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?

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

  1. Growing revenue
  2. Hit sales target
  3. Increase the Sales effectiveness
  4. Larger sales order
  5. Long sales cycle
  6. Repeat sales
  7. Sales cycle too long
  8. Unable to do sales forecasting

Marketing

  1. Generating more qualified leads
  2. Keeping the pipeline full, having enough quantity of leads
  3. Branding
  4. Creating new products and services which market needs
  5. Effective targeting. Which segments to target
  6. Lack of resources to carry out marketing activities
  7. Marketing Effectiveness. Providing the ROI of Marketing Activities
  8. Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

Customer

  1. Meeting client demands & expectations
  2. Better Understanding of customer's wants and needs
  3. Customer retention
  4. Customer satisfaction
  5. Customer Loyalty
  6. Getting more customer focus
  7. Inability to obtain customer feedback on product and service improvements.

Competition

  1. Inability to differentiate regarding competition
  2. New competitors entering the market place. Dwindling growth or market share
  3. Too much competition/market oversaturation

Losing customers or losing deals

  1. Losing customers
  2. Losing deals
  3. Deals lost due to delays

Business Intelligence

  1. Too long to produce reports on key business metrics.
  2. Lack of specific, measurable, business metrics or KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
  3. Missed Competitive Insights
  4. Monitoring performance
  5. Not Knowing Where Business Stands

Business Information

  1. Information Overload
  2. Lack of Information
  3. No actionable data
  4. Poor data quality
  5. Struggling to Get Real Time Information
  6. Lack of a centralized, customer knowledge
  7. Duplicated and inaccurate customer information

Sales rep/staff management

  1. Finding the right staff
  2. Hiring top talent
  3. Retaining top talent
  4. Staff productivity low
  5. Measuring staff productivity/performance
  6. It takes long before new staff become productive
  7. Motivating staff
  8. Training and coaching team
  9. Staff turnover
  10. Staff health care
  11. Staff pension

Customer service

  1. Take too long to resolve customer issues
  2. Too many customer complaints
  3. Not able to resolve customer issues satisfactorily
  4. Frustrated customer support staff
  5. 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.



Hitesh Changela

CEO, Author, Enterprenuer

Hitesh Changela is CEO of CRM Ultimate Limited, an innovative software technology company, based in the UK. Hitesh has worked in the IT industry for more than 17 years, including over 6 years at Microsoft Ireland. He is author of three books already published on Amazon. Book, Workbook, and QuoteBook . Hitesh lives in London. You can connect through social share or send him email hitesh@hiteshchangela.com or call him on +447404303064.