In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explores how a mismatch between your product sophistication and customer needs can lead to frustration and ineffective marketing.
Is your business struggling with aligning its advanced products with an evolving customer base? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explores how a mismatch between your product sophistication and customer needs can lead to frustration and ineffective marketing. Learn how to address the common issue of feeling bored or frustrated with your clients by realigning your product, customer, and marketing strategies. Let’s discover how to navigate these shifts smoothly to keep your business model in harmony and set yourself up for continued success!
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Introduction to Business Model Alignment
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years I've been doing this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy.
So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. In every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business.
And in today's show, I'm going to tackle one of my favorite topics, because it's one I haven't yet addressed directly on this podcast. And that's the idea of business model alignment, and what it looks like. And folks, this is the heart of everything I know and believe about Sequence Over Strategy.
Understanding Alignment
And it's also a frequent question that comes in. And it comes in something like this. Hey, Michelle, you talk about a business model needing to be in alignment, but what does that really mean? That alignment, it's such an overused word.
And yeah, alignment is an overused word. And I'm not going to lie to you. A chill kind of goes up and down my spine every time I use it, because it's such a buzzword. But it's important to getting your sequence right, and there's no other word to use. So let's talk about it today.
Now, a few episodes ago, I talked about the five stages of small business growth. And that's a really useful gauge to understand what you should be focused on and when. That's kind of the very first step of Sequence Over Strategy is taking a look at those five stages of small business growth and saying, which one am I in? And what does that tell me about what I should be focused on? So if you haven't yet listened to that episode, go back and take a listen to it after this, because these are the really kind of the two foundational pieces.
The Big Three
And in that episode, I talked a lot about the second stage of small business growth, which is the sales stage. And in that stage, the goal is to create consistent and repeatable marketing and sales. But that's kind of a trick question, right? Or even a trick goal. Because as a small business owner, as a solopreneur, as most of you are, you also have to like what you're marketing and selling.
So that second stage of small business growth, it's called the sales stage. And the goal is to create predictable and repeatable marketing and sales. But what that really means is that we're looking for something I call product market founder fit. Meaning you're looking to create product market fit, which just means the repeatable sales piece. But you want to find that for something you enjoy doing. There's the founder fit piece of it.
And that's where this pesky alignment thing comes in. And why this word alignment is so important to both understand and to think about at the same time you're thinking about those business stages. So if you are someone who's wondering how to structure your business, maybe you're thinking about some changes coming up, maybe you have some frustrations and you're not sure why your business is doing what it's doing, or maybe you're getting a little frustrated with it or even with your customers.
Maintaining Alignment
Listen up, because this could be a really big piece of the pie to your answer. So as we get into it, let's talk about what alignment means when I am using that word. Because when I'm working with business owners to look at that stage two, to look at that sales stage, to look at how to create consistent, repeatable marketing and sales, I'm looking at three things, three components of the business or what I call them.
I am looking at their product mix, I'm looking at their customer niche, and I'm looking at their marketing mix, aka how they're marketing whatever it is that they're selling, whatever their product mix is. I consider those the big three. And those three things, while they need to be in alignment with each other, or there's going to be what we call in the business world, what we call in the MBA world, quote unquote, noise in the model.
What does that mean? When you have noise in your business model, that just means something in there is going to be a little inefficient. Something needs to be oiled, right, there needs to be a little grease on the springs to get them moving again, aka it's not working as well as it could, aka it's not in alignment. Something is causing things to not run smoothly.
The Impact of Changes
And so when I explain this, I ask you to picture three dials or three levers, and those three dials or levers, however you want to picture them, represent each of these big three. Your product mix, your customer niche, and your marketing mix. And there's a point where all of those dials are set at a certain degree where they're in alignment with each other, right? They're dialed in and they are working together.
But then if you turn one dial a little bit, aka you make a little change in your customer niche, or you make a little change in your product mix, or you change something about your marketing, and you change that dial, well all of a sudden that dial may no longer be in alignment with the other two. It comes out of alignment. And to have a business that's really working, you don't want that. You want those three dials working together and in alignment.
And here's what can be frustrating, is as a small business owner, of course you change those things a little bit. All the time you're tweaking things here and there, right? All the time you're making a little change to your product mix. Maybe you decide to teach a workshop. Maybe you decide to add a module to whatever you're selling. We make those small changes to our product mix. Or as a customer niche, maybe you decide to expand and talk to a few more people than you've been talking to before. Or a little bit of a different segment. Or maybe your marketing changes. Maybe you decide to add a channel.
