[gk1]

Seems as though you actually agree with the article's premise, which you mistook to be about the sales deck.

The point is that your messaging should be about what the buyer needs, not what your product does. You happen to have different packaging for it (as do I[1]), but overall it seems we're in agreement.

[1] https://www.gkogan.co/blog/buyers/

[Persuadem]

With all due respect, I disagree.

No business in the world needs another product or solution. No business needs a subscription-based business to thrive. Nor does every business need to do inbound marketing to survive as well. Plenty of businesses thrive without it.

What Zuora and Hubspot (and many others have done) is use the same principles as religion to sell an ideology to their potential customers - an ideology that makes them think that they need what is being sold otherwise a horrible end (hell) awaits them.

[softawre]

You guys are on the same page. Heck, the article even uses the term "Promised Land", that evokes thoughts of heaven/hell in most, I would say.

[Persuadem]

There are similarities in the language - yes we could say that Raskin's promised land is my model's heaven.

But there is a major and important difference.

Raskin's model postulates that the promised land (heaven) should be the point of the whole story. For him, the whole story should be geared towards selling the promised land. (look at his other articles, he states that the promised land aka heaven is the most important part of any story).

But this is wrong.

Heaven (Raskin's promised land) is the same for most businesses operating in the space. For example, if you sell B2B the heaven you'll be selling is the same as every other business in B2B - "more money".

What these businesses are actually selling is a new doctrine. That is the point of the story - to sell a new way of thinking.

Hubspot sold the doctrine of "inbound marketing". Their heaven (promised land) is more clients and more money.

Zuora sells the doctrine of "subscription economy". Their heaven is the same as Hubspot's.

Drift is selling the doctrine of "conversational marketing". Their heaven is the same as the other two.

David Allen is selling the doctrine of "getting things done". His heaven (promised land) is "more productivity" and this is the same as every other productivity coach in the world.

What enables these businesses to distinguish themselves from each other and their competitors is not the promised land (because it's the same as virtually everyone else's) but their doctrines.

My model is a more accurate explanation of what is happening. That's important because we use models to recreate them for our own situations - you need an accurate model in order to do it right.

As Dharmesh Shah himself put - their success came from creating a quasi-religion of "inbound marketing".

This is how this model views it - through the lens of religious and other ideological story-telling, and it more accurately fits what these companies have done.

[beatgammit]

I don't think it's necessarily about what the buyer "needs", as much as appealing either to a big "want" or avoiding a significant loss.

Many of these companies probably don't "need" a subscription model, so Zuora focuses on the negative they're avoiding (getting left behind). From my experience, convincing someone to avoid a loss is way easier than convincing them to pull the trigger on a big win. This is a huge reason why people continue to invest with money managers instead of doing the mathematically better option of buying index funds: the money manager promises to preserve capital, whereas the index fund lists shows that it outperforms manual money management on average (big win potential).

In many cases, you're focusing less on reason and more on emotion, and you use logic to drive it home. People are more emotional than logical ("nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"), but they need a logical argument to justify their emotions (IBM solves our problems and isn't going away, so the higher price is justifiable).