One simple idea that falls out of the Heart of Innovation book — that you can use today — is this idea of selling into situations, not selling to ideal customer profiles.
Great post. One piece of advice I give to my startups: Stop talking about your bucket of water and look for a fire that bucket is able to put out.
I’ve done a couple decades of formal qualitative product and design research. Understanding context is always, but always, critical to high-intent sales. For instance, I often drop potential clients a note 100 days after they hire their first VP of HR. I don’t do anything with HR…but when my note comes, her report has just hit the CEO’s desk and the CEO tends to be in a problem-solving mood.
this is a great way of putting it, and I wonder whether there’s some generic list of types of situations somewhere
Situation-oriented thinking is one of the key things I took away from JTBD. For all of its glorious frameworks, methodologies, and conflicting worldviews among thought leaders, I think the idea is simply to uncover situations in which people engage with certain behaviors. These understandings can be used to frame our thinking around how we might help them make progress in these situations better. Pain is one indicator to look for, “not not” is another angle to approach the situations, but what’s essential to me has been to thoroughly examine the situations themselves.
Nowadays I use ICPs and situations interchangeably, but this “selling to a situation, not an ICP” is a really nice way to put it.
Most experienced practitioners have one…but it’s like a trading firm’s algorithm, valuable in inverse proportion to how many people know about it. (And much less codified/formal.) When I was coming up, I found that great sources of insight were blogs aimed at selling to professional services firms. Very little directly relevant, but the more you knew, the more you were able to read between the lines. A little like getting the best use out of an LLM, I guess.
The short answer is that it’s about putting out fires. You need to find the fire in any situation. A “pain point” or a “problem” is not a fire. A fire is a fire. Most business advice is written for post-scale companies who can’t specialize, or think they can’t specialize. At the growth stage, you need to put out the equivalent of small-to-medium electrical fires caused by overheated 15W circuits in commercial buildings no larger than 5,000 square feet. That specific! If you can do that, the rest generally comes.