Before You Create Demand, You Have to be Choosable.

I was in Aldi the other day, staring at an aisle full of fizzy drinks. 

Dozens of options. Some familiar, some suspiciously similar to familiar, and plenty offering decent value. 

Faced with all that choice, I picked up a Diet Coke.

I knew what I was getting with that Diet Coke, not so much Diet Vive (Aldi’s near identical home brand). Even less so Professor Peppy, though it did tickle me.

This is what many businesses miss when they start spending money on marketing and advertising. Before you create demand, build awareness or generate leads, you need to make the business choosable.

Because being seen isn’t enough.

If people can’t quickly understand what you do, who it’s for and why it might help them, you’re paying to make more people confused.

That’s a fucking expensive hobby.

It’s also why Aldi and the like use similar visual codes and naming conventions. If the Dr Pepper looking Professor Peppy isn’t Aldi brand Dr P then I don’t know what is. 

Awareness Isn’t Where the Funnel Starts

The traditional marketing funnel usually begins with awareness. People become aware of the business, consider it, develop a preference, purchase and perhaps advocate for it afterwards.

Fine.

But there’s a stage even above awareness, which almost never gets mentioned.

Choosability.

A business is choosable when the right potential customer can recognise it as a credible option for a problem they need to solve. They don’t need to know every feature, understand your methodology, memorise your company history or know the founder’s dog’s name. 

They need to see enough relevance to keep looking. You need to earn their awareness.

Without that, awareness has bugger-all commercial value.

You can spend heavily on advertising, produce endless content and chase visibility across every channel available. But if the people you reach don’t know what you’re for, all you’ve done is pour more money into a leaky funnel.

Actually, let’s call it what it is. It’s not even a funnel at that stage, it’s a bloody colander.

Busy doesn’t mean effective.

Weak choosability usually shows up further down the commercial process. People visit the website and leave. Prospects kick the tyres but don’t continue. Sales calls spend the first 20 minutes explaining what the business actually does, only to find the person on the other end hung up after 5 confused minutes.

Everyone looks busy, yet the pipeline remains depressingly sparse.

That isn’t a lead generation problem.

It’s a clarity problem.

Start With Their Problem, Not Your Product

The first step towards becoming choosable is being absolutely clear about your target market.

Not everyone who could theoretically buy from you. Not a giant list of sectors, roles and company sizes copied into a slide deck because somebody likes a large addressable market (said it before, if you’re for everybody, you’re really for nobody in particular).

The people most likely to experience a problem you can solve, care enough to want it fixed and have the money or authority to do something about it.

Then you need to understand how they describe that problem.

Founders and technical teams often explain their businesses from under the bonnet. They talk about functionality, architecture, integrations, methodology and whatever new technical breakthrough they’ve spent three years building (eh-ah as Boris Johnson would have it).

They understand every word.

Your potential customers don’t.

Worse, most won’t even give a shit.

A customer struggling with an unmanageable sales database probably isn’t waking up desperate for more tables, settings or automated notifications. They’re thinking about wasted time, missed opportunities, inaccurate forecasts and sales leads disappearing into a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

That’s the problem your message needs to reflect.

You’re not selling database functionality. You’re helping them keep every sales opportunity in one place, spend less time chasing information and make better commercial decisions.

The product creates the benefit.

The benefit makes you relevant.

Make the Message Easy to Carry

This becomes even more important in B2B because the person experiencing the problem is usually not the only person involved in solving it.

There might be an end user, a manager, an economic buyer, a technical evaluator, procurement and somebody senior who arrives late and asks why the whole thing costs so much and can’t we get their cousin’s niece to do something in ChatGPT instead.

In other words, the buying committee.

That doesn’t mean the decision becomes completely rational. Put three humans in a room and rationality is already OOO. But it does mean your message has to be able to travel.

The person who discovers your business needs to explain it to everyone else.

If they can’t describe what you do, which problem you solve and why it’s worth considering, you’re not going to make the shortlist.

You probably won’t even reach the long list. 

Who has time to understand a brand that can’t explain itself? Fuck that, keep scrolling.

This is why clear positioning isn’t just clever copywriting. It improves the ability of an internal champion to carry your case through the business. It gives sales a stronger starting point and reduces the amount of explanation required before a useful commercial conversation can begin.

Your message needs to survive being repeated by somebody who doesn’t work for you.

Preferably without a 38-slide deck, a shiny suit and an interpreter.

Your Competition Includes Doing Absolutely Nothing

Businesses also weaken their choosability by defining their competition too narrowly.

Your competitors aren’t only companies selling something that looks like your product or service.

The customer has other options.

They can keep using their existing supplier. They can hire a specialist. They can buy from a much larger provider offering your service as part of something broader. They can build a half-arsed internal workaround.

Or they can do nothing.

Inertias close rate on B2B sales opportunities is elite. 

The current process might be slow, messy and irritating, but it’s familiar. It’s understood and it does at least part of the job. Changing it takes time, money and political effort.

A spreadsheet can be good enough until the pain of using it becomes greater than the pain of replacing it.

That’s the commercial comparison businesses need to understand.

It isn’t enough to claim you’re better than another software platform. You need to show why your solution is worth changing behaviour for. What wasted time disappears? What risk reduces? What becomes faster, easier or more profitable?

If you cost ten times more than the spreadsheet, the value of solving the problem needs to justify that difference.

Otherwise they’ll keep the spreadsheet.

It might be held together with formulas nobody understands and maintained by someone called Keith who retired in 2019, but it’s still your competitor if you’re trying to sell in an alternative.

Make Yourself Choosable Before You Make Yourself Famous

The commercial sequence is pretty straightforward, though not often completely linear.

Someone notices a problem. They look for ways to solve it. They discover possible categories, approaches and suppliers. They become aware of businesses that might help. They consider a smaller number, develop a preference and eventually purchase.

That means your messaging needs to begin with the problem they recognise, not the category language you happen to use internally.

Someone might not know they need a CRM.

But they do know that they can’t keep track of sales leads, and are losing deals as a result.

“Keep all your sales opportunities in one place” makes the business choosable. Repeating “AI-powered CRM platform” in six different typefaces probably doesn’t. Check out my review of Zoho CRM with Storm to see exactly that play out.

Once you’re choosable, awareness becomes valuable. More of the right people can understand why you matter. Your social proof then helps make you credible. Your product, service and sales process can build preference.

But awareness can’t rescue a business nobody understands.

Before spending another spond on campaigns, content or lead generation, look at your website and ask three questions.

Can the right customer see their problem?

Can they understand your value in less than 20 seconds?

Can they explain it clearly to somebody else?

If not, don’t buy more attention.

Fix the bloody proposition.

Right. The Obvious Questions Answered

What does it mean for a business to be choosable?

A business is choosable when the right potential customer can quickly recognise it as a credible option for a problem they want to solve.

That means being clear about who you help, what problem you address, what outcome you create and why somebody should consider you instead of the alternatives.

It doesn’t mean explaining every product feature or proving the entire sales case immediately. It means earning enough interest to make the long list.

If people see your business but can’t understand why it matters to them, you’re visible but not choosable.

Commercially, that’s close to useless.

Why am I getting website traffic or brand awareness but not more sales?

Traffic and awareness only create commercial value when the people arriving understand what you offer and see it as relevant.

If visitors leave quickly, enquiries are poor or sales calls begin with lengthy explanations, the problem isn’t reach. It’s most likely the proposition and messaging.

Check whether the website reflects a problem the customer already recognises. Then make the outcome clear, remove unnecessary technical language and give people a reason to continue down the more detailed rabbit hole.

More traffic poured into unclear messaging usually creates more confusion, not more revenue.

Shoving more people through a broken door won’t improve the building.

How do I explain what my business does clearly?

Start with the customer, the problem and the outcome.

A useful basic structure is:

“We help [specific customer] solve [recognisable problem] so they can [valuable outcome].”

This isn’t the finished website headline. It’s a test of whether you understand the commercial value of the business.

Don’t lead with your methodology, technology or category jargon unless your target market already understands and actively uses those terms.

The explanation should be clear enough for a customer to repeat inside their own business.

If it needs a diagram, three footnotes and a warm-up act, it isn’t clear.

Should B2B messaging focus on features or benefits?

Lead with the problem and benefit. Use features as evidence that you can deliver it.

Buyers need to understand what improves after choosing you. That might be less lost time, lower risk, more accurate data, simpler processes, increased revenue or fewer opportunities slipping through the cracks.

Features matter later, particularly when technical evaluators and end users compare options. But a feature without a meaningful customer outcome is just product information.

Useful, maybe.

Choosable, probably not.

How do I compete with spreadsheets, existing processes and doing nothing?

First, accept that they’re real competitors.

Then understand why the customer continues using them. Familiarity, cost, convenience and fear of disruption can outweigh the negatives of a poor process.

Your job is to make the cost of staying put visible and the value of changing credible. Show what the existing approach wastes, risks or prevents, then explain how your solution improves the commercial outcome.

Don’t just say your product has more features than Excel. Excel has survived decades of software founders announcing its death. It’ll be fine.

Show why changing is worth the effort.

That’s how you beat inertia.