The two modes of attention
The two modes of attention
The foundation of science-based positioning is ’the hierarchy of attention’ which explains the two major approaches to B2B positioning in tech.
Every year, tens of billions of dollars in venture capital are invested in companies trying to stake out a meaningful, compounding, competitive position in the SaaS market, be that classic B2B SaaS, data infrastructure and security, or new AI-first startups.
And at the heart of that process is a fundamental conflict. For example:
Should founders build a ‘fat’ startup and go big, launching with a bang?
Should they go lean, and build an MVP, testing and iterating as they go?
Or what if we just focus on go-to-market (GTM) strategy. What should a founder do? Should they:
Create a category?
Focus on a niche?
Build a brand?
These are all quite different things! Yet a startup’s entire GTM motion and sales approach — and, perhaps, their fate as a company — hinges on how that question gets answered.
I’ve seen folks waste a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of opportunity because they picked the wrong answer to that question.
And yet, we’ve also all seen the big successes that seemed to pick the right answer to that question at the right time, and absolutely kill it. Startup X with the killer brand, company Y that really did create a category, or founder Z who really did start out in a niche…
What’s going on?
I found this quite baffling. There was no shortage of folks preaching to me and my clients what we should do, based on their particular experience. This often felt like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone was accurately and confidently (so confidently!) describing the part they could feel — maybe it’s a trunk, leg, or tail — and telling everyone else they were wrong.
Given we’re all on team Let’s Get Cool B2B Tech Products To Market, you’d think there’d be more attempts at synthesis, but there really wasn’t, because folks had (ironically) picked a niche position they wanted to defend.
That’s fine, but it doesn’t help founders or investors know which way to move. And it didn’t help me as a humble consultant trying to deliver work and advise my clients.
So I set about doing something about it.
The science that unlocks positioning
To date, we haven’t had a unifying framework that helps folks understand when and why they should use a particular positioning approach to drive their GTM motion and sales narrative.
Science-based positioning (SBP) is my attempt to solve that problem, and the foundation of science-based positioning is the modern science of attention.
Attention is (almost) all you need
There’s been a breakthrough in our understanding of our attention in recent years that not many folks are aware of.
(Astute readers will note this is a little bit of right-brain narrative.)
Most folks interested in AI would have heard about the famous “Attention is all you need” paper that — eventually — unleashed the generative AI wave.
In modern neuroscience, however, there’s been a transformation in the way we understand the nature of attention itself. It’s a little controversial, but it’s fundamental to science-based positioning because it highlights what the best folks are already doing when it comes to positioning.
I believe this new understanding of attention will become fundamental to all B2B sales and marketing work. And just as there was a lag and then an inflection point between the AI research and the success of tools like ChatGPT, I think (well, at least, hope) that there will be a similar inflection point for the research on the nature of human attention and its widespread use, even if it’s on an infinitely smaller scale.
In any case, when I came across this theory, I couldn’t believe how neatly it matched — and resolved — the seemingly conflicting positioning advice out there.
It explained just about… everything. Here’s the theory in a nutshell. (For a longer treatment of this theory, check out my big book on the topic, Positioning Science — Playbook.)
The hierarchy of attention
This modern theory argues our split brains generate two different modes of attention, and that dictates how we fundamentally ‘attend’ to the world around us.
This is the ‘hierarchy of attention.’ It comes to us from the neuroscience research of the legendary psychiatrist, philosopher, neuroscience researcher, and writer of incredibly deep books, Dr. Iain McGilchrist.
We’re going to discuss right-brain/left-brain theories here, and if that triggers your neurobabble detector, I get it. But trust me when I say this is not a rehash of the old, debunked split-brain theories from the ’50s and ’60s — this is new territory, so stay with me.
Unlike the old theory, it turns out both sides of our brain are involved in everything all the time, but — and this is an important ‘but’! — each hemisphere appears to have quite a different ’take’ on the world.
Now, I’m no neuroscientist, dear reader, I am but a humble positioning consultant. Therefore, I like to simplify these takes to:
Right-brain ‘radar’ attention.
Left-brain ’laser-beam’ attention.
Think of a bird, for example (to pick an illustration McGilchrist likes to use). It basically has two jobs: to eat and not be eaten. To eat, it uses its focused, narrow attention to pick out seeds on the ground, to grab sticks and build a nest, and otherwise use its ’tools’ to engage with what’s literally down in front of it.
