I often get asked by people – how do I get better at understanding my buyers? How do I become more problem-centric? How do I become more buyer-centric? How do I get the information that helps me do better discoveries? How do I know what problems to find? How do I build my PIC (Problem Identification Chart)? If you don’t know what that is – go read Gap Selling.
I get these questions all the time. How do I get better at understanding how to do a discovery that is focused on my buyer’s problems? Here it is – it might surprise you a little bit.
Go talk to your buyers. That’s the easiest way to be more buyer-centric.
Your company, unless you’re a brand new little startup, should have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people who bought your product or service. They’re using it and they’re liking it and it’s probably safe to assume they’re getting the outcomes that they had hoped to get when they bought it.
If you want to know how to Gap Sell, if you want to know how to do a better discovery, if you want to know how to be more buyer-centric, how to do discoveries to help you go find the problems that your prospects, buyers, or ICP are struggling with, simply go talk to an existing customer.
I’ve got to believe all you relationship sellers out there have a good relationship with some of these people. Call them up and say ‘hey can I get a half hour or 40 minutes of your time? I could really use your help. I know you’re a power user of our software, you’re a power user our service, you bought our product this long time ago, I would love to gather some information on your experience with it. Once you get them on the call you, reverse Gap Sell them.
‘Hey Mary/Tom/Joe before you got the product, before you bought our [insert your product/service] what was going on? What were some of the problems you were struggling with? What couldn’t you get done? How was it impacting your business? Why did you think you couldn’t stay there any longer? What would have happened if you didn’t change? Who were some of the other people/products/services/companies you were looking at? Why didn’t you go with them?’
Dig in and spend some time doing a reverse gap sell and ask them what the hell was going on before they bought your product or service, why they felt compelled to change, why they wanted to spend the money, why they couldn’t stay where they were and why it wasn’t okay or satisfactory not to change.
Ask them what were they hoping to accomplish. When you were in that place and you realized things weren’t going well what were you hoping to accomplish? How are you going to measure success? How is that going to impact your business moving forward? What were you hoping would be the changes or the biggest impact following the purchase? Where were you hoping it would take you today?
And then of course you have to ask did you get there? Hopefully they say yes. If they say no we’re still confident, we’re getting close, or we passed it, or whatever that’s great.
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But now what you have is the actual environment that somebody who should buy your product or service is struggling with. There it is you just reverse engineered what you’re going to look for. Now you can go into a new discovery call being buyer-centric. You can start looking for similar problems or environments.
Ask questions of people that look for those problems or environments. So an existing customer says to you oh you know our leads were terrible, our cost per lead was x amount of dollars and our closing rate on those leads was horrible blah blah blah now you know what to do with your future customers or your prospects. Now you can ask hey can you walk me through your lead process, can you walk me through your lead conversion?
I don’t know what more there is to say it’s that easy. If you want to do better at discovery you need to know your buyer’s environment better and the only way to know your buyer’s current state environment better is go to the people who already bought your stuff and ask them what was the world like before you bought us and why did you choose to change. Why couldn’t you stay where you are et cetera et cetera.
Now go be buyer-centric, this should change your discovery’s 10x.
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