---
title: "Value Stacking and Why Everyone Gets it Wrong"
episode: 11
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Tom Miller"
guest_title: "Author of 'Call Your Shots'; former CRO, Emailage"
date_published: 2023-06-06
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:13:18
word_count: 1897
topics: ["brand-positioning", "pricing-packaging", "gtm-strategy", "demand-generation"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-value-stacking/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Value Stacking and Why Everyone Gets it Wrong

_Thomas Miller on value misstacking, worthiness over price, and gravity as the universal law of business_

**Episode 11 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Tom Miller, Author of 'Call Your Shots'; former CRO, Emailage · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published June 6, 2023 · Updated July 22, 2026 · 00:13:18  
Canonical: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-value-stacking/

**Topics:** Brand & Positioning · Pricing & Packaging · GTM Strategy · Demand Generation


## Executive summary

In part three of a four-part series, author and go-to-market strategist Thomas Miller unpacks what he considers the most common — and most expensive — mistake in marketing: value misstacking. Companies routinely misjudge whether the highest value they deliver is functional or emotional, then stack it incorrectly across their messaging, their content, and the way they train their salespeople. The result is a company that leads with the wrong promise and leaves enormous value on the table. The other version of the same failure is 'spaghetti on the wall' — throwing every claim into the market and expecting buyers to sort it out. Miller's warning is blunt: when you raise the cost of customer thinking, you get punished, not rewarded, because it is not the market's job to figure your value out for you.

That problem sent Miller looking for a way to measure value itself. His conclusion is that the only unit business actually uses — price — is the wrong one, because price and value are fundamentally different things. He stops thinking in terms of economic value and starts thinking in terms of 'worthiness,' a broader unit that captures how effective a tool will be and how it will make a buyer feel, questions a price tag answers none of. With no existing way to measure worthiness, he built one, and it led him to a metaphor that reorganizes how he sees every deal: gravity.

The back half of the conversation is a tour of that metaphor — gravity as the universal law of business. Value exchange between a vendor and a customer behaves like mass attracting mass, and Miller decomposes an offer's pull into three forces. Mass is the innate value of an innovation before the market perceives it at all. Proximity is getting that offer close enough to the customer to be known — the high-touch-versus-volume game most companies spend their whole careers playing. And anti-gravity, the force he says is overlooked most, is the gravity of alternatives: incumbents renewing above 90% and expanding at 135% of the prior transaction, five thousand cybersecurity vendors drowning out a new voice, all holding the customer in place. Occasionally, timing or a sudden job-to-be-done produces a nonlinear 'fusion event' — as when the antivirus industry was born overnight when computers 'got sick.'

Who should listen: founders, marketers, product leaders, and sales leaders wrestling with positioning and messaging — anyone deciding which promise to lead with and struggling to explain why a genuinely better product still can't pull customers away from good-enough alternatives. The takeaway is a mental model for diagnosing whether you've stacked your value correctly, and for accounting for the competitive gravity that no amount of product mass or proximity can ignore.


## Key takeaways

1. **Value misstacking is the most common marketing mistake** — Miller's core trap: you misperceive whether your highest value is emotional or functional, then stack it incorrectly across messaging, content, and sales training. Lead with the wrong promise and you leave a large amount of your real value unclaimed in the buyer's mind.
   _Why it matters:_ Before writing another campaign, explicitly rank your functional versus emotional value and decide which to lead with. The order you stack value in is a strategic decision, not a copywriting detail.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Sales Leaders

2. **Don't throw it all at the wall — you'll get punished, not rewarded** — The other failure mode is dumping every value claim into the market ('spaghetti on the wall') as if buyers will sort it out. Raising the cost of customer thinking is penalized, because it is not the marketplace's job to figure out your value for you.
   _Why it matters:_ Lower the cost of buyer cognition by making one clear, correctly-stacked promise. More claims almost always mean less perceived value, not more.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders

