning thing and sometimes that's a lot of objection handling and sometimes even like changing packaging and pricing or the way you do deployment so that the customer feels more confident that this deployment just isn't going to fail.
Yeah,
but it's not like what you're saying is that most of the companies usually they want to really.
increase the value of the product.
But in the cases you just mentioned,
it's like,
you can increase the value of the product or you can decrease the value of the risks.
And in this case,
you can win over by reducing the risk for the customer.
Right.
So often,
like I've seen very little,
like people will come to me and they'll say,
well,
price is the objection.
It's,
you know,
the thing costs too much.
So if we reduce the price,
would that work?
Often that's not.
really the objection.
The objection is more around this risk.
And so
I don't think you should necessarily jump to the conclusion that price it's sometimes customers will tell you it's too expensive,
but what they really mean is it's too risky.
And so again,
if we could break the deal into pieces,
I'm not dropping the price.
I'm just dropping how much you have to commit to right now.
And then I'm going to have a phase two and then a phase three.
Or we're going to start with something here.
We're going to prove the value there.
Or sometimes we'll do a stage deployment.
Like I worked at a company where we're selling software to retail stores.
And we had this very,
very big deal that was like tens of thousands of retail stores.
But instead of selling them,
you know,
all 30,000 stores all at once,
we're going to say,
look,
we're going to do a pilot.
We're going to do that with five.
And then we're going to roll out to 100 stores.
Then we're going to do this region.
And then we're going to go region by region after that.
And so the customer is much more comfortable with that because things didn't have the opportunity to go way off the rails in this ginormous deal.
we were going to take these little baby steps so that the customer felt good and you know
As we were going along,
we were proving ourselves.
We're developing the relationships and we're building that trust as we go along.
Okay.
Sometimes you can't do that,
but where you can break things up,
it's usually a good way to take risks.
Sure.
Do it.
Just do it.
Don't let your dreams be dreams.
Yesterday,
you said tomorrow.
So just do it.
Make your dreams come true.
Just do it.