Avoiding Business Model Noise
These in and of themselves are not big changes, but taken together over time, they're really big changes and they're out of sequence, because what all those little changes do is they're all a series of usually little strategic changes that you make over time that the cumulative effect of them causes a really big change. And so the fact that you centered those strategies, those little changes over time, the fact that you centered those without considering the sequence of them means that your big three, those three dials, your product mix, your customer niche, and your marketing mix, those three dials get out of whack and they're no longer in alignment with each other.
And that's when we start seeing the problems. That's when we start seeing the questions like, why have my customers who have forever purchased this no longer purchased this product? Or I thought I made this product so much better and now nobody wants it. Or all of a sudden I'm doing all these marketing activities and nothing seems to work. Why is that?
Usually it's because you've tweaked some of those big three to the point where those dials have come out of alignment. And that's why I stress that word alignment so much because we have to keep our eyes on the prize and make sure we understand and know when we are moving that dial so that if it doesn't work or if something starts to add too much noise, you're not confused about why that's happening. Or even better, so that you understand as you're doing it that, hey, I'm making a little tweak to my product mix and you can think at the same time, oh gosh, this is going to move my product dial.
Finding the Right Balance
So I better now consider how it's going to move my customer dial and my marketing dial before I even implement it. Because that's how you kind of stay ahead of the curve. And that's how you create a model that grows in alignment without adding a bunch of noise and having to correct.
It's also, by the way, going back to what I said about that product market founder fit, it's how you can find a combination of these things that both interests you and keeps you excited about your business, but also works commercially. Listen, we're in business to make money. It's okay to say that you want to make money. You just want to do that in a way that makes you happy.
And too many times we either have those dials absolutely optimized for perfect capitalism, for the perfect amount of profit in a way that makes you miserable, or we optimize in the other direction in just something that makes you really, really happy, but maybe doesn't bring in enough money. And so we want to keep our eyes on both of those prizes, the product market founder fit, so we can find a combination of those dials that does both things, that both brings you the income and the revenue that you need, while also making you happy.
Keeping Dials in Alignment
I don't want anybody running a business that they hate. I've seen it way too often, and it's miserable. So I never want those dials just to be optimized for the revenue, just for the product market side of things. We want to optimize them for the founder as well, but in order to do that, we have to recognize that those dials exist, that there's a product mix, a customer niche, and a marketing mix that all need to work together.
And listen, that might sound really obvious. Of course, your product mix has to match with your customers, has to match with your marketing, but you would be very surprised how quickly these things can get out of alignment as you naturally grow as a business owner, right? When you have a small business, one of the great gifts of a small business is you can change things over time.
And so as you naturally evolve, as you naturally learn more, as you naturally do more things, you are going to change as a business owner. And so these things naturally evolve again, and it is actually incredibly easy to get out of alignment, especially if you don't know that that part of the sequence exists. If you don't even know that those big three are dials that you want to keep in alignment, it's not even going to be on your radar.
Introduction to Alignment in Business Models
So my goal in this episode, and in a bootcamp that I offer called Map Your Model, where I teach you all of this and how exactly to keep your model in alignment. And in all of my one-on-one work, my goal is always to expose you to these ideas so that you know they are happening in the background, so that you know that those five stages of small business growth and these big three dials are always running at the foundation of your business. And if they're not at least in the back of your mind when you're making some tiny changes, you're really in danger of the business stalling out because we add too much noise and too many things get in the way of everything working together.
And that's when businesses plateau and stall and frankly can circle for years trying to figure out how to get it back in alignment because they don't even know that they're trying to do that. So again, my goal is to expose this foundation to you so that you know it's underneath the surface of your business and humming along. And I would absolutely love for you to be asking these questions of yourself when you're making changes, but I most want you to know when something might be going wrong.
I want to be that hopefully angel on your shoulder where you remember and say, wait a minute, maybe I should think about my big three and those dials and are they in alignment or are they not? So let's talk through some examples because all this sounds fine and good in practice, but it's not easy to pull off. I am very happy to admit that. And frankly, it's not all that easy to see when the dials are working together because then it just looks like things are fine.
