Every buyer interaction either confirms or contradicts what we claim about ourselves.

We're accidentally training our prospects to distrust us, and then we're wondering why our conversion rates are falling through the floor. The majority of businesses spend enormous amounts on messaging and refining positioning statements and articulating what makes us different. We believe that if we could just explain ourselves more clearly, buyers would finally understand why they should be buying from us rather than someone else. But people aren't sitting there with spreadsheets doing rational comparisons. Their brains are running a— a more primitive OS that hasn't changed much in millennia. Something that treats uncertainty and friction as signals to back away. Usually this backing away is down to them not believing some outlandish claim that we're making. But this time it's not that. They're retreating because— everything else about the buying experience contradicts the assumptions of what those claims mean. When we say we're transparent, yet we're vague when we talk about pricing because we say we want to qualify the prospect. Or we'll talk about being customer-focused while our actual processes are optimizing for our own convenience rather than theirs. Basic information isn't easy to find on the website, salespeople talk at buyers, and you know, so it goes on. But each of these moments creates a feeling. The buyer may not be able to articulate what's making them uncomfortable, but their brain is well aware of what's going on and is silently keeping score. We think we're competing on the strength of our offering when we're really being evaluated on whether dealing with us feels risky or safe. Organisations build entire departments around managing customer perception, while continuing to ignore the actual experience. Marketing crafts messages about how easy we are to work with, meanwhile procurement requires vendors to fill in a 47-page questionnaire before they're allowed to speak to a human being. Or sales talks about partnership, while legal makes us sign some big huge contract that reads more like a preparation for divorce proceedings than anything else. I don't think there are many people out there who are connecting these dots. Finance wants to protect margins, consequently pricing becomes this elaborate negotiation tango. Operation wants efficiency, so customer service gets routed through 3 levels of bureaucracy before anyone with decision-making authority can get involved. IT, on the other hand, wants security, So onboarding requires more credentials than accessing documents about Area 51. While each of these decisions makes perfect sense to the department making it, buyers don't experience our business department by department. They experience the cumulative weight of every touchpoint where we've prioritized what's convenient for us over what's clear for them. We've convinced ourselves that buying decisions happen in the rational part of the brain. That if our product is objectively better, buyers will recognize that and choose us. But humans don't work that way. We decide based upon how something feels to us. And then we reverse engineer the rational justification after the fact. So a buyer visits our website but can't immediately work out what we actually do because the site's full of corporate speak and jargon that doesn't mean anything. Bing! That's a score against us. Then they try to find pricing and run into some wishy-washy language about custom solutions and enterprise packaging, which again means nothing, and they still don't even know if they're in the right place. Bing! Another score against us. Right? Finally, after, you know, wrestling with a chatbot or an automated phone system, they finally get to speak to a real living, breathing human being. But who then launches into a huge list of qualification questions without asking a single thing about the buyer's actual individual situation. Bing! Right? Remember, the buyer's brain is keeping score of all of this. Each friction point is an incremental withdrawal from an account that didn't have much in it to start with. And eventually they're withdrawing more than they banked, so they run away and try somebody else, and we're left scratching our heads wondering what went wrong. We'll sit in meetings trying to figure out why closure rates are down. We'll blame the market. We'll blame the competition. The lack of brand awareness. The economy. Sunspots. Chemtrails. 5G. Whatever the reason, it can't be anything to do with us, can it? And then some well-meaning soul will commission some research to understand why prospects aren't converting. The research comes back talking about lack of differentiation or an unclear value proposition. So what do we do? We go away to refine our messaging. Yet again, we're continuing to solve for the wrong problem. The gap between what we claim and how we actually behave is where trust goes to die. Someone can have the sharpest value proposition ever written, but if the experience of trying to buy from them introduces unnecessary obstacles or confusion, then none of that matters. Sure, sometimes friction is unavoidable as part of the sales process. I mean, if you're selling some large enterprise software deployment, then it's a complex process. But buyers understand that. But what they don't understand, or want to put up with, is why we make simple things complicated. Why does a straightforward question require 3 meetings before getting an answer? Why does our website have 17 different calls to action? But none of them help the person who just wants to know if we're remotely a fit for what they want to buy. Buying in a B2B environment is a stressful process for whoever's doing it because they're putting their professional reputation on the line. If this all goes sideways, they're the person who looks bad in front of their boss and has to explain why they made a bad choice. That anxiety is sitting there in the background for every interaction that they have with us. If we're laying on additional uncertainty with convoluted pricing and processes and a perceived unwillingness to give straight answers to direct questions, we're doing nothing more than amplifying their stress rather than reducing it. If we look at businesses that are winning today, they aren't always the ones with the best product or the sharpest pricing. Sometimes they're just the ones that don't set off alarm bells during the evaluation process. They might— buying feel less risky instead of more risky, which is why we need to forensically examine our buying experience from the prospect's perspective instead of ours. We know how everything works and why pricing is the way it is, or why we need specific information before we can move forward. But someone encountering us for the first time doesn't know any of that. They're trying to figure it out and understand whether whether we're worth the risk or not. And every bit of that friction adds risk to that calculation. Most businesses won't actually bother to look at this with any real rigor. Because it's far easier to keep tweaking value propositions or blaming the competition than it is to consider that we might be the ones who are the problem. Every buyer interaction either confirms or contradicts what we're claiming about ourselves. Many businesses are contradicting themselves dozens of times before a prospect reaches a sales conversation. And then they act surprised when establishing trust becomes difficult. We can keep refining positioning statements. We can add AI chatbots to our websites. We can A/B test our homepage until the cows come home. Or we could examine why people who start evaluating us keep disappearing halfway through the process. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.