28 Dec Demonstrate your value by digging deep to discover your customer’s hidden challenges
Demonstrate your value by digging deep to discover your customer’s hidden challenges
The success of your business depends on your customers, without them you would not have a business. The future of your business depends on keeping these customers and winning new ones.
To do this you need to get absolute clarity on the value of your business and of your products and services to your existing customers and to any future customers.
Once you have clarity on your value you have to be able to communicate it, otherwise, how are they ever going to know?!
The way you communicate your value to your customers matters more than anything else.
When you prepare well, ask the right questions and show a genuine interest in your customers business using the 3Cs (Curiosity, Care and Commitment), you are on the right track.
But which questions do you ask?
Problem finding is the essential ingredient in that first conversation.
If you ask your customer questions about ‘stuff’ they already know, you will fail to talk about enough value for change.
Diagnostic questions are the most powerful and valuable, but only if they uncover something new, unconsidered, unexpected, unknown.
Your competition is already having conversations with your customers about their known challenges, so you doing this just makes you the same as your competition.
You want your customer to make a change, to choose you, or to stay with you, so for this to happen you must stand out. Customer change, as we know is highly unlikely if they are tied into what they already know and understand, so your conversation needs to hunt for the unknown challenges.
Daniel Pink in his book ‘To Sell Is Human’ says that your products and services;
“are far more valuable [when your prospects are] mistaken, confused, or completely clueless about [their] true problem…
…your ability to get prospects to do something different, choose you, and pay a premium, hinges less on your problem-SOLVING skills and more on your problem-FINDING skills.”
The first time you approach a customer conversation with a focus on unconsidered challenges may be tough and you may stutter and stall! But the more you do it, the easier and faster it will become.