3. **Price and value are different things — think in 'worthiness'** — The only unit business uses to talk about value is price, but a price tag tells a buyer nothing about how effective a tool will be or how it will make them feel. Miller abandons 'economic value' for a broader unit he calls worthiness, and treats price as a last-minute balancing act, not the measure of value.
   _Why it matters:_ Separate the worthiness conversation from the price conversation. Establish why the offer is worth it in the buyer's mind first; the number is a final balancing step, not the opening argument.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

4. **Value exchange behaves like gravity — the universal law of business** — Miller reframes the vendor-customer relationship as gravity: heavier objects (more mass) pull lighter ones toward them. Value works the same way, and the metaphor lets him deconstruct why some offers pull customers and others, despite being good, don't.
   _Why it matters:_ Diagnose deals by asking where your gravity is coming from and where it's being cancelled out, rather than assuming a better product automatically wins attention.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

5. **Mass is the innate value of your offer before the market knows it exists** — The first source of gravity is mass — how valuable an innovation is in and of itself, sitting in the R&D lab before anyone perceives it. A genuine breakthrough is extremely valuable before the market ever hears about it.
   _Why it matters:_ Invest in real innate value ('mass out the ass'), but don't assume mass alone converts — an object with mass still needs a customer close enough to be pulled.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders

6. **Proximity is where most companies spend their whole careers — and it isn't enough** — The second source of gravity is proximity: building something good and getting it close enough to the customer to create a value exchange — high-touch for enterprise, low-touch volume for SMB. Miller admits the majority of his career ran on this thinking, but if proximity were enough, being a unicorn wouldn't be so hard.
   _Why it matters:_ Calibrate your intimacy model to the offer (enterprise high-touch vs. SMB volume), but recognize product plus proximity still leaves the hardest force unaccounted for.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders, Founders

7. **Anti-gravity — the gravity of alternatives — is the force everyone overlooks** — The third and most-ignored force is the pull of competing options holding the customer in place. Incumbents renew above 90% (the market leader near 100%) even when they're the third, fourth, or fifth best product, and expand at 135% of the prior transaction. With 5,000 cybersecurity vendors for a market that maybe needs 50, alternatives drown out your voice.
   _Why it matters:_ Model the incumbent's grip before you model your own appeal. Winning is less about having mass and proximity and more about ripping the customer out from the gravity of the next best alternative.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

8. **Occasionally you get a 'fusion event' — a nonlinear payoff** — Sometimes timing or the sudden significance of a job-to-be-done produces an outsized, nonlinear reward. Miller's example: the antivirus industry, born essentially overnight when 'everyone woke up and the computers were sick,' spawning a multi-billion-dollar market out of a vacuum.
   _Why it matters:_ Watch for moments when a job-to-be-done spikes in urgency — those are when correctly-stacked value and real mass compound into a category-creating win rather than a linear one.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives


## Frameworks

### Value Misstacking (01:23)

**Definition:** The mistake of misperceiving whether your highest value is functional or emotional and then stacking it incorrectly across messaging, content, and sales training — leaving real value unclaimed in the buyer's mind.

Miller frames misstacking as one of the core traps in his book. Its twin failure is the 'spaghetti on the wall' approach of throwing every claim into the market; both raise the cost of customer thinking, which the market punishes rather than rewards.

### Worthiness Over Economic Value (02:47)

**Definition:** A shift from measuring value in price (the only conventional unit) to a broader unit Miller calls 'worthiness,' since price answers none of the buyer's real questions about effectiveness or how the offer will make them feel.

Because price and value are different things, Miller stopped thinking in economic value and built a way to measure worthiness across value types. Price becomes a last-minute balancing act to make the offer 'worth it' in the buyer's mind, not the measure of value itself.

