Is The Problem You Solve The Problem The Customers Have?

Recently, I’ve been having a number of fascinating conversations with sellers on “the problem to be solved.”

I’ve been asking them, “What problem do you solve?” The responses usually focus on what their products/solutions do. They aren’t feature discussions (which is great), rather they describe things like, “we improve data accuracy, integrity, and quality.” Or “we reduce time on administrative tasks,” or any number of things.

While these are “problems,” what we are really describing is what our offerings do, and not centering on the problems the customer cares about. While data accuracy and time spent on administrative tasks are problems, they aren’t the core problems our customers are likely to be concerned about.

We and our customers tend to respond to surface issues, failing to address the real underlying issues. As tired as this analogy is, symptom are problems, but they aren’t the core, most important problem impacting the customer. Until we and the customer focus on the underlying core problems, we won’t be able to maximize the value and urgency to resolve the problem.

Here’s a very old example, but one I think illustrates what we might achieve if we really look for the core problem.

I used to lead a business unit selling engineering design and analytic tools. At a surface level, our tools dramatically improved engineering productivity. Initially, we justified the offering on just that, engineers could get more work done in less time. We could look at cost avoidance, not having to hire and onboard new engineers to meet project deadlines. But the business case was tough. That combined with a longer learning curve and a lot of process changes caused created challenges. While the expense reduction was profound, the time to results and the hassle factor in making the change really slowed the customer decision process.

We decided to change our approach, rather than focus on the obvious, engineering productivity, we thought, “What are we really helping the customer achieve?” We landed on, reducing new product launch cycles. Most of these customers had very long design and release cycles, often years. We realized the problem our solutions solved was not engineering productivity. The real problem we enable customers to solve is to reduce their time to product launch by over 50%.

I turned out this was a much more profound problem, rather opportunity, than improving engineering productivity. When we and the customer focused on engineering productivity, we focused on cost reduction. But when we focused the customer on time to product release, we were accelerating their ability to generate revenue (as well as improving productivity).

This slight shift in perspective is profound in impact to the customer. The problem to be solved changed from improving engineering productivity, to reducing time to revenue by a minimum of 50%.

How do we shift our perspectives, drilling down to address the real issues and problems?

One technique we’ve used is a variant of the “5 Whys?” Using the previous example, the usual way people answered “Why do we want to improve engineering productivity,” was “To reduce engineering expense?” But we then said, “What would happen if you didn’t use that productivity increase to reduce expense?” The answer came back, “We could get more work done in a shorter period of time?” Then we would ask, “What would happen if you could get more work done in a shorter period of time?” The answer, “We could reduce product release cycles and accelerate product to market?” Then we asked, “What would the impact be if you could bring a product to market one year sooner…..” You can see where this is going.

Another thing we are getting people to think about goes like this, I ask, “What problem to you solve?” Recently, I posed this to a client, the response was, “We profoundly improve data quality, integrity, and integration!” I then asked, “Who has these problems?” They looked at me, cross eyed, “Everyone!!!!!” We talked a little about their target markets, settled on a certain segment of financial services and another in healthcare. I then asked them to describe the problems they solved without using any of those words. How would they describe them to the financial services customers, and separately to healthcare? In doing this, they stopped talking about what they did, but focused on what it meant to the customers.

Too many sellers can only describe the features and functions of their products, leaving it to the customer to translate what the impact is.

Better sellers describe what their products do, which is a huge step forward.

But what if we could help our customers understand what our offering enable them to achieve?

Afterword: Here is the usual AI discussion of the post. They do go on some tangents, but come back to the core ideas. Enjoy!