It’s very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of the hamster wheel inside the fishbowl of building your business and forget about the overall opportunity parameters.

If you are struggling for traction, it indicates that you may be:

• Experiencing a mismatch between what you believe to be the opportunity and the reality of the opportunity (this is very common in the immediate-post-bar-napkin, just-keep-grinding and true-believer phases)
• Building a solution looking for a problem (this is typical of engineering driven companies)
• Not understanding who your ideal customer is and what their pain is (this is also typical of engineering driven companies)
• Lacking sufficient ideal customers who are willing to pay for a solution to their pain at a price point that supports a sustainably profitable business model (this is a strategic leadership error, typically a variation of “it’s my idea so it must be good”)
• Not effectively creating the perception of need in your prospects (this is marketing’s job, and this is fairly common when building solutions looking for a problem)
• Not closing on the perceived need (this is sales’ job, and this one is rare compared to the others in this list)