Many of us struggle to reorient our thinking from selling a product to solving a customer's problem. Do you know which you're doing? When you're in the selling mindset, you limit yourself from seeing all of your customer's needs in order to be happy with your product or service, making it challenging to keep customers and grow your business. When you focus on solving the customer's problem, your view changes from your product perspective to your customer's experience of it.
There is a specific term for the later called; Solution selling, which is a style of selling methodology. Solution selling has a salesperson or sales team use a sales process that is a problem-led (rather than product-led) approach to determine if and how a change in a product could bring specific improvements that help to solve the customer's problem i.e. your product or service.
Now that we've established the difference between selling and solving a problem, it's time to find your customer's pressing problems. Start by sorting out customers who are ready to buy from those who aren't. This segmentation will require different marketing and sales approaches.
Deciding to solve your customer's pressing problems may open a vast new market of opportunities that may have gone unnoticed when using the selling approach, you will become more appealing to your customer. Everyone wants to have their problems solved, so show them how you can do just that!
Whether the problem is one they're currently facing or will face as their needs change, if you cannot put your finger on your customer's problem, you won't be able to solve it.
Describe the issue as best you can, from their perspective, so they can see the value in solving it.
The most successful businesses find their customer's most pressing problems and do something to solve them in a convenient, cost-effective, and timely way.
There are a few systematic steps you can take to solve your customer's problems. It's important not to jump to conclusions and evaluate all alternatives.
1) Identify: You need to solve the right problem, which the customer sees as essential and a high priority. You can locate the correct issue by asking the right questions and observing your customer's responses. Why do they feel there's a problem? Is it something specific? Can they define the problem?
2) Analyze: How often does it occur? Is it severe? What might cause the problem? How is the problem affecting other processes? Ask as many questions as you need to understand all aspects of the problem.
3) Identify criteria: when making a decision, what is the criteria you and your customer will use?
4) Develop: go over as many solutions as you can; don't stop at the first one. Developing multiple options will help you evaluate alternative scenarios and find the best one. Be as objective as possible, assessing all the pros and cons.
5) Choose: With the criteria, you decided, and after you've gathered all possible information about your customer's problem, it's time to choose the best solution. Be sure that you can implement the solution and prepare for contingencies.
Exercise:
Step 1: Identify the problem and write it down
Step 2: Write down one solution to the problem
Step 3: Write down three other solutions to your problem
If you can't imagine at least three alternative solutions to your problem, you don't have a problem. You made the lack of your solution your perceived problem, and if you start from the formulation that your problem is the lack of your solution, you can never get creative enough to dig down deep to solve the real problem. At this point, try to analyze your problem to see if you can go back a step.
For example; problem: not enough trained teachers. Solution 1: more trained teachers. Solution 2:? Solution 3:? Solution 4:? In this case, 'not enough trained teachers' is not 'the' problem. You've defined your problem as the lack of your solutions, but If you got back a step, you're able to see that the real problem is inadequate student learning, which is why you needed trained teachers. Now, when you consider the real problem, 'inadequate student learning,' you're open to considering a broader array of possible solutions.
Systematically solving your problem will help you save time and find better solutions when designing your product or service, making your sales more straightforward. The steps we addressed above are not comprehensive and won't resolve everything, but once you can identify the 'real' problem and create a product or service that solves that problem, you'll be well on your way to high sales!
Happy Problem Solving.
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