### Gravity: The Universal Law of Business (04:08)

**Definition:** A metaphor treating value exchange between vendor and customer as gravitational attraction — heavier objects (more mass) pull lighter ones toward them — used to deconstruct why some offers pull customers and others don't.

Forced to explain a 'unit of value' without a clean number, Miller reached for gravity as the organizing law. An offer's total pull is a 'gravity score' built from three underlying forces: mass, proximity, and anti-gravity.

### Mass (Innate Value) (06:19)

**Definition:** The first source of gravity: how valuable an offer is innately, before the market perceives it at all — a breakthrough technology is extremely valuable sitting in the lab before anyone knows it exists.

Mass is the raw value of the innovation itself. Miller's shorthand is that you want an offer with as much mass as possible, but mass alone won't create a value exchange without a customer close enough to be pulled.

### Proximity (08:37)

**Definition:** The second source of gravity: getting an offer close enough to the customer that they know about it and can be pulled toward it — high-touch for enterprise, low-touch volume for SMB.

Proximity is where most companies focus (and where Miller says most of his own career ran): build something cool and get it near the customer. But if proximity were sufficient, being a unicorn wouldn't be hard — so another force must be accounted for.

### Anti-Gravity (The Gravity of Alternatives) (10:01)

**Definition:** The third and most-overlooked source of gravity: the opposing pull of competing options that holds the customer in place and prevents a value exchange — the gravity of the next best alternative.

Incumbents renew above 90% (leaders near 100%) even as the third, fourth, or fifth best product, and expand at 135% of the prior transaction. With thousands of alternatives drowning out a new voice, winning means ripping the customer out of the incumbent's gravity, not just having mass and proximity.

### Fusion Event (Nonlinear Reward) (12:02)

**Definition:** An occasional, outsized, nonlinear payoff that occurs when timing or the sudden significance of a job-to-be-done causes value to compound rather than add.

Miller's example is the antivirus industry appearing overnight when 'the computers got sick' — a multi-billion-dollar market born from a vacuum. Fusion events are when correctly-stacked value and real mass produce category-creating, rather than incremental, outcomes.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "One of the traps I write about in the book, I call it value misstacking: you perceive that the higher value is either emotional or it's functional, and you stack incorrectly in your messaging and your content and the way you train your salespeople, and you leave a lot of value on the table."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (01:23)

> "The other common mistake is that you just throw it all up in the air — the old spaghetti on the wall analogy — as if the market will sort it out."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (01:23)

> "When you raise the cost of customer thinking, you never get rewarded, you get punished, because it is not the job of the marketplace to figure this out for you."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (02:00)

> "The only unit of measure we use is price, but price and value are totally different things."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (02:47)

> "I don't think in terms of economic value anymore, I think in terms of worthiness."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (02:47)

> "Looking at a price answers none of those questions. So I needed another way to measure a unit of value, and there was no way to measure it. So I made one up."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (03:31)

> "How does the universe organize itself? Through the force of gravity — heavier objects will pull less heavy objects towards them. And that felt somewhat like the way the relationship between vendors and customers worked."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (04:08)

> "It's completely changed my perspective of how I think of business and value. Every time I look at any value exchange situation, I can't stop thinking about the metaphor."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (04:19)

> "Before the market knows about it, it's extremely valuable. I refer to the innate value of any offer as just its mass — just sitting there, how much mass does it have?"
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (07:07)

> "That was probably the majority of my career: let's have a really cool roadmap, let's build really cool products, let's get as close to the customer as we need to be. And it's cool, but it wasn't enough — because if that's all you had to do, it wouldn't be so hard to be a unicorn."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (08:37)

> "The force that gets overlooked the most is the gravity of alternatives."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (09:20)

> "In cybersecurity there's 5,000 cybersecurity companies. The world maybe needs 50. All of these alternatives are drowning the buyers, they're drowning out our voice."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (11:18)

> "Even if our product has mass, and even if we achieve proximity, how do we rip the customer out from the gravity that holds them in place — the gravity of the next best alternative?"
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (11:18)

