Nick Bennett had been teaching a concept called "elevate the problem" to every client at Duo Consulting for a year and a half. Standard curriculum for every engagement. He thought it was too obvious. Something everyone already knew.

Then he posted about it on LinkedIn. "It was one of my most popular pieces of content ever," he told me. He sounded almost annoyed by it. A year and a half of teaching this thing in private, and it outperformed everything he had posted that year.

Elevating the problem is about moving from crisis to success language. Instead of "you have no leads," you talk about "you have leads, but they are not converting," so you attract buyers who are already succeeding and stuck at a ceiling.

Most marketers think they need new ideas for content. Usually, you just need to publish the ones you already teach on calls.

Nick had missed it. And he had watched his clients miss the same thing.

Early on at Duo, he tried writing POV documents for them. He would frame up their problem, build the narrative, and hand it over. Those clients were rarely as successful as the ones who already owned their point of view.

"I did not know that I could not hand you one," he said.

He sees the proof on call reviews. The client says something different every time. Different story to Nick, different story to prospects. "No one can recall you. There is nothing to grab onto."

You cannot read the label from inside the bottle. Your best thinking is in the things you say on calls without noticing. That is your point of view. And you are usually the last person who realizes it.

Nick calls the testing process "open mic night". You are not performing your best set. You are testing to see what hits.

Here is a simple way to run your own version this week.

Remember, your goal is not to go viral.

Your goal is to see which of your "too obvious" ideas get replies, DMs, and saves. Those reactions are the market pointing at your real point of view.

For Nick, that one post turned into a podcast episode, then a 9,000 word mini book. He did not map that out in a content calendar. The audience did the planning for him.

But let us say the content starts working. People are engaging, DMs are coming in. What happens next?

And then nothing converts. The reason is almost always the offer. It is too custom, too abstract, or too hard for someone to explain to a colleague.

"Selling and marketing a custom service is generally much harder," Nick told me. "It is too abstract to market. It is harder for people to refer buyers to you."

His fix is what he calls standardizing. Not fully custom or productized. Clear enough that a prospect can understand what they are buying before a call. Specific enough that someone can refer you without a ten-minute explanation.

Nick learned this the hard way. He had his own offer stacked wrong for a while. The POV was right, the services were right, but the order was off. He put the offer at the top and, in his words, "business explodes."

So once you find your POV, ask this. Can someone explain what you sell in one sentence? If the answer is no, that is your next problem to solve.

What are you teaching in private that you have never said in public?

And once you find it, can someone explain what you sell in one sentence?

Your POV does not need to be invented out of thin air. It needs to be extracted. Your offer should not be complicated. It needs to be clear.

Keep those ideas flowing,

Christine

POV work is also what I do with my clients at Orchard Strategy.

We pull the “too obvious” concepts from your client calls, turn them into a clear POV, and publish on LinkedIn, so the right people remember you (and buy from you). If that is the kind of help you want, you can learn more here.

Nick Bennett: “Everybody universally agrees that it's a lot easier to sell something that has guardrails up, that's pre-packaged ... instead of a fully custom thing or a fully productized thing ... There's a sweet spot in the middle. We call it standardized ... there's three main ingredients that we focus on. What problem do you solve? Who do you solve it for and how do you solve it?”

Nick Bennett: “You fit the buyer, not the price. So what we mean by that is you decide what you want to charge. We have clients that decide they want to charge $15,000 a month for a service. Well, you can't sell $15,000 a month to a solopreneur doing 10K a month ... So if we want to charge 15K a month, we have to re-engineer the buyer and figure out who can afford that.”

Nick Bennett: “I think strategy is a dime a dozen. I don't think strategy is the most important thing in the world. ... Your strategy is only as good as your ability to execute. ... one of the main things we have to do is introduce execution into the business model so that we can help their clients be as successful as possible. That's where your pricing power tends to come from.”

Nick Bennett: “It's really easy to say the same thing in the same way every single time. But if you're saying something different every time, no one can recall you. No one can recall what does this person believe. There's nothing to grab onto. There's nothing to resonate with.”

Nick Bennett: “I have five thousand followers on LinkedIn and it's fairly targeted. It's almost exactly the people I want to sell to. ... If you want to sell B2B services, I think the five thousand follower list is doing pretty great ... When you post about your life and all the problems that you're facing, you're going to attract more people who look like you and not the people you want to sell to.”

Nick Bennett: “If we need to open up, we need net new people, we're going to market the problem all day. ... If we have people and they're new, we market the process ... We need to start sharing frameworks and the thinking. ... if we need inbounds, if we need actual leads, we need meetings on the calendar, we market the proof.”

I'm Christine Orchard. I host Marketers Do Coffee to learn how LinkedIn actually works from the people who do each part best. I also run Orchard Strategy, a LinkedIn strategy and content agency. We handle the whole channel for B2B founders, executives, and consultants, from positioning through to publishing.