Just finished a fascinating discussion with my good friend, Charles Green, and my new friend, Miles Veth. As our conversations often go, we were talking about the state of selling and how we improve. The conversation got me thinking about the issue: “Our customers desperately need help, but do we want to be helpful, do we know how to be helpful?
We, everyone, face worlds of accelerating turbulence, disruption, risk, and uncertainty. We face issues we may not have experienced before. We are, often, so busy we may not recognize threats or opportunities to change, improve grow. And when we do, we are overwhelmed with information and data about what we might do. And because so much of this is outside our experience base, we struggle with what to do and our confidence in the choices we make.
Often, we involve more people–we need differing points of view, differing expertise to address these challenges. These challenges, also, don’t just impact our own areas of responsibility, but impact many areas in the organization. Making the “right” decision is more difficult because more people are involved. And, as would be expected, uncertainty increases.
I won’t bother revisiting all the data we see reinforcing the struggle customers experience in committing to and managing a change process. Or the number of change projects than end in doing nothing. Or the lost opportunity our customers experience in failing to successfully manage a change initiative. You already know that.
The core issue is our customers are struggling. they are crying for help! And that demand for help will skyrocket in the coming years.
And sellers can provide that help. We work with hundreds/thousands facing similar challenges. While each situation is nuanced and different, we have great experience based on what we have seen others do.
The core issues are, do we want to provide that help? And if we do, do we know how to provide that help?
Do we want to provide that help? That’s, perhaps, the ugliest question we have to answer for ourselves. Do we really care about our customers and their success, or are we more focused on our success–and getting customers to buy is the inconvenience that impacts our ability to achieve our goals.
Too often, our behaviors, are self centered and not customer centered. We don’t understand our customers and their challenges. We defer engagement to the point where they are looking at solutions. Our “interest” in their problem is focused on how we present our solution, getting them to choose us. And we don’t know how to provide the help that is most important to them.
I often ask people who have just closed a deal, “What did they buy it for?” Too often the response is, “$100K ARR!”
And, if they should choose us and buy, we want to retain their business, possibly grow the business. But the support we provide focuses on their utilization of our product, not their success in achieving their goals. Again, I ask sellers, “What are your goals with the customer?” and the response seldom has anything to do with their experience and their ability to achieve their goals, it’s usually, “We need to retain that $100K ARR and grow it by 25%!”
Then, for those that genuinely want to help customers, they don’t know how to. They don’t understand their customers, their businesses, how they get things done, what they should be doing, what they might be missing. They know only what their products do.
This is actually a pretty easy problem to fix. Being curious, caring, working collaboratively to help them solve their problems–which is more than buying a product. Recognizing the customers are human beings, listening, building their confidence they are doing the right thing. Helping them move forward in complex decisions in which they have little experience. Leveraging our experience in helping others solve similar problems.
This is an issue of business acumen and putting the customer first is something we can learn and build skills. It changes our conversations and how we engage our customers. It changes the meaning we create for each other.
There are those reading this, saying, “Dave, we don’t have the time to do this! We have to make our numbers! What you are proposing is ‘charity.'”
And those are the people that are, for some strange reason, happy with win rates of 15-20%, lengthening sales cycles, 60% of qualified opportunities disappearing because the customer has given up, skyrocketing volumes of meaningless prospecting emails, and the majority of their sellers failing to achieve their goals.
Those that recognize the value of creating value with their customers, the importance of caring, the value of helping the customer successfully navigate their buying process, see something else. They’ve discovered the ironic secret about being truly helpful to customers. Win rates skyrocket! No Decision Made Plummets! Customer buying cycles/selling cycles reduce by 30-40% and customer loyalty and growth improves.
And those drive the ability to achieve quota and revenue goals. The secret these organizations have discovered is we succeed through helping our customers succeed.
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