Our main competitor is buyer inaction

Our main competitor isn't the businesses that are selling stuff which customers see as being comparable to what we're selling. Our main competitor is buyer inaction. Most lost sales don't go to the competition. They die because the buyer decided living with the problem is less painful than solving it. We spend enormous energy painting a picture of what life looks like after buying from us, and we're usually pretty good at articulating that future customer state. Where things go wrong is when the buyer's present state isn't uncomfortable enough for them to actually take action. A buyer who's been tolerating a problem for months or even years has already built workarounds and normalized the cost. That pain tolerance is our actual competition, the status quo. No amount of us promising rainbows and unicorns will overcome that inertia if the pain of staying feels less than changing things. We keep assuming the prospect already knows how much the problem is costing them, but they're often unaware because the cost accumulates in places that they're not tracking. And this is what makes many of us consistently wrong in the ways that we're selling. We'll walk into a conversation armed with outcome statements. We've rehearsed and refined them a million times. We're so confident with them landing, we don't even think whether they're appropriate for what the buyer's looking to hear. We're banging on about our platform reduces onboarding time by 40%, or, you know, we'll save you 15 hours a week. You know, which way will we be legitimate? And provable claims, but they're not landing on someone whose brain puts workarounds and procedures in place so they no longer see their issues are problems, but they see them as manageable issues. We're trying to sell a cure to someone who's forgotten they're sick. There's a well-known cognitive bias in behavioral science that explains why people weigh potential losses more heavily than equivalent gains. In other words, the feeling of losing $50 feels a lot worse than the feeling of finding $50 feels good. It's a pretty famous theory that dates back to at least the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work in the late '70s. Now, if you're a marketer who actually knows something about marketing, You're probably already aware of loss aversion theory. So why is it that when we're in front of a prospect, we do the precise opposite of what we should be doing? You know, we lead with the gain, the benefits, while the prospect sits there thinking, hmm, would be nice, but you know, what I've got works well enough. Those Scotch tape and string workarounds that the buyers created become invisible to them over time. At a certain point, they stop feeling like workarounds and start feeling like it's just how things are done. They no longer feel like problems anymore. They're just how it is on a Tuesday. This is what we're actually up against. We're not competing with another vendor's pitch deck. We're competing on the gravitational pull of familiarity. Where most sales approaches fail down, is that they treat the conversation as if the buyer has already decided to change and is now evaluating their options. But more often the buyer hasn't committed to change at all. They're still weighing whether disruption of doing something different is worth it. Most of us don't even consider that side of things and jump straight on to why we're the best option, which is irrelevant if the buyer hasn't decided whether it's worth moving or sticking with what they've already got. It almost sounds counterintuitive, right? We think being positive and aspirational is what motivates buyers. And in certain contexts, yes, it's true, but only once they've already committed to solving the problem, making it go away. But before that commitment exists, outcome selling is just noise. The more useful conversation for everyone is helping the prospect quantify what doing nothing actually costs. Not in a manipulative way, you know, with some contrived ROI calculator that spits out a conveniently enormous number, but by asking questions that make the invisible costs visible again. You know, what happens if this problem is still here in 12 months? How much time do you— does your team spend on workarounds that wouldn't exist if this was solved? Now these aren't closing questions, but they are awareness questions. We're helping the buyer see what their brain has quietly edited out. The psychology behind this is about how we habituate to persistent stimuli. If you live near a church that has a clock tower, right, after a while you're no longer bothered by the hourly chimes, right? Now, while that's great when you're trying to get some sleep, it's less useful when the noise is a business inefficiency that's been quietly compounding for maybe years. Most of us won't do this because we think it's too adversarial. We think that we're being confrontational by pointing out the buyer's problem instead of offering a solution. We've been trained to lead with benefits and keep things optimistic. But I think there's a big difference between being adversarial and being honest about what something costs. The prospect doesn't need us to be their therapist, but they may need someone willing to show them where the bucket is leaking, even if they've been ignoring it. Inaction always feels safe. Making it feel expensive is where our work lies. 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. 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