Does your work prevent a problem, or does it repair something that is broken?

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here’s the idea that I’d like to share with you today, and that’s this: When you’re talking to clients, when you’re talking to prospects, is your work perceived as or positioned as preventive, or is it perceived as something that repairs something that’s broken?

Let me expand on this a little bit. You can position your work as something that would prevent a future problem, a future issue, a future hurdle that your client’s organization may have. Or, they’ve already gone through something—something uncomfortable, something unpleasant, something that, if they don’t fix quickly, heads might roll, things might change that they don’t want to change, so something needs to be repaired.

When we’re talking about things that need to be repaired, there tends to be a much higher sense of urgency to get the problem fixed. They tend to be more open to taking risks and trying things that they might not have tried before. The buying cycle tends to be shortened if you can position yourself as someone who repairs a problem that they’ve already identified as a problem.

On the preventive side, there’s nothing wrong with positioning yourself as preventing future issues, but in many cases, that could be a little bit harder. We don’t always need to make investments in something that will prevent something that hasn’t happened yet, that may happen, that might happen at some point in the future.

So anyway, I would suggest you start thinking about how you’re positioning yourself in your conversations with clients and prospects and choose the right framing for the right client—be that preventive or be that repair. I’d love to hear how you think about this.