Problems — The 5th Thing You Need to Accelerate Sales

Last week we were cruising along the 401, watching your buyer.

And I promised that we would soon turn off onto a side road with better scenery…

Good thing. Because it is 42° with humidex today and there is NO WAY I’m going to stay in the car!!!

We are at Meech Lake, just outside of Ottawa in the Gatineau Park. Beautiful, magestic queen of a lake. I tipped the canoe off of the roof into the water, and we are pushing off to paddle and splash...

(Your buyer is a little nervous of my tippy canoe. Sitting on the shore on a lawnchair. And content.)

We could have taken days and days just to talk about watching the behaviour of your buyers.

And we will, some day. I just wanted to plant the idea for now. And see where you go with it.

Today, we are going to chat about the problems you solve for your buyers. And how different problems predict the probability of a successful sale and the speed with which your buyer will drive to buy from you.

Not all B2B buyer problems are created equal.

Let’s start right where we are. In this canoe. This is DEFINITELY a “Nice to Have”. This is great. My happy place, for sure.

But it wasn’t critical.

We didn’t have to come here.

There were other ways to keep cool and continue talk sales and buying process.

“Nice to Have” is the first and lowest level of problem your customer wants to solve.

In the B2B world, nice to have problems just don’t cut it. They don’t get priority and they don’t get funding.

In the B2C world, they do. Apple makes billions of dollars a year on Nice to Have stuff.

But we are talking B2B.

Back to observing your buyer. You need to listen to what they say and do to see what level of priority they assign to the problem that you could solve for them.

Nice to have looks and sounds like this: “COOL!” “Nice!” “Do you have a brochure on that?”

The next higher level of problem is “Frustrating”. This is something that is an itch, a tick, an annoyance, but they have a WORKAROUND for it.

Workaround is the KEY word.

And it is because if they have a workaround, you can be SURE that there are other problems without a workaround that are higher priority.

A Frustrating problem looks like this: “We don’t have that automated, but we have a guy who comes in every night to upload the faxes of our 3,000 daily workorders to a team in the Philippines overnight who enter the data into our system. When we get in in the morning and the guys open their Blackberry’s, everything for the day is there and ready to go.”

Is it impossible to sell on a Frustrating problem? No.

Is it difficult? Yes.

What do you think you need to do sell to someone who has a “Frustrating” problem? Email me. We can talk about that.

Next up, most exciting level for a seller, are “Impact" problems.

Super duper important. These are types of problems that solid pipelines are built on.

The types of problems that good B2B businesses are built on.

Impact means that your buyer, whether they measure it or not, know that not solving this problem or solving this problem will have a positive or negative affect on something important to them like revenue, profitability, etc.

They may never measure it.

But they know there is an impact.

And these are the things that they are hired to solve, fired if they mess up, have budget for, will put a team to task to solve, etc.

A buyer with an Impact problem will say things like: “I need to get to 100k in MRR in six months in order to get investment and our biggest weakness is in marketing and sales.”

Do you HEAR the impact in that? Yes. And that prospect is really wanting me to move FASTER than I am moving to help him solve his problem.

Another buyer says “We have a good business, but in five years I don’t want to be at the same revenue level, doing the same thing.”

Is that an Impact problem? Frustrating problem? Or a Nice to Have problem? Tricky, isn’t it.

What do you think? Email me. : )

(I don’t think it is an Impact problem. Yet.)

The final and highest level of problem is a Do or Die problem and those are few and far between and most of us aren’t in that business, anyway.

Those are the problems that if the buyer doesn’t fix it, they are done. Bankrupt. Out of business. Fired.

Think: PR firms, emergency clinics, disaster recovery firms. All in the Do or Die business.

Not me. Maybe you. Don’t know you well enough YET.

So, what should you be thinking about?

What type of business are you in? Is it a Nice, Frustrating, Impact or Do or Die business? What types of problems are you solving for customers?Are there a number of problems you can solve and some of them have higher priority than others? You should be selling and marketing only on the higher level problems. What about the opportunities in your pipeline? Prioritize your pipeline based on the level of problem the customer has expressed.Not asking your customer how critical the problem is? Start!

There. That’s all the business talk for today. Just dipped my black Tilley hat in the water and tipped it on my head…ahhh. : )

But could you paddle on the left for a while? The wind is making it hard for me to keep this boat on course.

Great. Thanks. That helps!

P.S. Forgot to tell you that I saw a big black bear here paddling last evening.