Do you know what you're selling?

I can’t imagine that anyone speaking to customers is going to suggest they don’t know what they are selling. After all, what have you been doing for the last several months and years? On reflection, I think the question is wrong. It really should be:

Do you know what your customers are buying?

For example, when you buy a bike, are you buying a means of transport to get to work? Or are you buying a recreational option to enjoy the countryside in the summer? Or as part of your high-end training regime? Inevitably, the answer leads to a different purchase. If you and your partner are buying a car, one of you might be buying a family transportation device, the other might be buying a status symbol. A great salesperson will uncover this and find you the best option.

Customers are not buying the product that you are pitching. Especially if you are a start-up, they may have no idea that your product exists until you engage them. Your customers are buying a solution to a problem. Even that problem may not be obvious. It certainly won’t be the same for all buyers in the organisation.

Imagine a product that allows companies to build applications with much higher performance than they can achieve with current tech. The VP product may be looking to improve the end-user experience. VP engineering may be looking to reduce engineering costs to deliver that experience. The individual developers may be looking to avoid messing around with code that is less exciting, so they can focus on more interesting tech. For none of them is the lead concern higher performance.

You will find that different organisations, and different people in these different organisations, do not all want the same thing. They have different pains, different Decision Criteria, different Metrics they care about.

All of which makes it quite challenging for the Seller to position the product correctly. There is one answer to this conundrum: Discovery. This starts with a good understanding of the different roles of your customers and what they’re likely to care about (you should absolutely not be starting from scratch in a conversation with a prospective buyer, but have a good basic understanding) and then validating their specific interests and concerns.

This means that the wider sales organisation, with support from marketing and product, must understand how these different personas operate, and help their Sellers work out the right conversations to uncover the real motivations of their prospects.

In your complex sales, do you know what the different personas are likely to want? Do you track their Decision Criteria and the pains separately? If not, it’s well worth considering