Been solo for ~2 yrs and October's been my hardest month by a huge margin. - 3 discovery no-shows - referral opp delayed - 2 engagements ended - "no" from a lead I was working since June - "no" or "not now" from 3 cold leads Hopefully this will be a fun story to tell in 2027.

If you're wondering why customer acquisition is so expensive in 2026, it could be one of these messaging gaps. I've consulted for 14 B2B brands on messaging and CRO in the last 18 months. These are 3 of the biggest reasons I've uncovered why buyers see products as "nice to have". 1️⃣ Not naming the problem you fix You'll find a dozen products that let you collect verified testimonials, but only @GetUserEvidence spoke about the "Evidence Gap" and how it's costing you deals you’d have otherwise closed. Naming the problem and talking about it relentlessly presses on your buyer's wounds just lightly enough to remind them it's there. That's how you create urgency. Without this, you go passive and sound like everyone else in your category, which makes it easier to lose deals to competitors or vibe coding. h/t @BrendanHufford for naming the naming mechanism (Content IP) 2️⃣ Focusing exclusively on in-market audiences I wish I could say that when I booked out Q3 a month in advance, I kept putting out content and networking and prospecting to keep my pipeline steady... 🤷 All the stellar creative and landing pages in the world won’t make someone care unless they're in-market. But less than 10% of your total market is actively shopping at any given time. I'll almost always advocate for fixing the bottom of your funnel first. But many teams are happy to invest in ads or product marketing, and then pull back when it's time to share their POV and expertise i.e. the stuff that gets buyers to think of you 6-12 months down the road. Podcasts, events, and newsletters are all superb for building relationships with people who aren’t ready to buy now but might later. And they work best when you have something to say that your audience won't hear from anyone else. 3️⃣ Trying to control the buying process instead of simplifying it Every buyer that converts goes through three phases: 1. Realizing there’s a problem (awareness) 2. Deciding they can’t keep living like that (in-market) 3. Hiring someone to help them fix it (evaluation) A lot of B2B teams try to control these and as much as we want to, we just can’t. Smart brands seek to influence rather than control. They ask what they can say that will help people at each stage figure out they have a problem, that they need a solution, and that they should choose us. What's cool is that being even slightly more helpful to buyers widens the gap between you and your competitors noticeably. For one brand that hired me this year, just adding a page with plans (absent across their category) led to a 3% lift in demo-to-SQL conversion rate in weeks.