Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Your pitch is accidentally insulting your prospect
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Hey Reader, A founder I work with spent weeks validating his SaaS with Account Executives. The data was damning: AEs lose roughly 53% of their deals because they're prioritizing the wrong opportunities. But when he brought this up in conversations, prospects shut down. Not because they disagreed. Because they couldn't admit it. The problem wasn't the product. It was the pitch. He was, without realizing it, opening every conversation with: "You are bad at your job, and I have a fix." Nobody buys that – no matter how true it is. Here's the shift that changes everything: buyers don't resist solutions, they resist implied incompetence. When your positioning says "stop losing deals," your prospect hears "you've been losing deals." Their ego kicks in before their logic does. The deal dies in the first five minutes. The fix is to reframe around outcome and environment – not personal failing. Instead of:
Same product. Completely different emotional landing. The buyer adopts the solution without having to confess anything. They're not buying a fix to their failure – they're buying a professional upgrade. That's a much easier yes. The Clarity Filter Insight Your prospect will never buy a mirror that shows them losing – sell them the window that shows them winning. [Share on LinkedIn] [Share on X] Go look at your homepage, your cold email, your opening line on a call. Count how many times your messaging implies your buyer has been doing something wrong. If you find more than one – rewrite it today. They already know their problems. What they want to buy is a better version of themselves. Speak soon, P.S. Don't write code for a product nobody wants to buy. I built Traction OS to give you the exact 60-day roadmap, sales scripts, and validation templates you need to hit your first $10k MRR without guessing. From complete scratch or with an existing MVP. |
Clarity Filter
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, A founder I spoke with last week thought he had social selling dialed in. "I can ask a friend who knows an e-commerce manager to make an introduction," he said. I had to stop him right there. That's a warm referral. A perfectly valid tactic – but not social selling. Calling it social selling is like calling a taxi a road trip. Same road, completely different commitment. Here's what social selling actually looks like: Step 1: Find your exact ICPs on LinkedIn. Not broadly....
Hey Reader, A founder I work with was freezing up on every cold call. Not because he didn't know his product. Because every call felt like a performance review – him auditioning, the prospect judging. The pressure was killing his ability to actually listen. So we tried something that felt almost too simple. He started paying prospects $100 for a one-hour research interview. Not a demo. Not a pitch. A conversation where he asked questions, took notes, and genuinely tried to understand their...
Hey Reader, During a mentoring session last week, a B2B SaaS team walked me through their go-to-market logic. They were targeting retailers in the CPG space. The reason? Retailers could mandate that vendors use the platform. Force the supply chain from the top. It sounded smart. It was a trap. I stopped them and asked one question: Who bleeds the most money when this problem goes unsolved?Silence. Then they realized it wasn't the retailer at all. It was a specific subset of mid-tier suppliers...