> "I was in the antivirus industry 20 years ago, and everyone woke up one day and the computers were sick. Out of the complete vacuum of space, suddenly a multi-billion-dollar industry was born."
>
> — Tom Miller, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 11 (12:43)


## Practical advice by role

### Marketing Leaders

- Explicitly rank your functional versus emotional value and decide which to lead with — misjudging the order is 'value misstacking' and quietly leaves value on the table.
- Resist the 'spaghetti on the wall' temptation: every extra claim raises the cost of customer thinking, which the market punishes. Make one clear, correctly-stacked promise.
- Model the gravity of alternatives before you polish your own message — if the incumbent's pull is strong, a better product still won't move the buyer.

### Founders

- Separate 'worthiness' from price. Establish why the offer is worth it in the buyer's mind first; treat the number as a final balancing step, not the opening argument.
- Invest in real innate value ('mass'), but don't assume mass converts on its own — you still need proximity and a plan to overcome competing gravity.
- Watch for 'fusion events' — moments when a job-to-be-done spikes in urgency — where correctly-stacked value compounds into a category-creating, nonlinear win.

### Sales Leaders

- Match your intimacy model to the offer: high-touch for enterprise, low-touch volume for SMB — proximity is a deliberate choice, not a default.
- Train reps against the incumbent's gravity: enterprise renewal rates north of 90% mean the real objection is inertia, not your feature list.
- Make sure the value your reps lead with is the value that's actually stacked highest — misstacked messaging shows up as reps selling the wrong promise.


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| North of 90% | Enterprise renewal rate | Once a company buys an enterprise product, it renews above 90% — even for the third, fourth, or fifth best product in the market — which is the 'gravity of alternatives' holding buyers in place. |
| ~100% | Market-leader renewal | The market leader in a category renews almost 100%, compounding the incumbent's competitive gravity against any new entrant. |
| 135% | Net revenue retention (best practice) | Net positive churn best practice: incumbents monetize at 135% of the prior transaction via upsell and cross-sell — extracting the market plus a premium on top. |
| 5,000 (vs. ~50 needed) | Cybersecurity vendors | Miller's example of overwhelming alternatives: roughly 5,000 cybersecurity companies for a market that maybe needs 50, all drowning out a new voice. |
| Multi-billion-dollar market, ~overnight | Antivirus industry creation | His 'fusion event' example — the antivirus industry born essentially overnight ~20 years ago when computers got 'sick,' out of a vacuum. |


## Entities mentioned

- **LeanScale** (company) — Miller uses his relationship with LeanScale as the illustration of proximity — he knew about LeanScale because he and Anthony know each other; absent that, he'd have had to find it via the podcast or by Googling 'RevOps as a service.' · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/leanscale/
- **Tom Miller** (person, guest) — Author of 'Call Your Shots' and a veteran go-to-market operator (multiple IPOs, buy- and sell-side M&A); Anthony Enrico's former CRO at Emailage. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/tom-miller/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/anthony-enrico/


## FAQ

**Q: What is value misstacking?**

A: Value misstacking is Thomas Miller's term for the most common marketing mistake: misperceiving whether your highest value is functional or emotional and then stacking it incorrectly across your messaging, content, and sales training. When you lead with the wrong promise, you leave a large amount of your real value unclaimed in the buyer's mind.

**Q: Why is throwing every value claim at the market a mistake?**

A: Because it raises the cost of customer thinking, and the market punishes that rather than rewarding it. It is not the marketplace's job to figure out your value for you. Dumping every claim ('spaghetti on the wall') and expecting buyers to sort it out signals less value, not more — a clear, correctly-stacked promise wins.

**Q: What is the difference between price and value, and what is 'worthiness'?**

A: Price and value are different things: a price tag tells a buyer nothing about how effective a product will be or how it will make them feel. Miller stops thinking in 'economic value' and instead thinks in 'worthiness' — a broader unit that captures those questions. Price becomes a last-minute balancing act to make the offer worth it, not the measure of value itself.

