Fractal Pty Ltd

The competitor beating you on most deals is not a company. It is the status quo. Doing nothing. Staying the course. Doing what we have always done, because it feels safe. Psychologists have shown people perceive the risk of changing as far greater than the risk of staying put. So when a prospect goes quiet, they usually have not chosen a rival. They have chosen to change nothing. Yet as business owners we convince ourselves the true competition is the other firms pitching for the same work. That is rarely what decides the deal. The question worth spending time on: how does your offer beat doing nothing? Position against inertia, not against competitors. When you focus on who you are truly competing against, more of the deals that get down to the line land your way.

The credentials on your website are not creating the trust they used to. The reason sits in how the claim arrives. Twenty years of experience on an about page is a statement you have made about yourself. The reader has to decide to believe it. That decision carries a built-in discount, because everyone knows who wrote the page. Ninety seconds of you answering a hard question works differently. The viewer reaches the conclusion themselves. They watched you handle it, and they decided you know what you are doing. Once someone has decided something for themselves, there is no barrier left to get over. It is already real to them. So the shift is from asserting authority to demonstrating it, and letting the other person do the concluding. I think that is why we are about to see a lot more content produced for no purpose other than building trust.

Your customers have never all looked the same. So why does the ideal customer in your head look like one person? When owners describe who they want to reach, the same variables come up every time: age, gender, location, job title. Job title in particular. I see a fixation on it. The problem is that job titles are made up. Two people with the same title do completely different work. Two people doing the same work carry different titles. What someone does online says more. The sites they spend time on. The searches they run. The way they carry themselves in their role. We have close to infinite data to target with now. Targeting by who someone is throws most of it away. Targeting by what they do uses it. If your marketing still starts with a job title, there is a sharper way to go about it.

Only 5% of a B2B market is in market at any given moment. That's the 95-5 rule, from Professor Dawes. The other 95% aren't ready to consider your offer yet. Most B2B marketing still chases the 5%. Search ads catch someone at the exact moment of intent. That's why the clicks cost $7, $10, $20 each, and why you might only reach a small share of the people searching. The trust work has to happen before that moment. I think about the car dealerships now sitting inside Westfield shopping centres. Most of us buy a car every five or six years. But every week we walk past those cars on the way to the supermarket. When the time comes to buy, that brand is already on the list. That's the job for B2B brands. Be in front of the 95% early, so you're shortlisted when they finally are in market.

A physio I know has patients turning up with a treatment plan they got from ChatGPT. He is frustrated. Anyone in a service profession recognises the feeling. I think the situation is better than it looks. People still weigh experience and human judgement when they make a decision that matters. The ones who act on whatever an engine tells them, without question, were rarely going to respect the profession or become good clients. What we bring is context. An answer can be technically correct and still wrong for this person, in this situation, at this moment. Seeing that takes cases, not a corpus. So the move is to go where those conversations are happening now. That means publishing, on camera, answering the questions your buyers are actually asking. Video is harder to produce than written content. That is the whole reason it carries authority. Your experience is the asset. It is doing nothing sitting in your head.

Marketing runs on two clocks, and most business owners only watch one of them. The signal clock is fast. Clicks, engagement, leads. It moves daily or weekly and tells you whether the tactics are working right now. The revenue clock is slow, and it lies in both directions. When revenue is healthy, it covers over bad marketing tactics. When revenue is soft, it convinces owners to kill perfectly valid initiatives before they ever had a chance to move it. My advice: watch both. The signal clock tells you about short term marketing impact. The revenue clock tells you whether the business is getting what it needs. A marketing strategy only works when both clocks are on the wall.