Problems worth solving

🤔 How do you find problems worth solving?

⏲ Spending enough time working with a customer to identify and validate relevant business needs is critical to the success of an opportunity for many sales teams.

🎯 To highlight this point here's some feedback from one of the sales teams I worked with last week on a design thinking sales programme.

🙏 "Thanks Mark - My key take-away is to start early engagement with the customer to understand the problem and align with them so that we have same focus as the customer to solve the problem"

Identification of Needs

🛠 There are a number of tools you can use to really 'explore' and 'investigate' customers needs.

1️⃣ Look for unmet objectives - customers share these in many different ways - look for published KPIs, look for challenges they face, look for wider strategic goals in their business reports.

2️⃣ Try creating a Value Chain - put yourself in the shoes of the different 'functions' and try to understand what are their specific needs.

3️⃣ Identify the person who has the greatest need and explore the root cause of their problems - when you have one create some pain and gain and then use contrast bias to build urgency.

4️⃣ Create an Empathy map of the centre of need and key stakeholders - imagine what they think, feel, say and do - this will help you empathise with them.

🤔 Let me know what you think.

I'm just about to run another sales training session and this will be the topic we work on today.

#designthinking #salestraining #identifyneeds #businessobjectives #valuechain #empathymap #leadership