**Q: What is 'gravity, the universal law of business'?**

A: It's Miller's metaphor for value exchange: the vendor-customer relationship works like gravity, where heavier objects (more mass) pull lighter ones toward them. An offer's total pull is a 'gravity score' built from three forces — mass, proximity, and anti-gravity — and the model explains why some offers attract customers while others, despite being good, don't.

**Q: What are the three forces of gravity in a value exchange?**

A: Mass is the innate value of an offer before the market perceives it (a breakthrough is valuable sitting in the lab). Proximity is getting the offer close enough for the customer to know about it — high-touch for enterprise, low-touch volume for SMB. Anti-gravity is the gravity of alternatives: competing options holding the customer in place, the force Miller says gets overlooked most.

**Q: Why is the 'gravity of alternatives' so hard to overcome?**

A: Because incumbents have enormous pull. Enterprise products renew above 90% — even the third, fourth, or fifth best in a category — the market leader renews near 100%, and best-in-class incumbents expand at 135% of the prior transaction. With thousands of alternatives drowning out a new voice, winning means ripping the customer out of the incumbent's gravity, not just having a better product.

**Q: What is a 'fusion event' in Miller's model?**

A: A fusion event is an occasional, nonlinear payoff that happens when timing or the sudden significance of a job-to-be-done causes value to compound rather than add. His example is the antivirus industry, which appeared essentially overnight when 'the computers got sick,' spawning a multi-billion-dollar market out of a vacuum.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Cold open: the value misstacking trap
- **00:30** — Functional vs. emotional promises
- **01:23** — The two mistakes: misstacking and spaghetti on the wall
- **02:00** — Don't raise the cost of customer thinking
- **02:47** — Price vs. value: thinking in worthiness
- **04:08** — Gravity: the universal law of business
- **06:19** — Mass: the innate value of an offer
- **08:37** — Proximity: getting close to the customer
- **10:01** — Anti-gravity: the gravity of alternatives
- **12:02** — Fusion events and the antivirus boom


## Related episodes

- **Ep. 10: Identifying your inner core value** (Thomas Miller) — Part 2 of the same series, referenced directly here — finding your 'inner core' superpower is the input to stacking value correctly. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-inner-core-value/
- **Ep. 8: How to become a Shot Caller with Tom Miller** (Thomas Miller) — The opening installment of the Tom Miller series that sets up the value, worthiness, and gravity worldview. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/tom-miller-shot-caller/
- **Ep. 91: Why Outcome-Based Pricing Is a Trap for Most AI Companies** (Roee Hartuv) — A pricing-and-packaging companion — both wrestle with the gap between price and perceived value. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/roee-hartuv-outcome-based-pricing-trap/
- **Ep. 4: The one and only way to align sales and marketing** (LeanScale) — Value misstacking is a messaging failure; this episode tackles the sales-and-marketing alignment that has to carry the correctly-stacked message. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/cameron-legge-align-sales-marketing/
- **Ep. 2: How to measure new business with usage based pricing** (Bernardo Alves) — Extends the price-versus-value theme into how you actually measure new business under modern pricing models. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-usage-based-pricing/


## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-value-stacking/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Cold open: the value misstacking trap

**[0:00]** And the truth is, one of the mistakes, and it's just one of the traps, I write about the book, I call it value misstacking, is you get it wrong. And you perceive that the higher value is either emotional or it's functional, and you stack incorrectly in your messaging and your content and the way you train your salespeople, and you leave a lot of value on the table.

### 00:30 — Functional vs. emotional promises

**[0:30]** Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast, where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening. Like, what's the high order big here? How will the market perceive my promise of impact? And should I lead with these functional promises? Or should I lead with these emotional promises about performance narratives and board level work that inspire confidence to move forward, feeling like you can act with confidence through a data driven approach. And like you can really think, and I know we went through this, like it can really almost drive you crazy, like trying to contemplate which of these two brand choices are going to make the most sense.

