Two Blind Men Walk Into a Conference Room

Imagine you sell a SaaS product to publishers. Your best market is the United States, where the average contract is worth $160,000 over two years.

Then, within a few weeks, two of your salespeople, in two of your toughest markets, come back with deals that don't make sense. In Spain, $1.2 million over four years. In Ukraine, where a typical deal is about €30,000, a contract worth €750,000.

That is what happened at a software company called Piano.

There had been no breakthrough release. No revolutionary new feature. The person who coached those salespeople hadn't even looked at the product.

He had taught them to question something everyone thought they understood.

A puzzle with a box

Before getting to what happened in those conference rooms, consider a small problem from the history of psychology.

In the 1940s, psychologist Karl Duncker studied how people approach unfamiliar problems. One of his best-known tasks has become known as the candle problem.

The objects don't change when someone discovers the answer. Only their interpretation does.

What happens when an entire product category mistakes the solution it provides for the business challenge it was created to address?

The conversation that kept repeating

The person who coached them was me.

I had come to publishing with no industry experience. Yet I sold six $250,000 strategy engagements in my first four months at Piano. These publishers weren’t buying software. They were paying for an insight and a path forward that had eluded them until that conversation.

Why would executives who had spent decades in this business pay a newcomer to help them rethink it? The answer began with a conversation that played out almost exactly the same way every time. Only later did I teach Piano salespeople to bring the same argument into their software sales.

I'd start by asking how things were going. We would talk about the business, the decline of advertising and the pressure to persuade readers to pay. Eventually, someone would say a version of the same sentence.

“It's hard to get people to pay for content when there's so much out there for free.”

These weren’t naïve executives. For more than twenty years, publishers had struggled with declining advertising economics and the difficulty of getting people to pay for content available elsewhere for free. The stakes were enormous, and the familiar answers weren’t enough.

My next sentence was intentionally abrupt.

“You're looking at your problem the wrong way.”

That tended to get the room's attention.

“You've just told me it's hard to get people to pay for content because there's so much free content out there. So why are you trying to monetize the most commoditized part of your business?”

“But the good news is, you have something very valuable. You have customers who love your brand. They come to your site every day and spend time with you. They would buy something from you—if it was of value to them.”

“Don't monetize your content. Monetize your loyal audience.”

The next word out of their mouths was almost always the same.

Not “Which features?” Not “Can we see a demo?” They wanted to know how to build the business I had just described.

What “How?” meant

The answer began with a different view of the business. Publishers possessed loyal customers, not just content to put behind a paywall. Who were those loyal readers? What did they value about the publisher? What else could they value that the publisher could credibly deliver?

One publisher produced so much excellent content that its most loyal customers struggled to keep up. When we spoke with them, we learned that missing even a day could mean losing track of stories they cared about. The publisher had been thinking about how to charge people for the content. But these readers revealed a different problem: they wanted help finding and following what mattered to them.

So instead of charging for content, we charged for tools that helped readers find and track the content they cared about.

Nothing about the readers' affection for the publication had changed. We had simply listened closely enough to discover another form of value within that relationship.

For that publisher, we used a design-thinking approach to understand the readers and turn the insight into something they would pay for.[2] But the point of view came first: don’t monetize your content; monetize your loyal audience. The method made the alternative actionable.

That is what made the answer to “How?” compelling. We weren’t leading with a claim about business value and then returning to features. We offered a different way to solve a critical business challenge, and a credible path to pursue it. That made it a conversation for the people responsible for the future of the business.

That is the conversation the two Piano salespeople took into their markets. In Ukraine, the salesperson told me what happened right after he delivered the line. The CEO turned to the two direct reports beside him and asked, “Did you get that down?”

Why did everyone miss it?

There is a tempting explanation: the publishers had simply failed to think creatively. But that misses the more interesting part.

They had good reasons to focus on content. Content was what they produced, what attracted their audiences and what subscription software was designed to sell. The market offered a recognizable set of products, budgets and measures for monetizing it.

And that is how a possible solution can quietly become the accepted definition of a problem.[3]

But the publishers didn’t need a paywall product. They needed a direct-to-consumer revenue stream to offset lost advertising revenue. “Monetize content” was one proposed way to accomplish that. Over time, it became the question buyers asked and vendors competed to answer.

I began by stepping back from the requested solution and stating the underlying business challenge as simply as I could: publishers needed another revenue stream. Once I separated that challenge from content monetization, the next question was what other valuable assets they already possessed.

They were fixated on monetizing content. I was puzzled by the attempt to charge for something increasingly commoditized, so I looked for another asset to leverage. The loyal audience was already there.

It is not that paywalls were wrong. Some publishers built successful subscription businesses. The blind spot was treating content monetization as the full scope of the opportunity, without reopening the question of the underlying business challenge.

The second blind man

It is easy, at this point, to imagine that the blind person in the conference room was the publishing executive.

But the other person had been sitting across the table all along.

Piano sold content monetization technology. Customers asked for ways to monetize content. We were prepared to compete on precisely those terms. The category didn't just shape the buyer's request. It shaped the vendor's answer.

This was the vendor’s predicament. Product-market fit had proved people would buy the software. But as sales grew harder, the instinct was to improve the tactics: more marketing, more BDRs, sharper capability decks, better demos, new features and discounts to close. Meanwhile, every new dollar of recurring revenue sold on features, discounted pricing and a vendor relationship carried more churn risk than it needed to. The company was working harder to win a contest defined by its category.

Selling the product had helped Piano find its market. The same habit could now limit the kind of company it might become.

The change we made was not simply a more persuasive pitch. It changed who was in the conversation and what role Piano could play. Instead of pitching product features to departmental buyers, the salespeople were discussing publishers’ most critical business challenge with CEOs and boards of directors. A product sale tends to create a vendor relationship: customer success answers support tickets and puts out fires. A conversation about a critical business challenge creates the opportunity for a trusted-adviser relationship, where customer success is invited into decisions about what happens next.

I had found a way to change the conversation without first changing the software. Two salespeople showed that the conversation could travel. But after I left, Piano’s sales organization returned to selling the product. The insight had changed individual deals, not the habits of the company.

So the two people in the conference room shared more than a problem. Each had been taught by the same category what counted as a solution.

Think again about Duncker's box. No new object was needed. It had been there from the beginning, doing exactly what everyone expected a box to do.

The publisher had an audience. The vendor had a product. Both knew these things. What neither side's usual conversation made visible was the business that might be built by understanding that audience differently.

Two blind men walked into a conference room. Both thought they understood the problem.

The one whose business depended on selling the answer had the most to lose by never questioning it.