Fall in love with your customers, not your product

I meet many entrepreneurs who struggle to gain sales traction for their product. When I ask them, what does your product do? They proceed to elaborate on all the wonderful features and capabilities of their product. However, when I ask about their target customer, I hear generalities. “We are selling to IT, or the marketing department, or financial services”, they explain. “We lower their cost, increase effectiveness, or provide insights on their data”, are examples expressed of the value provided to the customer. These entrepreneurs have fallen in love with their product.

The problem with falling in love with your product, is it’s like your baby. No one can tell You “your baby” isn’t perfect. It’s your baby, of course it is. You aren’t typically impartial enough to see flaws, weaknesses or gaps in your product at the level of importance they are. Because, “it’s your baby” and while you’ll acknowledge verbally, that it isn’t perfect, you don’t really believe it. So, you aren’t likely to change it fast enough to meet the real need of your potential buyer.

Here are the facts. companies don’t champion a purchase, individuals at companies do. Individuals want to solve their most pressing problems, not all of their problems. They don’t have time or access to budget for everything. So, a significant amount of time has to be spent understanding your targeted individual buyers. What are the burning problems that individuals with access to budget are experiencing? How can you solve one of those problems? The higher up in the organization the problem is felt the better, because the bigger their role or impact, the more budget access they are likely to have to spend on solving their problem, which ultimately means what they can spend on your product.

When asked, “what does your product do?”, you should be able to easily put it in the terms of your buyer. In the earlier days of MetricStream, as the company CEO, I’d respond to the question like this: Chief Compliance Officers in regulated industries are under huge pressure to put in place policies, procedures, and reporting, to ensure that their company is compliant with all the rules and regulations. Because the ramifications of not being compliant are skyrocketing with some of the largest fines levied exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars. Our software solves that problem.

By everyone in the company understanding the problem being solved, odds are greater that you will actually solve it and continue to solve it because product management, engineers, marketing, everyone is focused on the customer problem, not on the cool features.

Shellye