You’re Driving With the Windscreen Steamed Up

Here is the part of the analogy that matters most and gets skipped.

The windscreen did not fog because of the weather. It fogged because of your own breath. The moisture is coming from the people inside the vehicle. Nothing external did this to you and nothing external is going to fix it.

The same is true of customer clarity. Nobody outside your business made you vague about who you sell to. It happened gradually, from the inside, through a hundred reasonable decisions. You took on a customer slightly outside the pattern because the money was good. Somebody asked what your market was and you gave a slightly wider answer than was strictly true, because a wider answer sounds more impressive. A new service got added. A sector got mentioned on the website because you had done one project in it.

None of those were mistakes. Together they are why you cannot see out.

Ask most owners who they sell to and you will get an answer inside 3 seconds. SMEs in the South East. Mid market IT. Professional services firms of 50 to 250 people. Ambitious businesses that want to grow.

That is the sleeve wipe. It clears just enough view to keep going. It is not wrong, it is just far too small to steer by, and it fogs back over the moment you try to make an actual decision with it. Which channel. Which message. Which event. Which 3 words go at the top of the home page.

The reason it feels sufficient is that it is comfortable and it is fast, and you are late.

This is the bit that catches out intelligent people.

If a lack of clarity stopped you, you would fix it. It does not. The spending continues at exactly the same rate. The confidence continues at exactly the same rate. The team still has a plan, the agency still has a brief, the calendar still fills up.

The only variable that changed is visibility, and visibility is the one thing nobody puts on a dashboard. So it degrades quietly for years while every reported number looks broadly fine.

I watched this happen at scale in enterprise technology, and it is the clearest example I have.

The business was mid pivot, moving from one part of the market into another with a genuinely strong new product in security infrastructure. The instinct was that a new segment needed to be won from the top, so the aim went high. C-suite, consistently, with the budget to match. Executive events, executive content, executive everything. Nothing about the execution was poor. It was expensive, it was well run and it was pointed at the wrong people.

Because the person who actually connected with the product sat 2 levels further down. They were the ones living the problem it solved, every day. They reported into the executive, of course, but they carried far more influence over whether this thing got bought, for the simple reason that they were the only ones who felt the pain being described.

Nothing was strictly wasted. It was just deeply inefficient, which is harder to spot and therefore worse. The same money aimed 2 levels lower would have reached more organisations and started more real conversations, because it would have been landing on people who recognised the situation being described.

When the profile was rebalanced, the messaging changed almost immediately, and traction followed. The right pain in front of the right person produces a valuable conversation. Then, and only then, does it make sense to move up the chain, selectively, on the back of an opportunity that already exists.

The lesson generalises well beyond enterprise security. Authority signs. Pain initiates. Aim at the authority and you are paying premium rates to talk to someone who has to have the problem explained to them.

The formal name for the clear windscreen is an ideal customer profile. ICP, if you have been to enough conferences.

I am wary of the acronym, because it makes a simple thing sound like a deliverable, and the moment it sounds like a deliverable somebody produces a 40 page document containing 4 invented people with alliterative names, everyone agrees it is very thorough and nobody opens it again.

The plain version is this. It is the ability to picture a specific person, in a specific situation, at a specific moment, and to know what made that moment start them looking. If you can hold that picture, most marketing decisions answer themselves. If you cannot, budget will not compensate, because you are spending it at the edges you cannot see.

This is the first objection every time, and it is usually true. So let me deal with it properly, because the misunderstanding buried in it costs more than the fog does.

Narrowing your picture is not narrowing who you will accept money from.

You still take the business that walks through the door. You still say yes to the odd project outside the pattern. Nobody is asking you to turn away revenue and anybody who does is not paying your wages.

What the picture governs is where you aim, which is a completely different question. Aiming is what you do with the finite money and the finite hours: the campaign, the event, the page, the outreach list, the talk you agree to give. You cannot aim at everybody. You can only aim at somebody and remain open to everybody, and the businesses that grow are almost always doing exactly that whether they describe it that way or not.

The wide answer is not a strategy. It is a description of who has bought so far, which is a rear view mirror, and you cannot steer with one of those either.

Try this now, before you read on.

Name the last 5 customers who bought from you. Most owners can do this instantly.

Now, for each of those 5, tell me what was happening in their business in the 30 days before they contacted you.

This is where it usually goes quiet.

The first half of that question is a customer list, and a customer list tells you who bought. The second half is the only part that tells you when to show up, and when to show up is what you are actually buying every time you spend a pound on marketing.

Somebody lost a big account. Somebody hired a sales director who asked an awkward question. Somebody had a number queried at a board meeting. Somebody watched a competitor turn up at a trade show looking suspiciously well organised. Somebody, 2 levels below the executive, had one bad week too many with a problem they had been quietly absorbing for a year.

People do not buy because you appeared. They buy because something happened and then you appeared. Miss the something and you are paying full price to be visible on all the days it did not happen.

Call the ones who bought recently, because memory decays fast and the detail is the entire value.

Call at least 1 who very nearly did not buy. They will tell you more in 20 minutes than 4 happy customers will in an hour.

Do not call your favourites. They like you, they will be generous, and generous is useless here.

Do not have the salesperson make the call. Customers are polite to salespeople and politeness is fog.

The value is not in any single conversation. It is in the repeats.

If 3 of the 5 use roughly the same phrase to describe the problem, that phrase belongs at the top of your home page, in their words rather than yours. You did not write it, which is precisely why it works.

If 4 of the 5 describe the same trigger event, you have just found your timing. That is what your campaigns should be built around and it is very unlikely to be the calendar you are currently working to.

If the answers to the third question keep landing in the same place, you have found the objection you have never once addressed in your marketing, because nobody ever said it to your face.