Business Storytelling

Reframe, Don't Inflate: Turn 'Adjacent' Experience Into Undeniable Proof

Every founder chasing a deal slightly outside their exact track record hits the same wall. The buyer asks "have you done this before, for a company like ours?" and the honest answer is "not exactly." So the founder picks one of two losing moves. They inflate, stretching a loosely related project into a claim that will not survive a reference check. Or they apologize, hedging and undercutting themselves into "well, not that specifically, but..." One erodes trust, the other erodes the deal. Both treat adjacent experience as a liability to manage. That framing is the mistake. Adjacent experience is not a weakness to hide or exaggerate. It is proof you have not yet translated. Buyers are not actually asking "have you done this identical engagement." They are asking "do you have evidence you can solve my problem." Those are different questions, and the second one is often answerable with work you have already done, if you connect it to the buyer's situation correctly. When you lack exact-match experience, reframe your adjacent work into transferable proof instead of inflating it or apologizing for it, because buyers rely heavily on evidence to decide and they reward relevance over exact-category match: B2B research consistently shows buyers lean on case studies and social proof when choosing vendors, with case studies among the most-used content in the purchase decision . The founder who translates an adjacent result into the buyer's own problem gives them exactly the evidence they came for, honestly.

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

By Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Founder, Business Growth Accelerator

Executive summary

When you lack exact-match experience, founders inflate or apologize. Both lose. Reframe adjacent work into transferable proof buyers actually trust and act on.

Section 1

Key takeaways

• Buyers rely on proof to decide: case studies and peer evidence rank among the most influential content in B2B purchase decisions . • The buyer's real question is "can you solve my problem," not "have you done this exact engagement," and adjacent work often answers the real one. • Inflating fails the reference check and destroys the low-skepticism state buyers need to buy ; apologizing throws away evidence you actually have. • Reframing is a translation, not a stretch: it maps the underlying mechanism of past work onto the buyer's problem, keeping the claim strictly true. • The framework is mechanism, match, evidence: name the transferable mechanism, match it to the buyer's situation, then attach the concrete result.

Section 2

Why "not exactly" is usually the wrong answer to the right question

When a buyer asks about relevant experience, founders hear a demand for an identical case study and panic when they do not have one. But sit with what the buyer is actually trying to resolve. They have a problem, they are unsure you can solve it, and they are looking for evidence to lower that uncertainty. The exact-category match is a proxy they are using for "can this person solve my problem." It is not the thing itself. This matters because the proxy is often satisfiable with adjacent work. A buyer in logistics asking whether you have done logistics is really asking whether you can do the specific thing, say, redesign an operations dashboard so a non-technical team adopts it, and that is a problem you may have solved in healthcare. The mechanism transfers even though the industry does not. Your job is to make that transfer visible, so the buyer sees the evidence they wanted underneath the label they used. The stakes here are high because proof is where B2B decisions actually turn. Buyers lean heavily on case studies and peer evidence when they choose vendors, and that evidence carries real weight in the final decision . Broader social-proof research points the same direction, with a large majority of B2B buyers reporting they rely on peer evidence and testimonials before committing . When you apologize your adjacent work away, you are discarding the single most persuasive asset you have at the exact moment the buyer is asking for it. And when you inflate it, you produce evidence that collapses under scrutiny, which raises the skepticism that Gartner ties directly to losing the deal . Reframing is the only move that keeps the evidence and keeps the trust.

Section 3

The line between reframing and inflating

This distinction is the whole ethical and practical core, so be precise about it. Inflating changes the facts: it claims a result you did not produce, a scope you did not own, or an industry you have not served. It fails the moment a buyer checks a reference or asks a follow-up question, and it poisons the trust that makes the rest of your claims believable. Reframing changes the framing, never the facts. It takes a true result and shows why it is relevant to a problem in a different context. Every word remains defensible under a reference check. "We rebuilt a clinical-operations dashboard so nurses actually adopted it, adoption went from 40% to 85%, and your warehouse-adoption problem is structurally the same" is not a stretch. Every clause is true. What has changed is that the buyer now sees the transferable mechanism instead of dismissing the work because it says "healthcare" on the label. If you cannot make the connection without altering a fact, you do not have adjacent experience for this deal, and the honest move is to say so and possibly refer the buyer elsewhere.

