Solving Not Selling

I read this awesome article, Stop Selling and Add Value on Monday from the N2 Growth Blog. Mike Myatt, and his awesome moustache, writes:

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to talk to someone who wants to manage my account, develop my business, or engineer my sale. I want to communicate with someone who wants to service my needs or solve my problems. Any organization that still has “sales” titles on their org charts and business cards is living in another time and place while attempting to do business in a world that’s already passed them by. It’s time for companies to realize that consumers have become very savvy and very demanding. Today’s consumer (B2B or B2C) does their homework, is well informed, and buys…they are not sold.

This is right in line with what we’ve discussed on the subject of ‘Making It Personal‘, and in the ‘PR 2010 Framework‘. By making your product or service an experience by actually solving the problem (of course, the user may not see the problem until you highlight it) rather than providing the tool to do it, you are engaging far deeper with your customer, and can also charge a higher markup.

In fact it’s not just Mike and I thinking about it. Jeremy Epstein (have you seen his client list?) wrote an article yesterday entitled “your value = your relevance“. What a title. Your value to your customer is equal to your relevance to your customer. Beautiful. But also very conceptual. Let’s break it down:

The History Of Economic Progression

A hundred years ago, tell a commoner that they’d paid £50 for a haircut and dry, and they’d laugh at you – why pay when you can do it yourself? 10 years ago, tell average Jane she’ll pay for shopping to be home delivered, and she’d reply she’d rather save the cash and pick them up herself.

The history of economic progression is one of paying for someone else to do what you used to do yourself, for free. My examples are rather peice-meal and conceptual, but there are very intelligent people out there writing about this is hard cover books. My simple understanding is that as technology enables us to become better specialists, and as we culturally have more responsibilities and roles, we are more willing to pay others to handle the things that we don’t have time to.

Of course, we don’t pay them just for their labour. We pay them in accordance to their expertise, their relevance to our needs, the results – the value they impart. Quite simply taking a book, we know that we aren’t paying merely for the product in our hands, but the time and effort that produced the intellectual property that we are reading and receiving value from.

An excellent example is Nike+. Consider the fact that to measure your running day on day, you can simply use a map and a stop watch, and then a some paper to graph it out. But Nike solve a problem by removing the map, watch and effort of drawing by simply giving you something to put in your shoe, and watch in amazement as it charts everything online for you. In fact, what Nike have done is lifted restrictions and just made everything easier by doing all the work for you.

And the happy catch is this: you are paying far more than the free DIY version. But you are getting greater value through expertise, technology, and the reduction of your time, effort, and in some way, the stress of having to do it. As I often say to clients “make it one less thing your customer has to do.”

Solving Not Selling

All this stuff appeals deeper than fiance. It gets down to advocacy, passion, experience, change. Sure, there are inventions that are cheap and cheerful, but the majority of these game changers are lifestyle products and/or services in some shape or form. And very often, they are ahead of the curve.

I’m sure right now that you can think of plenty of ways to solve problems, rather than sell stuff. But as is the nature of innovation, only certain people buy it – early adopters. Many times I thought I had a great idea and everyone would swoop at it, only for it to flop. So I have realised that the need to 1. know you target market, and 2. grow by trial and error, is significant when solving problems. Some tips:

1. The best place to start, in my opinion, is with Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Art of Innovation‘. It’s helped me no end, and continues to.
2. Sound the depths. Segment some clients and experiment. Use social media to test the waters, as it is very cost effective and quickly helps you draw conclusions.
3. Continually re-think and re-write to get down the core of your ’solution’. I’ll be honest with you, I still haven’t got mine down to a single phrase. If you can only describe it using examples or a paragraph, then you know that you have too much of ‘you’ in mind, and not enough of your customer.
4. Draw on others. Pass it round the office, bounce it off your friends. Their perspective with save you lots of time, and open new paths to explore.
5. Adapt in public, rather than perfect in secret. This way you gather a following while you are growing (even if things are unclear), you pick up people who do get it, and you also get criticised and challenged which will sharpen you and help you cut out the rubbish.

I trust these points help you solve a few more problems this week!

Some Related Thoughts

• Moving Forward Part 1: Creating Permission
• Making The First Move
• Free From The Factory
• Becoming P2P
• The 6 Types Of Social Media Presences You’ll Meet In Heaven