“Can You Help Us……?”

“Can you help us…….” is music to every seller’s ears. It’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s the “Ka–Ching” that sounds when we hit the jackpot.

It’s the foundation of all inbound. We leap into action demonstrating how our products answer the customer’s question, we talk about how we are the right company to “help” them.

But there’s problem, not enough prospects are coming to us with that question. For those that do, we do everything we can to get them to choose us, but the reality there is never enough, We need more!

And that’s where outbound and all our demand gen programs come in. Their jobs are to find more customers asking for help, looking to change, possibly buy.

But here’s where the problem comes in. Our outreach strategies focus on a single message: “We can help you!!!!”

We embellish that message with, “Look at all the other organizations, just like you, that we’ve helped! Look at how great we are at helping you at this….! We know you may have these issues, we can help you!”

And that, for the most part, falls on deaf ears. Customers don’t care–though perhaps they should. They aren’t asking for help, so all our offers, regardless how loud, how many, how enticing, fall on deaf ears.

Until they ask, they don’t care! And the more we tell them that we can help them, if they don’t need/want it, we drive them away.

What does it mean, how do we get them to ask, “Can you help us…?”

What drives customers to this point?

It’s the discovery they have a problem, an opportunity, or that there is something that might help them improve or more effectively achieve their goals.

Our demand gen and outbound has to focus on getting the customer to think about these things, because until they think about these things and decide to do something about it, all our demonstrations of how we can help are meaningless. They don’t care about solutions, until they recognize there is something they want to change.

We need to refocus our demand gen and outbound programs to be business issues focused. Educating prospects and customers about business issues, challenges, opportunities, disruptions, threats. We have to incite our customers to consider, “Are we facing this? What might this mean to us? What if we fail to address this? How do we learn more about this issue and these problems? How is it impacting other organizations like us? Who else in our organization might be impacted by this? Do they care, should they care, how do we get them to care?”

Note that these questions are all focused on understanding the issue, on learning more. They haven’t even gotten to the point of, “Maybe we should change. Maybe we are missing out on something.”

And until they get to that point, they will never get to the point of “Can you help us….?”

We focus on “We can help you….” before the customer has even gone through these first two steps of their process. And, as a result, we fail.

We fail to achieve our goals. More importantly, we fail our customers/prospects? We aren’t inciting them to think differently, we aren’t helping them recognize they may have problems, we aren’t helping them recognize threats, we aren’t helping them recognize opportunities to improve and achieve. We aren’t inciting them to search, learn, and commit to change.

We aren’t creating the value that may be most important to them!

But it’s amazing to see what happens when sellers (however few) do this. When they change their demand generation and outbound programs to focus on the business issues and opportunities customers may be unaware of or unconscious to.

As these sellers engage the customer in learning, the focus is solely on the business issues and their potential impact on the customer. They help the customer understand, deeply, they guide the customer to the point where the customer then asks, “Can you help us….?”

As you look at this focus on the business and the problem—not the solution, we see some “magic” happening in the process. As you might expect, the probability of our winning, when the customer commits to changing, skyrockets. We’ve been working with them, helping them learn, building trust and relationships.

But the most interesting and counterintuitive thing is the total sales cycle is significantly reduced over our traditional approaches. We are seeing reductions in sales cycle by as much as 30%.

While I won’t dive into why this happens (reach out if you want to learn), at a high level, the customer is more purposeful, more focused, understands what they need to learn, what help they need, and are more committed to change. Stated differently, they are much more confident through their entire change management process.

We’ve all hear the mantra, “Slow Down To Go Fast!”

We race to tell the customer “We can help you,….” but they aren’t even looking for help. We serve them and ourselves better by helping them get to that question, “Can you help me…..”