### 01:23 — The two mistakes: misstacking and spaghetti on the wall

**[1:23]** And the truth is, like one of the mistakes, and it's just one of the traps, I write about the book, I call it value misstacking, is you get it wrong. And you perceive that the higher value is either emotional or it's functional, and you stack incorrectly in your messaging and your content and the way you train your salespeople, and you leave a lot of value on the table. Or the other common mistake is that you just throw it all up in the air, like, you know, the old spaghetti on the wall analogy, as if the market will sort it out.

### 02:00 — Don't raise the cost of customer thinking

**[2:00]** But when you raise the cost of customer thinking, you never get rewarded, you get punished, because it is not the job of the marketplace to figure this out for you. It's your job as the marketer, the executive, the product person. And again, it's, you know, this becomes, I think, you know, the vacuum that's existed through my experience in business, if people were just never trained to understand how to do this scientifically. And so, you know, that sort of led to my, my investigation into this idea of like, okay, if if the key to success is to understand value exchange events, how do you measure value?

### 02:47 — Price vs. value: thinking in worthiness

**[2:47]** And the only unit of measure we use is price, but price and value are totally different things. So using price as a way to understand how the market will perceive value is a very sort of last minute. It's a last minute balancing concept, which is why I don't think in terms of economic value anymore, I think in terms of worthiness. So at the end, if you have effectively identified your superpower, its value type, this thing you can uniquely deliver that no one else can, or that you can deliver better than most other alternatives, and you stack your value correctly.

**[3:31]** You know, you'll have to bring that into balance by making the offer worth it in the mind of the buyer. And yes, it means you'll have to put a price on it. But putting a price on it has nothing to do with the way people will perceive initially perceive this idea of, well, how effective will the tool be? And how will it make me feel? Looking at a price answers none of those questions. So I needed another way to measure, like the idea of a unit of value in all three categories, and there was no way to measure it. So I made one up.

### 04:08 — Gravity: the universal law of business

**[4:08]** And that led to this idea of the concept of, hey, how does the universe organize itself well through the force of gravity, which is largely an equation which says, you know, heavier objects will pull less heavy objects towards them. And that's the attractive force of gravity. And that felt somewhat like the way the relationship between vendors and customers worked. No, I, I really love that metaphor. And it's, it's throughout the entire book, and it's completely changed my perspective of how I think of business and value. And every time, every time I look at any, any value exchange situation, I can't stop thinking about the metaphor.

**[5:04]** And so I know you talk about gravity. And I know you tagline it as gravity, the universal law of business. And I think it just makes so much sense. And, and I'd love for you to, to dive into that and why you chose that and, and give all the examples that you feel like the metaphor just relates so well to business. Well, I didn't want to have to create a way to think of how to measure a unit of value.

**[5:34]** Like a nice number would have been nice, right, rather than needing to use a metaphor, but you're kind of forced to, you know, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, you know, it's hard like talking outside of, you know, existing frameworks and using non conventional terms, you know, always just makes it harder for an idea to break through. But as much as I tried not to use the metaphor of saying, like, look, let's think about value the way we think about gravity. If you have a lot of if an object is heavy, meaning it has a lot of mass, it will attract an object with less mass. So we could start with that.

### 06:19 — Mass: the innate value of an offer

**[6:19]** There's that that aspect of like the idea that something cool has a high net gravity score is great, but you have to deconstruct how you achieve a high gravity source so the first element of understanding how to achieve this high gravity score would be to understand well how much mass does the offer have meaning innately before it leaves, you know, the basement of the R&D lab, just innately in and of itself, how much, how likely is it that some innovation will have high value before the market perceives it at all.

