Have you ever wonderd why some sales and marketing messages seem to have the exact opposite effect of what was intended.

You see it quite a lot in B2B marketing. A company positions itself by attacking a competitor or by pointing out everything that’s wrong with a prospect’s current way of doing things. On paper, that seem to makes sense. If you can convince someone their current solution isn’t good enough, they’ll naturally want to hear about yours instead. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always works like that.

More often than not it actually makes people defensive and here is why. The moment you criticise a prospect’s current solution, you’re also indirectly criticising a decision they made. Maybe they bought that software five years ago. Maybe they were part of selecting that supplier. Either way, people tend to justify previous decisions before they’re willing to consider new ones.

Why prospects become defensive

There’s actually a name for this in psychology. It’s called the Ostrich Effect. The name comes from the old myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when they see danger, that’s not actually true by-the-way. The idea is that people tend to avoid information that makes them uncomfortable, even when dealing with it would most likely leave them much better off in the long run.

That’s exactly what can happen in sales and marketing.

The conversation quietly changes. Instead of the prospect thinking, “I’d like to learn more about this,“ they start thinking, “I need to defend why the decision we made wasn’t actually wrong.” At that point, your prospect is no longer evaluating your solution. They’re subconsciously defending their current environment, and what’s even worse, they’ll actively start to prevent you from speaking to others in their organization.

The same thing happens with marketing that is too problem-centric. It’s important to acknowledge that all organizations have problems worth solving; otherwise, there’s no reason for them to change. But there comes a point where repeatedly telling someone how broken their business is becomes counterproductive. Instead of creating urgency, it creates discomfort, and discomfort often leads to avoidance.

Reframing the conversation

Take something like a CRM as an example. There’s a big difference between saying, “Your CRM is outdated and is causing you to lose customers,” and saying, “Your current CRM has probably served your business well, but as your business continue ot grown you’ve probably reached the point where you need capabilities that aren’t available in your current system.”

Both statements are trying to get to the same place, but the second one feels very different. It acknowledges that the customer probably made a perfectly reasonable decision at one point in time. The conversation becomes about how the business has evolved rather than whether someone made a mistake years ago. That’s a very important distinction.

The same applies to almost every enterprise system. Most organisations didn’t make poor decisions. More often than not, they made the best decision they could with the information and resources they had at the time. The business has simply evolved since then.

That’s a much stronger message. You’re not actually asking someone to admit they were wrong, you’re helping them recognise that what got them to where they are today might not be what gets them to where they want to be tomorrow.

That doesn’t mean you avoid creating urgency. Good messaging still needs both a stick and a carrot. People need to understand the cost of standing still, but they also need to see a better outcome without having to be embarassed. If all they feel is criticism, they’ll often stop listening before they ever try to understand the value you’re trying to communicate.

One question worth asking when writing any sales or marketing message is this:

Does this make the prospect feel smart for talking to us, or does it make them feel foolish for decisions they’ve already made?

That’s quite a useful filter.

The exception to the rule

There’s one exception. Someone who’s recently joined an organisation is often much more open to criticise decisions made by others before they arrived because those decisions weren’t theirs. In that situation, change doesn’t feel like admitting a mistake. It feels like demonstrating strong leadership, which is probably why they were hired in to begin with.

Most of the time though, the challenge is not that people don’t understand the benefits of change. It is that people naturally avoid situations that make them feel like they’ve been wrong all along.

Maybe that’s really what the Ostrich Effect is reminding us of. Not that people avoid bad news, but that people avoid threats to their previous decisions.

Any good B2B marketing team should take that into account rather than fight against it.