On the other hand, it also has to keep an eye out for predators (and potential mates) — to not get eaten and pass its genes on. This requires broad, open, vigilant attention to change over time and what’s ‘out there’.
It seems that birds, and indeed just about all animals, have evolved with split brains for a reason, and that includes us humans, too (as McGilchrist documents in exhaustive detail).
How do we use this profound theory for the somewhat less profound job of selling software?
Well, if we have two modes of attention, it stands to reason we need two types of story, or as I call them (riffing on “system 1” and “system 2” from _Thinking, Fast and Slow):
‘Story 1’ — change stories for right-brain ‘radar’ attention.
‘Story 2’ — focused stories for left-brain ’laser-beam’ attention.
These two story types come together, to varying degrees, in everything you do, simply because this is how we ‘attend’ to the world as humans.
Attention preferences
Once you understand that these two modes of attention exist at a fundamental, how-our-brains-evolved level, and that some people, and some situations, tend to operate more in one mode than the other, you start to see this pattern everywhere.
And that has big implications for your positioning and sales narrative.
For example, in your sales narrative, you might lean more on one or the other story type, depending on your audience:
Executives and outbound folks are usually open to more story 1-style narratives about change over time, i.e. what’s happening ‘out there’.
End-users and inbound folks are usually focused down on the tool in front of them, and have narrow, story 2 questions about how things work.
I’ve seen this play out in real startup situations where hundreds of millions of dollars had been invested in the company, and hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent on a very ‘story 1’ approach to narrative. The narrative worked with executives, as you might expect, but it tanked with end users. Or so I thought. I then listened to outbound sales calls and found it did sometimes resonate with end users. Whether you were coming inbound or being contacted outbound changed your mode of attention, and changed what narrative worked!
These attention preferences play out in broader discussions around positioning, too. For example, it explains:
Niche positioning, and why some folks think you should focus on a niche (that’s left-brain laser beam attention at work).
Narrative approaches, and why some folks think you should create a category or have an ambitious strategic narrative about external change in the world (that’s right-brain radar attention at work).
Fundamental mismatches, and why some folks — founders especially — get caught in the middle of attention mismatches, with their investors pushing for the big right-brain story and their users, for example, pushing for focused solutions on how they use the tool.
(In fact, this goes right to the heart of the old ‘fat’ vs. ’lean’ debate about startups, too. It’s not that one is right and the other is wrong, it’s that there are attention preferences at play and the nature of that attention will dictate what works when.)
This reality affects everyone in the B2B sales process, especially in venture-backed startups.
Prospects, as discussed, can go either way — they might come into a sale late when they’re highly focused on story 2 (how you use the tool and the exact problem it solves), or they might be unaware of the problem and need a new story 1 concept put on their radar, one that matches something they’re seeing ‘out there’ on the horizon. (AI being the obvious example.)
Investors, on the other hand, tend to be very story 1 focused, as they’re in the business of looking ‘out there’ on their radar. Being able to switch gears into story 2 mode of focused analysis can help detect legitimate opportunities and dodge the not-so-legitimate ones, but attention switching is hard.
Founders, can show preferences for one or the other — perhaps they’re big on vision, or they’re very detail-oriented — but being able to connect and move between story 1 and story 2, between their radar and their laser beam attention, is a rare skill.
Consultants and advisors who may have had success reaching one mode of attention or the other, may strongly prefer that approach. Again, that can work, but being able to move between both is better!
It’s turtles attention preferences (almost) all the way down.
And this gives us a powerful, high-leverage approach to positioning that can drive your GTM approach, your leadership, and maybe your product direction, too.
New first principles
Until now, this involved a lot of confusion because we didn’t have the language to describe this phenomenon. And when it came to founders picking a position for their product or company, they’d be bombarded with conflicting advice.
But now we have the language and tools to do this properly. We can work backward from the nature of attention itself. We can diagnose narrative mismatches, we can identify when and where a category or narrative-driven approach might work vs. a niche approach, and we can leverage new and old fundamentals — like categories, niches, and brand — to better understand the “market” in “product/market fit.”
In more practical terms, we can also build better pitches. The key place this manifests is, as you might have guessed, in your sales narrative, especially in giving you the flexibility to meet folks where their attention is at.
The hierarchy of attention is, then, at the heart of science-based positioning, because it’s at the heart of how we attend to the world around us.
If we’re going to create a position in folks’ minds, then from a first-principles point of view, we’ve got to start with attention. Next, let’s look at how it plays out in your sales narrative:
