Brand and Targeting

Revenue had been declining for several years when I arrived. Not months. Not quarters. Years. In that situation, most teams make the same mistake. They try to improve performance by adding tactics. I don’t start there. I start with one question. Are we even solving the right problem for the right people? To be clear, this is just one lever in a turnaround.

I use many. Pricing, sales structure, operations, technology, talent. But before touching any of that, we have to establish demand fundamentals. Because if you’re misaligned on who you serve and why they should care, everything else downstream is expensive guesswork. Here’s what was happening with this client. The company’s messaging was built to target their prospect’s leadership. It spoke to the people who approved budgets the check writers, the KPI owners.

It sounded credible. It checked boxes, but it didn’t create pull. So we did the work. Research. We studied how people searched, what questions they asked, where they got stuck, and who actually felt the pain day to day of not using our client’s solution. That’s when it became clear the real target audience wasn’t company leadership. It was the end user.

The person expected to make the outcome work. Once we had the right audience, the next job was clarity. We started shifting from what the client sold to what the end user needed urgently – the burning need. In this instance, executives didn’t create demand. Users did when their need was met. If you can crystallize that burning need for the right audience, everything changes.

We stopped optimizing for their prospects leadership metrics and started speaking directly to the prospects end users problem. Same company, same capabilities, different relevance and relevance is what re-opens the pipeline. This was the beginning of the work. Not the only change, not the last lever, but it was this shift that allowed everything else to work.

Over the next phases of the engagement, that foundation contributed to 25% revenue growth.

If revenue has been declining and marketing feels like it’s working harder for less. Don’t start with bolting on new tactics. Start by asking, do we know with evidence who the real target audience is, and can we state their burning need clearly enough that they feel understood in five seconds?

That’s the foundation of demand.