What business problems you solve? Check out from these 75

By Hitesh Changela - 20 April 2017 | Marketing, Business Growth, Customer, Sales | 888 words | Less than 10 minutes read

“You know you are running a modern sales team when selling feels more like the relationship between a doctor and a patient and less like a relationship between a salesperson and a prospect. When you go in to see your doctor and she asks you about your symptoms, you tell her the truth. You trust that she can diagnose your problem and prescribe the right medication. When she says, “This is what you have. Take these pills,” you don’t say, “Let me think about it” or “Can I get 20 percent off?” You take the medication.”
(Mark Roberge, Former CRO at HubSpot)

Customers buy to satisfy their own needs, not ours.

Customer buys mainly for two reasons either to gain something or to alleviate the pain of something.

If we look back at the last dozens of purchase decisions we made, we can realise the main motivating factor would be either pain or gain.

Out of gain and pain, the most powerful motivator which propels customer to take action is alleviating pain.

Suppose a business owner has two choices. One is to prepare a business plan or strategy for next year and the other is to deal with the problem of meeting the sales target to keep paying employees and business alive.

Now assume we are a business consultant who can help a business owner with both choices, i.e. making a business plan as well as meeting the sales quota. Which service would be the easiest to sell? Obviously, meeting a sales quota. Right?

Once we understand the underlying pain our communication with our target customer becomes much more relevant and effective. We now are on the same page.

So the key question is:

What business problems do you currently solve for your customers?

• What are the biggest issues, problems, and challenges being faced by your customers or prospects?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• What exactly are they looking for? Why are they looking for that?

The bigger the problems we solve, the better. If we keep focusing on the customer’s problems, then it will open up other opportunities that exist in that particular industry, e.g., Smartphone manufacturers gave the traditional camera and camcorder manufacturers a run for their money when they created apps to allow users to take pictures/videos using their Smartphones, that they could then share instantly on social media networks.

Now let’s look at the most common business problems faced by businesses around the world.

I have categorised in the following category

1. General
2. Sales
3. Marketing
4. Customer
5. Competition
6. Losing customers or losing deals
7. Business Intelligence
8. Business Information
9. Sales rep/staff management
10. Customer service

General

1. Cash Flow problem
2. Inability to adapt as per market or customer demand
3. Inability to delegate
4. Inability to focus or concentrate on important tasks
5. Inability to keep up with technology
6. Inability to make the right decision at the right time
7. Increase profitability
8. Innovation
9. Keep up with Government rules and regulation
10. Lack of motivation
11. Lack of process
12. Lack of strategic direction/plan
13. Lack of vision
14. Lack of work life balance
15. Managing risks
16. Overwhelming work. Fatigue, Tiredness or burn out
17. Time management
18. Dependence on single or few clients

Sales

19. Growing revenue
20. Hit sales target
21. Increase the Sales effectiveness
22. Larger sales order
23. Long sales cycle
24. Repeat sales
25. Sales cycle too long
26. Unable to do sales forecasting

Marketing

27. Generating more qualified leads
28. Keeping the pipeline full, having enough quantity of leads
29. Branding
30. Creating new products and services which market needs
31. Effective targeting. Which segments to target
32. Lack of resources to carry out marketing activities
33. Marketing Effectiveness. Providing the ROI of Marketing Activities
34. Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

Customer

35. Meeting client demands & expectations
36. Better Understanding of customer's wants and needs
37. Customer retention
38. Customer satisfaction
39. Customer Loyalty
40. Getting more customer focus
41. Inability to obtain customer feedback on product and service improvements.

Competition

42. Inability to differentiate regarding competition
43. New competitors entering the market place. Dwindling growth or market share
44. Too much competition/market oversaturation

Losing customers or losing deals

45. Losing customers
46. Losing deals
47. Deals lost due to delays

Business Intelligence

48. Too long to produce reports on key business metrics.
49. Lack of specific, measurable, business metrics or KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
50. Missed Competitive Insights
51. Monitoring performance
52. Not Knowing Where Business Stands

Business Information

53. Information Overload
54. Lack of Information
55. No actionable data
56. Poor data quality
57. Struggling to Get Real Time Information
58. Lack of a centralized, customer knowledge
59. Duplicated and inaccurate customer information

Sales rep/staff management

60. Finding the right staff
61. Hiring top talent
62. Retaining top talent
63. Staff productivity low
64. Measuring staff productivity/performance
65. It takes long before new staff become productive
66. Motivating staff
67. Training and coaching team
68. Staff turnover
69. Staff health care
70. Staff pension

Customer service

71. Take too long to resolve customer issues
72. Too many customer complaints
73. Not able to resolve customer issues satisfactorily
74. Frustrated customer support staff
75. Negative publicity/negative reference from customers

What business problems you think most important? What business problems I have missed which you think is critical? I am very interested to hear what are your thoughts.