Identifying Misalignment: Examples and Solutions
So it's hard to demonstrate that, but it's very easy to point out when these dials are out of alignment and not working together. So I thought I'd share some of the very common examples of feelings I see of when these things are not in alignment because I have a feeling some of you will relate to them and might be able to flag them right now before they become too serious. So let's talk through three examples.
And again, these are the three most common examples that I hear in the form of complaints, frustration from my clients or from folks who are in my audience and are coming to me saying, I am feeling this and I have no idea why or what to do about it. Number one, the number one thing that I hear is that the leads that you have had for years are no longer buying something that you are selling. And most commonly you are excited because you have just upgraded that thing that you are selling.
So let's just think about a hypothetical. Maybe you have a small group program and it's been rolling for a couple of years and you decided to make some changes because you've evolved as a business owner. So you found some really cool things to add to it that you thought really added to the excitement of the program, brought the program up to another level, really up-leveled it for folks. And then you found that your regular leads were no longer buying it. And that was confusing to you, as is understandable, because you put a lot of time in upgrading this offer.
Understanding Customer Maturity Levels
Well, guess what? We probably have some dials that have gone out of alignment here because there is something going on that is often at the heart of dials that have gotten mismatched, dials that have gotten out of alignment. And that's something I call your customer maturity level. Now this is probably a whole entire podcast on itself, so I'm not going to get into all the details of how to use this model. But just know that customers come at different maturity levels.
And by maturity level, I do not mean how intelligent they are or any of those factors. I mean how prepared they are to take in deeper levels of information about the topic that they're interested in. And customers tend to come at one of five maturity levels. So levels one, two, three, four, five. One being the least mature, five being the most mature. And level one kind of immature customers or even level two immature customers, again, there's nothing unintelligent about them. But what it is, is they are new to a space and they are just discovering things. They are newbies. And then you get to level three, four, and five.
And again, a lot of complex talk that we could do about this. But in general, level three, four, and five mature customers are a little bit more experienced. A little bit more prepared for nuance. And so what tends to happen? Those groups tend to respond to marketing differently and tend to want different offers. You can imagine this. If you are someone who's just being exposed to material for the first time, you're a low maturity customer, you're not looking for a lot of nuance.
Addressing Misalignment Issues
You just need to understand the basics. Whereas if you're somebody who's been around in a market for five, 10 years, you're looking for a little bit more nuance, right? You're a higher maturity customer. Well, guess what tends to happen? As solo business owners, we have products that also kind of match our own maturity and our own experience. And as you have been in business longer, as you want to add more interesting things to your products, you may subtly be creating a product for a more mature audience.
And so when we have a situation where all of a sudden you have upgraded a product and then you come and tell me, why don't my leads want this new, cool, upgraded product? My first question is, did you make it too advanced for them? By mistake, right? We're not doing this intentionally. But in your enthusiasm and your own growing maturity, did you make a product that is too advanced for the customer base that you have always marketed to? Because a lot of small business owners start by marketing to a relatively immature audience because we ourselves are just getting started.
And then as your product gets smarter, as you upgrade it, if you don't also intentionally market to more advanced folks, guess what? Your more advanced product is going to be of less interest to the people you have marketed to. Again, you may not even know that you did this because a lot of this we just do by instinct. But if you started marketing to relatively low maturity customers and you never change anything about your marketing and therefore you're always attracting that same level of maturity, there's nothing wrong with that.
Realigning Product and Marketing Strategies
Those folks need information the same way higher maturity people need information. There's absolutely nothing wrong with what level of audience that you choose to market to. But if you slowly make your product smarter without changing who you're marketing to, eventually your product will be too advanced for the people you've always marketed to. So if you don't adjust that lever, you don't adjust that marketing lever and that customer niche lever to correspond with where you have adjusted your product mix lever.
Guess what? You're going to have a mismatch. And then you're going to add noise to your model. And that noise will be in the form of trying to market a too advanced product to a customer base that's not ready for it. That is a very common thing that happens. And what do we do when that happens? What we do is we have to ask, well, do you want to bring the product back down to the level of the people that you're marketing to? Or do you want to up-level your marketing and find people who want your new product?
And that brings me to my second most common situation that I hear that tells me some model dials are out of alignment. And this is when people come to me and say, I'm really frustrated with my clients or I'm really bored. And wow, they just aren't getting it. They're not understanding me. They're not excited to be here. It makes me not excited to be here. Just I'm kind of over my clients. And that's OK. I just want to say that first. Again, we all mature in our businesses.
