Posts Tagged ‘problem adoption’

Part 1 – Why a Problem Elevator May Be Your Problem

February 8th, 2014

If you told me a few weeks ago that my world would hinge on the word “problem” and a lot of the challenges I was having in driving understanding of our business would be based upon the lack of clarity as to what a problem really is, I would have been shocked.

I routinely ask my friends and contacts, “what problem do you solve and for whom”. I usually get a surprised look, a pause, and then something that resembles a value statement. But, it wasn’t till this week that I realized that the word “problem” had a different context. Talk about a loaded word.

When I have been using the word “problem”, I have been asking the question from an uneducated buyer’s perspective. “If I had never heard of your industry, let alone your company, what problem would I come to you for?” But, that has been interpreted as “How we do what we do that helps you.”

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Part 2 – What is the difference between “In-market buyers” and for “buyers with a problem that is yet to become a market”

February 8th, 2014

In-market – if your industry is half-way through its lifecycle, there may be a lot of buyers who don’t realize there is a category out there for their problem. Or, they don’t see the painful issues they are dealing with in their business as related to the industry. Or, they think they need to build their own homegrown solution to the problem. In short, they may have the problem, but the short-hand is not helping them connect to the industry/category, let alone to your approach to solving the problem. You need to be able to build a problem elevator that connects what they are experiencing to the solution you provide. Take to the basics, build bottom-up from the problem and their experience rather than category down through your feature differences.

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Part 3: Why Problem Adoption is Especially Important for Disruptive “New Technology” Companies

February 8th, 2014

For “new” technologies, especially where it is a strategic problem with complex moving parts, lots of people involved, going to cause disruption to the existing business processes to get to fix. May even involve fixing other things. Now add that not everyone agrees as to what the issues are, information is hard to find, very technical, very complex organizational impact, different levels of knowledge on the decision team AND you can wonder why the buying cycle is slow or stalls in no-decision. AND that is when they have connected with you. Imagine what it is like when you are just starting out and you are trying to research what to do to fix a problem in your business.

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