Tension Alignment Framework

Speaker 0: can you walk us through the tension alignment framework and how entrepreneurs can apply it to identify and resolve growth barriers in their business?

Speaker 1: yeah. i mean, the biggest, tension we all experience and, obviously, there's all kinds of tensions at play in every marketplace. right? but the biggest tension i look at is the tension between what we want to do and what the industry expects from us. so, you know, i'll give you a great example. i recently, was talking to an entrepreneur, who is selling, ransomware and threat protection software. it's a saas solution to small and medium businesses. great example because who wants to buy ransomware. right? we all believe that's not gonna happen to us. we all believe that, especially for small and medium businesses. and so, what happens in this situation is you resort to fear mongering, and then that pushes the prospect away even more. yeah. like, selling life insurance to somebody. right? or you try to tell them about all the features benefits, and you give them some kind of roi calculation, and that doesn't work either. right? and so, what do you do in a situation like that? one of the first things, you do is you take a step back and you go, okay. what is the inherent tension here? the tension is the world expects, that they wouldn't need this solution. that's what the world expects. the world doesn't want, anti ransomware solution. their expectation is i don't need any of this stuff. right? and your desire is i want every company to have this stuff because i wanna protect them. okay. so now that you've realized this, now you gotta figure out, okay, if the world doesn't want to or doesn't need any of this stuff, how do you make them need it? so what do they need? right? and so turns out what they need, for example, is to be able to track the efficiency of their network, for example, or they might need other peripheral services like, you know, ways to track the security of their network when people are on their mobile devices and things like that. and so you might realize that, actually, the solution you need to sell has to be packaged in part of a larger solution that's doing something else for the customer. so until you look at the tension between expectations and desires in terms of your industry, i'm not talking about, you know, our internal the stuff we do on the therapy couch. i'm talking about what the industry expects from our product versus what we want our product to do. until you do that, you don't give yourself that important dose of reality check. the moment you get the reality check, you realize, okay. we cannot win by pushing water uphill. what we have to figure out is how to fit our product into the expectation of the customer, at least initially. and then later, we can change that expectation. but initially, we have to. there's no other way to win.

Speaker 0: and it sounds like, you know, these are the exact techniques that santi was asking about. how do you go from looking for clients to clients looking for you?

Speaker 1: yeah. fantastic question. and, you know, we did this, when we were building motivebase, this is what we did. everything was inbound. everything was inbound. and the way we did it, was and i'm, you know, i'm not gonna talk about content strategy here. there's lots of gurus that talk about content strategy. for me, the point is the moment you do this expectation mapping exercise, you have tons to write about. so, for example, in our industry, we knew that, clients' expectations were charts and graphs. people love seeing a chart and a graph that says, i don't know, like, twenty two percent of millennials care about this. but as anthropologists, we wanted them to ask, what do these people believe? and that's pushing water uphill. we can't get them to do that in twenty fifteen. by twenty two, they were doing that. but in twenty fifteen, they weren't doing that. so how do we solve that problem? we solve that problem by figuring out, okay. step one, how do we fit our solution into the charts and graphs? so the first thing we did was we actually sought inspiration because my little one at that point had, you know, these, these kids' books where you can pull tabs or you open it's like where's waldo. open stuff and you get new layers of information. so we use that as inspiration. and so behind the graphs and charts were, layers of belief and value based information that came from our ip. and so we packaged it up in that way, which meant we had tons to talk about. so our entire content strategy revolved around peeling the layers. so that's what we call it, peeling the layers. so all we did was talk about the layers behind the statistics you see, and it got so much attention. us, ctos would reach out to us, and we'd acquire new customers. i remember this one time we acquired, conagra foods as a customer. in a matter of two weeks, she signed a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar deal, and that had never happened in the history of our business at that point. and it happened just because we didn't know this, but she had been reading our content for a year about peeling the layers behind the common statistics you see. so my point is, how do you go from looking for clients to clients looking for you? you have to figure out what is your version of peeling the layers. right? so do the expectation mapping exercise and then figure out what is your unique story that allows you to basically talk about this stuff to no end and gives you a unique voice. it's really important.