Flink Buying Situations Map

---
name: flink-buying-situations-map
description: Maps the moments a buyer starts needing your kind of help, marks which ones you can speak to from real work, and gives one post theme per situation plus the ones you leave alone. Use for "run flink-buying-situations-map", "buying situations", "category entry points for me", "what should my posts be about", "post themes", "be remembered when the need comes", "content pillars", part of the Claude Playbook for Authentic LinkedIn Presence Pack by Polar Bear.
---

# Buying Situations Map

## When To Use
You want to be the name that comes to mind when the need arrives, months before anyone is shopping. Use it when your posts drift from topic to topic and you want to link your name to a short list of real moments: a hire, a loss, a launch, a board question. It answers which of those moments you have earned the right to talk about.

## When Not To Use
If you have not yet written down who hired you and why, run Ideal Client Profile first; the map is built on it. If you already have themes and need to place posts in weeks, run Content Calendar instead.

## Inputs
- Your Ideal Client Profile, or notes on your best past engagements.
- A list of past deals and how each one started (an email, a call, an intro), as much as you remember.
- Optional: situations you suspect matter but have never worked on.
If you have none of this, I start from three deals you remember and mark the output as a first draft.

## Approach
Category entry points and the 95-5 rule, from the LinkedIn B2B Institute with Ehrenberg-Bass (see the LinkedIn B2B Institute's 95-5 rule research page): most buyers are not in market at any given time, so the work is to be linked in their memory to the situations that start a purchase, long before they shop. That research is about brands; here it is applied to one person, so the list comes from your own deals, not from a market study. The failure it prevents is a theme list copied from what everyone in your field posts, with nothing of yours behind it.

## Workflow
1. Ask at most three questions: which deals to draw on, how each started, and which situations you suspect matter but have not worked on.
2. Write each buying situation as a moment, beginning with "when": "when a co-founder leaves", not "leadership" or a service you sell. If it reads like a topic or a feature, rewrite it until something has happened in it.
3. Mark each situation "seen in my work" (name the past deal, without the client name) or "assumed". Assumed situations stay on the map, visibly.
4. For each situation, answer yes or no: can you speak to it from a real project? If yes, name the project. This is the line between a theme and a guess.
5. Give each situation you can back one post theme, written as the question a buyer in that moment would ask, and the format it fits (project story, lesson learned, opinion, carousel).
6. Move every situation you cannot back with work to the "leave alone" column. Leaving it alone is a choice, not a gap to fill with borrowed stories.
7. Add one plain line on time: the map is for presence before need, read over months; it is not a pipeline forecast and carries no percentages beyond the principle.

## Output Format
```markdown
# Buying Situations Map
[Your name], [date], built from [Ideal Client Profile or deal notes]

## Situations
| When... (the moment) | Seen in my work or assumed | Real project behind it | Post theme (the buyer's question) | Format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| When [event] | [seen: past deal, no name / assumed] | [project or none] | [question] | [format] |

## Leave alone
| When... (the moment) | Why you leave it (no work to back it, not for you) |
|---|---|
| When [event] | [reason in your words] |

## How to read this map
Presence before need: most buyers are not in market today, so this is read over months, not weeks.

## Decision
[You choose which situations become your post themes and which stay on the leave-alone list, by [date], before writing your Point of View Statement.]
```

## Done When
- Every situation starts with "when" and describes a moment, not a topic.
- Each one is marked seen or assumed, and every "seen" names a past deal without the client name.
- Every post theme has a real project behind it.
- The leave-alone column holds every situation without work behind it.
- No forecast, rate or percentage appears beyond the 95-5 principle.

## Quality Bar
- Situations come from real deals and the Ideal Client Profile, never from a list of popular topics.
- Themes are phrased as a buyer's question, so a post can answer it.
- The map names situations and roles, never named prospects.
- The map sets themes; scheduling them belongs to the Content Calendar.
- Only situations you can back with real work become themes.

## Next
Run flink-point-of-view (Point of View Statement) to decide what you believe about those situations.

## About the makers

This pack is made by Polar Bear, a consultancy built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).