Management Guru Peter Drucker stated nearly have a century ago that customers are always more interested in their outcome than they are in your solutions.
"What a customer buys and considers value is never a product but its always what a product does for them."
-Peter Drucker
A colleague of mine recently posed a question to me that I found to fit this conversation perfectly. He asked, "if a person purchases a shovel are they looking to buy a shovel because they like the tool or do they just simply need a hole?"
More often than not organizations decide to develop products and services often packaged as solutions from their own internal understanding of a marketplace's needed requirements and then position these solutions to sell them to the widest consumer base. While this approach has been successful and to a certain extent still is, customers are changing the way they evaluate their needs and their definition of value. Building strong sales relationships and asserting competitive advantages are typically the way most SAAS companies define success but has the changing climate made these approaches less valid than they once were?
With the abundance of product information available and how easily customers can conduct their own research around your products and services consumers are less inclined to ask "what your product can do?" but more often "what can it do for me?" New technologies and the commoditization of quality has made differentiating solutions a lot more difficult in today's current climate. A shift in evaluation criteria is occurring from negotiating the best price to who can supply the greatest business value. The question, is how do SAAS sales organizations adapt?
I believe that changing our definition of success is the first step in that process. Changing our mindset from solution based to outcome based requires that we not only measure the value received by our customers but the value we provide their customers as well. How can our "solutions" not only help in reducing cost or improving efficiencies but ultimately how we enable them to provided greater value to their customers. Approaching an engagement in this way, allows us to communicate to our customers that we are truly invested in their success. Changing how we engage with them and truly shifting that relationship paradigm from "provider" to "partner".
Today prospective customers enter the formal sales process better informed through their own research. SAAS sales organizations should respect the time and effort prospects have made to educate themselves by meeting them where they are and not pushing them through a contrived process that forces a one size fits all approach. How many times have you been in a product demonstration or sales call that is simply rehashing everything you already know? Simply put companies need to change how they communicate with their customers and that starts by changing how they measure value. Instead of aiming to deliver solutions that match a customers technical and operational requirements. Providers need to rethink their metrics of success and help customers assess for themselves the value of the solutions they are presenting. Understanding both the qualitative and quantitative business impacts and tying that back to the products and solutions they are selling can help change a pitch into a partner driven engagement for success.
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