Having identified your most valuable prospects, it's necessary to understand your prospects' most important issues, and in particular to identify the ones that have such a high priority that they will be prepared to invest time, money and resources to deal with them.
The issue might be a problem that needs to be solved, a pain point that needs to be remedied, or a goal that needs to be achieved. But the common factor is that the identified issue needs to be so important that your prospect cannot afford not to deal with it.
Given today's risk averse buying climate and increasingly complex and extended decision making cycles, spending money on issues that are merely irritating has little chance of being approved - no matter how interesting the solution might be. Having a strong Return on Investment (ROI) is rarely enough - you have to identify painful Consequences of Inaction that would follow should the issue not be addressed.
The Consequences of Inaction
If you are to win your prospect's business, the potential costs and risks of ignoring the issue need to significantly exceed the perceived costs and risks associated with finding and implementing a solution -
and someone (or some decision making group) with authority within the prospect needs to commit to take
action and to agreed to allocate the resources that are going to be required.
When qualifying potential opportunities, we strongly recommend that you systematically explore what would happen if the issue is not addressed, why it is important to deal with it now, what attempts have been made to deal with it in the past, and who else within the organisation is likely to be affected. If you cannot get satisfactory answers to these questions, you should insist that your sales people carefully re-assess the opportunity.
Understanding your Prospect's Most Important Issues
Just as with identifying your most valuable prospects, we’ve found that some of the most effective ways of identifying tour prospects' most important issues are to systematically review recent sales wins, losses and deferred decisions, and back them up with regular voice of the customer interviews.
You can also use these exercises to better understood the BuyerSphere that surrounds your most valuable prospects - the people, organisations and websites they turn to for advice. Monitoring the BuyerSphere, and the subjects that are getting the most attention, is an invaluable source of information about the latest key issues and trigger events.
Aligning their Issues with your Most Powerful Capabilities
Once you've identified an issue that your most valuable prospects are unlikely to be able to ignore, you need to selectively identify your most powerful capabilities - the ones that are particularly relevant to solving the problem, and which give you a significant advantage over your competition - including "in house" solutions.
Avoid the natural tendency to shower your prospects with a feature list as long as your arm - be selective. Concentrate on the areas where you are confident that your approach is going to be seen to offer a superior solution - and where you are likely to be able to stand out from the crowd. Use this as a basis for issue-led marketing campaigns.
Watch out for Trigger Events
Trigger
events initiate buying processes. They convert unaware or unconcerned
suspects to active prospects who have acknowledged an issue and are
starting to search for a solution - and as such they are the first
critical "moment of truth" in the prospect's buying journey.
These trigger events can come from inside the prospect organisation,
or from the industry at large. They may be predictable months or years
in advance, or they may occur without warning. But they all serve the
same purpose - to alert the prospect to the fact that the status quo has been disturbed and they are going to have to
think about taking action. Learn more about trigger events here.
Issue-led Marketing
Understanding your most valuable prospect's most important issues - and identifying the trigger events that cause them to start searching for a solution - provides a powerful platform upon which to base both inbound and outbound marketing. Issue-led marketing talks your prospect's language and focuses on topics that are likely to make them want to learn more.
Recommendations
- Systematically research your most valuable prospect's most important issues
- Use win-loss analyses and voice of the customer interviews to fill in the details
- Ensure that you are able to associate the identified issues with strong Consequences of Inaction
- Identify the trigger events that are likely to cause your prospects to start searching for a solution
- Systematically map out the BuyerSphere that surrounds and influences your prospects
- Use the intelligence you have collected to conduct issue-led inbound and outbound marketing campaigns
Could we help you to address your prospects' most important issues? We would be happy to arrange a brief exploratory conversation - see below for how to get in touch.
How does your organisation compare?
Why not download this 15-point checklist
and see for yourself how your organisation compares to some of the best
in breed? We can't guarantee that completing the checklist will give
you all the answers, but we think that it will at least help you to ask
the right questions!
Are you ready to learn more?
Please continue to browse the site and when you are ready to talk, contact us here or call +44 845 519 0295. We look forward to hearing from you!