“Behind every business objective is the fulfillment of a personal objective.”*
In our discovery process, if we conduct a discovery, we seek to understand the customers’ business objectives. “What problem are they solving, why is it important to solve it, what are the risks of solving/not solving it…….”
And we focus the presentation of our solutions in terms of how it addresses the business objectives. Perhaps it’s a value proposition, an ROI, or something else.
But underlying those business reasons, basically those things that impact their function and the work they do are personal objectives. It may be as simple as, if they don’t fix the problem, they will lose their jobs. These reasons are myriad and can be closely related to the job or role they perform, or very unrelated. They could be to position themselves for a promotion, get a pay raise or a bonus, get their managers off their backs.
It may be simply to remove a “hassle factor,” or reduce their workload, perhaps getting better work/life balance, of getting home in time to watch a child’s soccer game.
In the past, I’ve written a lot about decision confidence, the role of FOFU in driving no decision made. While the customer may articulate these things in business terms, 100% of the time the real reasons have to do with fulfilling a personal objective. So if we want to really understand these, we have to dive beneath the business objectives and understand the personal objectives of each person involved in the decision.
How do we do this? How do we understand the personal objectives of each of our customers/prospects?
This involves building a relationship with the customer, building trust, demonstrating that we are interested in their success. We can’t stop at understanding the business requirements, checking off our lists of features, functions, product capabilities that might address their business objectives. Our solution is rarely the thing that directly addresses their personal objectives. But what they achieve as a result of successfully navigating their problem solving process and selecting a solution may be the things that contribute to the achievement of their personal objectives.
We have to earn the right to probe beyond the business needs, asking about their personal goals. Questions about, “Why is solving this important to you? What happens to you if this problem isn’t addressed? What do you worry most about as you look at this problem and making a decisions? and more….”
The customer may answer in business terms, “My organization needs to get this done….” or whatever business justification they might cite. But we have to go deeper, “I get this, but what does it mean to you?”
If we haven’t built the trust and confidence between each other. If the customer doesn’t see the human to human connection, we will never earn the right to ask these questions. We will never get the responses that we need to understand what it means to them.
Regardless how we look at this, as long as there are people involved in buying/selling, each person has personal objectives underlying the business objectives. If we don’t fulfill those personal objectives, we won’t move forward.
*Thanks go Allan Weiss
Afterword: A note to managers. Just as our customers have personal objectives that need to be fulfilled, we and each of our people have personal objectives that need to be fulfilled in the performance of our jobs. Do you understand them? Are you connecting with each person at the personal level, as well as at the business objective level?
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. They take an interesting turn by extending this concept beyond just understanding our customers.
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