Creating Greater Value: Serving a customer's needs is not enough

Business needs don't exist on their own.?They're always tied to an underlying business goal your customers want to achieve, a pain point they're currently experiencing, or a business problem they're trying to solve.??

Yet, most of us -- whether as employees serving an internal client, or as consultants/sales people serving an external customer -- tend to be too focused on serving our customer's needs that we forget about why the needs came about in the first place.?In fact, serving our customer's needs can be addictive!

Why??Put simply, serving a need is the main reason we get paid to do whatever it is we are paid to do. And that's great.?But to create greater value for our customers, we must go beyond needs and truly understand the underlying goals and problems that created these needs to begin with.

For example, if you're a marketing consultant and you're helping a customer hit 100,000 followers on social media,??to you, that's your goal.?That's what you're paid to do.?But to your client, that's just a need -- a need that helps them solve a business problem (e.g. lack of business leads to help their frontline sales people to develop new business) that's preventing them from achieving a larger business goal (e.g. increase revenue by 50% in the next 1-2 years).??

Focusing on serving that need is what you're paid to do, and if you do it well, you create value for your customer.?But focusing on just serving a need does not really "differentiate" you from other vendors and service providers who want to do the same thing.?So how do you move up the value chain and create greater value for your customer??

You need to be able to articulate (and measure) how hitting 100,000 followers helps your customer cast a wider net from which their sales team can create above-the-funnel business leads, and in turn, generate revenue from new business.?You need to start having these conversations with decision-makers in your customer's company to position yourself, not as just another vendor, but a trusted advisor.?Otherwise, you're just one of ten other vendors who want to do your job.

Of course, that's easier said than done.?Information about business goals and business problems tend to be highly confidential, and customers won't share these with you unless they trust you.?And it takes time to build trust.

But you have to start somewhere.?To build trust, you need to make your customers feel understood.?And to make your customers feel understood, you need to demonstrate empathy, ask questions and put yourself in their shoes.

You can start by asking yourself:

• How does my customer measure success?
• How is their business goal this year different from last year??What caused the change?
• When they fail to meet their goals, what are the main contributing factors?
• What obstacles and pain points keep them awake at night?
• When the solutions they use to solve these problems don't work, what exactly don't work and why?

In a way, a business relationship is like a friendship.?We can all think of a friend that only shows up in our life when they NEED something from us.?The "good-weather friend".?You don't want to be that kind of friend to your customers.?You want to be that friend who understands their biggest dreams, and empathize with their most painful problems.?That's the kind of relationship that is truly valuable.?

How about you? How do you create greater value for your (internal or external) customers?