Customers Don't Buy Your Capabilities. They Buy Relief From a Fear.

We were selling ratings and reviews software. Customers were buying something else entirely.

I turned to Kristin Zhivago when I needed the truth. She's a marketer, author, and go-to-market advisor who's spent her career finding out why customers buy, not why companies assume. She was an inspirational marketing mentor to me very early in my Silicon Valley career. Years later, as CMO at Bazaarvoice, I called her because I didn't trust our own answer.

Her core belief, one I still use: the greatest marketing is articulating what it will be like to buy and own the thing you're selling, not what you hope it will be. You can't write that from inside the building.

She interviewed about 50 of our customers, not to validate our pitch, but to find the promise they believed we'd made and check it against what we delivered.

Our pitch was conversion: reviews build trust, trust drives sales. Customers believed that, but it's not why they picked us over doing it themselves or leaving reviews unmanaged.

They picked us because we were paying attention: reading every review, moderating, catching spam, fake, illegal, and abusive content before it reached their site. We'd already beaten the fear that scares most brands off reviews (our average review sat at 4.3 stars). Customers weren't hiring software. They were hiring someone accountable to carry that fear.

That's a different product than what we were marketing. The technology was the delivery mechanism; the real sale was trust.

Once Kristin surfaced that, we moved community management and customer success to the front of our marketing: not a feature, the actual promise.

The lesson I still use: customers don't buy your capabilities, they buy relief from a fear you're better equipped to carry than they are. You won't find that in a pitch deck, only by asking the people who already bought, or finding a Kristin to ask for you.