**[7:07]** Like if you if you if you invented some breakthrough technology, like before the market knows about it, it's extremely valuable. And so I would call. So I refer to the innate value of any offer as just its mass, but just sitting there, how much mass does it have? Okay, well, we know that there's not just one object in the in the in the universe, right? So you can have an object with mass. But what are you trying to do? You know, marketers for years have been using this term. Hey, look, we're creating coal. And I thought, wow, like, you know, yeah, that's really what you're doing an object with mass will pull a customer towards it.

**[7:51]** So, you know, I started imagining, you know, a world where, you know, your innovation enters the market, it creates a dent in the fabric of of the marketplace, because it has mass. Now, if an object meaning your customers close enough to your offer and they know about it, like, look, I knew about lean skill, because we know each other. So, but how else would I have known about you if we didn't have if we didn't have an existing relationship, like you, I would have had to have watched your podcast, or I would have had that somehow googled rev ops as a service and found you like all the extra work that has to go into getting the effect.

### 08:37 — Proximity: getting close to the customer

**[8:37]** The second kind of gravity that can create pull is what I just call proximity. And that's more or less what most companies focus on the idea that if we build something cool and get it close enough to our customer, we should be able to create some value exchange. And we should get rewarded for our efforts. And that's that was, I mean, honestly, Anthony, that was probably the majority of my career was based on that thinking of like, let's have a really cool roadmap. Let's build really cool products. Let's get as close to the customer as we need to be, you know, if it's an enterprise customer, it's all the, it's all the high touch stuff.

**[9:20]** And if it's an SMB customer, it's more of a volume, low touch thing. And, you know, you try to be efficient on that intimacy scale, depending on the offer. And it's cool, like that basic idea always, you know, was in my mind, but it wasn't enough, because if that's all you had to do, you would think like, it wouldn't be so hard to be a unicorn. So I knew like, I knew something else had we had to account for another force and the force that gets overlooked the most is the gravity of alternatives.

### 10:01 — Anti-gravity: the gravity of alternatives

**[10:01]** And you know, I like to say, like, what you want when you when you when you innovate, you want that you want an offer that has mass out the ass. That's kind of the little way I like to describe like, yeah, you want mass, more mass, the better. But what people have to understand is the gravity of alternatives has mass out the ass enterprise renewal rates for the last 20 years have a change. Once a company buys an enterprise product, they're renewing it north of 90%, even for like the third and fourth and fifth best

**[10:38]** product in the market for the market leader. You know, we know they're renewing it almost 100%. We know that net positive churn best practices like you're monetizing at 135% of the prior transaction. So you're going even beyond the idea of dominating the market. You're like, you're extracting the market plus this premium on top through upsell and cross sell. So the gravity of alternatives has to be accounted for when you think about this idea of like, well, how the hell are we going to win? Like, how are we going to win? We build something that has mass, we bring it closer to customers.

**[11:18]** But we face this immense opposing gravity, because we're not the only object in the universe. Like in cybersecurity, there's 5000 cybersecurity companies 5000. The world maybe needs 50. Right. So all of these alternatives are drowning the buyers, they're drowning out our voice. And even if our product has mass, and even if we achieve proximity, how do we rip the customer out from the gravity that holds them in place the gravity of the next best

### 12:02 — Fusion events and the antivirus boom

**[12:02]** alternative. And so I thought, you know, look, there, we have to account for this idea that look, other gravity is holding my customer in place preventing a value exchange event. So that became the third form of gravity, which I call anti gravity. And then occasionally, you can sort of get a fusion level event, where you almost get more, you get rewarded in a nonlinear fashion. And it's when things get, you know, essentially, either because of timing, or because of how significant it could become to get a job done.

**[12:43]** Like I was in the antivirus industry, like 20 years ago, and imagine, you know, everyone woke up one day and the computers were sick. Like, out of the complete vacuum of space, suddenly a multi billion dollar industry was born.


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