The Path to Sales Growth through Customer Focus – Part 3

This post continues the previous discussions of enabling sales growth through customer focus. In my opinion, the journey toward sales growth starts and ends with our customers, so I’m not sure why our customers aren’t always the foundation of our sales processes, methodologies, and messaging, but I can testify that many companies still need improvement in this area.

In part 1 of this series, I shared my Customer Focus Framework for Sales Growth and shared the five pillars of this framework:

Modeling Buyer Personas
Mapping the Buying Journey and Buying Process
Aligning your Sales Process and Methodology
Understanding Market Conditions and Buyer Issues
Aligning Your Sales Solution Architecture

I discussed Modeling Buyer Personas and Mapping the Buying Journey and Buying Process in that first post. In part 2 of this series, I wrote about Aligning your Sales Process and Methodology.

Today, we’ll focus on the last two pillars, Understanding Market Conditions and Buyer Issues and Aligning Your Sales Solution Architecture.

Understanding Market Conditions and Buyer Issues

If you assemble one hundred sales and marketing experts, they’ll have eight-five or more ways of describing this. This is just my way. Note that in some Buyer Persona structures, the conditions, issues and needs are part of the persona. If so, and you’ve already done this as part of your persona modeling, that’s great. No need to recreate the wheel. If not, this is critical and necessary, so don’t ignore it. Do it separately.

Market Conditions

This is what’s happening in the buyer’s industry and market. Think: “situation” and “circumstances.” These could include economic pressures, competitive environment, regulatory changes, and all the external factors that impact company performance.

Buyer Issues (Internal Conditions and SWOT, tied to Personas)

Based on those conditions and internal readiness to address them, your buyers (by persona) face certain issues. I think of this as a mini-SWOT analysis, from the buyer’s perspective… what are their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, relative to the conditions they are facing. This should be considered by persona, because even the same conditions externally, create different internal issues for a CFO than for a VP of Operations or a Director of Sales.

Negative Consequences of Inaction (NCI)

This is simple, but powerful and often overlooked, or assumed to be known or clear. Do not make this assumption and always state the consequences explicitly. What could happen, to the buyer, department, other stakeholders, or company, if the issues go unaddressed?

Positive Outcomes of Action (POA)

This is simply the flip side of the Negative Consequences, but worth restating. If action is taken, successfully, and the issues are minimized or eliminated, what are the favorable outcomes?

Need Statement

Based on all of this, what is the explicit statement of your buyer’s needs? Let’s be clear that this is not a statement about how you can help or your solution. This is just a summary statement, based on the Conditions, Issues, NCI and POA. Just ensure to make it about them, not what you provide. That comes later.

The Great Conundrum of Sales

Before I discuss Solution Architecture and aligning it to your buyer’s issues, here’s a recommendation that may surprise you. The above exercise is worthwhile to understand your customers, even if you can’t solve the specific issues they face (perhaps I’ll write a post later on how you can add value, gain credibility, build trust and become an advisor and problem-solver for your clients this way).

However, let me be clear that even the best intentions, stewardship, service orientation, focus on customer experience, pay-it-forward mindset, and go-giver attitude won’t save your job or your company if you don’t ultimately sell your products and services. This is the conundrum of professional sales.

You won’t become successful (long-term) by focusing on selling products or making commissions for yourself.
You need to focus on your customers and solving their problems.
Yet, if you solve all their problems without selling anything, well, you know that outcome.

You see the circle here, right?

The Superbly-Simple Secret Sauce of Selling

The answer to this dilemma is simple. Sales pundits have been saying it for years, so this is not exactly thought leadership here, folks.

It’s never about shamelessly hawking what you sell.
It’s always about finding people who have the problems you can solve.
- Note that they may or may not initially be aware they have a problem you can solve, or that you may not always truly know at the outset.

When customers have problems you can solve, you do still need to influence them to buy those solutions from you. If you have a clear value proposition from their perspective and can truly solve those problems at a fair cost, with a return on investment (in whatever way your customer thinks of that), you can sleep at night and feel good about yourself for “selling” or influencing, negotiating and generally navigating the buying and selling processes to a mutually-beneficial outcome. This is the attitude and mindset I have seen from top-producers over nineteen years of analyzing them.

