I talked to someone this week who was frustrated. “Marketing” wasn’t working, she said, and she wanted to know if I could “fix it.”
So I took a sip of tea and braced myself. She had a lot to tell me. (This happens a lot).
“Marketing” has become the catch-all word for anything that touches how a business shows up or gets attention. So marketing gets blamed for a lot of things, even when marketing isn’t actually the thing that’s broken.
In this one conversation, I heard three distinct problems. Only one of them was something I could fix.
The first was a commitment problem.
New messaging, abandoned after a few weeks because nobody responded right away. Positioning that lasted less than two months before getting scrapped. An offer that got some attention for three weeks, and when “no one bought,” the whole thing got labeled a failure and swapped out for the next idea. Pricing, target audience, channels, all of it in constant flux, and no one could keep it straight.
I can’t fix that. No one can, except her. Marketing is like exercise — you can’t go to the gym once and walk out with a new buff bod. It takes time and repetition. Every time you change the offer or the messaging or the audience, you are resetting the game. No progress is saved. Nothing is learned. You don’t know how to adapt because you’ve never given your market enough time to teach you anything.
This one is a business-owner problem. Committing to your positioning and your offer is the foundation for your marketing strategy. If you're changing things before the market has a chance to respond, you’re not gathering information to inform a strategy; you’re throwing spaghetti at a wall.
The second was a limited understanding of the actual problem she solves.
Not vague in a forgivable way that just needed some messaging polish. She couldn’t specifically explain how the buyer experiences the problem, what makes someone finally decide to act on it, or what changes for them once it’s fixed.
This one is closer to marketing, but it’s not something I can hand her. Audience research is a core marketing function, but in a founder-led business, that responsibility sits with the founder. She told me she has a lot of “business development” conversations, but she only takes meetings with people who could turn into customers. But business development is not the same as sales. If you are only speaking to a filtered sample of people who (you think) will buy from you, then you’ve cut off the closest thing you have to ongoing audience research.
Every conversation is an opportunity to learn how people think about a problem — even if they will never buy from you, are not your target audience, or are a competitor or peer. Business development is building more than a pipeline; it’s gathering knowledge to build a business that’s in tune with the people you’re meant to serve.
That doesn’t mean opening your calendar to every call and giving away free advice to anyone who asks, but it does mean loosening the gates on who you talk to and recognizing that you are gaining much more than you are giving away.
The third was deficit-focused messaging.
This is the one I actually could do something about. She’d been told to lead with the problem, dwell on the pain, paint the picture of what happens if nothing changes. That approach has its place. But most people don’t want to stand up and announce how badly they’re failing. Really — it’s like asking them to admit they have a toenail fungus. No one will say that. But they might say “I wish I could wear sandals.” Same underlying issue, completely different perspective. If your messaging spends all its time telling prospects what’s wrong with them, don’t be surprised when they start sneaking out the back door.
The fix here isn’t complicated. Talk about the upside more than the deficit. Frame inaction as a missed opportunity, not a blind spot they should feel embarrassed about. Assume your prospect already knows they have a problem and is looking for a way out, not a lecture about how they got there.
My work with clients is a partnership. Both of us bring expertise to the table, and we solve problems together. While I can’t decide on your positioning for you, I can help you understand the tradeoffs of each path. While I can’t have business development conversations for you, I can help you interpret what you are hearing and determine what it means for your offer or messaging. And I can design the strategy and the story that connects more people to the business you have created.
If you’d like to know what this would look like for your organization, let’s talk.