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This week in The Pivot: trying to win the hearts and minds of prospects to try to convince them they really need you—when they've already told you they don't.

Hey friends 👋

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The anti-pattern: trying to convince the market to buy.

Founders are burning energy trying to “win hearts” and convince skeptics who fundamentally don’t have the problem that it’s urgent enough to pay for a solution.

Yikes!

You’re pitching to prospects that haven’t had experienced the pain yet, trying to overcome objections about whether the system is “needed,” and working to craft “better messaging”.

Please stop. 84% of your market won’t buy no matter how good your pitch is.

They’re not skeptical because your pitch sucks—they’re skeptical because the problem isn’t severe or urgent enough for them. You’re trying to sell to the late majority when you should be hunting for early adopters.

The fix: stop “convincing” people who don’t feel the pain.

Start with the Diffusion of Innovation lens: only 16% of your market (innovators + early adopters) will buy a new solution before there’s proof it works.

So ask:

• Who in your target market just had a terrible incident?

• Who has a regulatory mandate coming down?

• Who’s already spending money trying to solve this problem with a worse solution?

Those are your early adopters—the ones where the problem is so severe and urgent they’ll deal with your bugs, your incomplete feature set, and your lack of references.

Find them first. Build proof with them. The other 84% will come later, but only after you’ve de-risked it with the people who actually need it right now.

The Tool: the Severity/Urgency Matrix

Map your prospect list on two axes—how severe is this problem for them (scale 1-10) and how urgent is solving it (scale 1-10).

Only chase prospects scoring 7+ on both. Everyone else goes in a “nurture for later” list. This forces you to stop wasting sales cycles on people who intellectually agree but won’t actually buy.

Here’s more on severity & urgency, and a deep dive on early adopters.

And this week’s deep dive on two techniques for finding who your early adopters are drops on Thursday.

Until next week,

—jdm

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