What If You Couldn’t Talk About Your Product?

Imagine a first call or meeting with a prospect. What if you couldn’t talk about your product or solution—even if the customer asked about it? What would you talk about?

Sure, you could exchange small talk, common interests, sports, hobbies. But that wears thin very quickly, you are wasting your time, the customer is wasting theirs. You may be breaking out in a sweat on what to do after the small talk. All you’ve been trained to do is talk about your product.

So what do you talk about?

Probably, you are forced into talking to the customer about what they are interested in. You might talk about what they are doing, challenges they might face, opportunities, problems. As the conversation progresses, you might dive more deeply into the issues, understanding the impact of these to them, how they feel about it. You might then explore whether they might want to do anything about what they face. What would change mean? How might they better understand the change? Where might they learn from others who have experienced the same thing?

In these conversations you might be helping the customer frame their challenges differently.

In this conversation, you may notice heightened customer interest. Your focus is on them, what they face. In engaging them in these conversations, you are helping them think through these issues, while building a relationship. You are helping them better understand the issues they face and changes that help them better achieve their goals. And at some point in the conversation, they will ask, “How can you help?”

Some of you are scratching your heads thinking, “This is crazy! I’m there to talk about our products and solutions, why should I focus on their issues? I will lose control of the meeting!”

But then, I would present some data: Clients making this transition see win rates at least double! “No decision made” reduces by about 20%. Buying/sales cycles reduce by 30-40%. This changes everything around our pipeline dynamics and revenue growth opportunities.

Then, I might ask you to reflect on your personal experience. You are likely to be more interested in people that are interested in you, than those who are just interested in themselves. We’ve all encountered these people, they talk about their accomplishments and how great they are. Their interest in us is limited to how we can help them.

As you start to think, “There might be something in this,” if you are honest, you might say, “I don’t know how to talk to them about their issues….. I don’t know how to engage them in talking about their business…..”

It’s much easier than you might think. The biggest issue is to change your mindset from, “I need to pitch my product,” to “I need to learn about the customer and their issues to better understand how my product might help.”

Some other quick ideas:

1. You should never be engaging a customer outside your ICP and who might be facing the issues you can help them solve. Anyone else, you are wasting your and their time.
2. Without understanding your customers, their jobs, how they get work done, critical success metrics, and even their language, you can’t engage them in relevant conversations. Focus on developing your customer acumen-learn about them, hang out where they hang out, understand what they talk to each other about.
3. Understand the problems you help your customers solve. We understand what problems our solutions address, but do we really understand the problem? Do we understand how customers discover these, how they define them, decide to change, navigate the problem solving process. Knowing what problems our products solve is insufficient, understanding the problems from the customer perspective is critical in engaging them in these conversations.
4. Help your customers understand what others in their markets are doing, issues they are seeing. Ask them if they are seeing similar things. Explore the impact these have or might have on the organization.
5. Help your customers think about the change process. Why change? What would they hope to achieve with the change? What are the risks? What if they decide to do nothing.
6. And if the customer decides to initiate a change, help them navigate the process. You bring great experience from other companies who have done similar things.
7. And when the customer asks, “How can you help,” focus on the things most important to them. Everything else is irrelevant.

It’s amazing what happens when you start talking your customers about the things they care about. Try it.

Afterword:  This the AI generated discussion of article.  Their discussion around business acumen is fantastic.  It’s an outstanding discussion.  Enjoy!