Be Obsessed with Customer Needs, Not Value

Forget about what you sell. To be relevant to buyers, you must be obsessed with their needs.

Is your CFO nearby? Grab him or her, because this next part has nothing to do with any touchy-feely, do-gooder version of selling. I want to show you how to increase both revenues and profits:

Be obsessed with understanding customer needs.

Understanding customer needs enables your firm to make sound financial decisions about whether - or not - you have the proper capabilities to win, keep and grow the most valuable customers.

Is your CFO still there? You can’t make sound financial decisions without being closely and constantly in tune with customer needs.

In other words, success depends on being obsessed with customer needs. If you skip this step, you are simply following the (disproven) If You Build It, They Will Come strategy. Make products, then hire sales hunters to push those products, hard.

Reality check: do most companies follow the advice I’m sharing here? No way. They prefer to be obsessed with customer value. They want to find and attract the customers who will pay them the most money. They want to skip all that stuff about listening to customers, understanding customers, and serving customers.

To me, this is like saying you want a big salary, but you don’t want to actually do anything. It’s a nice fantasy.

Only when you listen to customers, can you find - and anticipate - disconnects between your current capabilities and those your most valuable customers are starting to need. If don’t have a necessary capability, you can then decide: do we build it, do we buy it, or do we partner?

As your CFO will confirm, decisions like these should always be based on facts, not gut instinct and mere hunches.

But how can you find new customers?

Of course, you are always looking for new customers, and it’s hard to understand a future customer’s needs before you have contact with her. So what to do?

One strategy that I’ve seen work brilliantly is to find new customers who closely resemble your existing customers who have done the most amazing things with your services.

In contrast, most firms look at their highest sources of annual recurring revenue, and try to duplicate them. But this doesn’t often work, because a big customer isn’t necessarily happy, or profitable.

Look at existing customers and understand for which customers you are generating the most value because you’re meeting their needs. Figure out what makes up your best fit customers and go find more of them.

When we segment customers by needs, we make it possible to move their needle. By default, we then move our needle. Most don’t do this; they design to move their own needle. Whose needle are YOU obsessed with moving? 

This is the second in a series of articles about my Serving the Modern Buyer framework. In the meantime, you might want to check out the lineup for Advocamp, where I’ll be speaking in early March. Attending is a phenomenal way to wrap your brain around what it takes to leapfrog mere sales teams and be a company that designs its processes to create true advocacy.

Jill Rowley delivers keynotes, strategy sessions and workshops on Social Selling. Always be connecting! Your network is your net worth.