Problem Or Product Focused Selling?

It’s Monday morning, I’ve just cleared my email and social feeds. Each of us experiences the same thing, grumbling at the terrible quality outreach. Then, too many of us turn around and inflict bad outbound prospecting on our own victims.

100% of the prospecting messages I see are product focused. The outbound communications are something like:

• “We are known for having the best product/services doing this…… I’d love to talk to you about it and what our customers are experiencing…..”
• “We’ve developed new capabilities in our product, you will be very interested in learning how you can use them….”
• “World class leaders get huge results from our products! Can I show you what results you might realize…”

Sometimes, the product pitches are thinly veiled by a problem:

• “Is lead/demand gen a problem for you? Let us show you how our product solves this problem….”
• “You need more in your pipeline, let us show you how we solve that problem….”

Every prospecting message I see focuses on the sender, their products, and their companies. Nothing focuses on our priorities and our company.

But unless the prospect is very late in their buying process, product/solution focused prospecting is unlikely to catch their attention.  Until they care about it, they don’t care about it!

What would happen if we changed our outreach strategies to focus on problems?

Some of you may react, “But Dave, we do this.  We talk about the problems our products and solutions solve….”

But this isn’t the issue many customers face.  They need to understand the problem before they can even think about the solution.  They need to understand:

• What is the problem, precisely?
• How does it impact us?
• How do we recognize that we have the problem?
• How do we understand who in the organization is impacted by the problem?
• What happens if we do nothing?
• What questions should be be asking ourselves?
• Who needs to be involved in understanding the problem and mapping a course forward?
• How do we gain and manage consensus across all these people?
• What support will we need to understand and measure the impact of the problem?
• What will it take to solve the problem?
• How long until we see results, what are the risks?
• Are we doing the right thing in prioritizing these issues over others we face?
• ………..?

Until the prospect of customer begins to address, understand, and internalize these issues, any discussion of solutions fall on deaf ears.  In fact it’s highly likely to frustrate them!

Part of their challenge at this stage, is they may not know how to look at, understand, and define the problem.  If they haven’t encountered it before, they struggle in knowing what they should be asking themselves.

Then once they start on the problem solving/change management process, much of their work focuses on building their confidence, not in the solution, but that they are assessing the issues around the problem in the right way.

However urgently we want them to focus on solutions, until they have done this work, our focus on our products slows them down and confuses them.  As much as we are trying to “help” them solve their problems, we are not providing the “help” we need.

We’ve seen this in their buying processes.  They wander, they start/stop, they shift priorities, directions.  They are diverted to other issues, they lose then regain interest.  We see the data on this struggle, the increasing number of change/buying projects that end in no decision made, the increases in buyer regret, the increasing length of complex buying cycles.

Seller reading this are probably frustrated! 

“Dave, this is a huge amount of work, we have to hit our numbers, we have to move faster!  Maybe we should just wait until they have done all this work and are ready for us to pitch solutions…….”

Again, the data tends to suggest this is a losing strategy.

Win rates are plummeting, customer experience/satisfaction is declining (critical to laying the ground work to retention renewal).  And, as mentioned before, no decision made is increasing along with sale cycles.

The data on problem led selling is fascinating.  Helping our customers through the process of understanding the problem drives:

• Increased interest and engagement with the customer because we focus on what they are interested in.
• Increased trust because we are providing the insight, knowledge, help in understanding the problem.
• Dramatic increases in win rates, because of the relationship and confidence we are building in helping them navigate the process.
• Dramatic reductions in “no decision made,” again because we build their confidence that they are doing the right things.
• 30-40% reduction in buying cycle because we are helping them navigate a process they rarely do.

While it may seem counterintuitive, our time and cost to results is much lower when we align with customers in problem focused selling—at least for complex B2B buying.

But this means we have to give our sellers the tools to enable them to engage in problem focused selling.  We have to:

• Help them understand our customers’ business and how they get business done.
• Help them understand the problems our products solve, but at a deeper level:  What do the problems mean to the customer and how to they better understand and define the problems.
• Engage them, focusing on the problems and their impact, not the solutions.
• Provide content and on-line experiences that help customers better understand the problems.
• Helping customers that may not realize they have the problem determine if they do, then inciting them to change.
• Helping the customer navigate the change process, the problem definition/solution process.  After all, they seldom do this and don’t know how/what they should be doing.
• Provide tools to help them measure, characterize, and define the impact of the problem.
• …….

Problem or Product focused selling, which is the best approach?

Regular readers will recognize my standard answer, “It depends…..”

Product focused selling can be very effective for customers that are extremely knowledgeable about the problems and products.  They buy these products very frequently, they have developed deep knowledge in the problem and potential solutions.  The risk of failure or making a bad decision has to be very small or non-existent.  Also, the scope of organizational impact/decision is very narrow.  The more people involved, the more complex the consensus management process.  These customers are looking for the most efficient and easiest buying process, the buying process becomes very transactional.  And, ideally for these purchases it might be fully automated.  Leveraging problem focused selling in these situations slows the customer down, frustrates and alienates them.

Problem focused selling is most impactful in complex B2B change initiatives.  Where people have little experience in these issues/problems, where the need to look at a change is infrequent.  If the rate of change in the business is very high, so what may have worked before may not be the right solution.  Where more people are involved in the process and the process for gaining and managing consensus is more difficult.  Where time to decision and time to results might be longer.  Where the risks are higher, or the investments may be higher.  Where people may not even recognize the opportunity to improve and change, needing to be incited to consider different approaches.  Using product focused selling in these situations isn’t being helpful.  It doesn’t provide the customer what they need to do in understanding and solving the problem.  It slows them down, frustrates and alienates them.

Problem or Product focused selling, it depends.  In the choices you make, make sure with you are aligned with how they view the issues.