I sometimes feel this puts me in the minority, but this is why I struggle with using sports and military metaphors for selling… a topic for another day.

Aligning Your Sales Solution Architecture

With that said, let’s return to our original train of thought. Once you clearly know the buyer’s Conditions, Issues, NCI, POA, and Needs (for problems that you can solve), you can begin to document your Products/Services, Capabilities, Differentiators, and Solutions, relative to the buyer’s needs.

Products / Services

This is probably the last thing you want to mention in an early solutions discussion with your buyer, but let’s face it… most of the capabilities, differentiators and solutions that we craft to resolve customers’ problems, are fueled by our products and services. While we don’t want to rattle off a list of unrelated features and benefits, you (and especially your new hires) need to be clear how your company solves problems. Your buyers need to know this as well. There are appropriately different levels of detail that is needed for different buyers (think: personas or economic, user, technical, etc.), and perhaps based on where you are in the sales process (such as prospecting, early solution exploration, or detailed solution presentation to a buying committee). The goal is to match the appropriate level of detail to the buyer and process stage. Too much, too early, is a bad thing. Too little, at the right time, is a bad thing. Like the Goldilocks story, you want to get it “just right.”

Capabilities

Simply put, these are the abilities you have to solve the problem. Capabilities usually exist at a higher level than the products/services and especially the features and benefits of your products/services.
- Example: Your customer wants to document their sales processes and have their sales team use a consistent approach, where it makes sense. You offer a software that analyzes CRM records and uses algorithms to cull out the likely processes by type of client and product/service sold, as a starting point (allowing them to validate the process and make adjustments). Then, your solution integrates with their CRM to help reps manage their pipeline through the finalized process that they established. Your solution has been shown to save up to 45% of the time usually dedicated to sales process mapping. (Completely made all that up.)
No deep details there, right? They need to map a process and you have an offering that will help them speed the process and manage it afterward. There are likely multiple features that enable this solution, and possibly services with the product, and you haven’t mentioned a single one at this level.

Differentiators

Pick a company. Find 3 competitors. Review all their websites. See if you can clearly see a differentiator. Want to have some real fun? Do it with your company and your competitors. (Go ahead, I dare you.)
For fans of “Blue Ocean Strategy,” if you’re swimming in a Blue Ocean, enjoy the water, but watch on the horizon for the pinkish-red coming your way. You won’t always have a competitive advantage or differentiation (or for long), especially in commoditized markets. In my experience, you can usually find something (hint: look at the humans, and look at how well you enable them – perhaps the topic of this post might help you build some differentiation through customer focus).
In any case, differentiators sometimes appear in unlikely places, and I’m writing a separate post about how you can find them. Know this: they’re almost always found through customer focus, and what your customers care about. Look hard, find or develop yours (even if it’s you and how you operate and bring value), and document it here.

Solutions

It might be a stretch for some to say this is different than Capabilities, but I think of them separately. Sometimes, a solution is a gaggle or combination of products, services, features, and/or capabilities. If so, your Marketing team might consider branding these (different topic, but worth considering). In any case, document your solution sets in your Solution Architecture, with the consistent alignment and focus on how it all directly addresses and resolves your buyer’s Conditions, Issues, NCI, POA, and Needs.

Once you have this done, organized by the Buyer Issues and your Solutions, you can begin to create sales messaging by persona, identify target customers and buyers, and take your message to them.

It’s not always easy, but it is that simple. At a high level, that’s how it works and comes together.

Customer Focus Framework for Sales Growth (The 5 Pillars)

I hope this three-part series of posts has given you some food for thought. Again, the 5-pillar framework we’ve been discussing is:

Modeling Buyer Personas
Mapping the Buying Journey and Buying Process
Aligning your Sales Process and Methodology
Understanding Market Conditions and Buyer Issues
Aligning Your Sales Solution Architecture

I’d be pleased to hear your thoughts and reactions to this post or the series, and hear what’s been working for you, to achieve sales growth through a relentless focus on your customers.

In the meantime, thanks for reading, be safe out there, and by all means, let’s continue to elevate our sales profession.

Mike
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Mike Kunkle
Transforming Sales Results with Clear Insight & Focused Execution

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<mike at mikekunkle dotcom>

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