Educating Our Customers….

Hank Barnes wrote a brilliant post, “A Question Of Prospect Education” It’s an important post, be sure to read it.

We tend, to often, to get this wrong. When we educate our customers, whether inbound or outbound, we tend to educate our customers on “Why buy us!” We focus on discussions around the presumption they are well educated on the issues, buying, change; focusing our discussions on proving the superiority of our solutions/products over the alternatives they may consider.

We make a giant leap forward, too often, leaving our customers behind; lost, confused, and fumbling in their change and buying processes. And we see the data on this with up to 60% of committed buying efforts ending in no decision made, and a majority of those that have, somehow, completed their buying process lacking confidence in the decision they have made, possibly having regret with the actions they have taken.

By analogy, when I started playing golf, I wanted to get out on the course immediately and start playing. After all, I’d spent many Sunday afternoons watching final rounds of the pro tour. I “knew” what to do base on that deep experience. You probably can guess my level of “success” as I hit the course. (I did create great comic entertainment for the others in my foursome.)

Too often, we may see our customers doing the same thing–leaping to solutions before they really understand what they are trying to do and what they need to learn to achieve their goals.

Or as sellers, impatient to get an order, we skip to the end, without making sure the customer is properly educated.

There is a sequence, critical to both the customer and our success. If we and the customer fail to honor that sequence, we are likely to fail. The customer will tend to wander, shift their goals, priorities, start/stop. As a result their buying process is confused, possibly longer than necessary, and, as I’ve mentioned, more often ends in failure.

There is an educational sequence our customers must be guided through, to help maximize both their success, but also to optimize their efficiency in the process.

And sellers, because we have been through similar things with hundreds of customers, can be the guides for our customers, helping them execute the process effectively, efficiently, and reaching a decision in which they have great confidence.

Let’s start at the beginning:

First, there’s the discovery or recognition that they may need to change. Customer may start experiencing problems, they bay be struggling to achieve their goals. They recognize they have a problem and need to begin to change.

Or they may be completely oblivious to the need to change. They may be achieving their goals (perhaps with some struggle), but they may not recognize they could do better. There may be things they are blind to, but can help them grow and improve. Or opportunities they may be missing.

Helping the customer understand and commit to a change process is critical to executing the next steps effectively and efficiently. It provides the foundation to building their confidence in doing things differently. We, sellers, see what’s happening, in their markets, industries, and companies. We help incite them to think differently and commit to change by helping them think differently, “Have you ever considered…. Do you see these things happening…. We see these shifts in your industries and markets…. It seems your customers may be looking for new things….. What would happen if you did this”

As the customers begin to understand this, their first goal is to understand the change, confronting issues like, Why Change? What do we need to understand about the change process? What do we need to learn? Who does this impact? What are the risks? What happens if we don’t change? Where might we fail, how do we avoid this? What support do we need within the organization and from management? What does this mean to each person involved in the process? What are others doing? What’s happening in our markets, with our customers, with our competitors that might impact our ability to achieve our goals? Could we do better?

None of this has anything to do with the solutions they might implement, but is strictly focused on a deeper understanding of the problem, making informed commitments to change, and developing a plan to decide specifically on what they want to achieve and then when.

Only when they have done this well, do they begin to consider what changes might be made, and how they make those changes. They are still in their early education process but moving on from the why change to making it happen. In this, they will be interested in deepening their understanding of what others have done, where others have succeeded and how, where others have failed and why.

A key part of this process is establishing their own project plan. What do they want to do, who is involved, how they manage their project to achieve the results, what solutions they might consider. This is the critical part of their education process on how do buy. Unless they are doing these things every day, they don’t know how to buy, what to look for as they consider solutions, how to gain/maintain consensus through the project.

Only once they have successfully developed their plan and have begun to address these issues to they start to assess, what to buy, which solutions they should look for, how they should evaluate alternative solutions. It’s only at this point that they can begin to understand why they might choose us. They have a framework based on the problem they are trying to solve that allows them to make an informed decision in which they have great confidence.

And when we are educating them about why they should choose us, we do this based on what they are trying to achieve, the problem they are trying to solve, the risks they might encounter, and so forth. Because we’ve been involved in helping them get to this point, we have outstanding insight that is unique to what they’ve gone through and where they want to go. We can position the discussion of why choose us, in that context.

If we have not been involved in helping them reach this point, we are seriously handicapped in how we help them choose us. If we don’t know all of this background (having educated ourselves along with the customer) the only context we have in presenting why buy us is comparing our solutions to the competition. We are missing the major issues the customer considers critical to their success.

We want to strengthen our ability to achieve our goals. We want to improve our customers’ abilities to take action and buy. We want to help them be as effective and efficient in this process as possible. We want them to buy, we want them to have confidence in choosing us.

The only way we do this is by educating our customers and helping them learn. But we have to start at the beginning. We experience, too often, what happens if they don’t.