TFT: The Word Gap That Makes You Look Interchangeable
Your customer’s problem has a vocabulary. Miss it, and your value leaks out before the renewal.
The website won the deal.
The onboarding went clean.
And you still can’t tell if they’ll re-sign.
That’s the leak Part 1 didn’t cover.
Last time, Jeff Hassemer and I traced how a positioning leak forms before the call. The dark funnel sets an expectation you never wrote. The handoff drops the message. The rep improvises to save the deal.
The leak doesn’t stop at the signature. It follows the customer inside the account, into a quieter place: the gap between the words you use for the problem and the words your customer uses for it.
You think you’re delivering value, but in reality you sound the same as the last three vendors.
Ninety days out from renewal, that gap is the whole game. The goal has to be to bring value in a different way from the competition.
Here’s how to close it. Get specific before the meeting. Diagnose in their language. Drive the outcome in their words.
Share this with a founder who’s staring down a renewal they can’t read.
Get Specific Or Get Ignored
As I reflected on the article Jeff and I wrote, I realized the fix really started for me before I ever sat down with the customer. It started when I narrowed the problem down, not just to help founders with sales, but specifically technical founders. The ones who really just want to focus on building the next product that solves the next problem.
Christopher Lochhead and the Category Pirates built a whole book around one move: Niche Down. Get as specific as humanly possible about what you do and who it’s for. Most founders resist it. Narrowing feels like leaving money on the table.
Look at how Tesla started. They didn’t launch “electric cars.” They launched an electric sports car. One narrow thing, for a small group of people who could pay for it. That specificity limited their options on purpose. And it funded everything that came after.
Remember when Amazon was just an online bookstore?
Specificity earns something in a sales relationship. It tells the right customer “this is for you,” in a voice the wrong customer walks straight past. When the positioning is sharp, the customer recognizes themselves in it. When it’s broad, they file you next to everyone else and start comparing you on price.
Broad positioning is the first leak. I’ve never been able to fix a language gap with a customer who wasn’t sure what value I brought to the table.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe
The real leak lives in language.
Once the sale closes, the clock starts ticking. Not just for renewal, but for value delivery and trust building. Every account I have lost has been because I did not deliver enough value within the first 30 to 60 days. That is why diagnose before you prescribe is one of the key steps in the Revenue Flywheel System. The customers that I have been the most successful with I learned how those specific customers saw this specific problem. Then I used their exact words to describe the problem back to them and show them the outcomes.
Do they say DSO or time to invoice? Uptime or downtime? Production numbers or revenue dollars? The words are the map.
I see this every week in my day job. My customers all open with the same line: “I want to increase runtime.” True, in fact everybody wants the equipment to run longer. But runtime was never the real goal. The real goal is production. They want the same fluid out of the well, reliably. So there are two numbers that actually matter:
How often the equipment is running.
How much the system produces while it runs.
The day I heard the difference between “runtime” and “production” was the day the conversation changed.
Now I could talk about where our products and services beat the competition on the number that mattered to them. The real one, sitting under the stated one.
Once I understood that, I could deliver the outcome in the right language. Miss that step, and the customer can’t map what you did to what they care about. Use the wrong words for the outcome and the problem, and the value you created leaks out before anyone writes it down. At renewal, you look interchangeable. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.
Understand the problem in your customer’s own words. Align your outcomes to those same words.
Drive The Outcome In Their Words
Once I understood the real problem in their terms, I started doing two things. Restate the outcome in their language. Then drive it, fast.
The chain looks like this:
That last step is where most relationships stall. People diagnose well, then move slowly. Renewals don’t wait for slow. The outcome has to land while the customer is still deciding whether you were worth it. It starts from the first interaction, not 90 days before renewal.
When I put the outcome in production terms and moved on it early, the customer saw the value clearly. They saw why we won on the metric they cared about, not the one on our spec sheet.
That’s the difference between a renewal you hope for and a renewal that’s already decided.
Same product, with the same spec sheet. Different words, delivered fast. That’s how you close the positioning leak before it costs you the account.
The Flywheel Reads This As Engagement
Positioning inside an account is living work. It’s the Customer Engagement engine doing its job.
You understand the real problem → you deliver the outcome in their language → the win becomes visible → the renewal and the expansion get easier.
That’s the flywheel spinning instead of stalling. Broad positioning and borrowed language add drag, and every renewal turns into a fresh argument about whether you were worth it.
I’ve seen this firsthand. I’ve lost accounts because I was not “better than the other guys”. What I realized was I had not put the value in their terms. In my case that meant still talking about runtime instead of production. Once I changed my value proposition to production terms and delivered on that value proposition my runback rate (or renewal rate) increased.
This is why I want to share the Revenue Flywheel System with other technical founders. Not sure which driver is leaking momentum before your next renewal? The Revenue Flywheel Diagnostic will show you in under 10 minutes.
Action Step
Before your next renewal conversation, do this:
Write down the customer’s real goal in their exact words, not your words for it….Theirs. (If you’re guessing, you just found your first call to make.)
Name the one outcome that proves you’re moving that number.
Restate it back to them this week, and move on it before the renewal clock runs out.
Skip it, and you’ll keep delivering value in a language your customer doesn’t reward. The work still happens. The credit leaks out. Renewal becomes a coin flip you could have won.
I’d recommended Reading
I’d recommend checking out Christopher Lochhead’s book on niching down and category design, Here’s a link to him talking about it on Lenny’s newsletter: How to become a category pirate.
Sales is just problem solving with another human.
Specifity sells. And each customer segment uses a different language. Very useful. Thanks.