Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 13, 2018

There are a broad range of products/services that you CANNOT sell to the CEO or senior exec of a company — too irrelevant to them. You either need to figure out how to position your service against EXISTING top priority to CEO, or you are better off selling “lower” in org

But sell too low, and at a company where the principal-agent problem is at its peak (employees are agents, corporation is the principal), and “saving the company money” or “making the company money” are totally irrelevant.

So for most products and services, you need to find somebody in the “middle” and figure out how to make the agent, not just the ethereal principal, win.

Some of the most valuable companies operate in the “zone of irrelevance” because there is no impetus to switch them out (think: payroll, janitorial services, etc) and costs are not SO high, so not as much margin/competitive pressure

In many cases you need to wait for a fundamental shift to challenge one of these companies, or get very, very creative (and very determined) selling into “the middle.” But it’s ironically much stickier to be in the “zone of irrelevance, yet necessary” for clients