Recently, I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Howard Dover about some programs he and Becc Holland are conducting with his students. We talked about some fascinating concepts: Mis-diagnosis and Missed-diagnosis. Both concepts are hugely important, so I need to separate writing about them. In this article, I’ll focus on Mis-diagnosis. I have written a companion article on Missed-diagnosis. I encourage you to read both.
What is a Mis-diagnosis? At it’s simplest level is is mis-diagnosis is an incorrect identification of a problem. Mis-diagnoses are rampant, and not for malicious reasons.
For instance, as sellers, we are looking for customers that have the problems we solve. So our diagnostic process is very biased. We ask the questions to identify “the problem.” Our cognitive bias causes us to “understand” what the customer says in a certain way, but it may not be what the customer really said. So, as sellers, we may think we have found the right customer and opportunity, but, in reality, we have mis-diagnosed the problem. Stated differently, “If all we have is a hammer, everything begins to look like nails.”
As sellers, we have to understand what the customer is really saying, we have to makes sure we are correctly diagnosing the problem the customer tell us they want to solve.
But it gets more complicated.
Customers mis-diagnose their problems. They may think they have a certain challenge or opportunity, but may have it completely wrong. It may be something they have never encountered. As a result, they don’t know how to analyze it, they don’t know what questions they should ask, what data they should be collecting, who they should be involving. Because of this lack of understanding, they may mis-diagnose what they are seeing happening.
But mis-diagnoses happen in other ways. Like sellers, they have their own cognitive biases, they may see things and interpret them based on their past experience, but not identifying the real problem.
Sometimes, these mis-diagnoses appear because of lack of information. They may not have the information or may not know the information they should be collecting to assess the problem. Or they may misinterpret the data they have, causing them to draw the incorrect conclusions about the problem.
Sometimes, there is an over-reliance on expertise. Our deep expertise creates overconfidence in certain areas. As a result, we fail to look for errors in our diagnosis or alternative explanations. Or the problem may look similar to past problems we’ve addressed, so we jump to the same solutions, without assessing where it might be different.
Too often, we may underestimate the problem, focusing on our perspectives/experience, but not seeing it from a broader perspective. In today’s world of rising complexity, we tend to try to simplify things or not see the entire picture. As an example, recently I was involved with a client selling supply chain technology solutions to IT. IT understood the issues, understood the problem and how my client could help them solve the problem. But they didn’t prioritize it, they had other things to do. But when my client started talking to end users–people in procurement/logistics/manufacturing, they realized there were monstrous issues. They weren’t meeting commitments to fulfill customer orders. These unhappy customers were taking a lot of sales time, demanding the account managers fix the problem or contracts would be cancelled. And those customers weren’t interested in looking at new opportunities my client presented until they solved the supply chain problems.
So, we tend to look at problems from our perspectives, not appreciating the impact the problem might have on people in other parts of the organization.
Or sometimes, when we try to look at the big picture, understanding the entire problem and it’s impact on everyone, we are overwhelmed by the complexity and give up. It’s still a problem, but we just can’t deal with it.
Finally, we are under constant time pressure. That time pressure may cause us to take shortcuts in the problem solving process, resulting in a misdiagnosis.
As sellers, we have to be cautious that we are correctly diagnosing problems, not just hearing what we want to hear.
As sellers, we have a tremendous opportunity to help our customers understand and correctly diagnose their problems. We have deep expertise with hundreds of other customers. We can leverage this by helping the customer more deeply understand the problem, and how they should be analyzing it. We can heighten the urgency, by helping them make sure they are involving everyone impacted by the problem. Using my previous example, my client drove the problem to the top of ITs priorities by involving the functions that were directly impacted by the problem.
But there’s still a remaining danger around mis-diagnosis. And it comes from inbound. We have customers coming to us, saying, “We have this problem, we want to look at how you help us solve it…..” Our “happy ears” cause us to jump directly into presenting our products. We don’t take the time to reconfirm how the customer got to that diagnosis and whether it is correct.
But when we take that time, some amazing things happen. We build customer confidence they are solving the right problem, that they have diagnosed it correctly. Very often, I see customers expanding their view and understanding of the problem–driving higher urgency and much bigger deals. All of these things increase the value we create with the customer in assuring they have diagnosed the issue correctly.
But when we do this, we have to do it quickly, the customer may be impatient, thinking they have done the right things and wanting to move on. Engaging them in purposeful conversations, helping them understand why you are asking these question and what it might mean is critical to success.
Mis-diagnosis happens more than we know. We see signals of potential mis-diagnosis in concepts like No Decision Made, decision confidence and buying regret. Make sure you help your customers understand and diagnose the problem correctly. Make sure you are diagnosing the problem correctly.
Then there’s the category of missed-diagnoses. These are opportunities we and our customers miss, because we because we are blind to the opportunity or the problem. We don’t recognize the opportunity to change.
For managers and leaders: Within our own organizations we have similar problems. We face huge challenges with Mis-diagnoses and Missed-diagnoses. So much of what I see impacting selling organizations is the result of Mis-diagnosis. And when I look at opportunities for step function growth or innovation, the failure to exploit them is a result of Missed Diagnoses. They represent such huge opportunities for performance improvement.
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