Don’t Sell Solutions, Sell Problems

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Of course, I’m not suggesting you deliberately harm your customers! Rather, you should adopt an approach that clearly conveys the problem you solve in advance of communicating the way you solve it. For example, at my third start-up, Rypple, we developed a modern performance management solution focused on providing employees with ongoing feedback, coaching, and recognition rather than a once-a-year performance review. Selling that solution in a mainstream way may invoke statements like:

“We help employees get the feedback they need to uruguay telegram data perform their best and grow their careers”
“We help managers become great coaches”
“We help promote your amazing culture by making winning behaviors visible”
Implying that employees don’t get enough feedback at work, managers can often be poor coaches, and your people do awesome things that not everyone sees. All fair points and all problems that have a benefit to addressing. But also statements that are easy to dismiss. On the other hand, we found prospects were much more responsive to our pitch when we preceded those with messages with ones like:

“70% of people leave their company due to lack of growth opportunities”
“80% of your employees use the word HATE to describe performance reviews”
“4 out of 10 of employees are actively disengaged at work and typically cost companies like yours $3-5M per year in lost productivity”
Why did this approach work so well? The messages were striking. They were laden with specific and compelling statistics. And they invoked real business pains. In short, they made the customer realize that they were bleeding.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that every statement that emanates from your sales and marketing machine is pain-centric. But in a world where the modern buyer is inundated with pitches, seemingly similar solutions are more bountiful than ever before, and companies operate on the principle of inertia to survive in a sea of distraction, pain is what sharpens the point on the tip of your pitch spear. Without it, it’s easy for your painkiller solutions to be easily dismissed as a vitamin.