The Three Reasons People Don’t Buy

How to remove the obstacles between you and your next 100 customers

The Question

“Why aren’t we growing faster?”

For most tech companies out there, this is THE question.

When you’re growing faster, you can make more mistakes. When you’re growing faster, you can invest more in what’s working. When you’re growing faster, you can convince that game-changing executive to join your team or that on-the-fence investor to come along for the ride. And most importantly, when you’re growing faster, your company is just worth more.

So, you tell me. Why aren’t you growing faster?

…Do you even know?

The truth is, there are only three things standing in your way. Three obstacles keeping you from breaking out and reaching the outer limits of your growth potential.

Three reasons people don’t buy from you.

Here they are.

1) They can’t find you. 
2) They don’t trust you.
3) They’re not ready yet.

That’s it.

Whatever the business, whatever the stage, whatever the product… one of those three is holding you back. (Sometimes, it’s all three.) And every best-selling growth book, every marketing guru, every agency and consultant and been-there-before board advisor… they’re all really just talking about those same three factors.

If prospects can’t find you, you never get your chance.

If buyers don’t trust you, the deal never goes anywhere.

And if they aren’t ready yet, you need a way to hang around the hoop until they are.

Obstacle-Based Thinking

Ryan Holiday, the front-man of the modern-day Stoicism movement, hit it big a few years ago with his book The Obstacle Is The Way. The book’s title paraphrases a famous passage from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which goes like this:

“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”

There’s so much to take from that line.

It’s about your mindset, sure. Controlling how you react to things — especially setbacks — is the central tenet of Stoicism. But that quote is also a powerful reminder to keep your approach simple, and of the importance of working on one thing at a time. It’s about looking upstream for the big problem before you focus on the little details.

So before you get into the weeds on micro-segmentation, or spend hours on A-B testing, or feel like you need to shop for another sales enablement tool, or start talking yourself into an expensive rebrand — take care of the obvious stuff first.

What’s in our way?

Where’s the blockage?

Rather than build a faster car… how can we just clear the road?

You’ll find similar principles everywhere you look. My favorite is an old mafia saying which translates to:

“Before you begin your journey, take the rock out of your shoe.”

So… which rock is still rattling around in your shoe?

Why aren’t people buying from you today?

Which of those three reasons is it?

Spend time talking with your team about which obstacle is most in your way. Bring a little data and agree on where the blockage is. Then go spend a month working together on removing it. Agree on how you’ll measure your progress and how you’ll keep score. Talk about it every week.

Pick one obstacle.

Get it out of the way.

Watch things improve.