Why Your Marketing Should Target Companies in Intolerable Pain

(Not Those Who Just Want to Improve)

Most marketing strategies are built on a comforting assumption:
If we clearly explain our value, reasonable companies will decide to improve.

That assumption is wrong.

In the real world, organizations don’t change because improvement sounds nice. They change because the current situation has become intolerable.

Improvement is optional. Pain is not.

Companies tolerate inefficiency, bad tools, outdated processes, and mediocre results for years. Everyone knows things could be better — and yet nothing changes.

Why?

Because improvement competes with:

  • Internal politics

  • Budget inertia

  • “Good enough” performance

  • Fear of disruption

  • The effort required to change

As long as the pain is manageable, the status quo wins.

Change only happens when something breaks:

  • Revenue stalls or drops

  • Leads dry up

  • Customers complain or churn

  • A competitor pulls ahead

  • Leadership gets called into a room they don’t want to be in

At that point, the question is no longer “Should we improve?”
It becomes “How fast can we fix this?”

This is where most market sizing goes wrong

Traditional marketing talks about Total Addressable Market — how many companies could benefit from your solution.

That number is almost meaningless.

The real market is not:

  • Everyone who might want better results

  • Everyone who should modernize

  • Everyone who agrees your solution is “interesting”

The real market is much smaller — and much more valuable:

Companies that will actually issue a purchase order.

And those companies share one defining trait:
They are experiencing intolerable pain.

Why “hair-on-fire” buyers aren’t a niche

Many teams worry that targeting pain-ready buyers makes the market “too small.”

In practice, the opposite happens.

When you market to companies in pain:

  • Sales cycles shorten

  • Objections disappear

  • Budgets already exist

  • Decision-makers show up

  • Conversion rates rise dramatically

You stop spending time convincing people why they should care — and start helping people who already do.

The market looks smaller on paper, but it’s far more real.

What this means for your marketing

If your messaging is built around:

  • “Best practices”

  • “Optimization”

  • “Future-proofing”

  • “Nice-to-have improvements”

You’re talking to companies that are comfortable delaying action.

If instead your messaging speaks to:

  • Risk

  • Cost of inaction

  • Missed revenue

  • Competitive exposure

  • “This can’t go on anymore” moments

You attract buyers who are ready to move now.

Good marketing doesn’t persuade reluctant organizations to change.
It finds the ones who already know they must.

The uncomfortable truth

Targeting companies in pain feels exclusionary. It is.

And that’s the point.

Effective marketing is not about being appealing to everyone.
It’s about being unmistakably relevant to the few who are ready.

If your marketing feels calm, polite, and universally agreeable, it’s probably optimized for people who will never buy.

If it makes the right buyers feel seen — and the wrong ones quietly move on — you’re doing it right.

Because in the end, markets aren’t defined by possibility.
They’re defined by intolerability.