Who Is This Important To?

We are taught to “call high.” We want to reach the top executives in an organization, getting their support in buying our solutions. In our best days, we have articulated a business case about the impact of our solutions. “We can reduce costs by $10M. We can reduce swelling admin time by 20%, we can increase revenue by $100M…..” The numbers can appear big, particularly in context of the investment the customer may have to make in our solutions.

But too often, when we are focusing on the approval of top executives, these results produce a MEH reaction. In the context of the issues they face, the impact is small. If they are worried about billions, a $10M reduction in costs is a drop in the bucket. If selling reduction in admin time/tasks represents a few percent of their overall expenses, they may have bigger fish to fry. And even if we increase revenue by $100M, in a $10B plus organization, that’s 1% or less.

But these are big numbers, we can have a huge impact! The issue is “who is this important to?”

The reality is, few of our solutions, when we are honest, are game changing at the corporate level, particularly when we are looking at larger organizations. That doesn’t mean our solutions aren’t important or that we should give up, we have to focus on the people the solution impacts the most, getting their support to invest in those solutions.

This raises key questions:

• Do we really know who our solutions are important to? For example, if we are selling software technologies, while IT may be key, it represents a net incremental expense to them.  But the real benefit will be realized by another part of the organization.  Until we get the people who benefit the most to drive IT to support what they want to achieve, IT is likely to not pay attention.
• Even if we are focusing on the people our solutions are important to, what is most important to them–now? If we don’t understand what is important to them now, we can’t position our offer in meaningful ways. What if we could save them money or improve their productivity by $10M. That’s a big number. It may be a big number to our customer, but that doesn’t mean it’s important to them. Saving money might not be the core issue they face at the moment. It may be market growth, or bringing a new product to market or something else. If we aren’t helping them in something important to them, then the value we might create is meaningless to them.  They may be facing crises in other areas, and won’t focus on what we do.
• What if they don’t know how it might become important to them? They may be happy with the status quo—things are OK, not great, but why change? Our issue is “How do we make it important to them?”

Until we find/create a customer that has a problem important to them–one of their top priorities, and we provide high impact solutions to that problem, we are pushing a rope up a very steep hill.

But how do we do this?

Yep, you guessed it, this post is really about business and customer acumen.

Unless we deeply understand our customers’ business. Unless we deeply understand the issues that are or should be important to them, we can’t connect what we sell to the things they care about. This gives us our starting point.

The next step is identifying who in the enterprise this problem is likely to be important to?  These are, typically, the personas we may have identified in our selling strategies.

While we may have identified the personas, each individual is different.  They have varying priorities, they may have different challenges and issues.  Until we understand why they should be interested now, we are wasting their time and ours.

We must identify who “owns” the problem—not necessarily the solution to the problem, but the problem itself.  In most organizations, it’s typically not an individual or a single department/function, problems impact many parts of the organization in different ways.

Too often, we don’t take the time to do this.  We paper their inboxes and social feeds with all sorts of meaningless stuff, driving them away.

Too often, we wait for them to figure all this stuff out themselves, doing the heavy lifting to identify the problem and assess solutions, coming to us with a few final questions.  We miss all those people that never get this far—the majority of the market.

For each of your opportunities, can you identify who the problem is important to?  Why it’s important to them now?

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  Enjoy!