If you were to ask you leadership team to share their version of your strategy, what would happen?
If you are like the hundreds of leaders I have asked this question to over the years, you will tell me that you will get different versions, few that resemble each other or what you, as the business leader, would say.
This is a fundamental disconnect that struggling businesses face.
They believe that what they think is true when it comes to delivering solutions to their clients.
What I have seen is that most leaders drive the business and its hopeful success from an inside-out perspective. That is, they believe that what they think internally is true when it comes to their customers, or, they believe that fewer than a handful of their customers speak for the whole. These suppositions are fraught as our customers don’t really care what we do as much as they care about what we do for them.
Most of what is offered or built adds little to no value to your clients’ needs for progress. You also have to understand how high up the stack of what is important to them what you’re offering is. I have learned that the key is NOT to ask them what they want but to have them share their struggles and the progress they are trying to make.
Your job is then to find a pattern in these dozens of conversations to help you decide what to build and how to create key messages to catch prospects’ attention.
For instance, I worked for a start up that offered a phenomenal product for the building industry. We could help homebuilders construct energy-efficient homes while minimizing the cost of components based on multivariate optimization technology that was used by NASA for Mars.
We calculated that it would save billions of dollars per year in building and energy costs.
We demonstrated this to dozens of companies with their own blueprints and materials. All thought it was a phenomenal breakthrough, however, over several years, no large organizations implemented and few smaller builders did. The problem was that the amount of change they would have to make in their businesses to accommodate outweighed the cost savings to them, the homebuyer. For almost all of them, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
The idea was phenomenal. However, the market players were not ready for it. Their actions spoke more loudly than their words.
This is an excerpt from my book Further, Faster that further illustrates the need to solve the key problem(s) your customers are struggling with that prevent them from moving ahead.
“…Bob was in the business of selling condos. His Core Customers were empty nesters. Before building the condo complex, he asked some folks who wanted to move to a smaller footprint home (Push) what was important to them in a condo so he could design something that they would be happy with (Pull). He was told that one-floor living, a second bedroom for guests and grandchildren, and a few other items were important.
Bob built the units to these specifications and early on, many sold. However, soon his sales stalled. There were many interested parties but they were not moving forward. After many discovery interviews, he kept hearing something about the dining room table.
He found that many people and couples were ready to move but would not do so until they figured out what to do with the dining room table—and these newly designed units didn’t have room for the table. For these people, the table held a certain reverence since there were so many memories associated with it. They could not just throw it out.
With this information, Bob redesigned future units by shrinking the second bedroom to create more space for the dining room table. Sales shot up and stayed there. Bob was unaware of the unspoken anxiety a large number of potential buyers had before they would move ahead. He had done a great job of the push and pull pieces but had not looked for reasons some folks had for not moving such as the dining room table or, as he also discovered, what they would do with all of the stuff they had in the attic and basement.
When he solved for the latter by adding a “sorting room,” he got another permanent jump in sales. This is what I mean when I say Know Your Customers. Since we are primarily emotional creatures, we have to apply logical and emotional constructs to the marketing process.”
There are so many other stories, like that of Waze, The Container Store, McDonald’s in the early days, Nest, Dyson, Henry Ford, and Alan Mulally’s Ford. When the team takes the time to truly understand what the customer values most and builds solution and/or services to solve for them, selling becomes much easier.
The science shows that people say they want more options, but they do not value them. Once we can dig beyond the surface needs, we find out that there are just a few things that truly matter to our customers. If we were to provide and optimize those few features or services, they would come back to us over and over again happily paying a fair price.
Are you chasing the wind?
This cycle mimics the metaphorical pattern of trying to chase or catch the wind. It is rare and often fleeting.
As you prepare for 2024, and these things resonate with you, please pick up my book, or give me a call, and I would be happy to talk further with you about how you might break vicious cycle.