When a position breaks down — Kelford Labs Daily

“We call this third pathway a decomposition, because you seek to decompose, or break apart, the problem space in a new way that lets you apply the existing opposing models separately, to discrete parts of the problem, without diminishing their impact or compromising between them.”

— Jennifer Riel & Roger Martin, Creating Great Choices

Your business does this, and that.

It serves these customers, and those customers.

Sometimes, despite all our efforts to focus—and our sincere belief in its value—we end up doing more than one thing for more than one type of customer.

Look, I’m right there with you. Our business consults, writes, and teaches. In the same ways, about the same topics, following the same process—but these are still three distinct activities. 

The thing of it is, though, we don’t promote all three things at once, or ever to one single prospect.

Each component of our business has its own promotional approach, its own buyer.

In the words of Riel and Martin, we’ve decomposed—broken apart—the problem space in a way that lets us demonstrate our value at a distance to each buyer about each service without compromising, contradicting, or confusing.

So I offer this as today’s reminder:

There may be reasons why you do more than one thing for one buyer. That’s fine. The mistake is talking about everything all at once.

Make sure your website has one buyer and offering in mind.

Your social posts have one prospect its talking to directly, about one thing in particular.

Your sales conversations focus on one approach and one service for one prospect at a time.

You’re not a buffet of options: You’re a specialized, high-end purveyor of just what the client needs, in just the right way. You just have a couple different types of client.

So don’t compromise. Choose.

Don’t blend. Break down.

Don’t confuse. Decompose.

Kelford Inc. shows you the way to always knowing what to say. Demonstrate your value at a distance—the essence of marketing—to the people who value it most.