Underlying our GTM strategies, we’ve always thought our jobs is to get our customers the information they need. 90% of our focus is giving them information about our products, our companies, ourselves. Some of it is giving them information in the form of insights, helping educate them on issues in their markets/industries, trends, how other leverage our solutions.
It turns out, getting information is not the challenge customers are facing. Between what they normally can find through visiting our websites, doing Google Searches, or leveraging LLMs like ChatGPT, our customers are overwhelmed with information.
This overwhelm is so, well, overwhelming, that too often customers and prospects give up, almost before they start.
Perhaps the greatest value we can create with our customers/prospects is to help them filter out all the noise. Perhaps helping them viciously narrow the information they need to pay attention to is one of the most important things we can do to help them navigate their buying process.
Our instincts and virtually all our training focus on providing our customers more information. Case studies, product details, demos, trials, testimonials about our product. Our presentations keep adding more information, piling on to that we’ve already provided.
We are doing this, our competitors are doing this, our customers are doing their own research. And, today, AI adds a multiplying factor to this.
The customer is overwhelmed, overloaded, confused. When they are seeking clarity, understanding. When they are struggling to make sense of everything they see, when they are struggling to develop their confidence, the world — and we are wired to do just the opposite, though that may not be our intent.
Perhaps we can provide the best help to our customers by helping them filter out the noise. Helping them discard and eliminate that which is not important or relevant to their problem or what they are trying to achieve.
But we can’t help our customers do this, if we don’t have a deep understanding of the problems and issues they face. Unless we know enough to be able to help them disregard that which may be a distraction, irrelevant, and not important, we can’t filter out the noise.
If we can’t filter out the noise, we and they can’t move forward.
Recently, I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts on art, music, and literature. What I am learning about is the greatest practitioners in each never seek what they can add, they are constantly looking at what they can eliminate. The ultimate in artistic expression is the ability to strip out everything, getting to the essence of what they are trying to convey in their art.
The same thing is sorely needed by our customers and in our own work.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.* It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. You have to understand the essence of [the challenge] in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” Steve Jobs
* “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
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