Section 4

The BGA framework: the Transferable-Proof translation

Turn adjacent work into undeniable proof with three steps: mechanism, match, evidence. Prepare these for the two or three deal types just outside your core track record. 1. Extract the mechanism, not the industry. For each meaningful past project, write down the underlying problem you solved in industry-neutral language. "Reduced onboarding time," "made a distrusted team adopt a new process," "cut a decision cycle from weeks to days." The mechanism is the transferable asset. The industry label is what makes buyers wrongly discount it. 2. Match the mechanism to the buyer's stated problem, out loud. Do not make the buyer connect the dots. Say the connection explicitly: "the reason this is relevant is that your problem and that one are both fundamentally about X." Buyers rarely do the translation work themselves, and an unstated connection is a discarded proof point. Naming the structural match is the move. 3. Attach one concrete, true result. The reframe is only as strong as the evidence under it. Land a specific, verifiable number or outcome from the adjacent work. This is where reframing earns the trust that inflating destroys: your claim survives scrutiny because it was always true, which is what keeps the buyer's skepticism low and gives them the proof they weighted so heavily . 4. Name the difference before the buyer does. Acknowledge what is genuinely different about their situation ("your team is larger and unionized, which changes the rollout") and say how you would handle it. Naming the gap yourself proves you are reasoning about their specific case, not pattern-matching a pitch, and it preempts the objection instead of getting ambushed by it. 5. If the mechanism does not truly transfer, say so. Sometimes adjacent is not close enough, and the honest answer is "this is new territory for us, here is why I still think we're the right team, and here is how we'd de-risk it for you." That is reframing's honest floor, and it beats an inflation that unravels at the reference check, which is the reframe honesty the whole approach depends on.

Section 5

You are reframing, not inflating, when…

You are reframing when every claim you make about adjacent work would survive a reference check word for word, and when you have named the structural match between your past problem and the buyer's out loud rather than hoping they infer it. You are reframing when you volunteer what is genuinely different about the buyer's situation before they raise it. You are reframing when the buyer responds with "oh, I hadn't thought of it that way, that's actually relevant," because that sentence is the sound of an adjacent result being accepted as proof. And you are doing it right when you win deals slightly outside your track record not because you exaggerated your fit, but because you translated real evidence into the buyer's language, which is the only version of this that holds up when the buyer calls your reference and asks them to describe exactly what you did.

FAQ

Direct answers for operators.

How is reframing not just a more sophisticated form of lying?

Because reframing never alters a fact. It changes which facts you foreground and how you connect them to the buyer's problem, while every individual claim stays true under scrutiny. Lying, or inflating, changes the facts themselves: the result, the scope, the industry. The test is simple: would every word survive the buyer calling your reference? If yes, you reframed. If no, you inflated.

What if my adjacent experience genuinely doesn't transfer to this deal?

Then say so, and decide whether to compete on other grounds or refer the buyer elsewhere. Trying to force a transfer that is not real produces a claim that collapses under one follow-up question and takes your credibility with it. Buyers weight proof heavily , so weak or forced proof is worse than honestly conceding the gap and competing on fit, approach, or price instead.

Won't naming the differences in the buyer's situation talk me out of the deal?

It does the opposite for the deals worth winning. Naming the real differences proves you are reasoning about their specific case rather than running a pitch, which lowers skepticism, the sentiment Gartner ties to high-quality deals . The buyer already knows their situation is different. Pretending otherwise reads as either ignorance or sales spin.

How much adjacent experience do I need before I can reframe it?

One genuinely relevant project with a concrete, true result is enough, as long as the underlying mechanism truly matches the buyer's problem. Reframing is about the quality of the structural match and the strength of the evidence, not the quantity of past work. One well-translated case beats five loosely related logos.

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Written by

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Founder, Business Growth Accelerator · Country Director, AVODA Group Uganda · EMBA

Joshua helps service-business operators turn scattered marketing into a clear path from first attention to booked call. He is Founder of Business Growth Accelerator and Country Director of AVODA Group Uganda.