The Solo Moved, The Song Didn't

Pull up a sales call from a year ago. Then pull up one from last week. Same kind of buyer, maybe the literal same person, same job title printed on the same badge. Listen for where they lean in.

It’s a different spot.

A year ago the thing that made them sit up was one set of words. Now it’s another set entirely, and nobody sent a memo about the swap. The buyer didn’t announce they’d changed. They’d swear they hadn’t. And in the way that matters most, they’re right.

What moved was the ground, not the person. A year ago the market wasn’t doing whatever AI is doing to it right now, and that churn quietly rewrote the conditions every buyer is standing in. New fears, new shortcuts, new ways to look smart in front of a boss. So the things they need a product to prove have shuffled. The value props that landed last spring sound a half-step flat today.

But ask them why they bought into your company, the worldview, the bet you’re making about where the world is going, and you’ll get close to the same answer they gave you a year ago. That part held.

Two layers. Two different speeds.

Think of a band. The rhythm section is your company. Bass and kick drum, holding the song’s identity steady, show after show, room after room. That steadiness is what people mean when they say they trust you. The solo is your product. Improvised for the night, bent to the crowd in front of you, different every time the room changes.

And the room has changed.

It’s full of strangers now, every one of them holding tools that didn’t exist to this degree last year.

A good band reads that room and changes the solo. The bass line stays put.

The trouble starts when a company gets spooked by the new room and decides the whole song is wrong. Everyone starts soloing at once. They drag the AI energy all the way down into the company story, repaint the thing that was supposed to stay still, and what comes out isn’t bold. It’s noise.

In a way they sawed through their own bass line chasing a sound they heard in somebody else’s set.

There’s a quieter way to get it wrong, and it’s worse because it feels responsible.

You go re-interview your customers, careful operator that you are. They tell you they still love the company. You exhale. You file the notes. And you miss that the product reasons rotted while you were being reassured. The affirmation was real and the affirmation was a trap. (It kinda, sorta, always is if you give it too much weight…) A customer saying the song still sounds like you is not the same as the solo still working.

So the question I keep circling is how you tell those two apart in the moment. When the ground shifts, is it a tremor in the solo, change the value props and move on, or is it the kind of quake that means the song itself has to change, your category moved and the company story has to follow it down?

I don’t think that question has a clean universal answer. I think it has an owner. Somebody whose actual job is standing at the seam between the slow story and the fast one and making the call, quarter after quarter. Not a document in a shared drive that gets updated when someone remembers it exists. A person. The drummer, not the soloist everybody’s watching. The one who decides when the whole song shifts tempo and when it’s just this one solo running long.

Most places don’t have that person. They have a deck. The deck doesn’t know what room you’re in tonight.

And if you want that call made well, you invest in the one who makes it before you need them to make it. That’s the part companies are realizing they’ve skipped pre-AI wave. They spent a fortune chasing the customer’s new mood after new mood and almost nothing on the one teammate built to hear it coming.

So, if you’re looking for an action step here…pull the two recordings. Sit with the gap. Notice that your buyer is loyal to the song and restless about the solo, both at once, and that the restlessness is the honest part. Then ask who in the building actually owns the difference for your brand.

If the answer is nobody, that isn’t a messaging problem.

Stay Positive & Just In Case It’s Not Obvious… That Person’s Title Often Has “Marketing” In It