I was struggling for a long time to choose a title for this post before settling for what you see today. The subject deserves special focus and needs to be discussed more.
One skill that every B2B SaaS startup must have that would ultimately determine whether a company is successful or not is in its ability to understand a customer or a user or a prospect when you are talking to them.
For example, when talking to a prospect on Zoom, we should be able to clearly articulate the following:
- Why are they talking to you?
- What do they want solved?
Many people have the habit of talking in a high-level manner, and they won’t explicitly tell you their problem or why they are talking to you. They will constantly beat around the bush, not deliberately; it just happens that way. In these cases, which happen a lot of times, it is the responsibility of the startup representative to creatively ask follow-up questions that help you go towards answering the two questions.
Get this consistently wrong, and you not only won’t succeed, but also your startup journey will be long and painful.
Let’s consider that every call you have with a prospect lasts an entire hour. An hour is a long time, and in that span, if you fail to understand why the prospect booked a call in the first place or if you can’t determine what they want resolved, you won’t be able to clearly communicate what to offer or not to offer. You have a huge problem at hand that is far worse than what you imagine. You might think, let me just show them what we have or demonstrate the product, but this is a hit or miss and sadly mostly a miss.
We all go wrong sometimes, and that’s okay, but in my observation, if you are consistently wrong at this step, the chances of you establishing a successful company or a business are super slim.
How do you know you have this problem?
Super simple, just ask yourself these questions:
- How many prospects did we talk to in the last month?
- In how many cases can you clearly articulate the answers to the two questions?
- If you say you can articulate very well for 90% of the calls, then you should also have answers to why they converted or didn’t convert
It’s equally important to know why someone didn’t convert, and that is why it is so important to get this step right.
If you understand the prospect well, and what problem they want solved and why they were talking to you in the first place, you will be able to translate this understanding to product features and services that can be sold.
And just to repeat this, you won’t succeed without this. Its fundamental.
You can be weak at many other things, but this cannot be one of them.
