Wedges

I’ve been thinking a ton about wedges recently.

A few or our members have been banging their heads against the wall trying to close initial customers. These members are mostly selling B2B, but this is just as relevant for our folks selling B2C.

The frustrating part has been how excited potential customers are by the value prop our members are pitching. They definitely want this, just… not now.

One of the members described this as not having a “bleeding neck problem,” which I loved and felt was appropriate for Halloween. If the first thing you do for your customers doesn’t solve a bleeding neck problem - an urgent problem that gives them loss aversion (meaning that every second they aren’t solving it there’s tangible, calculable pain/damage) - you’re going to have a hard time closing customers.

Even if your long-term vision is aligned with customers, we likely need to solve a smaller, bleeding neck problem first to get our foot in the door. You need long-term value and wedge value.

Here’s an example.

One of our alums built an analytics tool for retailers that helped them get visibility into their customers’ journey — from the time that potential customer saw and clicked on a facebook ad, to their interactions with the landing page, to the times they interacted with sales emails, to checkout flow, to repeat purchase. These are usually separate silos, but the company stitched them together.

Companies were excited about seeing the “whole journey.” This was a North-Star 🌌 type of value. To become the type of company that has full visibility into their customers and is constantly testing and tweaking flows.

However, the first thing the Tacklebox company did was tell them exactly where their current flow was breaking.

The first value prop — the wedge 🧀 — was:

“We’ll stitch together the entire customer journey and tell you, exactly, where you lose the bulk of your customers.”

Customers then trusted them to solve hard problems, and they built out the longer-term vision of full analytics transparency.

Spend time on the wedge problems. The bleeding neck problems. That’ll make life 100x easier.