Address your customers’ challenges

Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer at Corporate Visions, offers advice on how to engage with your customers in a way that will make your brand stand out

Building your sales messaging on what customers tell you their needs are is a good way to demonstrate that you can deliver what they need.  However, this seemingly reasonable approach has serious limitations. Principally, that you run the risk of delivering commodity messages that don’t differentiate you. That’s because, like you, your competitors are relying on the exact same inputs from prospects and customers. And more often than not, you’ll all be responding to those stated needs with similar capabilities.

As a result, your prospects and customers will struggle to see any difference between you and their current approach (or between you and your competitors, for that matter).

Value-added services won’t help you create separation either. Research around choice overload suggests that, far from differentiating you, so-called value-added services actually fuel the perception of unnecessary cost and complexity. Buyers might well perceive such services as a negative or, at best, a neutral addition.

Analyst firm Forrester Research found that once they commit to making a change, 74 per cent of buyers prefer to buy from the company that’s able to create the ‘buying vision’.

To be that company, you need messaging that identifies your prospect’s ‘unconsidered needs’ ­– in other words, business challenges they don’t know about or have underestimated. Then you need to link those unknown issues to your strengths.

Here are three kinds of unconsidered needs you can address in your messaging:

1. Undervalued needs

Simply put, these are needs your prospect doesn’t fully appreciate. These problems are big and looming, and your buyer has drastically underestimated the speed of their approach – and you need to prove that. These could be oncoming regulatory, competitive, or global market issues that your customer is aware of but not prioritising. To deliver a compelling message about these needs, you need to ‘amplify’ the size and speed of these challenges through research and insights. You can then show your prospect how failing to address these challenges can pose a threat to their desired business outcomes. Once you highlight some new considerations they should be looking to solve, you can then link those to one of your previously unspecified strengths.

2. Unmet needs

These are needs your prospect or customer doesn’t realise they have because they’ve used stop-gap measures and other workarounds to conceal the nature of the pain. But the pain is real, and it’s your mission to show how the status quo they’re in is unsustainable because of it. Once you’ve done this, lead your audience to the fact that you’ve developed a more viable, long-term solution.

3. Off the radar needs

These are often longer-range issues that come to light when a vendor has a means of solving a problem the prospect didn’t know they had – until you point it out. You can enhance the value of your deals by identifying these ‘off the radar’ problems and bringing them into the life cycle of the buying decision. 

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