Most of our selling activities are driven by our customers. As much as we may try to pitch our solutions, they don’t care–until they care. We end up waiting for them to be ready to talk to us. Even then, too often, they are choosing to minimize or eliminate sellers, preferring rep free buying experiences. Ultimately, sellers are deterred in engaging customers until very late in the buying cycle, and when/if customers want that engagement.
And while this represents the current reality sellers have learned to live with, perhaps even revel. And, somehow, organizations seem to meet their growth goals, we have to change!
We have to stop waiting for our customers!
By doing so, we do them a disservice. By doing so, we fail to achieve our full potential.
The issue is, our customers struggle with identifying and managing their problem solving /change process! Our customers struggle with their buying process! And most of the time, they fail!
I’ve written innumerable posts and cited the ongoing market research validating this challenge.
But there’s this dynamic between customers and sellers that reinforce this dynamic.
We focus on our presenting our solutions. But this is meaningless to the customer until the very end of the their entire change/problem/buying cycle. And we’ve trained our customers to behave this way. Since our focus is excursively on our solutions, we have trained our customers to wait until the very last stages in their buying process.
Yet our customers struggle and fail, they never get to the point of actually selecting a solution. And they struggle with that. But they won’t engage us!
We can’t wait for the customer!
We can’t wait for them to be ready to talk about solutions. They will never get there! We have to engage earlier.
But we can’t do this until we change how we are engaging them. We have to create reasons that cause customers to want to be engaged. We have to be able to talk to them about what they want to talk about when they are ready to talk about it.
And their biggest struggle is in the change/problem definition process. We have to start helping them with understand the need to change, to define the problem, to engage in the change/problem solving process. This is where they struggle, this is where they need help, this is where we should have deep expertise!
What happens when we do this? What happens when we act as Problem Experts?
They are more likely to succeed! They are more likely to successfully navigate the process, with greater confidence! And they do it 30-40% faster than if we aren’t helping them.
And what’s it mean to us? We build trust and confidence. We built a bias for the customer to want to work with us! Our win rates skyrocket, our deal sizes increase, our customer retention increases. And we get all that done in 30-40% less time!
We can’t wait for our customers!
They and we can’t afford to wait for us!
Afterword: The foundation for this is our Business Focused Selling program. For information, reach out. One of the tools we use to help improve seller ability to become Problem Experts is the Problem Focused Brock Questionert. Again, reach out if you want a copy.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post, Enjoy!
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