how to respond to "it does the job" people

Hey,

If you ever tried selling any solution to more than one person, you know this response:

Some founders—especially first-time founders coming from technical backgrounds—feel frustrated and stuck when their product isn’t getting the traction they know it deserves and all they hear is “we already have a way to do that.”

I’d be frustrated too. I was frustrated by these responses when I was selling my services as just “copywriting.”

Almost a year ago, Josh Braun posted an important reframe regarding this:

And while the rest of the post is focused on what that means for cold calling, there’s an important thing to remember from this about your messaging.

See, “we already doing it another way“ isn’t something you can fight — not every time anyway.

In my messaging canvas, one of the very first things you have to do to develop your messaginig is define how the current way of doing their job isn’t working:

That’s because if there isn’t a strong reason for them to dislike their current way of doing things, there’s barely anything you can do to make them consider an alternative.

So the next time you hear “we’re already using X for that“ in response to your pitch/website copy, there are only 2 reasonable ways fo you to do something about it:

1. Realize they aren’t an ideal customer for you and go to the drawing board again.

2. Realize they’re your ideal customer but you don’t know enough about their actual pains, and fix that.

Works for messaging in any medium.

Things I found for you

• Hannah Shamji on ignoring your customers

• Anthony Pierri on early-stage <> growth-stage positioning

• Matthew Bishop on website first impressions

• Andrew Yedlin on believable <> valuable claims

• Jon Itkin on magical thinking hurting you

Meme of the week