Evolving with Your Client Base
And if your clients have started to frustrate you, that is OK. But when I hear that, the first thing that comes to my mind is that, oh, you have probably gotten bored of marketing to lower maturity clients and you are probably somebody who is chomping at the bit to create that more advanced product. But you're not doing it because you're staying with the clients that you have.
So in that way, that's good. You're choosing to stay in alignment. You're recognizing that you have a product that your current client base wants. But when we bring in that founder fit piece of it, you're getting frustrated and you're getting bored. You want to do something else. And so if your clients are frustrating you, that is usually a sign that we need to look at that alignment between the product mix and the client base and make some decisions and figure out why they are boring you.
And again, it is usually because you're kind of chomping at the bit to work with a little bit more of a mature customer. And that's great. And that's fine. As long as you know that that is what's going on, you can make that adjustment. And you can say, yeah, you know what? I want to evolve. I want to go after a little bit more of a mature customer and offer them something that is not going to bore me, that is going to be a little bit more interesting to me, that is going to allow me to talk in a little bit more advanced terms or in a little more nuance or whatever it is.
But in order to do that, I'm going to have to consciously change those dials again. I'm going to have to change my marketing mix dial to find more mature customers, which will change the customer dial to more mature customers, which is exactly what you need, so that you can provide them with a product that won't bore you. We'll get you back in alignment. We'll find you some customers that will excite you for what you want to do. And then all of a sudden, guess what? Your clients aren't going to frustrate you anymore because you're going to allow them to evolve with your own maturity.
So that's a common question and a common thing I go through with clients who are in my boot camps, with clients who are working with me one-on-one when we discover this. And they just say, Michelle, I'm so frustrated. I'm bored of my clients. We make that decision and say, OK, what does that really mean? Usually it means we have to go find a new client base.
Resetting the Dials
And that's exciting. It's exciting and it's a great solution because it can reset those dials into a different place so that they're all in alignment so that you can then do what you want to do. And that comes, again, with the third case study that I always see, which is people coming to me saying, "I'm just bored."
I've been doing this for five years. It's working, but that product-market-founder fit, it's not there because I am bored. And again, that's when they start saying, okay, what is boring you? Can you not talk about this topic anymore? Right? Do you need to talk about it in a different way? Do you need to do marketing that is different and exciting for you now? Do you need to find different clients? Which one of those dials is boring you the most as the business owner?
Identifying the Core Issue
Is it the product mix? Is it the customer mix? Is it the marketing mix? Can we even tell? Because if we can get in there and talk about which one of those dials is at the crux of your boredom, guess what? We can change that dial. We can say, okay, we've identified that the product mix is what's boring you. Cool. Let's come up with a product mix that makes you excited.
But then once we do that, what else do we need to do? Then we need to say, okay, if this is the new product mix, what does it look like to change the customer niche dial and what does it mean to change the marketing mix dial? So those things come back into alignment because you can't just change the product mix on a whim. That is going to have, if you were only changing that, that's going to have knock-on effects and it's going to mess up your marketing and it's going to mess up your ideal customer to the point where again, there's going to be noise in that model and that model will not return what you need it to return.
Navigating Misalignment
So that's why when you have these moments, when you're frustrated with your customers, when you're frustrated with yourself and you're bored, when you're frustrated that something's not selling, the answer is not to stay at that strategy level and just change one thing. The answer is to consciously say, okay, which of the dials is causing this and how am I going to change that dial? And then how am I going to change the other two so that they will work with the new position of the original one?
Let me say that in English. If we figure out again that the product mix is a thing that's boring you, cool. We can change that dial and come out with a new product mix, but we cannot just do that. Then we have to say, okay, given the new position of the product mix dial, how do we also need to change the customer niche and the marketing mix so that all three are working together? Because if I just changed the product mix, now I'm going to add a lot of noise into my model because now I'm going to have a marketing mix and a customer niche that do not support my new product mix. They're not in alignment with it.
Ensuring Alignment
So what's the result going to be? Disappointing sales, disappointing revenue, aka noise in your model, aka not in alignment. So when you're changing one of those things, you have to change all three and you have to understand those knock-on repercussions. And that's what you're doing when you're navigating your way through that sales stage. That's why it can take a little while to navigate through that sales stage of the five stages of small business because we have to be thinking all along about keeping these dials in alignment.
