What's at the center of your frame?

Have you ever been on a sales call and heard "Wait! I didn't know it does that!"?

This is what happens when marketing places some of the value outside of the frame.

The frame is the boundaries of your messaging. Outside of this, there may be value, but for whatever reason — accident, ignorance, or strategy, it was left unsaid.

Unspoken messaging can't resonate. Of course, there's a marvelous exception: the earliest adopters are prospects that have a talent for hearing or seeing things that you yourself haven't even said (this is their talent, and often a treasure as you search for resonance).

But if we want to sell beyond those visionaries, we should assume that people won't hear or notice what doesn't get said early and often in our funnel.

Not only that, but even the things that *are* said, but live on the edges of our framing (a footnote here, an h3 there, this little paragraph or FAQ), usually fade into the noise.

As product makers and visionaries, we live inside our heads and can fall into the trap of assuming our prospects are actively reading our minds or using their imagination to make connections and see what's obvious to us.

In truth, your prospect's value perception works much like their physical eyes — only the tiniest dot in the center of their field of view is in focus. The rest is a blurry space that their mind fills with assumptions based on your positioning.

If you discover that something close or beyond the edges of your messaging is more valuable than you realized, consider re-adjusting your frame. Placing that value at the center of your messaging may be a key to unlocking market fit.

Over time, the more intentional you are with your framing, the more qualified your interest will be, and the faster you'll make progress.