Create Content to Coach, Not Convince

Buying patterns have changed. And so must your strategy.

Created with Adobe Firefly

Let me tell you about the worst purchase I ever made at work.

It was a few years ago. Gen AI tools were just catching on, and I started looking for ways to add AI into our production workflow.

So, I:

• Scoured product reviews and forums

• Found a tool that matched my criteria

• Built an internal business case

• Got leadership buy-in and company-wide support

And eventually signed a one-year contract with a promising tool.

But there was a problem. I just didn't know it at the time.

We're Here, but Should We Have Come?

I invested a ton of time and energy an social capital to get that project off the ground. Everything I researched pointed to this tool as the right choice for the problem I was trying to solve.

But once I understood more about how AI tools like that work, it became painfully clear that ChatGPT on its own could do most of what we needed for a fraction of the cost.

Needless to say, we never fully implemented that tool. Spent a lot of money. Wasted a lot of people's time. And I felt like a failure for investing so much in an initiative that died on the vine.

What I didn't know then is that my experience is fairly normal for B2B buying decisions.

The Psychological Toll of the Buyer’s Journey

You've heard the stat that 70 percent of the buyer's journey happens before talking to sales.

But marketers often don't fully consider what happens during that time.

Just like my story, it's a lot of self-directed research, making a business case, getting internal buy-in, and defending the decision against any skeptics that get in the way.

And it all takes an emotional and psychological toll, leading to what behavioral scientists call Escalation of Commitment.

Picture a VP of Customer Success at a mid-sized SaaS company.

She's three months into building the case for a $200K customer health scoring platform. She's done the research, run the demos, and built compelling ROI projections around preventing customer churn.

But the process has been exhausting.

Three rounds of stakeholder meetings, endless questions from finance, pushback from her team, and the CEO keeps asking if it’s really the right move.

She’s staked her reputation on this initiative. So when someone questions whether health scoring platforms actually reduce churn, it doesn't feel like helpful information—it feels like an attack.

She's gone too far down this path to turn back now. The psychological cost of admitting she might be wrong feels impossibly high. So she doubles down on her commitment and charges forward.

Escalation of Commitment is a vicious cycle:

• Commit to an approach

• Hit obstacles or resistance

• Double down instead of pivoting

• Defend decision to stakeholders

• Escalate your commitment even more

Most marketing teams try to shock buyers out of this pattern. They create provocative messaging and content that challenges assumptions, points out mistakes, and highlights the cost of inaction.

It's a proven approach for grabbing attention and driving action. But when buyers are already emotionally invested in a decision, it backfires.

Content that takes a provocative, negative stance only hardens your buyer’s resolve to prove their original choice was right.

The Coaching Mindset

What if, instead of trying to provoke buyers out of their current approach, we helped them evolve it?

Instead of: "Five Mistakes You're Making in Your Sales Training Strategy"

Try: "One Simple Way High-Performing Sales Teams Accelerate Training Results"

Instead of: "Your Current Content Strategy Isn't Working"

Try: "The Missing Piece Preventing Your Content From Reaching Its Full Potential"

Notice the pattern? You're not attacking their current approach. Rather, you position your insight as an enhancement to what they're already doing.

The formula is:

1. Validate their thinking ("You were right to focus on...")

2. Acknowledge progress ("Teams like yours have seen success...")

3. Introduce a new perspective ("What we're seeing now...")

4. Frame as evolution ("This builds on what you have...")

Instead of making buyers feel defensive, you help them feel smarter for considering a new approach.

The challenge, of course, is turning this insight into something your team can actually execute.

Here's How I'd Roll This Out

1. Start with the team conversation

Position this as adding a psychological layer to what we're already doing, not starting over: "We're going to coach buyers to rethink their approach instead of provoking them to change their minds."

2. Map buyer escalation patterns

Comb through call recordings, customer interviews, and talk to customer-facing teams. What do buyers typically think their problem is when they first come to us? What's the actual problem we end up solving? The goal is learning our prospects' frame of mind and how it changes over time.

3. Audit existing content

Which assets might accidentally make committed buyers feel defensive? Which could be quickly refreshed with de-escalating headlines? Test new versions against originals to build team confidence and get data to show it works.

4. Create targeted content

Build new marketing and sales assets using the de-escalation framework. Work with sales leaders to integrate the approach into discovery conversations, and build AI workflows plus editorial processes to scale production without losing quality.

It would take some time. But my hunch is that we’ll capture more revenue from buyers who would have otherwise dismissed our provocative messaging.

---

Napkin Notes

• "Neurologically speaking—and contrary to popular belief—we don't make logical decisions. We make emotional ones. And emotional avoidance clouds our decision-making." – Executive Coach Joe Hudson, from this excellent article.

• "Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring." From Velocity Partners’ Yes, AI Is Making You Stupid

• Try this experiment: Track how much time your team spends creating versus debating for one month. I bet you'll find they're spending more energy defending their creative choices than making them. That's not a creative process. That's an endurance test.

---