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Be contentious: the importance of disqualification

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

Most startups happen when someone finds a problem that they’ve experienced themselves, or discovered that someone else has.

Now the challenge is to find people who are ready to pay to solve the problem… and that can be hard. Generally there are a number of reasons that startup marketing and sales is hard:

  1. People don’t want to hear they have a problem
  2. They don’t think they have a problem
  3. They don’t believe their problem can be fixed
  4. They might think they have a different problem to be solved
  5. They think there’s a different way to solve the problem

These challenges manifest in many different ways: lack of TOFU engagement, poor sales funnel metrics, more rejection than you’d like in the sales process – ultimately, hitting the bottom line.

But because we’re human, we try to cure the symptom rather than address the cause. A misdiagnosis means you tackle the small problems individually, rather than seeing the bigger picture. You’ll end up wasting time, effort, energy, and money trying to overcome small rocks… and underestimating the mountain ahead of you.

Along with everything else we’ve covered here on Building Momentum – like niches for riches, using unconventional wisdom, understanding your customer and their buying journey – I wanted to offer another principle that helps to prevent the pain from the source.

Be contentious

Contention means having an opinion, an assertion, and maintaining it in argument. That isn’t the same as ‘strong opinions, weakly held’. An unwavering belief that you’re comfortable to shout about and be known for.

Contentious beliefs in marketing and SaaS can be almost anything, from beliefs about pricing or product architecture, to the application of technology or in response to accepted wisdom about a particular problem.

Good contentious beliefs are based on customer insight. Bad contentious beliefs are internal assumptions, applied broadly.

In my post looking at a book on the American Republican party messaging machine, Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, one of the main concepts is that frames (“mental structures that shape the way we see the world”) need to already exist in our customer’s minds to be activated. We cannot create framing, promote them, and expect them to be transmitted with success.

Contention leads to disqualification

Think about a newspaper that you actively choose not to read, or a store you choose not to shop at. Is the primary reason for that something that the business knows and promotes about themselves?

That’s an example of proactive disqualification in action.

Being contentious acts as a filter. It can draw in the believers, those who recognize the frame — and ward off those that aren’t a good fit.

Disqualification is at least 10x more important in product/marketing/sales, but often not a focus. Founders/marketers/sales reps are so keen to try and target everyone they possibly could, leading to the issues described in the first half of this post.

When you can attract the right prospects, and prevent bad-fit customers from getting into your pipeline, you’ll lose less energy, be more focused, and build a better understanding of what really matters to the intended audience without irrelevant noise.

This isn’t to say that you should only every talk to the believers, and ignore those who aren’t, creating an echo chamber. There’s a balance between hearing what you want, and hearing what you need.

Look to your customers to find opportunities for contention

Again — and I want to iterate this as strongly as possible — you need to discover how to be contentious in the mind of your customer. The framing needs to pre-exist – it cannot be forced. Talk to your best-fit customers, find out what they think about life, the universe, and everything in it. There, you’ll find opportunities to offer alternative viewpoints that resonate, and find it easier to grow your business.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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