Even as you mature, even as you evolve as a business owner, we've got to keep you in alignment. So if this is something that's interesting you that is catching your ear and you're like, oh gosh, yeah, this is something that's happening for me. I want you to know that I do teach a bootcamp about this. It is called Map Your Model and we spend time over two days in one week, breaking all this down so that you know exactly how those dials work together or don't work together.
Joining the Bootcamp
And you can learn how to navigate this on your own. We do have new dates coming up in September. So I want you to be aware of that. And you can always check this out at themichellewarner.com backslash map your model and jump on the waitlist because we are going to be opening those dates for September very soon. And if you are somebody who wants to get into this with me and wants to dive into your model and really understand how to bring it into alignment and what your options are to do so, that is the place to do it.
Let's sum up everything that we have talked about today. Your model needs to be in alignment. When I am talking about sequence over strategy, the first two steps of sequence over strategy are number one, what stage of business growth are you in? And then number two, are your big three components, your product mix, your customer mix, and your marketing mix, are they in alignment or are they not? First two questions we ask.
Understanding Alignment and Strategy
So we need that model to be in alignment and that does not come from strategy. Again, that doesn't come from, oh gosh, I'm just going to tweak the product mix really quickly. Uh-uh. Because as soon as you tweak the product mix, we have to deal with everything else. So you can't be throwing spaghetti against the wall in order to fix these things. You have to understand how these dials work together or don't work together so that you can navigate them, so that you understand when I move this dial, here's how I'm going to have to move the other two, or here's what I'm going to have to think through.
If you change something about your product mix, it's going to be a knock-on effect on your customers and your marketing. And if you change your customers, guess what? There's going to be a knock-on effect with your product mix and your marketing mix. It's all completely normal. As I have said, this is how your business evolves. So I don't want you to never change anything. That's not the point of today.
Navigating Evolution
It's all normal and you want to change and you want to evolve, but you also need to realize what you're doing as you make that evolution. Because when you don't realize it, the results are not going to be what you want them to be. The revenue is not going to be there. You're going to think it's a failure. You're going to roll out some wonderful new product, and then it's not going to sell and you're going to think, oh gosh, nobody wanted that product, and you're going to ditch the idea, which is not the point at all, right?
The new product is probably wonderful and amazing. We just need to get it to the right people through the correct means of marketing. And so I never want you to be discouraged by starting with that strategy because if you start with the strategy, you're missing all this foundational stuff and the strategy is not going to work. So instead, I would so much rather you understand how to navigate these pieces so that you can put your model together in a really strong way and have it be in alignment.
Additional Resources and Closing
And by the way, what would an episode be if I didn't talk about relationship and traffic marketing, right? And that's one of the biggest pieces of this alignment is when we look at that marketing mix lever, are you on the right side of relationship or traffic marketing? It's a huge one that comes up when we're looking at getting models into alignment.
So again, when we're talking about summing this up, I just want you to know all of these changes are very, very normal, but you're going to make your life a lot easier if you're making these changes while understanding these levers that need to be in alignment, understanding how you're moving these dials than if you are just trying to make changes blindly, hoping that one of them will work and one of them will solve your problems.
So my friends, here’s to keeping those dials in alignment and navigating them appropriately and confidently knowing what you're doing. As a reminder, I talk about all of this obviously here on the podcast, at my monthly events, and we do have a round of the Map Your Model bootcamp coming up.
So if you are interested at all in that, jump on the waitlist over at themichellewarner.com slash map your model. We have a round coming up in September, going to be doing some early bird pricing, doing some fun stuff. So get on that waitlist if you are interested in hearing more because I would love to spend a couple of days teaching you how to navigate this sucker. It is just one of my favorite things to do. As you can imagine, this is the heart of sequence over strategy. So showing you kind of these cheat codes and how to navigate this stuff is really, really fun for me.
So again, you can find that over at themichellewarner.com backslash map your model. In the meantime, thank you as always for being here. If you haven't done it already, please subscribe and even rate the show whenever you're listening. It just makes a huge difference in others being able to find it. And you know, you can always find me at themichellewarner.com where you're going to see all the information that you need. You'll see the information on the bootcamps, you'll see all the different podcast episodes. So that's really your hub to come hang out with me. I'm going to see you right back here in two weeks. Thanks so much, guys.